Back when he’d been rehearsing for the fugitive role, asking Abby countless questions about how she’d handle herself on the run, Luke had given her a simple but memorable piece of advice: “Never underestimate the helpfulness of your local library.”
On her first day as a fugitive, Abby headed for the library in Rockland. In Luke’s script, there’d been dialogue about big cities being better to hide in than small towns, because nobody paused to look at a stranger in a place where everyone was a stranger. She believed that, but big cities were hard to come by in Maine, and so she settled for Rockland, the county seat, home to the courthouse and the jail and the BMV. A regular metropolis by Maine standards, with maybe twenty thousand residents.
She parked several blocks from the library, near the harbor in a busy parking lot that was shared by two seafood restaurants and a YMCA, and she walked along the water for twenty minutes, watching her back, before she moved toward town. No one followed. In the library, she found a computer where she could sit with her back to the wall and her eyes on the door.
When she logged on to the internet, her first instinct was to read about herself. Pragmatic fugitive behavior or clinical narcissism? She wasn’t sure, but a cursory review of news sites was reassuring to her invisibility, if not her ego—the reports were that Hank Bauer had died in a car accident whose cause was currently under investigation. Police in Maine were keeping Abby’s story quiet for a reason, or possibly they didn’t believe it, but in any case, they weren’t making a big deal out of her call to David Meredith.
Not yet.
She moved on to Amandi Oltamu. There was plenty to read here, because Amandi Oltamu had been an important man, but Abby was going to need a translator to help her understand half of it.
The obituaries were helpful but vague, capturing his childhood escape from a war-torn Sudan and his education history (Carnegie Mellon and MIT) and revealing that his marriage had ended in divorce and he had no children. He was described as “renowned in his field.” Okay, Abby thought, let’s find out some more about that field. A few searches later she landed on a paper written by Oltamu. The title was “Improving the Coupling of Redox Cycles in Sulfur and 2,6-Polyanthraquinone and Impacts on Galvanostatic Cycling.”
It wasn’t a good sign that Abby was tentative on the pronunciation of two of the words in the title.
She didn’t waste time attempting to wade through the entire paper. If there was a clue in that paper, Abby wasn’t going to be able to identify it. Instead, she went to the Hammel College site and found a short press release on Dr. Oltamu’s scheduled talk. This one was at least a bit more civilian-friendly: He was going to speak on how batteries could combat climate change. The press release didn’t mention anything about teenage assassins, though. Less helpful.
Oltamu’s bio on the site said that he’d consulted with the International Society for Energy Storage Research. The ISESR page noted that his work was focused on a new paradigm for battery energy storage at atomic and molecular levels.
Terrific. And tragic. He’d been doing vital work, and then he was killed. Maybe the vital work was why he’d been killed. If so, that was going to require more understanding of the topic than Abby could glean from web searches. There was a better chance of her figuring out how to jailbreak the security on that cloned iPhone than of her determining the breakthrough Amandi Oltamu had made with regard to the new paradigm of galvanostatic coupling. Or cycling. Whatever. Understanding the importance of Oltamu’s work required an advanced degree, or at least the ability to pronounce polyanthraquinone without sounding like Forrest Gump.
Jailbreaking the device Oltamu had left behind seemed like the better option, but Abby had failed once already. She’d tried Tara and not Tara Beckley, but if Tara Beckley was wrong, she was down to one swing of the bat. She still didn’t understand the security approach either; shouldn’t it be more advanced, a fingerprint or a retina scan or facial recognition?
Maybe it was. Maybe the prompt asking for Tara’s name was a ruse, and the only way the device unlocked was with Oltamu’s retina. That would be a problem, considering that by now he’d been buried or cremated.
Had Oltamu been trying to protect himself at the end, adding Tara Beckley’s photograph as a lock just before Carlos Ramirez drove into him? Or was Abby’s instinct wrong, and Oltamu hadn’t taken the picture? Even if Abby was right about the location, and she was pretty sure that she was, it didn’t mean that she was right about when it had been taken. For all she knew, it was Tara Beckley’s Facebook profile picture.
Bullshit it is. Not with that smile. Something was wrong when that picture was taken. She wasn’t sure what yet, but she knew something was wrong.
Tara’s Facebook profile was private, but Abby found an open Facebook page called Team Tara, the one Shannon Beckley had said kept her mother occupied and away from tranquilizers. Abby opened it without much hope, then froze.
The first post was a video with a caption claiming Tara was awake.
She moved the cursor to the video and clicked Play. The camera was shaking, but Tara was clear, and so were her eyes. As a doctor asked her questions, she looked up. Once for yes, twice for no. The motion was unmistakable.
Her mother wasn’t being optimistic; Tara was awake and responsive.
Abby whispered, “Oh, shit,” loudly enough to earn an irritated glance from an old man reading a newspaper a few feet away.
Abby lifted a hand in apology and returned her attention to the screen. The video had been posted only a few hours earlier but already it had hundreds of shares, people eager to distribute this good news far and wide.
A blessing, yes. And maybe a terrible invitation.
She logged off the computer, picked up the case file, and left the library, then walked back down to the harbor and stood about five hundred yards from the Tahoe. She pretended to stare at the sea, but she was really looking for people watching the car. There was no obvious sign of interest in the vehicle, but right now everyone felt like a watcher. Paranoia was growing. She forced her eyes away from the parking lot and looked out across the water. The wind was rising, northeasterly breezes throwing up nickel-colored clouds, as if the morning’s sunshine had been a mistake and now the wind was working hastily to conceal evidence of the error.
