Sweet Dreams Boxed Set (150 page)

She took the money, thanked him profusely, then ran for the door. “I’ll return the laptop and pay you back on my return trip!”

“Where are you going?” her mother asked, following her down the walkway. “Don’t go running after that man!” Gordon appeared close behind her and tossed Angela a bag of snack food he’d quickly pulled together for the road.

Angela didn’t pay Samantha any attention. She put the laptop on the backseat and then climbed in behind the wheel. The engine fired up on her first attempt and the tires screeched as she pulled away from the curb.

An hour later, Angela had already traded her car for another and was on the freeway. Knowing that Jason would have to trek for at least an hour on a secondary road, she’d made a speedy and even trade for a dented 1990 Volvo 240.

After thirty more minutes at the wheel, she worried she had either passed Jason by without noticing him or he’d gotten a ride from a stranger. She was thinking about heading back to her mom’s house to see if he’d returned after all when she spotted a tall figure up ahead. It was Jason. He was walking along the highway, his left thumb out, trying to hitch a ride.

She drove past him and then pulled over to the shoulder of the road, the tires spitting up gravel and dirt as she slowed.  When he approached the car and opened the passenger door, surprise lit his features. “Angela, what are you doing?”

“I can’t let you do this alone.”

“Well, I can’t drag you into my mess.”

“You already have. I’m going with you.”

“I have no idea what will happen. You could get hurt.”

“I want to help you, Jason. You can’t spend the rest of your life in prison for something you didn’t do.”

“This is not a good idea.”

“Please get in. I can help you.”

***

After realizing she wasn’t going to give in easily, he climbed in and pulled the door closed. “Whose car is this?”

“I traded in my wreck for this one,” she told him. “Even exchange.”

“You got ripped off.”

She merged back onto the road. “But now, if anyone realizes I’m missing, they won’t be able to find my car.”

“Not until the car dealer recognizes your face on the news.”

“I’m trying to help. Don’t be a jerk.”

He smiled.

“If you’re hungry, there’s food in the back, compliments of Gordon.”

He gave her a long look. “I’m sorry I left without saying goodbye. I don’t like goodbyes. Never have.”

“No big deal,” she said with a shrug.

He knew that wasn’t true. He could see the hurt in her eyes, feel it hanging heavy in the air between them, but he let it go. What more could he say? He liked Angela, and he didn’t want to see her get hurt.

After grabbing some chips and water from the back, he flipped through the radio stations until he found one report about the riot that had broken out at San Quentin. Not one word was said about an escaped convict.

“Maybe they don’t know you’re missing,” Angela suggested.

“Not possible. They take a count every night. They had to have known by six o’clock the day I went missing, if not sooner.”

“That could mean the prison hasn’t told anyone outside of the prison walls, which could mean there’s no nationwide manhunt, right?”

“Wrong. More than likely it means that the FBI doesn’t want me to know they’re on to me, so they’re keeping the media out of it. Personally, I’d rather know what’s going on. I’m sure they know that.”

“So, what are you going to do? What’s your next step?”

“I have a few people I want to talk to, but I need addresses. Maybe a library.”

“Not a library,” she told him. “We need to find a Starbucks. Most of them have WiFi. I borrowed my mom’s computer so we could do some research and find out what your friends have been up to.”

***

It didn’t take long to find what they were looking for. Angela parked the car but reached over and stopped Jason from exiting the vehicle. “Hold on.” She crawled over the middle console, hopped onto the back seat, and rummaged around in her bag. “Don’t forget your hat. I found an old pair of aviators at mom’s house, too.”

He smiled as he obligingly put on her attempt at a disguise.

She drew back and took a good look at him. “Perfect. You could be anybody.”

He took a glance in the rearview mirror. “Why do I get the feeling you’ve done this before?”

She grinned, then slipped on a baseball cap of her own, along with a pair of sunglasses. “First, we’ll find a table,” she said as they walked toward the coffee shop. “Then I’ll get us both a coffee. I used to study all the time at Starbucks. Most people keep to themselves. Just act normal. We’re just two people on a ride across country, doing some research.”

