On Borrowed Time (22 page)

“I trust Allie completely,” I said.

“You’re the boss,” he said, in a way that sounded like he considered that an unfortunate truth.

When she came back in I told Craig that we felt we were running out of time, that we had to start applying as much pressure as we could. “Robby Divine, my Wall Street guy, said that Lassiter’s drug results come in next week. If it turns out like I think it will, he’ll have his money. He’ll have gotten what he wants.”

“Other than the fact that you can’t stand him,” Craig asked, “what does that have to do with you?”

“Because if he has Jen, then it might be to use her against me; to keep me in check in case I started to become a danger to him. If I got too close, he could play that card, threaten to hurt her. Once he wins, he wouldn’t need her for that anymore.”

“Richard, I’ve been on this guy like white on rice, and I’ve seen no evidence that he has her. Absolutely none.”

“We’ve got nothing else to go on,” Allie said.

Craig frowned, his frustration obvious. “Okay. So you want to break into a building. Which one? The White House? Fort Knox?”

“The annex building at Ardmore Hospital.”

“Why?”

I wasn’t going to share Marie Galasso’s name with Craig. Even though I trusted him, I couldn’t be one hundred percent sure that he wouldn’t mention it to someone else in the course of his investigation. With Philip Garber lying on the ocean floor, I simply could not take the chance. “I’ve got information that there might be something in there that can help us.”

“What kind of information?”

“I can’t say.”

“Where did you get it?”

“I can’t say that either.”

He stood up, clearly ready to walk out. “In the face of all this trust, my eyes are filling up with tears.”

“Craig, I need your help.”

He stopped, thought about it for a few moments, then sighed and sat down. “What exactly are you asking me to do?”

“You’re a security expert. You know how to keep buildings secure, and my guess is you know how to get into one if you have to. You certainly would be better at it than me.”

He frowned, but said, “I need to know what I’m looking for once I get in, so that it can be done quickly. The first rule of breaking into buildings, in case you’re planning on turning this into a career, is to get in and get out.”

“I’m going in with you,” I said. “And I don’t know exactly what we’re looking for, but I’ll know it when I see it.”

“Are you going also?” Craig asked Allie. “Because if so, I’ll need to get a date.”

Craig’s attitude toward Allie seemed somewhat hostile, which I hadn’t noticed before. But it didn’t seem to faze her.

“No, you two can have a boys’ night out. I’ve got my own plans.”

I could see Craig wanted to ask what they were, but was afraid we would use the secrecy card again. So I jumped in. “She’s going to keep an eye on Lassiter.”

Allie smiled. “A stakeout.”

“What for?”

“Because it’s better than sitting around here doing nothing. Maybe he’ll lead us to Jen, or maybe to something else.”

Craig nodded, more in resignation than anything else. “Be careful,” he said, and Allie agreed that she would.

“So are you in?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I’ll check the place out; if I think there’s a way in without us getting caught, I’ll do it.” Then, “Even though I think this is nuts.”

“You’re just figuring out that I’m nuts?”

“I’ve had a hunch.”

It took Craig two days to check things out to his satisfaction.

He insisted we meet outside, in Riverside Park, to ensure privacy for our discussion. “I can get you in,” he said. “We can go tomorrow.”

I was actually surprised to hear this assessment; I thought he’d say the place was too heavily guarded. “You sure?”

He nodded. “I think so. After nine o’clock at night the place empties out. The security guard from the main building does a walk-through every forty-five minutes.”

“So that’s how much time we have?” I asked.

“Well, this guy is not exactly Special Forces; he probably wouldn’t notice if the Rose Bowl parade was going through the building while he was there. But there’s no sense taking chances, so I would say just under forty-five minutes,.”

“What about burglar alarms, security cameras…?”

He frowned. “Who do you think you’re talking to? I can handle all of that.”

“That’s my boy.”

We agreed to go forward on our mission the next night, and I went home to get nervous. Kentris called, more checking in than anything else, but I wasn’t about to tell him what we had planned.

