"Oh, just after you get off work."
She sounded pleasantly surprised herself.
"I can make tater tot hot dish.
Your old favorite."
Ian grunted acknowledgement.
"Okay.
I'll be there."
"All right!"
He could hear her smiling, and tried to ignore the vague sense that he was wandering into one of her traps.
Maybe it'll be different this time.
Maybe she's just worried about me.
"I'll let you finish getting ready for work then."
There was nothing sinister about the bathroom once he got off the phone.
His earlier certainty that he had simply fell reasserted itself, and he got dressed as quickly as he could.
The commute was like trundling through a minefield, as little explosions of neck pain detonated all around him.
He winced when he checked his side mirror, hissed every time he had to brake too suddenly.
When he reached the office building, the handicapped spots right by the front door beckoned.
He weighed the idea of using them, imagined his car getting towed, and drove past.
The tender space just above his right hip ached as he climbed out of the car, and he wondered how badly bruised it was.
He had some ibuprofen in the glove box, but his neck hurt too much to lean over to it, so he walked around to the passenger side door, opened it, and knelt.
As he reached for the compartment latch, Eston hissed, "God damn it."
Ian's heart lurched; he reeled backwards as if he'd touched a live wire.
Eston was in the driver's seat, his eyes flicking back and forth from the front window to the rear view mirror.
"Right now?" he demanded.
From the back seat, Alex whimpered, "I really gotta."
"We'll be at Kelly's place in fifteen minutes," Eston seethed.
"Why do you have to piss right now?
What the fuck is wrong with you?"
"I'm gonna pee on the
floor
!"
"No!" Eston barked.
Something resembling panic flickered in his eyes.
"Don't!
Fuck!"
He glanced over his shoulder, yanked the wheel to the right.
"Come on," he snapped.
"There's a lake here."
"Morning, Ian!" someone called from across the parking lot, and Ian jerked again, sending a shock of pain through his neck.
Eston was gone.
He stalked across the parking lot, neck stiff and eyes riveted to the distant door.
When he finally got to his desk, he leaned his whole body over to look in his personal pharmacy drawer.
He was just throwing four tablets in his mouth when he heard Billi's voice say, "Morning, Ian.
This is Kelly."
Ian turned around, the pills scraping jaggedly down his throat.
A thin, mousy woman smiled timidly and extended a hand.
Ian stared at it.
"She's starting in the new training class today," Billi explained.
"She'll be on our team when she gets out."
"'Kelly?'" Ian repeated back.
Her smile widened as she nodded.
Ian shook her hand once, and dropped it like a used wad of toilet paper.
A flicker of - dismay?
concern? - crossed Billi's face, but she didn't say anything.
"And this is Sheila Swanson," she went on, ushering the small woman onward.
Ian stared at Kelly's back until Sheila turned around, beaming with fake welcome, and he was forced to turn away.
Between calls, he investigated.
He looked her up in their email system, but she hadn't been added to the group yet.
He checked the team roster on the intranet site, but that was worse - it didn't even show Jorge yet, and he'd joined the team nearly a year ago.
Finally he found a little faux-news story on the corporate intranet site, announcing the new trainees.
Kelly Dennon
Kelly comes to us from Star Pointe Credit Union, where she helped to maintain the
Maple Grove
branch's computer network and troubleshoot issues as they arose.
Kelly has extensive experience in Windows networking.
She will be joining Justin Keplin's team in the First Contact Support area.
The piece included a little picture of her, wearing the same timid smile he had just seen.
Star Pointe.
The name sounded familiar, so he Googled and found that it had gone out of business during the big banking crisis, while the likes of AIG and Citigroup were raking in federal bailout money.
He must've heard the story on MPR or something.
If that had really been her last job, she'd been unemployed since early 2009.
She'd been out of a job when Alex went missing.
That doesn't mean anything
.
But he dug further anyway, trying to find out where she lived, and found a Dennon, Kelly; Employer: Star Pointe CU; Location:
Zimmerman
,
MN
.
Zimmerman was north of the Twin Cities, over an hour's drive from Shakopee.
Eston had said,
"It's a twenty minute drive."
He stared at this data, his head twitching slightly in denial, ice racing in his veins.
It's not her.
You have no reason to believe it's her.
But what if it is her, and this is what he's been trying to tell me, and I just
ignore
it -
It's not her.
All you have to go on is the name.
It's not enough.
There are a million Kellys out there.
But this is the one that came right to my desk, this is the one that I've been presented with - maybe he was warning me about her, I can't just ignore -
Then what are you gonna do?
some incredulous part of his mind demanded.
