Page 98 of Take Your Breath Away

God, he was a genius.

Except. Hang on. If you were going to give Brie a new name and a new life, wouldn’t you think it was a good idea to move her out of Milford?

So, maybe he wasn’t a genius.

And maybe that wasn’t Brie. He decided it was time to get back to the produce section and—

No fuckin’ way.

Tyler was looking out the window to the parking lot. There was the lady, putting all her groceries into the back of a station wagon.

A black station wagon. A black Volvo station wagon. Just like the one in the photo on the detective’s phone.

She loaded up the back of the vehicle, closed the tailgate, and wheeled her cart into a nearby collection station. Tyler watched, open-mouthed, wondering what he should do.

He needed to know who she was. He needed to talk to her.

For his sister. For Jayne. So she could sort out, once and for all, what was going on with Andrew.

Tyler started running for the door. He had to dodge around some other customers wheeling carts toward the exit, and, when he reached it himself, had to hit the brakes while he waited for the glass door to swing open.

As he ran out into the lot, the Volvo was backing out of its spot.

“Hey!” Tyler shouted. “HEY!”

But Tyler was a good five car lengths away, and the windows were up on the woman’s car. There was no way she could hear him. The Volvo’s brake lights flashed for a second as she shifted from reverse to drive. Then she put her foot on the gas, heading for the road that ran past Whistler’s.

“Wait!” Tyler cried, hoping she might see him waving in her rearview mirror.

But she didn’t. She steered her car onto the street and drove off.

Tyler changed direction, hand already in his pocket looking for a key, and ran into the alley beside the store, where he kept his bike chained to a rack. He quickly used the key to remove the chain, tossed it to the ground, hopped on the bike, and shot back out of the alley, nearly colliding with a Honda Civic.

As he hit the street, he caught a glimpse of the black Volvo, stopped at the bottom of the hill at a red light.

Yes.

He pumped those bike pedals like he was the devil himself.

Thirty-Nine

Andrew

At least this Matt guy wasn’t one of those assholes who tries to lose you at the same time as he wants you to follow him. I’ve known guys like that. They say, “I’ll lead the way,” then run through yellow lights and get several cars ahead and you have ask yourself, what the hell are they doing?

But Matt took it easy, always glancing in his mirror to make sure he hadn’t lost me. The drive gave me more time, not that I really needed it, to continue mulling over the events of the past couple of days, and further back than that.

About a year after Brie vanished, I received a message from a Milford resident vacationing in Spain who said he was sure he had seen Brie on a street in Madrid. This traveler was a friend of a friend of mine, which was how the message found its way to me. There was no picture, no real details of any kind. I followed the story in the news, his forwarded email read, and when I saw this person I thought it might be her. Just wanted to help.

Yeah, well, thanks for that solid tip. What the fuck was I supposed to do with that?

There was a handful of letters in the mail. One lady wrote to say she had been told by God that Brie was working as a Russian spy for Putin, and had been called back to report on her mission. Clearly, Putin had been hard at work trying to get all of Milford’s darkest and deepest secrets. A detective from Washington State offered his services, saying he had a solid record of tracking down missing persons. An Internet search produced not one story to support his claim.

I’d heard from a psychic, too. Some local woman, said she’d had a vision about what had happened to Brie, and was willing to share it with me for five hundred bucks. I did some checking, learned she had run this kind of game before in Milford, then moved away to San Francisco for a while. I told her if her vision was so convincing, go sell it to Detective Hardy.

It was the last I heard of her.

Maybe the way I so quickly dismissed these so-called offers of assistance comes across as disinterest on my part, or, as Detective Hardy seemed to believe, evidence that I already knew Brie’s fate and therefore couldn’t be bothered to follow up on any of them.