Page 104 of Close Pursuit

“As a jaybird. You want the cash or not?”

“Hell, yeah.”

“Take the Beltway to Highway 270 northwest out of town. It merges into Highway 70. Follow the signs to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It’ll take you straight into Pittsburgh.”

“What am I supposed to do when I get there?”

“Ditch the car and get drunk off your ass. You might want to save enough money for a bus ticket back to D.C., though. I expect panhandlers do better here than in Pittsburgh.”

The guy snatched the keys out of her hand. Whether he would actually head for Pennsylvania or merely drive to the nearest liquor store, she had no idea. But it was worth a try.

The guy did get into the rental car and head in the direction of the Beltway, at least. She cringed back in the shadows of the store building as the traffic lights changed and a stream of cars rolled past. Good lord willing, one of those was whoever’d tailed her from the convent.

She waited until the street was deserted to hurry down it toward the nearest Metro stop with Dawn. She used spared change from her wallet to buy a one-way Metro ticket, and headed for Union Station.

She wrote a check that emptied her bank account at the currency exchange window in the train station on the assumption that it would take whoever was tracking her a while to look for and pick up a money trail on her. Long enough for her to be gone from here. She bought a hat and a new coat, stuffing her old coat in a trashcan in a ladies’ restroom.

She bought a cheap duffel bag and ducked into a drug store in the Union Station Mall to pick up rudimentary baby supplies for Dawn. She stuffed them in the bag. Fleeing with a baby certainly complicated matters.

She paid cash for a ticket on the next train out of the station, which turned out to be a local headed up the east coast, through New York City, to Boston. She had to hustle to make the train, and didn’t spot anyone racing after her.

Had she done it? Had she ditched whoever was after her and Dawn?

She fell into a seat as the train crept out of the station. A few people jumped on at the last second, but none of them looked like FSB operatives to her. Not that she would be able to tell one from a harassed businessman, she supposed.

Dawn declared her opinion of the last few minutes’ worth of racing around and started to fuss. Katie pulled out a bottle and mixed bottled water and formula for the baby before she could start screaming. Last thing she needed was to have everyone on the train notice and remember her. Katie won the race against baby-meltdown and got a bottle into Dawn’s mouth before the screaming commenced.Whew.

The rhythmic noise and swaying of the train seemed to lull Dawn to sleep. The baby slept through a brief stop in Baltimore, and Katie sighed in relief as the train pulled out of the station without Dawn waking up.

Now what?Unpredictable. What would be unpredictable?

Alex looked into Chester Morton’s office grimly. His lawyer’s body had been removed, but an obscene tape outline remained on the blood-coated desk, and a crime-scene team was hard at work collecting samples. He wasn’t allowed into the room, of course, but he’d seen enough. Chester had been shot at his desk, and the man’s computer was turned on, a dancing screen-saver still going strong. Which meant the killer had been able to access the lawyer’s files.

“Time of death?” he asked Chester’s secretary tersely.

“This morning, sometime. The firm was closed for Good Friday.”

Alex blinked. This was Easter weekend? The woman continued tearfully, “Mr. Morton must have come in to catch up on some work. The police think he surprised an intruder.”

Or maybe the intruder followed Morton here and forced him to log in to his computer before killing him. Chester was far too security conscious not to have encrypted the hell out of his computer.

“Who knew Chester’s passwords?” Alex asked grimly.

“Nobody—“ the secretary broke off as the significance of the question dawned on her.

He was right, then. The intruder had been after files. Alex turned to Chester’s paralegal who’d just walked up to them. “My files were copied, weren’t they? All of them.”

The young man frowned. “That’s correct. How did you know?”

“Call it a hunch,” Alex replied dryly.

The paralegal continued, “Just the recent ones were copied. The custody paperwork and the trust fund documents.”

“Anything else?”

“All of Mr. Morton’s recently opened documents were copied from the cache in his computer. We’ve notified the other clients affected, but…” the guy hesitated, and then added in an apologetic rush, “…but he said if anything bad ever happened to him, it would be because of you.”

Alex’s jaw tightened. Chester had been no dummy. He knew the ilk of Alex’s enemies, perhaps better than anyone. Morton had been his father’s attorney, too.

---