“You’re holding out on me,” he said, as the conversation neared an end.

“What are you talking about?”

“There’s something you’re not telling me. I can hear it in your voice.”

“No way. Why would you say that?”

“I’m a cop; I have a built-in bullshit detector.”

I kept denying it, but there’s no way he believed me. The truth was, it didn’t matter if he believed me or not; I was going ahead with it.

Allie was having no luck at all with Lassiter. She had already spent all of two days following him around, which basically consisted of watching him go to lunch. “You want to give it up?” I asked, as she set off for another day of the same.

She shook her head. “No, maybe something will happen today.”

“Just keep your cell phone handy,” I said. “I may be calling for you to bail me out of jail.”

“You don’t have to do this,” she said.

“Yes, I do.”

She nodded. “Yeah. I guess you do.” She said she would be back by five o’clock, in time to cook me dinner before I went off to Ardmore Hospital. She kissed me good-bye, not a particularly romantic kiss, at least at first. The second kiss, and then the third, definitely moved the ball into the “romantic” category.

When we finally broke off the last kiss, she just looked me in the eye and said, maybe a bit wistfully, “Life is complicated, Richard.”

I smiled. “Mine more than most.”

“You know what I mean,” she said.

“Yeah. I know what you mean.”

Allie and I were falling in love, had fallen in love. We had just moved past my ability to deny it to myself, and probably the same was true for her. I recognized the feeling because I had been in love once before, with the person I’d been spending every minute of every day searching for. A person who may not even exist.

Life was definitely complicated.

It was a really long day; I guess waiting to commit my first felony had the effect of making time move slowly. I expected Craig to have everything under control; he wouldn’t knowingly bring us into a situation that had great risk. Unfortunately, the key word was “knowingly.”

Allie didn’t come home at five o’clock, and by five-thirty I was starting to get worried. I called her on her cell, but it went directly to voice mail. I tried again at least ten times before six-thirty, when I had to head to Ardmore, and then at least another twenty times on the way.

By the time I got there, I was panicked that something had happened to her; I simply could not think of another reason why she would not be answering her phone for almost three hours.

I met Craig at a mall parking lot just outside of Ardmore. We discussed what was about to happen, then drove to the hospital in our separate cars and parked in the main lot. Craig got out of his car and into mine, because we were early. It was nine-thirty, and Craig said the guard made his first pass-through at nine forty-five.

“Allie is missing,” was the first thing I said when I saw him.

“Yeah?”

“She didn’t come home tonight, and she’s not answering her phone.”

Craig said that we needed to focus on our reason for being at the hospital. The plan was for him to stand in the shadows near the building, and when the guard finished his rounds, Craig would do what was necessary to disable the security devices. He thought that would take less than ten minutes, at which time he’d call me, and we’d go in together.

“You bring your gun?”

I tapped my pocket. “Right here.”

He pointed to the glove compartment. “Now put it right there. We get caught, you don’t want them to be able to put ‘armed’ before ‘robbery’ in the charge.”

Before he got out of the car, he said, “Richard, no matter what happens in there, we need to talk later. I’ve got something you need to hear.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “What is it?”

“Later,” he said. “First things first.”

The call came at exactly 9:56. I didn’t answer it, just got out of the car and walked to the back of the annex, where Craig was waiting. “You ready?” he whispered.

I took a deep breath. “Ready.”

I did so and he opened the door. I cringed, expecting an alarm to go off, but there was only silence. Craig was obviously good at this.

We went inside, and Craig had a small flashlight to guide us through the place. The first room we went into was a large one, in the center, with probably half a dozen desks, each with its own computer screen. The desks were basically clean, these were obviously very neat people, and the drawers that I tried were either locked or empty.

Along the outside of the room were five offices. Three seemed not to have been in use, and the other two offered nothing of apparent interest to us.

