I Will Find You(44)
“So what’s Burroughs’s plan now?”
“I’m not sure, Max. Maybe he plans to hide in the national parks. Wait us out. Maybe he plans to sneak across the border into Canada.”
Max worked the fingernail hard.
“You don’t buy it,” Sarah said.
“I don’t buy it.”
“Tell me why.”
“Too many holes. Burroughs is a city kid. Does he have any survivalist experience?”
“Maybe. Or maybe he thinks, how hard could it be? Maybe he thinks he has no choice.”
“It’s not adding up, Sarah.”
“What’s not adding up, Max?”
“Let’s start at the top: Was this escape planned out in advance?”
“Had to be.”
“If so, wow, it’s a pretty wacky plan.”
“I don’t know,” Sarah said. “I think it was pretty ingenious.”
“How so?”
“It’s so simple. Burroughs just grabs the gun and walks out with Mackenzie. No tunnels to dig. No trucks to hijack or garbage cans to hide in. None of that. If that guard…what was his name again?”
“Weston. Ted Weston.”
“Right. If Weston doesn’t look out the window at just the right time—if he doesn’t spot the warden and Burroughs getting into the car—they’re home free. No one would have reported Burroughs missing for hours.”
Max thought about it. “So let’s follow that trail, shall we, Sarah?”
“We shall, Max.”
“When it all went wrong—when Weston sounded the alarm—your theory is that they were then forced to improvise.”
“Exactly,” Sarah said.
Max considered that. “That would explain Burroughs’s call to Rachel when she was at the diner. If Rachel was in on it from the get-go, he wouldn’t have had to make that call. She’d have already been in place to pick him up.”
“Interesting,” Sarah said. “Are we now theorizing that Rachel Anderson wasn’t part of the original breakout plan?”
“I don’t know.”
“But it isn’t a coincidence. Her visiting Burroughs on the day he breaks out.”
“Not a coincidence,” Max agreed. He started working on a fresh hangnail. “But, Sarah?”
“What, Max?”
“We are still missing something. Something pretty big.”
Chapter
18
I stand on Twelfth Street in New York City and eat the most wonderful slice of pepperoni pizza ever created, from a place called Zazzy’s.
I am free.
I don’t think I believe it yet. Do you know that feeling when a dream gets weird—good weird, in this case—and suddenly, right in the middle of your nocturnal voyage, you realize that you may indeed be asleep, dreaming, and you fear you’re going to wake up and so you try desperately to stay asleep, clinging tightly to the images in your head, even as they fade away? That is what I’ve been experiencing for the past few hours. I am terrified that soon my eyes will open, and I will be back in Briggs instead of standing on this urine-scented (a smell I welcome because you supposedly don’t have scents in your dream) city street.
I stand across the street from where Harriet Winchester aka Hilde Winslow now resides.
I escaped today. It boggles my mind. Less than twenty-four hours ago, a prison guard at Briggs tried to murder me. Then, when it seemed that I, the victim, would be blamed for the attack, Philip and Adam broke me out. The crazy events of the day—all in this same day that is still ongoing—come hurtling toward me. I try to volley them away and focus on the task at hand.
Hilde Winslow had lied on the stand and helped convict me. The answer to why is my first step in rescuing my son.
Rescuing my son.
Every time I think about that phrase, I need to bite down and fight back the tears and remind myself of what’s at stake. Before Rachel’s visit, my son was dead, murdered, perhaps even by my hands. Now I believed the total opposite: Matthew is alive, and I’d been set up. Why, how—I had no idea. One step at a time.
The first step is Hilde Winslow.
After I rolled out of Philip’s car at that outlet mall, I called Rachel to pick me up. She was at a diner. I explained to her where to go and when to be there. Meanwhile I headed into the employee parking lot. The stores were just opening, so most employees were beginning their shifts. That gave me time. Rachel, I knew, was from New Jersey. When the cops put an APB on her car, that’s what they would be focused on—New Jersey license plates in Maine. I found a beat-up Honda Civic with screws loose enough to take off both license plates. Would the owner notice? Probably not for a while. Most people don’t check to make sure their license plates are in place before they drive. But even so, even if Mr./Mrs. Beat-Up Honda noticed, it would be hours from now after their shift. We would have the head start we needed.
Rachel had wisely done as I asked—maxed out all her credit cards at ATM machines. She used three credit cards, two with an $800 maximum, one with $600. Along with the money the Mackenzies had given me, I was financially flush enough to last a little while anyway. The police would at some point figure out where Philip had really dropped me off. Philip’s story, whatever he concocted, wouldn’t hold water for more than a day or two.