Trader Joe’s, the South Seas tiki-styled grocery store chain with a cult following, was located in Annapolis Plaza, adjacent to the sprawling Annapolis Mall. Monday morning, I arrived early and parked close to the entrance, not far from the cart return where I was certain Trish could not miss me.
The weatherman had predicted an unseasonably low fifty degrees, so I kept the engine running, the windows rolled up and both the heater and the radio on while I waited, nerves thoroughly frazzled, for my friend.
Eleven o’clock came and went with no sign of Trish.
By eleven fifteen, she still hadn’t shown up, but anybody can get stuck in traffic, I reasoned. She’d have to be driving south on I-95, and it always seemed to me that there was no part of that aging interstate – running nearly two thousand miles along the east coast from Miami, Florida to Brunswick, Canada – that wasn’t under construction.
At eleven thirty-five, Gustav Holst launched into ‘Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity’ on the radio, none of which I was feeling.
At eleven forty-five I decided that I’d been stood up – again! I gathered up my handbag, thinking I might as well not waste the trip. Trader Joe’s carried a brand of spicy chicken sausages that Paul adored, and their chocolate lava gnocchi was to die for. A friend had raved about their Everything But the Bagel Sesame Seasoning Blend, so I’d put that on my list, too, along with several bags of ready-to-bake pizza dough.
I was reaching for the ignition key when someone rapped on the passenger side window – a blond wearing oversized sunglasses and a zip-up white hoodie. I mashed on the switch to power down the window, leaned across the seat and said, ‘What can I …?’ before I recognized the woman’s face. Trish.
‘Trish! Thank God. Get in, get in!’ I said, pressing the lever to unlock the car doors.
‘Sorry I’m so late,’ she said as she slid into the seat next to me. ‘There was a fender-bender in the Harbor Tunnel.’
I leaned across the console and embraced her. ‘Never mind about that. You’re here, that’s all that counts.’ I held her tight for a few seconds, then pulled away. ‘What on earth have you done to your hair?’
‘You don’t like it.’ It was a statement, not a question.
I squinted at my friend’s new do. Trish’s shoulder-length hair had been gracelessly cropped just short of her ears, and instead of being the dark chestnut I’d known for years, was now a high-voltage blond. ‘It’s certainly different,’ I said, without elaborating on what was clearly a do-it-yourself job.
‘My gawd, it’s like a greenhouse in here, Hannah!’ Trish struggled out of her hoodie and draped it carelessly across her knees.
‘Sorry.’ I switched off the ignition, killing both the engine and the heater. ‘It’s cold out, in case you hadn’t noticed.’ I smiled to let her know I was teasing. ‘It would be a lot more comfortable meeting at your house, or even mine. And there’d be hot coffee.’
Trish’s gaze was steady and unblinking. ‘I won’t be going back to Prince George Street again, Hannah. Maybe not ever.’
For a moment, I couldn’t speak. ‘I don’t understand,’ I said at last. ‘You left all your stuff behind! Don’t you need it?’
‘It’s not safe. That’s why I asked you to meet me here where it’s more public. Lots of people around.’
‘Stop it! You’re scaring me.’
‘I’m scaring you?’ She extended a hand, palm down. It trembled like a leaf in the wind. ‘Look at me. I’m a basket case.’
‘What the hell is going on?’
‘Before I explain, I need to give you something.’ She fumbled in the pocket of her hoodie and pulled out a bright blue flash drive. She cradled the drive in her hand, staring at it for a long moment, as if absorbing its digital contents using some sort of Jedi mind trick. ‘I need you to keep this for me,’ she explained, holding it out. ‘Someplace safe. And for God’s sake, don’t tell anybody you have it, not even Paul.’
I had reached out, but jerked my hand away. ‘I can’t promise …’ I began.
The corner of her mouth quirked up. ‘Right. I know you tell Paul everything, so I won’t make you promise to keep him in the dark.’ She thrust the drive in my direction. ‘Here, take it.’
‘Not till you tell me what’s on it,’ I said, still holding back.
‘I can’t.’
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Trish! Are you selling government secrets to the Russians or something?’
‘Of course not. You know me better than that.’
‘I’m beginning to think I don’t know you at all,’ I snapped. ‘What kind of person simply walks away from a house, a job, her friends and all her possessions without saying a single word to anybody? Even a text message would do. We’ve all been worried sick.’
Her head drooped. ‘I know, and I’m sorrier than I can say. What I’m about to tell you, you can’t tell anybody. Promise?’
‘Except Paul.’
‘Yes, except Paul.’
‘Thank you,’ she breathed, seeming to melt into the upholstery. Without looking at me, she said, ‘First of all, you need to know this. My real name is Elizabeth Stefano.’
I felt like I’d been sucker-punched. ‘What?’
