16th Seduction (Women's Murder Club 16)

He still had his spare keys. They hadn’t found the sux he’d plucked from the cart in the electroconvulsive unit at the end of the hall. The cops had nothing on him.

He could run.

Where would he go?

CHAPTER 80

CONNOR GRANT HUMMED and sang along with Pavarotti over his sound system as he packed for his liftoff to obscurity.

His ribs ached. The right side of his jaw was still shades of green and blue, but his week-old beard disguised the remains of the beatdown, and he was moving around just fine.

He came down from his bedroom with the bag that he had packed with a few basics—enough for about four days—which he would ditch as soon as he got overseas.

Inside his office, with the tenor keeping him company, he swung open the hinged bookcase and tapped the digital code into the wall safe behind it. He removed a banded stack of currency, a half dozen credit cards embossed with assorted names, several passports, and a one-way first-class plane ticket to Zurich. He slipped the ticket and chosen passport into the inside breast pocket of his “cheerful” blue jacket.

The small fireplace was working on some notebooks he’d piled in pyramid fashion, and the blaze was at a nice steady burn. He grabbed a few files from his desk drawers and fed them to the flames. It was time to get rid of all his souvenirs, the clippings of the original fire back in Maynard, Wisconsin. His memories were vivid enough. He’d started a grass fire that had traveled across the small yard, lighting up a propane tank, which blew up the small wood-frame house, killing everyone inside: mother, father, and little brother Lane Kingsley.

Ninth grader Adam Kingsley had set the fire. He watched the shattering of glass and the explosion and the inferno that burned until nothing was left. Even the human remains were unidentifiable. He’d never cared for his family, and they hadn’t cared for him, either. As a breeze blew across the cinders and ash, he saw an opportunity to become someone else. Someone better.

He hitched to Michigan, took on a new name, dummied up a birth certificate, and convinced Ann Arbor Senior High to let him into the eleventh grade. The next year he got a driver’s license at the DMV. He started college that year, and four years later, when a car bomb killed three kids in the senior class and he was presumed to be a fourth person in that car, he took on a new identity in a new town.

By the time he graduated from the University of Miami School of Law as Sam Marx, he had perfected his methods of switching lives: missing persons, dead babies, unidentifiable victims of fires and explosions that he’d set—all became his cash flow and the framework for new lives.

When his pièce de résistance, the Sci-Tron explosion, sucked up all the available fire and rescue manpower in San Francisco, no one thought about the apartment fire in Nob Hill that burned up the remains of a bachelor, Jonathan Bishop, as well as several other people living in that building.

The real Jonathan Bishop had been an investment banker, and although his body was ashes now, his life story would carry on. “Connor Grant” gathered up his folder containing documents of Jonathan Bishop’s life and dropped them into his bag.

Jonathan Bishop’s history was filling his mind, his career path and family history, the well-planned and fortunate life of an elite one percenter in America.

And so, what to do with his own remains?

Grant crossed the small room to the photo gallery over the credenza. He lifted the few framed photos down from the wall: pictures of himself as a child; the seductive shot of his third ex-wife, RIP; the only picture he had of the Kingsleys; and in the back of the frame, behind the cardboard, was Sam Marx’s diploma from the University of Miami.

They had to go.

He removed the photos and the diploma from their frames, then put them into the fire. Jonathan Bishop wouldn’t need them in Zurich.

Grant stirred the fire with a poker. Then he took all his backup CDs and broke them up. He had already wiped his hard drive; it was sparkling clean and would come with him overseas.

Bye-bye, Connor Grant.

He was panting a little, sweating from the heat of the fire, when he made iced tea. He took the glass back to the easy chair in his living room and sipped tea until the guttering flames died.

As an afterthought he pulled a book on international banking from the bookshelf and tossed that into the bag and zipped it up.

The man still known as Connor Grant was elated to be leaving town. But he wouldn’t ship out without giving San Francisco a great big kiss good-bye.

CHAPTER 81

GRANT LEFT HIS blue-and-white little granny house through the kitchen door and stepped out into the driveway. His large canvas duffel bag was where he had left it on a luggage trolley beside his old Hyundai.

He tossed his travel bag into the front seat, carefully loaded the duffel into the trunk, and folded up the trolley, which he fit into the trunk on top of the duffel.

Reaching behind him, he took his semiauto handgun out of his waistband and secured it under the driver’s seat.

Done, done, and done.

He walked over the gravel drive and out to the front yard.