Page 79 of The Lie Maker

Kitchen drawers, he thought. People were always tucking notes and scraps of paper in there.

Another strikeout.

Next, Earl searched the bedroom. The drawer in the bedside table contained what one might expect to find. Spare change, reading glasses, lip balm for those cold Boston winters, Tylenol, condoms.

He looked through the dresser, then moved on to the bathroom. Even took off the lid of the toilet tank and checked to see whether anything had been taped underneath. He’d seen that in a movie once. No such luck.

Finally, he returned to the kitchen and looked at the two closed laptops on the table.

Why two?

Jack hadn’t liked it when Earl was hovering around the laptops on his last visit. He opened them up, waited for the screens to come to life, and found they were both password protected.

Of course they are.

Earl tried several configurations of Jack’s birthday but had no success. He tried the titles of his two published novels. Another strikeout.

“I’ve got it!” he said aloud.

He typed OSCAR LAIDLAW. Jack’s pen name.

Nothing. Tried it again in lower case, then with capitals on the O and L. Again, nothing.

His dad’s name, Earl thought.

He entered variations of Michael Donohue—mdonohue, daddonohue, michaeldad—and then coupled them with the year he went into witness protection, but struck out each and every time.

“This is hopeless,” he said.

He closed the laptops and sat there, scanning the room, wondering whether there were any places he had missed.

He’d searched everything.

Cayden would not be happy. But at least Earl would be able to accomplish one thing he’d been asked to do.

He took the small device he’d been keeping in his pocket, got on his hands and knees, and affixed it to the underside of the kitchen table.

Forty-One

Jack

You hear a lot about road rage incidents. I was involved in one, not long after I’d come back from a trip to Paris to do some book research. Just about the scariest thing that, at least up until that time, had ever happened to me.

I’m willing to admit what started it was my fault. I didn’t see the guy in my blind spot. I cut him off. It was completely unintentional. But sometimes lack of intent doesn’t matter.

I was southbound on Broadway, somewhere around Saugus, moving from the center lane to the far right so that I’d be lined up for the exit to Essex Street. I glanced over my shoulder but somehow I missed this guy in a hulking big Ford F-150 pickup. I know, I know, how do you miss something big enough to have its own zip code, right? Somehow I did.

So I moved into the exit lane and heard the driver of the Ford lay on the horn at the same time as there was this squeal of brakes and I glanced in my mirror and saw a huge grille filling my rear window. I raised a hand and waved, which was the only thing I could think to do. A “sheesh, I’m sorry” kind of wave with no extended finger, but the driver either wasn’t in a forgiving mood, or misinterpreted my gesture.

He started riding my ass for the next mile or so, coming to within an inch or two of hitting my bumper. Hitting the horn, flashing his lights on and off.

I was scared shitless.

I tried speeding up to get away from him, but whenever I did, this asshole kept pace with me. The truck loomed so large in my mirror and rear window that I couldn’t even see the windshield, or the guy behind the wheel. I flashed back, for a second, to that Spielberg movie, Duel, where Dennis Weaver is being pursued by the anonymous madman in an eighteen-wheeler.

The only thing I could do, I figured, was call the police. I reached for my cell, tucked into the inside pocket of my sport jacket, but as I pulled it out it slipped from my fingers and landed on the floor in front of the passenger seat.

“Shit!”