‘It’s a long story, which I’ll get to in a minute. What’s important now is this flash drive,’ she said, thrusting it in my direction.
Elizabeth Stefano. Elizabeth Stefano. Should I have recognized the name? Was my friend a notorious fugitive? My fingers itched to find my iPhone and consult Google, but instead, I took the drive from her, curled my fingers around it and folded it protectively into my palm.
‘Gosh, Trish … or should I call you Elizabeth? Lizzie? Liz?’
‘Trish will do just fine, Hannah. I haven’t been Liz for over twenty years.’
‘I don’t know what to say,’ I said.
‘Just listen, then,’ Trish said. ‘Two weeks from today, a case is supposed to be filed in the Southern District Court in New York.’
‘And this drive …?’
She held up a hand, cutting me off. ‘The case will be big news, and involve the Lynx Media Corporation.’
I was familiar with Lynx, a sprawling American media company headquartered in nearby Alexandria, Virginia, with operations worldwide: Lynx Broadcasting, Lynx News and Lynx Productions. Several years before, I’d been strong-armed by a former Lynx News associate into stepping in as a last-minute substitute for a cast member on Patriot House: 1774, a television reality show filmed over the course of three months in Annapolis’s historic William Paca House. I still had the costume and the DVDs to prove it.
‘Listen to the news,’ Trish continued. ‘Listen carefully, and if you don’t hear anything about the case by the following day, I want you to get that flash drive to the New York Times. Pronto. Promise me you’ll do that.’
‘Why? What’s on it?’
‘Documents,’ she said. ‘An insurance policy, of sorts. The Feds have the originals.’
‘Why me, though, Trish? Can’t you turn it over yourself?’
She shook her head. ‘Impossible. I’ll explain in a moment.’
‘But who do I give it to?’ I asked, accepting her explanation at face value, but feeling totally unqualified for the job.
‘David Reingold at the Times. Remember him? The guy who won a Pulitzer for exposing that worldwide Internet adoption scam?’
I nodded. The story had been national news for months – child trafficking in black market babies.
Trish’s flash drive seemed to grow hotter in my hand. ‘But, why wouldn’t this case, whatever it is, go forward?’
Trish stared thoughtfully out the windshield for a moment. ‘If you’re rich and powerful and well-connected, you can make inconvenient things disappear.’
‘“Things”?’ I repeated. ‘You’re acting like you actually mean “people”.’
Trish nodded silently.
‘It sounds like you don’t trust the federal prosecutors to do their job,’ I said.
Trish snorted. ‘In this administration with a stooge of an attorney general calling the shots, would you?’
‘I see your point,’ I said, tucking the flash drive securely into my bra. ‘But I think you owe me an explanation.’
‘It all started when I ran away from home. I was fourteen,’ Trish confessed, settling deeper into the passenger seat as she began her tale. ‘Some silly fight with my mother about a slumber party she wouldn’t let me go to because she figured there’d be boys there.’ She turned to me and grinned sheepishly. ‘There would have been boys there, of course.’
‘Where did you run to?’ I asked.
‘New York City. Where else?’ She shrugged. ‘Crashed at a YWCA on Lower Broadway and got a job bussing tables in a deli.’
‘They hired a fourteen-year-old?’ I asked, incredulous.
‘Totally legit, as long as I wasn’t serving booze,’ she explained. ‘And with some creative paperwork, fashion models can be as young as thirteen.’ Trish swiveled in her seat to face me. ‘Can you imagine how easily you could exploit …’
Trish started, her eyes grew wide and a poppy blossomed on her forehead. As she toppled across the console, I heard a second pop, and the passenger side window dissolved into a spider web.
Instinctively, I ducked. In the eerie quiet that followed, all I could hear was the blood pulsing in my ears, followed by Trish’s raspy breathing. My friend was slumped against my shoulder, her blood flowing profusely, soaking into my sweater.
‘Trish? Can you hear me?’ I shouted, using my right hand to cradle her head, holding her upright. Blood flowed wet and warm over my fingers, gushing out of a wound at the back of her head. ‘Trish! Stay with me. You’ve been shot.’ With my left hand, I fumbled around, searching for something, anything to bind up her wound and staunch the blood. So much blood!
Trish’s hoodie had slipped to the floor, but I managed to grab it by a sleeve and pull it into my lap. I rolled the body of the hoodie up like a sausage, leaving the sleeves free, then used the sleeves to tie the makeshift bandage around Trish’s head and draw it tight. ‘Help will be here, soon,’ I babbled, hoping she heard me. ‘The hospital’s right around the corner. Stay with me, Trish. Please, stay with me.’
No time to locate my cell phone and dial nine-one-one. I fumbled for the steering wheel, mashed my palm firmly down on the hub until the horn began to blare.