Page 95 of The Lie Maker

I thought about that. “I could. But I don’t know. I mean, if this guy is my dad, she already knows that and knows where he’s supposed to be living. And she’s kind of on overload at the moment.”

I told her about the murder of her witness, and Gwen’s urgent reaction to it.

“That explains the chain on the door,” Lana said.

There was another, bigger reason for not telling Gwen I had a possible lead on my father. She’d want to know where I got it. And then she’d know I’d disclosed to Lana what I had been doing for her.

She wouldn’t be very happy about that. Especially when she was worried about a possible leak.

I’d finished one slice and was reaching for another. “Is there really any point in going up there? If it’s not him, it’s a total waste of time. And if it is, we already know he’s not there.”

“I don’t think you’ll know that till you go. I mean, seeing where he’s been living, assuming it’s him, might spark some idea about where he’s disappeared to.”

She was right. I had to know. I was going to go to New Hampshire.

“Would you come with me?”

“I can’t,” Lana said. “I mean, I’m swamped. If I were actually going to meet him, yeah, I’d come. But this is more of an exploratory mission.”

“True.” I looked at my watch. If the traffic wasn’t too bad, I was betting I could be in Gilford before eight o’clock. And if the whole thing turned out to be a dead end, I could turn around and come home. Be back in my bed by midnight.

But just in case...

“I think I’ll throw a couple of things in a bag,” I said. “You mind wrapping up the rest of that pizza? Think I’ll eat it on the way. Oh, and—”

There was one other problem. I didn’t have a car.

Lana had already taken out her pepper-spray key chain and was prying her car key off it. “Yes, you can borrow my Beemer. Just don’t fuck up the gears. Have you ever even driven a stick?”

Fifty

Cayden pulled the buds out of his ears.

This, he thought to himself, was what you called a development.

So Jack Givins and whoever this woman was had a possible lead on the name and an address for the man who was once known as Michael Donohue. What was so goddamn frustrating was that while it was clear they had the information, neither of them had spoken it out loud.

The woman, he surmised, had displayed the details to Givins. Maybe it was on her phone, or possibly she’d written it down on a slip of paper. Wherever the location was, Givins had said it was about a two-hour drive.

Cayden brought up a map on his computer. A two-hour drive. Well, that could be any one of a thousand places. Too bad this wasn’t one of those times when he’d been staking out Givins’s apartment. He could have followed him. But he didn’t think he could get there before Jack departed.

Shit.

So where the hell was Jack going, and how was Cayden going to find out?

First, he had to report in. He picked up his cell and entered a number.

“I think he’s found him,” he said to the person who picked up.

“How?” said the voice at the other end.

“Not sure. Something to do with a license plate. Looks like his girlfriend helped piece it together.”

“Girlfriend?”

“She came by, figured out some shit. And now he’s heading there.”

“Is the girl still at his place?”

---