“Got it.”

Everything went according to plan. It wasn’t crowded and they found a spot in a quiet corner. He couldn’t recall if he’d ever been to a Starbuck’s before or ever had their coffee. “This is good. What is it?”

“Caffè Mocha.”

“Where did you get the money?”

She turned on the computer and typed the password
princess
. “Mom’s boyfriend, Gordon, loaned me a few hundred dollars.”

He watched her closely. “You seem to really know your way around a computer.”

“Well, I took a few computer science courses and dabbled in web design and basic programming, but the medical field is where my passion lies.”

“So, what’s the deal with you, Angela?”

“What do you mean?”

“What’s your plan? What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“Why is it so difficult for anyone to believe that I just might like my job at the morgue?”

“I didn’t mean to assume. Do you like your job?”

“I do,” she said. “But my plan was always to go back to school…med school…and become a family doctor.”

“What stopped you?” he asked before taking another swallow of coffee.

“I had just turned eighteen when my parents divorced. I was angry with both of them at the time. Then my dad disappeared and I didn’t want to live with mom, so I struck off on my own. But keeping a roof over my head and food in the fridge wasn’t cheap. I managed to put myself through two years of med school, but it was costly, so I decided to drop out of school for a while. That’s when I snagged a job at the morgue. The years passed and before long, it no longer seemed feasible to go back to school and saddle myself with debt.”

“So now what?”

She shrugged. “Working at the morgue isn’t bad, but I guess I would prefer to help people while they’re alive and keep them out of the morgue.” She paused before she added, “These past few days have opened my eyes, made me see that I never should have given up my dream. I believe I have you to thank for that.”

“How so?”

“Look at you…accused of murder and yet you haven’t given up. You’re determined to do everything you can to fight for your freedom.”

“It sounds like you really might believe I’m innocent.”

“Would I be here if I didn’t?”

The corner of his mouth turned upward. Angela Chack was full of surprises.

“Okay,” she said, “we better get busy. What’s the lawyer’s name again?”

“Michael Gabaldon.”

It was quiet while she did her research. He’d been doing some research himself over the years. But he only had so many hours a week on the computer and he hadn’t wanted anyone to know what he was up to. There was only so much planning he could do within the confines of the prison walls without giving himself away.

“It sounds as if you worked with your lawyer for years,” she said as she typed. “What made you think, after all those years, that he had something to do with your incarceration?”

“I was a cocky twenty-seven year old when I went to prison. The last time I saw Mike, I had already spent three years behind bars. I was no longer the same naïve young man. Prison life tends to make a person grow up fast. I learned some non-verbal survival methods in prison, including how to decode the human face.”

She raised a questioning brow.

“If I wanted to survive in that place, I needed to stay alert, and learn to read involuntary facial expressions: anger, surprise, contempt, and so on.”

“And you saw something in the lawyer’s face that you hadn’t seen before?”

“Exactly.”

“Can you read my face?”

“Easy.”

“Okay…so?”

“You’re feeling pretty good about yourself.”

“And what makes you say that?”

He placed the tip of his finger on her face, near her nose, and gently traced it to her mouth. “You have a tiny line that runs from the edge of your nose to your outer lip. You’re happy. Not a fake happy either because your muscles are engaged.”

Now that she was conscious of him watching her, she made a face, trying to mask whatever it was she was feeling.

He laughed.

Smiling, she went back to focusing on the task at hand. “Like taking candy from a baby,” she said a few minutes later. “Internet searches these days make it so that anyone can be an investigator.”

He tried to read the screen. A glare prevented him from doing so. “What did you find?”

She took the pad of paper, wrote down Mike Gabaldon’s address, then slid the paper his way. “He lives in Davis, California.”

As Jason pondered all the things he wanted to ask the man, Angela sipped her coffee and continued searching his case. “Who is Stephanie Carr?”

