Brett Battles - Shadow of Betrayal

To be safe, she walked down half a block to avoid the light from one of the streetlamps before crossing the street. As she approached her sister’s car, she half expected there to be another notice from the police, marking it as part of the crime scene. But there was nothing. Either they hadn’t realized it belonged to her sister, or they didn’t care.

She slipped the key into the lock and opened the door. Inside, the dome light came on. She leaned in and turned it off.

“Okay, you’re going to stay here while I go get the box,” she said to Iris. “I’ll be right back, so you’ll be fine.”

As she put the girl down on the small back seat, Iris’s lower lip began to tremble.

“No, don’t cry, sweetie. Just play with your bear.” Marion looked around. “Where is it?”

But the bear wasn’t there. They must have left it upstairs, she thought. That’s why Iris hadn’t wanted to be left on the couch.

“Dammit,” Marion said under her breath.

She glanced around to see if there was anything that could keep Iris occupied. The best she could come up with was a map of eastern Canada, but it seemed to do the trick.

“I’ll only be a minute,” she said, then shut the door and hurried back to the house.

Once inside, she went straight for the box in the living room. She started to pick it up, but then stopped. Pauline.

She first checked around the couch to make sure Iris hadn’t dropped the bear there, then ran upstairs, her gaze focused on the steps to make sure it wasn’t somewhere along the way.

She expected to see the bear sitting in the middle of the bed when she entered her bedroom, but it wasn’t.

“Where the hell did you go?” she said, annoyed.

She got down on her knees and looked under the bed. Nothing.

She retraced her steps back into the hallway and down the stairs to the living room couch. It was nowhere. But that didn’t make any sense. It had to be somewhere between the bed and couch. She knew she should just forget it and leave, but Iris had liked the bear, and it warmed Marion to think about the connection it gave the girl to Marion’s father.

She headed back upstairs into the bedroom. She was almost at the point of wanting to tear the room apart when she spotted it wedged between the bed and her nightstand.

With a relieved laugh, she pulled it out and headed back downstairs. She put the bear in the box, then picked the container up and turned to leave. She made it halfway across the living room when she heard the noise.

It wasn’t much. Just a subtle scrape at best, but it had come from behind her, near the front door. She looked over her shoulder as she heard a second scrape. Not near the front door, just beyond it. Outside.

She froze, her gaze darting from one window to the other on either side of the front door. The curtains were drawn, but the light from the streetlamp made them glow. As she watched, a dark shadow of a man appeared in one window. He was heading from the front door toward the side of the house.

It’s them , she thought. They’ve found me.

She set the box on the floor carefully so as not to make any noise, then tiptoed to the back door. She hesitated just inside it for only a second, then stepped through into the backyard. Unless the intruder had doubled back when she’d turned away, he’d be coming down the side to her right, so she moved across the yard to her left. When she turned the corner, she was relieved to see no one waiting for her.

She went only a few feet down the side, then stopped. She could hear steps. Faint, like someone was making an effort to be quiet. They were around the back side of the house now. Whoever it was had missed spotting her by seconds.

She waited, then heard a very light creak. Only someone who had lived in the house would have noticed it, and known what it meant. Someone had entered the kitchen. Then the creak came again. Not one person. Two.

Her breathing began to increase. She reached a shaky hand back and pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her head. She crept toward the front of the house, taking careful steps so as not to draw any attention. As she did, she listened for the progress of those inside, knowing the deeper they went, the better her chances of getting away.

She stopped a few feet before the front of the house, and waited until she was sure at least one of her pursuers was in the living room. That’s when she made her move.

She rushed through her parents’ front yard and across the street to the Saab in seconds. As she opened the door, she thought she could hear noise from the house. Had they heard her?

She was in near panic as she climbed into the car. The keys slipped in her fingers and nearly dropped on the floor. But she managed to get them in the ignition and get the car started.

“Hold on, baby,” she said to Iris, who was lying unsecured in the back seat. She knew the words would mean nothing, but was unable to do anything else at the moment.

Marion backed up as far as she could, then pulled out of the spot, just clearing the car in front of her. As she started to press down on the accelerator, movement outside to her left caught her attention.

She turned just in time to see a man approaching her car. His hair was short and blond, and the look on his face determined, like he would stop her at any cost. There was also something familiar about him. The hair was wrong, but she swore she had seen his face before.

And then he was gone, left behind as the Saab’s speed increased.

She worried that he might pull out a gun and shoot at her. But as she monitored him in her rearview mirror, he just stood there watching her drive away. Then it came to her. The news report that morning. The man who had killed the American official. The sketch. That’s who this guy looked like.

But before she could process that thought further, she saw something else in her mirror.

A car making a fast U-turn and heading in her direction.

CHAPTER

15

“WHERE ARE YOU?” QUINN ASKED. HE HAD HIS PHONEto his ear. Nate was on the other end, his speakerphone switched on.

“How the hell do I know?” Nate said. “I’ve never been here before.”

“You’re still behind her, though,” Quinn said.

“Yes, I’ve still got… wait. Did you say her?”

“Her name is Marion Dupuis. She’s the missing daughter.”

“You’re sure?”

“I saw her as she drove off, and I’ve got a picture right here. Same person.”

Quinn was sitting in the passenger seat of a Lincoln Continental he and Orlando had stolen a block away from the house. In his lap was Marion’s box. The contents seemed to be consistent with someone on the run, who wanted to take a few personal mementos along. Two items were of most interest. The first was a book. A French version of A Wrinkle in Time. Inside the cover, in the handwriting of a preteen, had been written: Ce livre appartient à Marion Dupuis —this book belongs to Marion Dupuis. That had given Quinn the woman’s name.

The other curious item didn’t fit with anything else in the box. A motel key for someplace called Motel Monique.

“Hold on,” Nate said. A moment later, “Shit.”

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s just a pain in the ass to follow someone who knows a city that I don’t.”

“You lost her?”

“Of course not,” he said.

“Give us some street names. We’ll see if we can find you.”

“I’m on … eh … Rue Drummond. It’s one-way, but we just turned off a big street. Renee something.”

Quinn had found a map of Montreal in the glove compartment. It was old and worn, and had been buried deep under a stack of other papers. He looked down the street index for Drummond, got the coordinates, then found it on the map.