Wherever She Goes(25)

The woman stage-whispers, “Yes?”

“Baby napping?”

A tired smile and a nod. “She just went down.”

I gesture to ask if she’d rather speak in the hall. She nods again and steps out, while keeping the door cracked open.

“I’m looking for Kim Mason,” I say.

Her brows knit. “Kim . . .”

“Mason. Her employer gave me this address.”

The frown deepens. I tell her the address, and she says, “That’s this apartment, but I don’t know a Kim.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“My husband and I moved in after we got married. Two . . . no, two and a half years ago.”

Long before the pizza place even opened, meaning Kim didn’t move recently and forget to update her address with her employer.

I take out the photo. “Have you seen this woman before?”

Her eyes widen. “That’s the girl on the news. The one who was murdered.”

“Have you ever seen her anywhere else?”

She shakes her head. “If I had, I’d have called it in.” She looks up at me. “You’re with the police.”

“I’m helping with the investigation.” True enough.

Her gaze returns to the photo. Then she looks at me. “This is exactly why we left the city. My parents said that since my husband had a good job, we should move someplace safe to raise our babies.”

No place is safe. Because every place has people, and the threat isn’t always the gangbanger on the corner. It can be the woman next door. Or the guy lying in bed beside you.

Which isn’t what she wants to hear.

I remember Paul last night, giving me crap about my building’s broken front door. When we picked our house, he’d looked around and declared it a good neighborhood. A “safe” one. The sort of place he felt comfortable leaving his new wife and raising his future kids, and I wanted to gape at him and say, “You’re a lawyer. You should know better.”

It was like mistaking our white picket fence for ten feet of electrical barbed wire. But he couldn’t see that. Which I suppose explains how he ended up with me. He saw what he wanted. He accepted the image I presented, of a woman who had never done anything worse than rack up traffic tickets. A bit scattered and quirky but totally harmless. That’s the package he bought. What he got . . .

What he got was very different. He’d finally sensed that and backed away.

I ask the young woman a few more questions. It’s clear, though, that she’d never seen Kim before her photo appeared on the news.

Outside, I walk around. There’s only one other apartment building on this street, and it’s five stories tall. Kim gave a seventh-floor address.

Which means she gave a false one.





Chapter Fifteen





I am at home, tracking down Kim Mason. Or the woman pretending to be Kim Mason. It’s a fake identity, too, as I quickly discover. Working under the table. Giving her employer a false address. Hiding the fact she has a child. Those are not the actions of a young woman who’s just a little cagey with her personal info.

A fake ID takes this to a whole other level, especially if she had documentation to back it up. There was a time when I toyed with that option. It didn’t last long, but I learned what building a false identity entails, and despite what we see on television, there isn’t some guy in the shady part of town who’ll set you up with an ironclad birth certificate for ten grand.

What you can get from that dude in the shady neighborhood, though, is fake ID cards, and for a whole lot less than ten grand. Those cards will get you into a bar before you hit twenty-one. They will not get you past a police check.

If Kim Mason was working under the table, that suggests she’s only using fake ID, not an actual false identity complete with Social Security number. She’s living under a false name the cheap way.

Why would she do that? Tons of reasons, as I well know, most of them involving mistakes made, a fresh start needed. But her situation adds a wrinkle. A hidden son.

But I need to prove there was a son. That a child has been taken. And I am no closer to accomplishing that goal than I was when the police first turned me away.

So I am home, utilizing skills left rusty for years. I’m hacking my way to Kim Mason.

I know that’s a fake name. Her address, and likely 99 percent of everything she gave her employer, is also fake. But there will be that 1 percent. The single piece of information she provided that needed to be genuine.

A phone number.

Her boss said that he’d used that number in the past, and she answered. So it is correct.

I quickly establish that it’s a prepaid. Which is what I expect. Someone like this won’t have a legitimate credit card, much less be paying a monthly cell phone bill with it.

What I need are her call lists. That could take serious work. Tech companies update their security constantly. Or they do . . . if they’re not selling cheap prepaids, which is ironic really. People buy prepaids because they provide anonymity, and yet hacking into those records isn’t nearly as tough as it would be with a regular phone.

I download an encrypted version of her call records for my laptop and run it through a simple decryption program. Then I write out the last dozen numbers of calls made and received and dial her last call placed. That number goes to a take-out place. The next is her work. The third just rings, no voice mail. The fourth tells me the number is no longer in service, which means I put a big red circle around it for later. It’s the fifth-oldest call that actually gives me a response. When a man answers, I say, “Hi, I just found this phone on the sidewalk, and I’m trying to track down the owner. All I have is a first name. Do you know anyone named Kim?”