Abby knew that making contact with Tara Beckley’s family would be a suicidal move. They’d rush to the police, bring more attention, and, quite possibly, kill whatever faint hope she had of trading the phone in her pocket for evidence that exonerated her in Hank’s death and for the chance to send his murderer to prison. It was too early to reach out; she’d be better off walking into the police station.
Unless the family believes you.
Unless that, yes.
She watched the ferry head out from Rockland toward Vinalhaven, and she thought of the way Tara’s eyes had flicked up at the doctor’s questions, the responsive motion so clear, so undeniable, and then she thought of the countless tests Luke had failed. Then she withdrew the working cell phone from her pocket, the one she’d promised herself she wouldn’t use again. Just by turning it on, she was broadcasting her location.
But she had to try.
She opened the case file she’d taken into the library and flipped through it in search of another number. Not Oltamu’s this time. Shannon Beckley’s. She dialed.
Shannon answered immediately. “Hello?” A single word that conveyed both her confidence in herself and her distrust of others. She wouldn’t have recognized the number, so she was probably already suspicious.
“This is Abby Kaplan and it is very important that you do not hang up. You need to listen to me, please. You’ve got to listen to me for Tara’s sake.”
She got the words out in a hurry. She had to keep the conversation short on this phone.
“Sure,” Shannon said. “Sure, I remember you.” Her voice was strained, and Abby heard people talking in the background and then the sound of a door opening and she understood that Shannon was leaving a crowded room. She was at least giving Abby the chance to speak.
“Have they told you I killed Hank Bauer yet?” Abby asked.
“They have.” She spoke lightly, as if trying not to draw concern or attention, and Abby heard her footsteps loud on the tiled floor of the hospital. She was walking away from listeners.
“It’s a lie. We were both supposed to die and I made it out.”
“That’s different than what I’ve heard.”
“I’m sure it is. If I could explain it, I’d have gone right to the police. But Hank is dead because whoever killed Oltamu—and Ramirez, there are three of them now, all of them dead…” Her words were running away from her and she stopped and took a breath, forcing herself to slow down. “Whoever did that wants a phone. Not your sister’s, and not Oltamu’s real phone. One that he had with him, maybe. I’m not sure it’s actually a phone; it might just be a camera designed to look like one. But I’ve got it.”
“What does—”
“Hang on, listen to me. I just read a post from your mother’s Facebook page that claims Tara is alert. I saw the video. That needs to come down.”
“What? Why?”
Abby looked at how long she’d been on the call—twenty-five seconds. “I’ve got to hurry,” she said, “and I don’t have all the answers you’re going to want, but you have to limit access to Tara. And you have to limit the questions she’s asked. Because if she remembers what happened that night, then she’s a threat to somebody. Three people are already dead, and that’s just the ones I know of. I was supposed to be the fourth.”
Shannon Beckley didn’t speak. Abby wanted to be patient, but she couldn’t. Not on this line.
“If you think I’m crazy, fine, but I’m trying to give you a chance,” she said. “Trying to give her a chance.”
Shannon’s voice was low when she said, “I don’t think you’re crazy.”
“Thank you.”
“But I can’t limit access to her,” she said. “There are too many doctors involved, and they’re not going to let me call the shots. If you think she’s at risk of being…killed, then who am I supposed to tell? Who do I call?”
The wind gusted off the water, peeled leaves off the trees, and scattered them over the pavement, plastering one to Abby’s leg. She stared at the bloodred leaf, then looked over to where the Tahoe was parked. A man in an L. L. Bean windbreaker walked by it without giving it so much as a passing glance, but still Abby scrutinized him.
“I don’t know who you call,” she said finally. “If I knew, I’d call them myself. Maybe you can trust the police.”
“You’re not sure of that, though?”
“I’m…” She’d started to say she was sure, but she couldn’t. All she could think of was the way the kid had smiled when he’d spoken of friends in cells and friends in uniforms. “I’m not sure,” Abby finished. “Sorry. There has to be someone to call, but I don’t know who the right person is, because I don’t know who I’m dealing with. I don’t know what Tara saw, what she heard.”
She faced the hard, cutting wind and paused again, aware that she was letting the call go on too long but no longer caring as much because an idea was forming.
“Can you ask her the first round of questions?” she said. “Without doctors around, or at least without many of them. Can you handle that?”
“Questions about what happened that night?”
“Yes. You need to do that. But they have to be the right questions. They have to…they need to be my questions.”
“What are those?”
“I’m not positive yet. I mean, I know some, but…let me think.”
“You have to tell me what to ask!”
Abby squinted into the cold wind and watched the ferry churn toward the island, its wake foaming white against the gray sea, and then she said, “Ask her if he took a picture of her. I definitely need to know that. And if he did, then ask if she gave him another name.”
“Another name? What do you mean, another name?”
“I’m not sure. If she called herself Tara or Miss Beckley or whatever. Ask what he knew her by. That’s really important. What would he have called her?”
“She would have been just Tara. That’s it,” Shannon said, her voice rising, but then she lowered it abruptly, as if she’d realized she might be overheard, and said, “Why does this matter? What do you know?”
“People are killing each other to get to a phone that was in her car,” Abby said. “I have it now. It was in the box I brought down to you. I don’t know what in the hell is on it, but it looks like he took her picture. It’s on the lock screen now, and it wants her name. But her name doesn’t—”
The phone beeped in her ear then, and her first thought was the battery was low, but when she glanced at the display, she saw an incoming call, the number blocked.
The wind off the water died down, but the chill within her spread.
“Hang on,” she told Shannon Beckley, and then she ignored her objection and switched over to answer the incoming call. “Hello?”
“Hello, Abby.”
It was the kid.