Kill her?
His earpiece beep-beeped.
He moved his mouse to the X, and hovered.
"Hello?" someone on the line said.
Ian closed the window with Kelly Dennon's address and asked the caller how he could help him.
He thought about Kelly Dennon through lunch.
He thought about her the rest of the day.
As he drove to his mom's after work, he pondered ways to make her confess.
There was one Law & Order spinoff where the detective always made the perps admit to their crimes.
It happened every show, without fail, and all the guy had to do was tilt his head in an unsettling manner.
Ian doubted that would work for him.
On
Dexter
the main character often made his victims confess before he killed them.
But that required stripping them naked and tying them down with plastic wrap; essentially, scaring the living shit out of them.
Ian pondered this.
There were other ways to frighten people.
He thought of sending anonymous emails (
"I know what you did")
and immediately rejected the notion as asinine; he considered cornering her in an alley or something and beating her until she admitted what she'd done, but in addition to the moral conundrum of possibly assaulting an innocent woman, there was the simple reality that dark alleys were hard to find in the suburbs.
This problem made him chuckle once - a sound more closely resembling a grating bark than a laugh.
He could follow her home.
Make sure she really lived in Zimmerman.
Or look up the address and see when the property was purchased.
He glanced in the rearview mirror, about to make a lane change, and saw Alex in his seat.
He was still in his funeral clothes, staring at the back of Ian's seat with heavy eyes as he clutched Mr. Tuskers.
Something about the sight made Ian feel intensely guilty, which in turn, as always, made him mad.
"I met a woman today named Kelly," he said.
"She came right up to my desk.
Is that who you were trying to warn me about?
Did she hurt you?"
Alex was wearing his heavy winter coat now.
The stuffed elephant disappeared.
"Daddy, please!" he shouted.
"May we listen to something
else
?
"
It was phrased politely, but it was more of a demand.
There was some music that Ian used to play that his son had absolutely hated.
Ian drew a breath, tried to focus on his son's meaning rather than his words.
"You don't like this music?"
"No."
Alex curled his lips in disgust.
"No, it's all wrong.
I want to listen to Sesame Street Musical."
Ian's heart suddenly started twanging like a taut guitar string; his hands shuddered.
It's all wrong.
He was grasping at straws, desperate, and all day he'd actually been thinking about how to corner Kelly Dennon and -
"All right," he said, as much to stop his self-recrimination as to answer Alex.
"All right.
Forget it."
In the backseat, Alex nodded.
He stared out the window in silence while Ian imagined headlines.
HOPKINS
FATHER OF KIDNAPPED BOY IMPRISONED FOR ASSAULT
MURDERED BOY'S FATHER COMMITTED TO STATE MENTAL HEALTH FACILITY
IAN COLMES, 34, FOUND DEAD IN HOME
He had imagined this last one as a suicide scenario, but as soon as he pictured it, he realized it could easily have happened this morning in the shower.
Or:
IAN COLMES, 34, KILLED IN COLLISION
Or:
IAN COLMES, 34, FOUND DEAD OF CO POISONING IN SMARTLINK PARKING LOT
He'd had a lot of close calls lately.
They disturbed him - they would've disturbed anyone - but it was more than that.
He chewed on it as he made the last turn toward his mom's house, rolled up the quiet street, and crunched into the snow of her unplowed driveway.
As he knocked on her door, he finally figured it out.
On Sunday morning, Leroy Eston had looked at him and said, "
Well, well.
"
That day and every day since, Ian had nearly been killed.
It was amazing how quickly the old superstitions tried to come back.
He sat at his mother's table, while the gentle but condemning eyes of Jesus Christ gazed out at him from a portrait on the far wall, and mercilessly smothered the urge to tell her he was under spiritual attack.
She would believe him, at once.
That's exactly why the idea was so enticing.
She had never doubted the existence of demons and angels, never for an instant believed that anything they said at the local Assembly of God might only be metaphor.
But he wouldn't be willing to accept her solutions.
And his refusals would only pile tinder on the fire of her convictions, sparking a new battle in the War For Ian's Eternal Soul that he simply didn't have the energy to wage.
The last round of combat had ended in an uneasy truce; she had sworn to pray for him every day, and to be there for him if he needed her, but she conceded that Jesus would need time to "work on his heart."
Exhausted from a grueling year of fending off her constant church invitations and fervent letters, Ian had gladly agreed to this logic.
If the truce were still valid, he sure as hell didn't want to be the one to break it.
She said grace.
Ian closed his eyes and clasped his hands, feeling like a hypocrite.