We went into the other main room, which was the one that Marie Galasso said Frank Donovan should not have been in, but which she reported him as coming out of. This was set up as a small hospital annex, with six beds and a lot of standard hospital equipment, such as intravenous carriers.

There was also what seemed to be an X-ray room, and another room with a sign that read
SURGERY
on the door. We went inside each, and they seemed to be as one would expect.

The entire time we were in there I was thinking about Allie. With all that was going on, there was no way she would leave herself unreachable, unless something was very wrong. My mind was racing with questions of what I could do to find and help her, although my record of finding and helping missing women I loved was fairly dismal.

We continued to search for anything at all unusual or revealing, but there was simply nothing to be found. Finally, Craig pointed to his watch, silently making the statement that it was time to get out.

I nodded my agreement; we were learning absolutely nothing by staying there, so there was no reason to risk getting caught. I left and went back to my car to wait for Craig, who was restoring the security equipment back to its original state so as to cover our tracks.

Within ten minutes he was back, and he got into my car. “Sorry to put you through this, Craig. Waste of time.”

“No problem,” he said. “Everybody gets bad information sometimes.”

I nodded. “I guess so.”

“Richard, I said we needed to talk.”

“I remember.”

“I’m a suspicious guy; I like to check things out. I can’t help it, and even though it can be annoying, it usually turns out to be a good thing I checked.”

I didn’t like where this was going. “Okay…”

“So I checked out Allison Tynes. I knew you wouldn’t want me to, so I didn’t tell you about it.”

Now I was both annoyed by where he was going and fearful of what he would say when he got there. Was he going to tell me why Allie was missing?

“Spit it out, Craig.”

“Richard, she doesn’t have a twin sister, never did, and she’s not from where she said she’s from.”

It was as if he’d shot a jolt of electricity through me. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I said it as clearly as I can. She’s not who you think she is.”

I shook my head. “That’s not possible. It is simply not possible.”

“I found this out by getting her prints off a glass in your apartment. Her real name is Nancy Beaumont. She’s done time for fraud and extortion. I’ve got the documents here.” He handed me an envelope that he had in his jacket.

“No…” My head was spinning.

“Richard, I’m sorry.”

“You’re also wrong. I don’t know where you got your information, but it’s bullshit.”

“Take it home and look through it,” he said.

“You don’t get it,” I said, getting angry at Craig in a burst of classic kill-the-messenger. “Somebody out there has been manipulating everything in my life. Since day one, nothing has been as it seemed to be, because they’re out there pulling the strings.”

“Richard—”

I interrupted. “Now they’re doing it to you; they’re setting you up with false information, because—”

“Look through it. Okay?”

“—because Allie is real. I know it, Craig. I know it. You cannot tell me otherwise, so don’t try.”

I drove home in a daze.

Craig’s revelation was so stunning, so bizarre, so absolutely impossible, that I didn’t fully have the power to comprehend it. As I neared my house, I had finally decided that it could not possibly be true. Of course, I was aware enough to realize that a lot of things that could not possibly be true had already come to pass, so I was left with one dominant emotion.

I was scared.

I didn’t try to reach Allie on the way home, mainly because I didn’t know what I would say if I reached her. I was still very worried about her, but first I needed to get things straight in my own mind.

I stopped on a street about a mile from my apartment and parked there. I turned on the interior light, took a deep breath, and opened Craig’s envelope.

It was all there. Nancy Beaumont’s prison record, complete with mug shot, except the person in the shot was Allie. Copies of press clippings about her arrest, again with Allie’s picture in them. Copies of photographs of the real Allison Tynes, along with her twin sister Julie, from their high school yearbook, but they looked nothing at all like Allie and Jen.

It was all there, but it could not possibly be true. I would not allow it to be true. If a person could be made not to exist, then these documents could be wrong.

They simply had to be wrong.

I drove the rest of the way home hoping that Allie would be there, but not knowing what I was going to say if she was. The most important thing would be not what I said, but what I saw in her reaction; that would tell me what I needed to know.