Jeff Abbott - Trust Me

‘Where did he go?’

‘In the back.’

They walked to the end of the hallway and found a master bedroom, the cheap furniture shrouded in plastic, as if trapping memories in a clear amber. Dust covered the plastic.

They backed up to the next bedroom. Eric’s bedroom. A flicking-on of the light showed a room little changed from when Eric had taken his scholarship money and headed off to the University of Illinois. Clippings of his achievements dotted the wall – from high school through college, and then after, a shrine of proud parental hopes. A son who’d made nothing but good choices and then made a very bad one.

Luke studied the clippings. ‘He was president of an honor society, and he ends up a killer and kidnapper and a money man for extremists.’ He ran a finger along the frames: Eric’s first letter offering him a banking job, in the operations division of a national bank; Eric in the sands of the Middle East, at a construction site, shaking hands with an older, elegant Arab businessman; in London, standing stiffly with other bankers; on a windswept beach, a borderline between desert and sea, watching the skeleton of a resort take hold.

‘He really did spend a lot of time overseas. Did he ever talk about it?’

‘No.’ She paused for a moment, looking at the smiling Eric beaming in the desert sun. ‘At my import company, I bought these really unusual pots from Papua New Guinea. There’s a face on each side, like a totem. Eric thought they were cool. Maybe he liked them because they were two-faced, just like him.’

‘He’s like Henry, in some ways. Henry loves his photos of himself at work, surrounded by powerful people. I don’t understand why Eric and Henry got involved in this. Why? Why risk it all?’

‘Some men can never have enough – money, pride, power,’ Aubrey said. ‘Name your poison and it will have an addict.’

He peered inside the closet. ‘Help me look.’

‘What are we looking for?’

‘What shouldn’t be here.’

She found the laptop three minutes later, tucked behind a stack of worn paperbacks on the top shelf. An old, cheap subnotebook, paired with a power cord.

Luke plugged in the system, started it up. It presented a password prompt.

‘Any ideas?’ Luke asked.

Aubrey rubbed a finger against her lip. ‘Let me try.’ She sat and tapped words on the keyboard. ‘I’ll try words that meant something in his life.’ Luke continued searching the room. He found two guns; Glocks with ammunition. The serial numbers had been filed away. Both were hidden in a box under the bed, camouflaged by a scattering of old Hardy Boys paperbacks. And money. Five thousand in cash.

Not fifty million, which would take up a considerable amount of room.

Luke put the money and the weapons on the bed.

‘Nothing is working,’ she said.

‘Stop and think for a minute. You said he set up your bank accounts. Did he set up your passwords at first?’

‘I kept the passwords he used,’ she said. ‘They were more secure than what I would have conjured up. I would have used my name or my phone number or my first cat’s name. He came up with passwords you could remember but that were hard to break.’

‘How?’

‘Well, he always said to use words with letters you could easily replace with numbers and it would look kind of the same in your head. Like a word with Es, replace the Es with 3s. Or Ls, replace with 1s. He said it was much more secure than the word itself, and still easy to remember.’

‘What did you choose for your passwords?’

‘Aubrey, but with a 3 replacing the E. And another one, for an account he set up for me after we got back from Paris, was Paris, but with a 5 instead of the S.’

‘Where did you go in France?’

‘Mostly around Paris. Montmartre, Saint Germain, the Louvre. All the tourist spots. We also went to Versailles and we went to Strasbourg for a couple of days.’

‘Did you go on any other trips with him?’

‘No.’

‘Let’s write down every shared interest you had, every place you went together.’

‘Just because he gave me passwords that meant something to him doesn’t mean his passwords will also tie back to me.’

‘Maybe not,’ he said. ‘But you were his priority. He put everything on the line for you, Aubrey. I am willing to bet you were in the fore-front of his mind when he was hiding this money. It was a ticket for the both of you.’

He found a piece of paper and wrote down all the various neighborhoods and sites they had seen, all the common threads she could think of – their gentle rivalry of Cubs and White Sox, his obsession with Bulls basketball, his few favorite music groups and TV shows and movies, their preferred restaurants, a wine they drank on special occasions, the places they’d traveled together. Luke felt as if they were conducting an autopsy on the happier moments in Eric’s life. Then they started playing with the words, replacing letters with numbers in Eric’s style, turning Es and Bs to 3s, Ls into 1s, Gs into 8s, Ss and Ps into 5s. The list grew into dozens of permutations.

He became conscious as he scribbled with the pencil that time was passing. Maybe a neighbor would knock on the door, wondering who was parked in front of the empty house. Maybe the police would come, looking for evidence as to why Eric was murdered. Sweat formed along his lip. He pushed a piece of paper at her. ‘Start entering these, please.’

She typed, fingers pistoning on the keyboard, working through each possibility. ‘No. No. No.’

After the tenth no he said, ‘You’re being negative.’

She hit it on the forty-second try. ‘This laptop,’ Aubrey said, ‘is officially our pet bitch.’ She turned the screen toward him. Unlocked, it showed a normal desktop.

‘Which word?’

‘It was versailles, except with 1s instead of Ls. I should have guessed. We had a really nice day in Versailles. He wondered aloud if you could get married there.’

An awkward silence filled the room and Luke broke it. ‘Thank God for the consistency of bankers.’

She got up and he leaned over the laptop. He started to search through its files. A few text files, an email program and a web browser, nothing else installed. Luke opened one of the text files; inside were listed the same accounts on the piece of paper. Beside each account was a regional bank and a password, and a business name. The companies carried names that spoke of vague occupations – Lionhead Consulting; Three Brothers Partners; Jester, Inc. – nothing that hinted at what exactly they did. He counted a dozen of them. ‘He established a bunch of accounts for different companies.’

‘Try them. See if the fifty million is in those accounts.’ He could hear the urgency in her voice.

Luke surfed to each regional bank’s website, entered in the account info and the password. He could hear Aubrey holding her breath, her mouth close to his ear.

But each account only held a hundred dollars, probably the minimum to stay open.

‘These must be accounts he set up for the Night Road,’ she said. ‘For them to access money.’ Her sigh tickled his shoulder.

‘He hid the money somewhere else. He could have tucked it into an idle account at Marolt Gold, changed passwords, opened up new accounts under false names. He started in bank operations, I saw it on his bio. Which means he’s technically adept. We may never find it.’ A wave of despair washed across him.

Luke did online searches for the various company names. They did not have web pages. ‘These are all dummy corporations. Another dead end.’

‘Luke, we have to find this money.’ Frustration filled her voice.

‘Let’s see where else he went the last time he was online.’ Luke looked in the browser’s history window, which told him every site Eric visited. Aside from the banking pages, Eric had visited only one other place on the internet: a website about TV shows.