Page 65 of South of Nowhere (Colter Shaw #5)

65.

Alisette Lark.

As Colter Shaw sat across from her, she looked at him with narrow eyes.

It was a gaze very, very different from the ones she’d shot his way earlier in the day.

“So, reward seeker.” Her voice was husky. She’d apparently been softening it earlier. “There many of you around the country?”

“Not enough to make a union.”

“You don’t take over a Hyatt for your annual convention, hm? Sessions and keynotes and boxed lunches?”

He set his pen and paper in front of him. Sometimes the people he was interviewing balked at his recording their conversation on his phone, even the offerors—whose side he was on, of course. But no one ever had a problem with taking notes.

“You were never military, Alisette.”

Always let the subject know right off that you’ve done your homework.

“But you get the chain-of-command concept, obviously, considering this job.”

She regarded him with eyes that now reflected boredom.

Shaw continued, “Waylon was the general in charge. You’re, well, a sergeant. Or captain, if you like.”

“And you want the commander in chief.”

“Of course we do.”

“As I told Barbie out there—”

He frowned.

“The officer.”

“Officer Starr’s name is Debi.”

She sighed. “Barbie’s a doll.”

He shook his head.

“A toy?…Where did you grow up, Mars?”

Might as well have.

“As I told her , Waylon believed in insulation. I never met the person who hired us. Him or her. I never heard a name. A location, a make of car. A size of shoe. A preference of food or wine. Nothing. It was for everybody’s safety. His—or hers. And ours. You’re not going to torture me, but there’re people who would. When they know the ground rules, that I’m completely ignorant, they’ll realize that there’s no reason to proceed with the pliers or blowtorch. We go our separate ways. Or they shoot me in the head. Either way, painless.”

Encouraging that she was talking. Getting the first word out of a suspect’s mouth was often the hardest part.

“No dead drops?”

A shake of her head. “Not that I heard of.”

He’d seen her behavior when she was being deceptive—which had been nearly every minute they’d been in each other’s company. That was her untruthful kinesic—body language—baseline, how she behaved when lying. The tilt of her head, the pauses when selecting a response, the tap of foot, the squint of eye, a gesture, a verbal tic—or the absence of a verbal tic.

Now the behavior was different. Not drastically so, but evidence to Shaw. He believed it was ninety percent the case that she was being honest.

“How did they communicate?”

“Like everybody else in this business. Burners.”

“What did Waylon do with them?”

“I repeat my comment. He broke them in half and threw them out. You didn’t see the Barbie movie. I suppose you haven’t seen Breaking Bad either?”

No clue.

“Where did he toss them?”

“Sewers, lakes, dumpsters, garbage cans. Half the world’s cold cases could be solved with enough people to go through every inch of the local sewage systems and trash dumps.”

He gave no reaction, but he’d had the same thought on more than one occasion.

“The most recent phone Waylon used? Where did it end up?”

Her eyes were now back to flint. “There’s nothing in it for me, Colter. The sentence’s mandatory. Conspiracy to commit murder, special circumstances. I may not get the death penalty. But I’m definitely never getting out. I tell you anything at all, whoever the client is, I’m dead. They’ll have unlimited funds. And that means a long reach—even into Q.”

San Quentin, one of the most secure prisons in the country.

“Point us in the right direction. We could recover a phone on our own. Crime scene. Nobody’d know the lead came from you.”

“Again, why? Nothing’s in it for me.”

He studied her for a moment.

Shaw rose and walked to the video camera sitting on a tripod near the door. He shut it off.

Which engendered a frown.

He returned and sat. “What if there was something else we could offer you… I could offer you.”

Now she looked curious.

“You’ll be in prison. Granted. That’s your future. But what about your past?”

She shrugged.

Shaw said slowly, “The past…It’s never erased. Is there anything I could do to…clear up some questions you might have? Something you’ve been wondering about over the years?”

Her eyes widened momentarily, then grew inscrutable once more.

He leaned forward, smelling her sweat and perfume—and, he was pretty sure, a scent of Waylon Foley’s expensive aftershave. “I find things, you know. I find people. It’s what I do. And I’m good at it.”

This time the crack in the stone was wider.

“Would there be anyone in your past you might want to know about?”

She inhaled and exhaled an unsteady breath. Licked her lips.

Shaw had read in the brief bio Marissa Fell had prepared about Alisette Lark that, at nineteen, she had gotten married. And, two years later, divorced.

Shaw was thinking of several rewards he’d pursued under circumstances with some parallels. Rewards posted by women in their thirties or forties, who had married young and then divorced after several years and moved on to very different lives.

Women like Alisette Lark, though without the criminal angle.

As a general rule Colter Shaw did not pursue rewards to find birth mothers or adopted children. Most often, each in their own way wished to remain anonymous. But there was one exception: when the birth mother had been diagnosed with a genetic illness later in life and she felt her child should be made aware of it.

Shaw had then tracked down the adoptive parents and delivered the information on the medical condition.

Lark breathed deeply and lowered her head to wipe a tear away with fingers of her shackled hand.

Shaw said softly, “I’ll find your son or daughter, tell you about them. What they’re studying, the family they’re part of now. I won’t tell you where they live or give you enough information to find them on your own. That’s set in stone. But you’ll know something.”

He pushed his notebook and offered the fountain pen. “Draw a map of where you think Foley might’ve pitched the phone.”

She stared at the implement for a long moment, then picked it up and started to draw with a steady hand. She was talented. As she sketched, she said, “Even if you find it, remember, Waylon broke it in half.”

“Let us worry about that,” Shaw said. “Keep going. You’re doing great.”