“Yes, sir.” But everyone in the room knew that the first head to roll would be the warden’s.
GRACE OPENED HER EYES SLOWLY. BENEATH her was a blanket of deep undergrowth. Springy and prickly like an old straw mattress, it must have broken her fall. Her head was filled with a loud whirring.
No. It’s not in my head. It’s overhead. Choppers.
They’re looking for me.
She had no idea how long she’d been unconscious. Minutes? Hours? What she did know was that she was freezing cold, so cold that it was hard to move. She also knew that she was in grave danger. In the short time she’d been inside the truck, they could not have gotten more than a few miles away from Bedford Hills. She had to put some distance between herself and the prison.
Gingerly, Grace got to her feet. By some miracle, nothing seemed to be broken. Gradually her eyes acclimated to the darkness and she could make out the shadows around her. She was standing in woodland just a few feet from a quiet country road. Not quiet. Silent. A single twig cracking beneath her feet sounded as loud as a thunderclap.
I have to get out of here.
Her left side was bruised and stiff, but she found she could walk without too much trouble. To her right, the tree line jutted up into a steep escarpment. From the top of the hill, Grace heard the dim rumble of traffic.
The police will be patrolling the main road. If I go up there, I triple my chances of being caught.
If I don’t go up there, I won’t get a ride out of here.
She started to climb.
AT THE TOP OF THE HILL someone had planted a row of poplar trees, presumably as a sound barrier. Grace squatted low behind them, trying to get her breath. The climb had exhausted her. The road was busy, almost as if it was rush hour. Grace wondered again how late it was, but there was no time to dwell on that now. Brushing the icy leaves off her skirt, she stepped out onto the side of the road and stuck out her thumb, the way she’d seen people do on TV.
I wonder how long it’ll take for someone to stop. If I don’t get inside soon, I could die of hypothermia.
A squad car screamed out of the darkness, blue lights flashing, sirens blaring. Instinctively Grace leaped back for the cover of the trees, twisting her ankle on the icy hard ground. It was agony but she didn’t dare cry out, holding her breath in the darkness, waiting for the police car to slow or pull over. It didn’t. After a few seconds the dying wail of the sirens faded to nothing. Grace crawled back out to the roadside.
Standing there, thumb out, stamping her feet against the subzero temperature, Grace started to sway. She’d barely eaten all day, and the fall from the truck had left her weak and dizzy. Lights from the cars’ headlamps began to merge into one solid orange glow. In Grace’s frozen, confused state, it looked warm and welcoming. Half conscious, she staggered toward it. The deafening blare of a truck horn brought her back to her senses.
“Are you outta your mind, lady?”
A man had stopped. Pulled over onto the hard shoulder, he was talking to Grace out of the driver’s-side window. Middle-aged, with a thick black mustache and dark eyes that sat flat on his face, he looked like he might be part Asian, but it was tough to be sure in the darkness. He was driving a light blue van with TOMMY’S YARD SERVICES written on the side in bold black lettering.
“Don’t you have a coat?”
Grace shook her head. Pretty soon her whole body was shaking, racked with cold and exhaustion. The man reached over and opened the passenger door.
“Get in.”
BOOK 2
FIFTEEN
DETECTIVE MITCH CONNORS RETURNED TO HIS desk in a pensive mood.
Is this a good thing, or a bad thing?
Tall, blond, athletic and altogether too big for his glass-walled office, Mitch Connors looked more like a football pro than a cop. Sinking into his uncomfortable chair (Helen had bought him the damn thing two years ago, for his back pain. It had won a bunch of design awards, apparently, and cost a small fortune, so he couldn’t throw it away, but Mitch had always hated it), he stretched out his legs and tried to think.
Do I really want this case?
On the one hand, his boss had just handed him what would, in a few short hours, become the biggest, most high-profile investigation in the country. Late last night, Grace Brookstein had pulled off a dramatic escape from a maximum-security prison. It would be Mitch Connors’s job to find her, apprehend her and haul her thieving, designer-clad ass back to jail.
