She knew that given this unexpected move, she would not sleep for days, worried sick about Penny being a part of this, and what might become of her daughter if her enemies were ever successful. She glimpsed her immediate future. Their survival depended upon her own random, unpredictable behavior. They would live on what she’d saved until she found new work. She did not maintain a bank account; instead, she converted paychecks to cash for a fee and bought U.S. Postal Service money orders. She would keep moving, would contact no one. They would return to an isolated, unpredictable life for the next few days or weeks, however long it took for WITSEC to run a nearly identical ad to read: “Mr. Johnny Citizen, PO Box 411, Washington, DC.” That combination would alert her that whatever the problem, it had been resolved. It would be safe for protected witnesses to call the memorized phone number and check on their individual status. For Alice, long since out of the program, it would likely mean choosing someplace else to resettle with Penny. St. Louis had not worked out as planned anyway.
Self-pity crept in and she pushed it away. She would not cry in front of her daughter, would not resent their situation. She was alive. She had a beautiful daughter. She would not fantasize some life other than that she’d been handed. She would not give them that. She would not succumb.
She and Penny were a team like no other. Best friends. Mother and daughter. Rivals. Survivors.
She looked up from the clutter of clothes, sorted first by necessity, given that she’d elected to try for a warmer climate this time. Fewer clothes, less baggage.
She turned.
Penny was not in the room.
She called out, the first tendrils of fear wrapping around her heart.
“Pen?”
No answer.
Her daughter had been standing there only seconds-minutes?-earlier.
Her feet moved independently of her. First at a walk, then a run, she hurried around the few rooms offered by the loft’s layout. She checked under both beds, in all three closets, behind the couch… all of those places Penny sought during hide-and-seek.
Then she arrived at the front door only to find it hanging open.
Her daughter-her headstrong, precocious, adorable, frightened little girl-had run off.
Alice hurried within the building, neighbor to neighbor. Not many of them knew her particularly well-she’d made a point of not getting close. But most knew Penny just from hellos in the hall and at the mail slots.
With each successive failed attempt, her desperation increased. She was lightheaded and sick to her stomach. She steadied her balance and attempted to predict where Penny might go.
She ran three blocks to a church playground, grateful that Mrs. Kiyak, a neighbor who didn’t know her well but recognized a mother’s fear when she saw it, agreed to guard the apartment building’s stoop in case Penny returned. Alice ’s deeper concern was that the elderly Mrs. Kiyak might forget why she was sitting there, for whom she was waiting, and might return to her own apartment unaware she was in fact deserting her post. Mrs. Kiyak had delivered Christmas cookies to her friends in the building, not a month too early, but on the twenty-fifth of September.
The playground stood empty, a blanket of fall leaves at its feet. They stirred in a light breeze. One of the swings moved pendulously on its chains. The more Alice shouted, the more anxiety flooded her.
She fought to calm herself again. If she’d covered her tracks well, and she believed she had, then no one from her past knew about Penny’s existence, no one could connect either of them to St. Louis. If she’d made any mistake, it had been using her Alice Frizen social security number at St. Luke’s, a mistake she had not repeated here in St. Louis. Able to manipulate computer data with ease, she’d covered her tracks within her employment records at Baines Jewish Hospital by way of a small sin she felt was forgivable, adopting the Social Security number of a woman her age and roughly her description who had passed away from cancer up in Minnesota. By the time the IRS figured that one out, Penny would have her own grandchildren.
The sounds of city traffic hummed like swarming bees. She inhaled the improbable mixture of rich fall smells: wet, loamy earth; the dry dust of brittle leaves.
She couldn’t imagine Penny leaving the building without her, much less the neighborhood. But then Alice realized that if Penny had left, there was probably only one place she would go.
Remembering she’d left some cash by the phone in the apartment, and now not remembering if she’d seen the money during her search, Alice hurried back home. If the cash was gone, then she thought she knew exactly where to find her. Candy was Penny’s first and only real weakness.
Discovering the cash missing from where she’d left it, Alice tried three neighborhood stores, two that sold candy and one that offered ice cream. Drawing blank looks and offers to help from each establishment, she wandered back out onto the sidewalks.
She rarely shopped the same grocery store twice in a row. The nearest lay eight blocks away-the opposite direction from the hospital. Sometimes they walked to the market, sometimes they took the bus. She spun in circles, tears now threatening as the hopelessness, anger, and frustration competed within her.
She thought of the toy store and broke into a run, slaloming through pedestrians, avoiding collisions. Then, halfway to the toy store, she skidded to a stop. Across the street she spotted Little Annie’s Bookshoppe, Penny’s favorite store after Crown Candy.
Torn between the two, she willed her feet to move but they wouldn’t budge.
“Penny!” She screamed in such a shrill voice that she turned heads, then quickly reminded herself that she was the one the Romeros sought.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Larson felt about hospitals the way kids do about dentists. He’d watched his mother die in one; he’d sat by his brother’s side as he recovered from a freak diving accident that left him a paraplegic; he’d had his own shoulder operated on, allowing him to continue rowing. The smell, the morose quiet. The only thing good about hospitals was women in uniforms; even a woman wearing blue scrubs turned him on. Pathetic.
He entered Baines Jewish, the third hospital he’d visited since landing two hours earlier in St. Louis, bound and determined to ferret out Hope.
Trill Hampton had met him at the airport, driving one of the Service’s black Navigators, an ostentatious ride if there ever were one, considering the Service’s efforts to maintain a low profile.
Hampton, a graduate of Howard University, was often asked, stereotypically, if he’d played college sports-football was the first guess because of the broad shoulders and thick neck, the cantilevered brow and jutting jaw. But in fact his interest in college had been theater arts, and to this day, he was Larson’s best guy to send into a dicey situation that required the elements of undercover work. Like Larson, he’d come to the Service through public law enforcement-Baltimore PD-where he’d found the thinly concealed corruption impossible to sidestep, finally turning in his shield and keeping his mouth shut. Through this service he learned more than he’d wanted to know about the federal witness protection plan, eventually applying there for his next job. Like Stubblefield, Hampton had been with Larson for nearly seven years; first on a witness protection team, and more recently FATF.
Hampton spoke with a tight voice. “Scrotum thinks both Palo Alto and Duke are worth a follow-up. He says you can have Wash U since you’ve been on the road. All three have supercomputers capable of decrypting Laena, and Markowitz either contacted or visited all three right before his disappearance.”