Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(91)

Chapter 38



MIRIAM HAD NO ALLIANCES—everyone an enemy, no one a friend—and that was a difficult way to live for anyone, let alone an eighteen-year-old girl. She had to protect Claire. That was what her brother wanted and that meant keeping her in the dark and pushing her away, saying good-bye, no matter how difficult it was to let her go. The farther away, the better, the safer.

In the parking lot outside the train station, she closed and locked the door of the Ramcharger and sagged down on the bench seat so that no one could see her, and cried. She did not tremble—she shook completely. She permitted herself five minutes of this before straightening up and roughing away the tears and driving off without snapping her seat belt into place.

It was time to get to work.



Miriam had been doing her research. The articles she read about the raid—following the courthouse bombing—implied cooperation between local police and federal authorities. No names were released. The location was listed as outside Portland, but she knew the safe house was in Sandy.

She visited PSU and walked around campus until she saw a girl of the same approximate build and appearance as her and approached her and smiled broadly and shouted, “Cynthia! It’s so good to see you!”

The girl wore a hiking backpack that turtled her with its weight and size. “I’m not Cynthia.”

“You’re kidding me. I’m so embarrassed. You know, you look exactly like her. I’m going to have to tell her she has a double.” She laughed in a high, shrieking way. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Kirsten. Kirsten Packer.”

“I’ll tell her to look for you. It will be like looking in a mirror. This is so weird. Sorry, Kirsten.”

Kirsten gave her a perplexed smile and adjusted the straps on her backpack and trudged off to class and Miriam pulled out her pay-as-you-go phone and dialed the number for card services and said, with a panicked voice, that she had lost her purse and would like to report her student ID card stolen. “Kirsten Packer,” she said. “That’s my name. Can you help me?” They assured her they could print up another, no problem.

The building was a five-minute walk. She pinched the skin around her eyes to swell and redden her expression. Then she stared at the sky for thirty seconds until her eyes watered before pushing through the door. A kid with a short Mohawk was working the counter. “That sucks so bad,” he said. “I hope everything works out for you.”

She tucked the card into the back pocket of her jeans and said, “It will.”

She stopped by the campus bookstore and bought a pink PSU sweatshirt and drove the twenty minutes to Sandy, to the police station, where she said she was a criminology major at PSU doing a report on police raids and wondered if she might view some reports.

She made herself look younger by pulling back her hair in a ponytail and pretending to chew gum. She had a spiral notebook in one hand, her ID card in the other. A woman with jowls and her hair done up in a jet-black helmet looked at the card, looked at Miriam, and said of course, so long as she signed in and paid the administrative fee.

Within twenty minutes, she had the information she needed. Ten names. All local police.



She made phone calls, fiddled around on the Net, drove through a few neighborhoods, before narrowing down her prospects to Ernest Hobbes, an inspector in Sandy; and Dennis Hannah, a SWAT team member with Clackamas County. Both single.

In Hobbes’s home office, she finds a large stash of gay pornography, so she turns her sights on Hannah, a thick-necked man with a mustache who wears jean shorts and changes his own oil and drinks at the Tip-Top Tavern every Friday night.

She drove to the mall and browsed the stores and bought high heels from JCPenney and a lace push-up bra from Victoria’s Secret and a short skirt and skimpy top with a scoop neck and a jangly necklace and earrings from Maurices. She circled the cosmetics counters at Nordstrom. The women who worked there all wore white coats as if they were doctors and when they looked at her plain face they twisted up their expressions in sympathy as if about to give a difficult diagnosis. “Can I help you?” one of them said and Miriam said, “Get me whatever lipstick, foundation, blush, and eyeliner you think matches my complexion. And whatever perfume you think smells good. Now.”

At home she laid everything out on the bed in the shape of a woman, the invisible woman she planned to become.



Apparently she has a small head. She bought a blond shoulder-length bob at the Wig Gallery in northeast Portland. Even their smallest size kept slipping out of place. So she held it with her hand, as though it were a hat, when walking from her truck to the ramped entry of the Tip-Top Tavern. The day was cold, but she wore no jacket.

Once inside, her stiff posture loosened into a slink. The juke played Johnny Cash. Somebody tossed darts in the corner. An Oregon Ducks clock glowed green and gold on the wall. She spotted Hannah at a high, round table, sharing a pitcher of light beer with a friend. She took her time approaching the bar, making sure everybody got an eyeful. She ordered a ginger whiskey and climbed onto the stool and crossed her legs.

It didn’t take long. She sipped her drink and watched the Trail Blazers on the TV hanging over the bar. She sensed him before she heard him, the man in the brown leather jacket with the American flag patch sewed onto its shoulder. He was leaning against the bar only inches away from her. “Buy you a drink?” he said.