Jeff Abbott - Trust Me

The reporter, forty feet away, wiped rain from her face and raised a hand. ‘Hey! Y’all just get back in from the search?’

Oh, God, Luke thought. He turned and walked away, toward a tent set up for the search parties.

How the hell was he supposed to get out of here? Steal a car? He had no idea how to, and while breaking into a cottage for warmth and food after being starved for a day and surviving a cold river seemed forgivable, grand theft auto did not.

‘Warren, hey man!’

He glanced over his shoulder and saw Dumont standing with the reporter, gesturing at him to join them.

Luke forced a smile, mimed a shiver and drinking coffee. He waved and kept his hand up by his face. Then he turned, pulling the jacket’s hood halfway over his face. He ducked into the tent.

Coffee, bottled water, breakfast tacos and doughnuts were being served on a short table. He snagged a cup of coffee, steaming and black, and collected his thoughts.

Nowhere to go and no way to get there. He watched a police officer speaking into a walkie-talkie. Just turn yourself in, he thought, with a sudden and deep ache of resignation, of surrender.

Find Eric. Find the answers. Don’t you dare give up.

Braintree wasn’t a big town and he walked down to the main street. He had no money, no way out of town. He checked his watch, a Rolex that his mother had given him when he graduated from college. That would be a source of cash, but he’d rather pawn it in a town where he wouldn’t be remembered so easily. And he hated to give up a gift she had given him, but these were desperate times.

The library was open; it was just past ten in the morning. He walked inside, wandered the maze of the stacks. The smell and sight of books gave him a sudden comfort. They had been his friends after his father’s death, after his mother’s accident, and a library was a place he knew how to use. He went to an array of public computers, nodding at a tall blonde woman who was working at the main desk.

He opened a web browser and jumped to the Houston Chronicle web page.

The chlorine bombing in Ripley still dominated the headlines. The rains had removed the immediate threat, and the ruptured tanks had been sealed. Forty confirmed dead. Chemical plants around the country were on a massively increased state of alert.

The homeless man’s murder was a second-tier story; but the report offered no picture of the victim, and no name. Except that the homeless in the area didn’t seem to know much about the man. Several said he was a stranger.

That wasn’t a mystery he could solve here. He had to find Eric and Aubrey.

Luke Googled Aubrey kidnapped. He found references to a soap opera character snatched as part of a storyline, a Chilean activist who’d been missing since the Pinochet terrors, the sad detailing of a girl stolen in Oregon by her father five years ago. But nothing recent.

Maybe Aubrey hadn’t been reported as kidnapped, either. Eric had gotten her home before anyone realized she was missing.

But missing wasn’t the same as kidnapped. He searched on Aubrey missing.

Three results down he found it. A personal blog called Grace-amatic, written by a young freelance designer named Grace in Chicago: My friend Aubrey (I designed the logo for her export-import business) is missing. She’s not returning phone calls, she’s not at home, she’s not at her office, she’s not updating her social networking pages, and no one has seen her. I called the police and they were useless, they said I have to wait twenty-four hours to file a missing persons report. That’s insane. Her boyfriend, well, they just broke up a couple of weeks ago, but he said he doesn’t know where she is. I don’t know what to do omg I’m a little freaked out that the cops really do make you wait twenty-four hours.

Then two entries later: Update on my missing friend: Aubrey is no longer missing and apparently wasn’t. She called me this morning to say she took a few days to deal with some personal issues and she’s fine, thank God, and to please not blog about her life and I feel like fricking Chicken Little for panicking. The cops were right.

Chicago.

He went to Grace’s portfolio and found the one logo she’d done for an export-import company. Perrault Imports, specializing in ‘artistic’ imports from South America, Europe and Asia – modest pottery and wall hangings, sold in turn to retail outlets. The contact name was Aubrey Perrault.

Who then was Eric?

He risked signing onto the social networking site – he had an account there as well, as did most of his generation – and found a profile linked to Aubrey’s. Ah, sweet, hello Eric, one of her top friends. Eric Lindoe. He jumped to Eric’s profile. Thirty-five. Working at a private bank called Gold Maroft in Chicago. He Googled Eric Lindoe, found a few news stories, mostly tied to press releases from his employer about promotions. He had gone to the University of Illinois on full scholarship. He had started in bank operations and moved rapidly up into overseas banking: for construction projects in Saudi Arabia, Britain, Switzerland, Dubai and Qatar.

A man with so much to lose, committing kidnapping and murder – there had to be a reason.

He did another Google search, tying Eric’s name with Henry Shawcross. No results.

He had to get to Chicago. He had no money, no resources. And he couldn’t turn to his few school friends, he couldn’t put them in danger.

But he had people who wanted to be his friends. In the Night Road.

He remembered the other night showing Henry postings from the one who called himself ChicagoChris. He went to his email account through a website that allowed you to surf the web anonymously. He’d learned about it in one of the discussion groups. Chris had sent him a phone number in one of his emails to Luke. He found it in an email from two weeks ago and wrote it down.

Then he surfed to Twitter, the web service that allowed you to send short updates and messages to all your friends in your network. His network included all his grad school friends, a few college and high school buddies. People he cared about.

He sent a message to everyone on his Twitter list: I’M INNOCENT. In case he didn’t make it out of this mess alive, he wanted to make that gesture, to give his friends reason to believe him.

Then he erased the browser’s history and logged off the internet.

He glanced up at the librarian, who sat frowning at a computer screen. He saw two volunteers murmuring over a book cart, sorting volumes. One laughed softly. The librarian stood and vanished into an office. The two women stepped toward the back of the library – Luke could smell coffee, hazelnut on the air.

Luke looked over the counter and saw a purse. He peered inside and found a cell phone. He grabbed it and hurried to the back of the stacks. No one noticed.

He called ChicagoChris’s number.

‘Hello?’ A young smoker’s rasp, sounding tired.

‘I hope this is ChicagoChris. This is Lookout. From TearTheWallsDown discussion group.’

‘Hey, man! Hey! How are you?’ Chris sounded happy to hear from him, but it was the overabundant enthusiasm of someone who spent far too much time alone, and not happily.

‘I hope it’s cool to call. You sent your number.’

‘Sure, glad to finally talk.’ ChicagoChris painted himself online as a badass, a man who wanted to right the wrongs of the world by redistributing wealth on an extreme basis, a prescription for saving the world from over-industrialization, but he sounded like a giddy schoolboy. ‘You in Chicago?’

‘Hardly,’ Luke said. ‘But I need to get to Chicago, and I need help. I’m getting hassled big time.’

Chris clicked his tongue in his mouth, waited.

‘I wrote some truth on a board I shouldn’t have, and the FBI’s looking for me.’