Page 94 of The Five Year Lie

My stomach takes a dive.

“He said that either he’s dead or he’s really good at staying hidden.”

“Oh.” I make myself inhale. “Is that... Can people just disappear?”

Zain fiddles with his coffee cup. “It’s possible. But you’d need to be really smart about it. You could never have a bank account or a credit card in your own name. Or a driver’s license.”

But he faked his identity before.My impulse is to argue like a child who doesn’t want to hear that Santa isn’t real.

“Did you send your letter to the lawyer?” Zain asks.

I shake my head. “Not yet.” I typed it up, but haven’t been able to bring myself to mail it.

Zain sets his coffee down. Then he actually pulls me into a hug.

My surprise is overridden by how badly I need a hug. Zain smells like coffee and cinnamon gum. And my eyes feel unexpectedly hot.

But then I look up and see Hester watching us through the conference room window.

I step back, and Zain gives me a soft look. “Take it easy this weekend.”

“You too,” I choke out.

Then I go back to my desk and google the judge. But it doesn’t go well. There’s a lawyer named Arnold Kerry in Ireland. And a judge named Armand Kerry in Arizona.

But I can’t find an Arnold Kerry in Maine.

Of course I can’t. Because nothing about this is ever going to be easy.

On Saturday, I leave Buzz with my mom for a couple of hours and head over to the studio. After another night of wine, Google, and sleeplessness, I’m going stir-crazy.

“So now I know everything about judges and warrants. Some judges are elected, and some are appointed.” I pause after I tell Larri this and puff more air into the glass bubble on the end of my pipe. I blow until my lungs burn, and then I swing the pipe in a slow arc to let gravity exert some force on the shape. “But either way,” I pant, “it leaves a paper trail. This Judge Kerry? Nothing on Google. Don’t you think that’s weird?”

Without waiting for Larri’s answer, I hustle back to the glory hole and heat my piece again.

She watches me from the worktable in the corner, where she’s sorting a pile of colored glass chips. “Honey, I’m tired just looking at you. And you lost me with this judge stuff about a half an hour ago. Now I’m just nodding and smiling.”

“Whatever. But I’m telling you it’sweird. You’d think if a judgewas busted for taking bribes, he couldn’t just vanish. There would have been a news story.”

“What if he just retired?” Larri asks. “Why are you so sure that the judge was taking bribes?”

I carry my piece over to the marver and gently flatten one side against the steel. “It turns out that fifty warrants for one small police force is alot. He only wrote three warrants outside of Lowden. And there aren’t any judges in the system with as many warrants as he had, and in such a short period of time.”

“Hmm” is all Larri says.

I carry my piece back to the flame, then repeat my steps, once again pressing a flat plane into its curved surface. Glass hates to be square, so it’s a lot of work keeping the material just soft enough to get the square shape that I’m looking for, but firm enough to hold the edges.

“You know... I’ve met judges,” Larri says. “I’ve stood in their courtrooms with Tara, holding my breath while they made their arrogant decisions. Those people aren’t easily intimidated.”

“Fair. But what if he was greedy?”

“Cops don’t have a lot of money to pay out bribes.”

“I’ve thought of that,” I grumble, crossing the studio again to warm my piece. And she’s right—how many bribes could a dirty cop really afford? Unless the cop had something dirty on thejudge. “It could be a blackmail situation.”

This time she only lifts her eyebrows at me.

“That sounds like a badCSIepisode, huh?”