“She was a receptionist at the time of the murder. She’d only been working at the office for about a month.”

“It says here that she was a key witness.”

“That’s true. She pointed at me in the courtroom and said I was the killer. She also testified that she’d seen Dirk and me inside his office the night he was killed.”

“I thought you said the office building was empty.”

“I thought it was, but I didn’t see any reason for her to lie. I figured she must have been in the parking lot when Dirk and I returned to the office, but I never saw her. My lawyer knew this, assured me he’d done everything he could to try to disprove the girl, but it ended up being her word against mine.”

“What about the police? Surely they must have done some investigating.”

“In the end,” Jason said, “nobody could disprove Stephanie Carr’s testimony.”

“So she lied. But why? Maybe she was working with your lawyer.”

“She and Mike Gabaldon have always been on the top of my list of people I need to talk to. Can you find a location for her?”

Angela nodded. “She lives in Carmichael.” She tapped her finger on the table next to the computer. “Was her desk close to Dirk’s office?”

“No. Different floors. The receptionist was the first person you saw when you walked into the building. Dirk’s office was on the second floor.”

“How would she know that you were in his office unless she walked in on you two?”

“At the trial she said she had a letter for Dirk and when she brought it upstairs, she saw the two of us arguing, so she left. She also said she saw me jump up out of my chair and pull something, possibly a weapon, from my pocket.”

“Did she say it was a knife?”

He shook his head. “Said she couldn’t see what I had in my hand. She said she was nervous and walked off before either of us spotted her.”

“If she was worried about a man’s life, she would have called the police.”

“That same point was made in court,” Jason said. “In the end, it didn’t matter.”

“Don’t look now,” Angela said, “but two policemen are making their way in here.”

The second he heard the door open, he stiffened, couldn’t help it.

Angela forced a smile, then touched his arm as if he’d just given her some good news. Before he knew what she was up to, she moved closer to him and rested her head against his shoulder. It took him a minute to catch on, but he did, and casually slipped his arm around her.

For the next few minutes, he forgot about the cops standing in line behind them and instead got a wonderful glimpse of what it might be like to live an ordinary life…just hanging out with his girl in a coffee shop.

Chapter Nine

That night, still wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap, Angela kept her gaze straight ahead as she walked past the pool to the motel room. They had made it as far as Provo, Utah, where they had found a Motel 6 right off Interstate 15 for thirty-two dollars a night. Free WiFi and a mall two miles away.

She knocked on the door, and said, “It’s me.”

Once the door opened, she slipped inside. It wasn’t until she put the pizza box on the table by the window and dropped a plastic shopping bag on the bed that she noticed Jason seemed upset. “What happened?”

He plowed his hands through his hair as he paced the room. “I was hoping I had another day before they figured out which body bag I ended up in, but the feds are in Vermont.”

“How do you know?”

He gestured across the room.

She moved closer to the television for a better look. “Oh, my God! That’s the Montpelier morgue! And Rob! What’s he doing on the news?” She grabbed the remote and turned up the volume.

“The last time I saw Angela,” Rob told the reporter, “she was upset with me for breaking up with her.”

“Why don’t you tell the world where I found you!” she shouted at the T.V.

“I’ve been worried sick,” Rob continued. “I called her several times in hopes of talking things through. It never crossed my mind that she’d been abducted by an escaped convict.”

Christine stood in the background, sobbing.

“Give me a break,” Angela said. “I had no idea she was such a good actress.”

After the clip ended, Jason walked over and shut off the television. “Do you think anyone recognized you at the pizza place?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

She looked at the bed. His belongings were neatly packed. He was ready to shove off. “We need to stick with the plan,” she told him. “You need to get some sleep.”

He rubbed his chin. “Maybe so, but we need to set off early. I want to confront Mike before the police get to him.”

“Maybe they won’t think to talk to your lawyer since they have no reason to believe you have a beef with him, right?”