Jeff Abbott - Fear

‘But Groote and Quantrill and Sorenson, they’ll be hunting us, Nathan, they will kill us if they find us. We can’t recover if we’re dead. And Allison asked you, and me, and Celeste, in different ways, to help her. I’m not inclined to let the people who killed her get away with murder.’

‘Are you kidding me? You’re a mobster, the feds are hunting you, not just Groote. And she doesn’t want to step outside.’ Nathan gave a jagged laugh. ‘I can do plenty to get it back, but I can’t have the two of you tripping me up. I suggest you guys lay very low for the next few days.’ He turned to leave.

‘You want to be a hero. Then be one,’ Miles said quietly. ‘We shouldn’t work apart. Work with us.’

Nathan took five steps, then stopped. He rested his head against the doorjamb. ‘I’m not good with people. You don’t really want me around.’

‘You can’t have a life on the run alone, Nathan. No money, no prospects, no help. We don’t even know what the long-term effects of Frost might be. You can’t run off on your own. Help us. You knew more about what Allison was planning. I know you must have trusted her. Cared about her.’

Nathan weighed the words for several moments. He dropped his bag on the floor, raised his head, nodded. ‘All right. I’m in. So what’s the next step?’

‘Find Frost,’ Miles said, ‘and take the fight right back to these bastards.’

Breakfast was stale bagels, made edible through toasting and a thin coating of jam, and a pot of industrial-strength coffee. Normal morning routine. Except their routines usually included antidepressants, precious pills that they didn’t have, and Miles wondered if the three of them would lose focus, the power of clear thinking, without their meds.

‘So you just look up this Mercury Mountain on a computer and call them?’ Nathan asked around a mouthful of bagel.

‘I don’t think we call. We go see whoever has access to the IP address where Allison sent the research.’ He glanced at the clock: 6:00 A.M. He needed a computer on which he could make an online purchase and install new software, and he figured he wouldn’t be able to do that on a coffee-shop computer.

But he could on the gallery’s computers, if the locks hadn’t been changed. Joy was in early often, but six in the morning was too early for her. He wondered if there would still be the police protection at the gallery he’d asked DeShawn to provide.

‘We’ll all go,’ Celeste said.

‘You don’t have to, you can stay inside.’

‘No. Let’s all go,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ll be okay.’

They found a pair of ill-fitting jeans and a flannel shirt for Nathan, along with tennis shoes. Celeste put on dark glasses and a ball cap and a windbreaker. She took the windbreaker’s hood and pulled it over her head; too big for her, it shielded her face.

‘You gonna be okay?’ Miles asked her at the door.

‘Yes. Let’s do it.’

The three of them drove to the gallery, Miles driving, more confident behind the wheel. The lot was empty; no police car. Miles hurried them to the gallery’s door, noticing a plywood cover where a pane of glass had been. He tried his key, fed his code into the alarm system. The red light changed to green.

Celeste slid the windbreaker’s hood from her head, stepped inside, shivering. She and Nathan examined the art on the walls.

‘What lovely pieces,’ she said.

‘Touch nothing,’ he said, giving Nathan a hard look. Nathan shrugged. They followed him upstairs to Joy’s office.

Miles fired the computer up, opened a browser, hunted in Google for the name Mercury Mountain. No Web site for a hosting service – so not a hosting service that wanted customers, just a name to attach to a server. Miles jumped to a software vendor who sold IP address tracking software, dug out the VISA card he’d opened in his father’s name for emergencies.

‘I used this software when I had to track for the mob who really owned certain porn sites,’ Miles said. ‘It’s gotten a lot harder to find out who has certain Web domains, they could be bought with a stolen credit card or paid for ten years with a money order. But I’d find which of my bosses’ rivals owned porn sites, and my boss hired hackers to bring down the sites, cut into the rivals’ profits.’

‘You knew all the charming people,’ Celeste said.

Miles bought the software, entered in his VISA number, prayed the transaction would go through. Waiting. And then he got a confirmation.

‘Thank God,’ he said. He downloaded and installed the software, entered his license key, and entered in the IP address Celeste had found on her system. A map of the United States displayed, tracking the IP address, and finally pulsed on a location in northern California. Miles clicked: the IP address belonged to a server in Fish Camp, California, owned by an Edward Wallace.

‘Google him,’ Celeste said. Miles did, conscious now that they might only have minutes left. Joy – at DeShawn’s request – could have put an alert on the alarm system to let him know if the gallery was accessed after hours, just in case Miles came back. He hoped not.

Most of the Google results offered links to articles written by Edward Wallace – a few years out of date – mostly on post-traumatic stress disorder, and the gist seemed to be that the government was moving too slowly in addressing the growing problem of traumatic stress, especially among soldiers. He clicked through them; Edward Wallace was a neurobiology researcher in PTSD, affiliated with a university in San Diego. At least he had been four years ago.

‘She sent it to Edward Wallace for analysis, maybe,’ Celeste said.

Miles clicked on the next-to-last link. It summoned a local news story in a small-town paper from Fish Camp, California. An Edward Wallace of Fish Camp had been injured in a hiking accident. He was new to town – recently relocated from Fresno. His wife, Renee, was on an extended teaching fellowship in psychiatry at a medical school in the United Kingdom, so he had been hiking alone when he fell.

‘Odd. They don’t mention the name of the school,’ Celeste said, leaning over his shoulder. ‘Where exactly in California is Fish Camp?’

Miles clicked and searched and found a map. ‘Just a couple of miles south of Yosemite National Park.’

‘We should call him. Say we know Allison and need to know how he’s involved,’ Nathan said.

Miles clicked on the last link, an archived notice from The Fresno Bee.

There was a wedding picture of Edward – bookish and tall – and his bride, Renee, smiling, intelligent, confident, blond hair pulled back in a ponytail.

Renee Wallace was Allison Vance.

Groote cleaned off the screwdriver under a jet of water.

At his feet, on the kitchen floor, lay DeShawn Pitts. Groote believed a man bent, broken, and without hope was a tragic sight.

Groote ran a finger along the edge of the screwdriver. He’d learned the technique in Laos from a morals-challenged detective when Groote briefly worked with their police force on an exchange program: make a slight cut where the skin lay shallow over the bone, drive the screwdriver’s tip to the bone, twist and shred the flesh, let the subject hear the sound of metal grating against their own skeleton. Keep the subject gagged and you had quiet and a minimum of mess.

‘One last time,’ Groote said. ‘Or we’ll let Mr. Screwdriver explore fresh new territories. Above the eye socket. The pubic bone. Base of the spine.’ He lowered himself down to DeShawn’s eye level. ‘Listen. Why protect this guy? He screwed you over. He ran. Didn’t give a thought to your career, your professional standing.’

‘My job,’ DeShawn managed to say – his voice was barely above a whisper – ‘… to protect him.’