His boss said, “You’re the best, Mitch. I wouldn’t put you on this if you weren’t.” And Mitch had felt a warm glow. But now he felt something else. Something bad. For the life of him, Mitch couldn’t figure out what it was.
He blamed the chair. It was so torturous, no wonder he couldn’t concentrate. Ergonomic, my ass. I figure Helen bought it on purpose to torment me. To pay me back for all the shit I put her through. Then he thought, That’s bullshit, Connors, and you know it.
Helen wasn’t like that. She was an angel. Saint Helen of Pittsburgh, patron saint of tolerance.
And you drove her away.
MITCH CONNORS HAD GROWN UP IN PITTSBURGH. He was born in the well-to-do suburb of Monroeville, where his mom was a local beauty queen. She married Mitch’s dad, an inventor, when she was nineteen. Mitch arrived a year later and the couple’s happiness was complete.
For about six months.
Mitch’s father was a brilliant inventor…by night. By day, he was a traveling encyclopedia salesman. Mitch used to go on trips with him. The little boy would watch in awe as his dad scammed one housewife after another.
“Do you know the average cost of a college education, ma’am?”
Pete Connors was standing on the front steps of a dilapidated house in Genette, Pennsylvania, wearing a suit and tie and shiny black shoes, his trilby hat held respectfully in one hand. He was a handsome man. Mitch thought he looked like Frank Sinatra. The woman standing at the door in a stained housecoat was fat, depressed and defeated. Hungry kids ran around her feet like rats.
“No, sir. Can’t say I do.”
The door was closing. Pete Connors stepped forward. “Let me tell you. It’s fifteen hundred dollars. Fifteen hundred dollars. Can you imagine that?”
She couldn’t imagine.
“But what if I were to tell you that for as little as one dollar a week—that’s right, one dollar—you can give your child the gift of that same education right here at home?”
“I never really thought about—”
“Of course you didn’t! You’re a busy woman. You have bills, responsibilities. You don’t have time to sit down and read studies like this one.” At a given signal, Mitch would run forward and hand his father a laminated sheaf of papers with the words Educational Research printed on the front. “Studies that prove that kids who have an encyclopedia in the house are more than six times more likely to go into white-collar jobs?”
“Well, I—”
“How’d you like for this little guy here to grow up and be a lawyer, huh?” Pete Connors slipped one of the dirty-faced children a boiled candy. “For as little as one dollar a day, you can make that happen, ma’am.”
He was like a whirlwind. A force of nature. Some women he would bulldoze. Others he would charm and cajole. Others still he would take upstairs to perform some “secret” sales technique that Mitch was never allowed to see. It always took around fifteen minutes, and it always worked. “Those Pennsylvania women!” Mitch’s dad would joke afterward. “They’re hungry for knowledge, all right. You ain’t never seen a woman hungrier for knowledge than that one, Mitchy!”
After every sale, they would drive to the nearest small town or rest stop and Pete Connors would buy his son an enormous ice-cream sundae. Mitch would return home to his mother full of excitement and wonder, chocolate sauce smeared all over his face. “Dad was amazing. You shoulda seen what Dad did! Guess how many we sold, Mom. Go on, guess!”
Mitch could never understand why his mother never wanted to guess. Why she looked at his dad with such bitterness and disappointment. Later—too late—he understood. She could have borne the infidelity. It was the recklessness she couldn’t forgive. Pete Connors was a natural salesman, but he was also a dreamer, who regularly blew his earnings investing in one crackpot invention after another. Mitch remembered some of them. There was the vacuum cleaner you didn’t have to push. That was going to make them millions. Then there was the mini-refrigerator for your car. The running shoes that massaged the ball of your foot. The clothes rack that got out creases. Mitch would watch his father work on each new design during weekends and late into the night. Whenever he finished a prototype, he would “unveil” it in the living room in front of Mitch’s mom.