“Mmm,” I said. I wasn’t so sure that afternoon had been useless, even if I didn’t know how it fit in yet. “I’ll keep poking around.”
“It’s been one of those days all round,” Frank said, through a mouthful. “I’ve been chasing our girl and getting zip. You’ve probably noticed: we’ve got a gap a year and a half long in her story. She ditches the May-Ruth ID in late 2000, but she doesn’t show up as Lexie until early 2002. I’m trying to track down where and who she was in between. I doubt she went home, wherever that is, but it’s always a possibility; and even if she didn’t, she might have left us a clue or two along the way.”
“I’d focus on European countries,” I said. “After September 2001, airport security tightened up a lot; she wouldn’t have made it out of the U.S. and into Ireland on a fake passport. She had to be this side of the Atlantic before then.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know what name to chase. There’s no record of May-Ruth Thibodeaux ever applying for a passport. I’m thinking she went back to her own identity or bought herself a new one in New York, flew out of JFK on that, switched identity again once she got wherever she was going-”
JFK-Frank was still talking but I’d stopped dead in the middle of the lane, just forgotten to keep walking, because that mysterious page in Lexie’s date book had gone off in my head with a flash-bang like a firecracker. CDG 59… I’d flown into Charles de Gaulle a dozen times, going to spend summers with my French cousins, and fifty-nine quid sounded just about right for a one-way. AMS: not Abigail Marie Stone; Amsterdam. LHR: London Heath-row. I couldn’t remember the others but I knew, sure as steel, that they would turn out to be airport codes. Lexie had been pricing flights.
If all she wanted was an abortion she would have headed to England, no need to mess about with Amsterdam and Paris. And those were one-way prices, not returns. She had been getting ready to run again, right off the edge of her life and out into the wide blue world.
Why?
Three things had changed, in her last few weeks. She had found out she was pregnant; N had materialized; and she had started making plans to take off. I don’t believe in coincidences. There was no way to be sure of the order in which those three things had happened, but by whatever roundabout path, one of them had led to the other two. There was a pattern there, somewhere: tantalizingly close, popping in and out of view like one of those pictures you have to cross your eyes to see, there and gone too quick to catch.
Up until that night, I hadn’t had much time for Frank’s mystery stalker. Very few people are willing to ditch their whole lives and spend years bouncing around the world after some girl who pissed them off. Frank has this tendency to go for the more interesting theory rather than the more likely one, and I’d filed this one somewhere between Outside Chance and Pure Hollywood Melodrama. But this made three times, at least, that something had smashed broadside into her life, left it totaled, irreclaimable. My heart twisted for her.
“Hello? Ground control to Cassie?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Frank, can you do something for me? I want to know anything out of the ordinary that happened in her May-Ruth life in the month or so before she went missing-make it two months, to be on the safe side.”
Running away from N? Running away with N, to start a whole new life somewhere, him and her and their baby?
“You underestimate me, babe. Already done. No strange visitors or phone calls, no arguments with anyone, no odd behavior, nothing.”
“I didn’t mean stuff like that. I want anything that happened, anything at all: if she switched job, switched boyfriend, moved house, got sick, took a course in something. Not ominous stuff, just your basic life events.”
Frank thought about this for a while, chewing his burger or whatever. “Why?” he asked, in the end. “If I’m going to call in more favors from my friendly Fed, I need to give him a reason.”
“Make something up. I don’t have a good reason. Intuition, remember?”
“OK,” Frank said. He sounded disturbingly like he was picking bits out of his teeth. “I’ll do it. If you do something for me in exchange.”
I had started walking again, automatically, towards the cottage. “Hit me.”
“Don’t relax. You’ve started to sound way too much like you’re enjoying yourself in there.”
I sighed. “Me woman, Frank. Woman multitask. I can do my job and have a laugh or two, all at the same time.”
“Good for you. All I know is, undercover relax, undercover in big trouble. There’s a killer out there, probably within a mile or so of wherever you’re standing right now. You’re supposed to be tracking him down, not playing Happy Families with the Fantastic Four.”
