The Old Man(27)
She didn’t deserve what he was doing to her. She was a good person. As he had gotten to know and like her better, he had begun to dislike himself. He had been behaving like a drowning person who clung to the nearest swimmer and held himself up by pulling her down. If he was going to escape, he had to provide a means of escape for her too.
One morning when Zoe went out to do some errands, Caldwell climbed up in his closet and took down one of the false identity packets he had put together for Anna. He had given her the identity of an imaginary woman named Marcia Dixon, who was the wife of Henry Dixon, one of his aliases. He had built the identity with Anna’s help in case they ever had the need and the opportunity to escape. Anna had taken the tests for the California driver’s license, and had her picture taken for the front of it. She had gone back a couple of times to the Los Angeles DMV to have her picture retaken to keep her photo up to date and pay the renewal fee.
He had kept the female identities in existence after Anna’s death. In addition to the sentimental reasons, he’d had some practical ones. He might be able to buy things on Marcia Dixon’s credit. A car registered in a woman’s name might not trip any of the alerts for a male fugitive, and if he was pulled over while driving it, showing a license with the same surname would certainly get him by.
Now he set aside the items that didn’t carry a photograph—birth certificate, Social Security card, marriage license, credit cards. It was only then that he turned his attention to the difficult things—the driver’s license and passport. The passport was the first step.
When Zoe came home from her errands that day he took a photograph of her with his cell phone. He posed her against a white wall and said he was going to send a picture to his daughter because she’d said she wondered what Zoe looked like. As he pretended to send the picture to Emily, he evaluated it. The picture was good.
Zoe bore only a superficial resemblance to Anna, but she was about the same age as Anna had been in the picture, and she had brown hair that she wore long, as Anna had. Her nose was thin, as Anna’s was, and her eyes were big, blue, and wide apart. She knew how to smile for a camera and look natural. She didn’t look exactly like Anna, but two photographs of the same woman could easily vary that much over time. He took three more shots of Zoe in different poses, and selected the one that looked most like Anna. He sent the photograph to his computer, sized it precisely to simulate a passport photograph, and printed it on his color printer on photographic paper.
Caldwell went online, printed the application for a passport renewal, and filled in the spaces. He submitted Marcia Dixon’s old passport and paid the fee, including the extra cost of an expedited return, with a credit card in Marcia Dixon’s name. The new photographs he submitted were the ones he had taken of Zoe. He knew he was taking a risk, but requesting renewal of a ten-year-old passport from a new address was such a routine operation that he expected the government employee who processed it would handle it without much thought.
He decided to defer the task of getting Zoe a new California driver’s license, because Marcia Dixon’s was fairly recent. Anna had never driven a car in California, so Marcia Dixon had a perfect driving record, and her license had been renewed automatically twice since Anna’s death. The photo on the license was a woman with long brown hair. If he ever needed Zoe to have a better Marcia Dixon license, he could send her into a DMV office to apply for one.
All of those steps could wait, and he might never need to take them. If the government renewed Marcia Dixon’s passport, her identity papers would be solid enough to hold up to any scrutiny they would be likely to get. His own papers as Henry Dixon were perfect, and that would help. For most purposes other than flying, if a man showed his identification, nobody asked his female companion for hers.
Right now, the most important thing he could do to stay safe and to keep Zoe McDonald safe was to live the quietest, least noticeable life he could. So he spent the summer with Zoe and his dogs in the Chicago suburbs. Zoe’s daughter, Sarah, came to stay with them for about three weeks that summer. During June and part of July she returned to Los Angeles to take a summer school class, and she had arranged to serve a barely paid internship at a law firm until the end of August, when the fall semester started.
Caldwell and Zoe lived through the long days of summer, sank deeper into their habits, and spent most of their time together. Occasionally Caldwell would board the dogs at a kennel he had found and he and Zoe would take a brief trip. He wanted her to be entertained, and he wanted her to get used to traveling with him. There might be a time when he would have to tell her they were going to take a surprise trip, and have her readily agree to it.
They spent three days at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island in Michigan, a weekend at Big Cedar Lodge in Missouri, and a couple of days at the French Lick Resort in Indiana. Any destination they could reach by car was safer for him than flying, and the short trips to resorts seemed enough to energize Zoe.
Caldwell never stopped trying to keep Zoe deluded and happy. He was unfailingly attentive, affectionate, and generous. It wasn’t difficult. As soon as he met her he had been sexually attracted to her, and as time went on, he caught himself admitting to other things about her that he admired—her humor, intelligence, emotional strength. He occasionally reminded himself that the important thing was not that he enjoy her company, but that he use her emotions to keep himself secure and ahead of his pursuers.