Ridley Pearson - Cut and run

Ridley Pearson Hyperion OEB 1401382495 fr

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ALSO BY RIDLEY PEARSON

The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red

(writing as Joyce Reardon)

Peter and the Starcatchers

(co-written with Dave Barry)

The Body of David Hayes*

The Art of Deception*

Parallel Lies

Middle of Nowhere*

The First Victim*

The Pied Piper*

Beyond Recognition*

Chain of Evidence

No Witness*

The Angel Maker*

Hard Fall

Probable Cause

Undercurrents*

Hidden Charges

Blood of the Albatross

Never Look Back

* features Lou Boldt / Daphne Matthews

WRITING AS WENDELL MCCALL

Dead Aim

Aim for the Heart

Concerto in Dead Flat

SHORT STORIES

All Over but the Dying in Diagnosis: Terminal,

edited by F. Paul Wilson

Close Shave in Murder Is My Racquet,

edited by Otto Penzler

COLLECTIONS

The Putt at the End of the World,

a serial novel

TELEVISION

Investigative Reports: Inside AA

(A&E Network, June 2000)

The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer (Movie)

(ABC TV, May 2003)

For Marcelle

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special Thanks to Laurel Shaper Walters and David Walters and Marcelle for the multiple reads of the manuscript; to Paul Kenny, for a place to hang my hat and pen; to Ed Stackler, for his patience in editing many revisions; Leslie Wells, my editor at Hyperion; Al Zuckerman, friend, editor, agent; Amy Berkower, Writers House; Matthew Snyder, CAA; Susan Steiger, attorney; at Hyperion: Karin Maake, Bob Miller, Ellen Archer, Jane Comins, Katie Wainwright. Thanks also to Nancy Litzinger and Louise Marsh for their day-to-day office support.

For helping me with the details: Andy Hamilton, Assistant United States Attorney (retired); Eric Robertson, U.S. Marshal for the Western District of Washington State; and to many who choose to remain anonymous.

PROLOGUE

SIX YEARS EARLIER

The forty-first day was their last together.

Roland Larson was holed up in a truck stops pay phone, half-mad from guarding her round-the-clock while denied any privacy with her whatsoever. He resorted to calling her on the phone. Hed slipped her his cell phone, and now dialed his own number to find her breathless as she whispered from her hardened bedroom, the aft cabin of the bus, not thirty yards away.

I cant stand this, she said.

He found himself aroused by the hoarse, coarse sound of her. Forty-one days, under every conceivable pressure, and this the first complaint hed heard from her.

Us, or the situation? he asked.

Hope Stevens had been moved on three separate occasions: first, to a wilderness cabin in Michigans Upper Peninsula, the kind of place Larson could see himself retiring to someday, a lethargic life so different from the one he lived; then shed been moved to a nearly abandoned Air Force base in Montana, the desolation reminding him of a penitentiary, a place he knew well; and finally, into a private coach, a customized diesel bus that Treasury had confiscated from a forgotten rock band, its interior complete with neon-trim lighting and mirrored tables. Painted on three sides as a purple and black sunrise, the coach comfortably slept six and converted to club seating by day. Three deputies, including Larson, two drivers, and the witness traveled togetherone of only a handful of times in the U.S. Marshals Services long history of witness protection that a moving target policy had been adopted. The last had been aboard a sleeper train in the mid-70s.

Ironically, the more attempts made upon her life, the more importance and significance Hope Stevens gained in the eyes of her government. It wasnt for her keen understanding of computers that they guarded her, nor for her fine looks or sharp tongue (when she did bother to speak); it was instead for a few cells and chemicals inside her skull and the memory trapped there, living now like a dog under the front porch, cowering with a bone of truth in its jaws.

The problem for Roland Larson was that the longer he guarded her, the more he cared for hercared intenselya situation unforgivable and intolerable in the eyes of his superiors and one that, if discovered, could have him transferred to some far outpost of government service, like North Dakota or Buffalo. But the few private moments shared with her overwhelmed any sensibility in Larson.

After just seventeen days of protection, the Michigan cabin had gone up in flamesarson; in the resulting firefight, a shadowy ballet in the flashes of orange light from the mighty blaze, two deputy marshals had been injured.

When, at the Montana Air Force base, mention of persons unknown had been intercepted by some geek in an NSA cubicle, the marshals had been instructed to move Hope yet again. Larson wasnt much for running away from a faceless enemy, but he knew well enough to follow orders and so he did.

As a former technical consultant to an industry probe of fraudulent insurance practices, Hope had connected a string of assisted-care facilities to millions of dollars in wrongful charges. The names shed eventually given JusticeDonny and Pop Romero and, by inference, the young scion of the crime family, Ricardo Romerowere well known to federal law enforcements Organized Crime Unit. The Romeros, notorious for inventive white collar crime on an enormous scale, also played rough and dirty when required, the arson and the shoot-out at the lake a case in point. Hopes value to Justice was not only her initial discovery of insurance frauda scheme involving billing Medicare long after the patient was deadbut, more important, her interception of a series of e-mails sent to and from the Romeros that proved to be murder-for-hire contracts. Five executives of the same health care consortium that had called for the probe, all referred to in the correspondence as whistle-blowers whose actions threatened the Romeros, had later been found brutally murdered, the victims of so-called Serbian Spaslaundry bleach enemas that burned the victim from the inside out over a period of several hours, their families tied up and forced to watch their prolonged deaths.

Intended perhaps to implicate the Russian mob, these horrific tactics did nothing of the sort. The FBI had immediately placed the Romeros onto their Most Wanted list and their two remaining witnesses, Hope Stevens and an unnamed accountant, had been placed in protective custody.

The e-mails had been electronically destroyed; they existed now only in Hopes memory. Government prosecutors believed a jury would convict based primarily on her testimony. And so they sequestered her on the garish bus, never allowing her off, never risking her being seen in public, and never stopping the bus for more than fuel or supplies. The strategy had kept her alive for the past ten days and left everyone on board with a bad case of cabin fever. Discussions had begun to once again relocate her, this time to a static, or fixed, location, probably a federal facility, quite possibly a short stint inside an unused wing at a federal penitentiary, or in an ICU at a city hospital. They had myriad tricks up their sleeves if left to their own devices. They seldom were.

Isnt there something you can do? Hope asked. Order us to stop at a motel, and arrange for you to guard my room? There has to be something.

Im only guessing here, Larson answered, but I think a few of the guys might see through that tactic. He caught his reflection in the polished metal surrounding the pay phones keypad. No one was going to call him pretty, although they had as a child. Hed grown into something too big for pretty, too hard for handsome, like a puppy growing into its feet. Pedigree be damned.

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