Angel Fire - Lisa Unger [88]
He remembered a time when he had been so sure of himself. No problem he couldn’t fix, no case he couldn’t solve. That was so long ago. A lot had changed.
Even after he had returned to his home and gone to bed, he had stayed awake, thinking, watching the ceiling fan rotate. He had just been drifting off as the sun started to peek in through the blinds, his wife still sleeping soundly beside him. A loud grinding noise woke him suddenly. His retired next-door neighbor was mowing the lawn at the crack of dawn for the second time in a month. Son of a bitch, he’d thought, knowing that any hope of sleep was gone.
“Didn’t you talk to him about that?” his wife had murmured sleepily. She had turned over to look at him and he noticed that her pale skin was creased from the way she had slept.
“Yeah, but he said he had to do it in the morning. He’s too old to mow the lawn in the heat of the day. So I suggested he get someone to do it for him. He misunderstood and thought I meant he couldn’t take care of himself. He got all pissed off.”
“We should get a caretaker. That lawn is a bear.”
“How would you know? You’ve never mowed it in all the years we’ve lived here.”
“Yeah, and you’ve never mopped a floor or cooked a meal.”
He remembered the conversation with a chuckle, as he shifted in the waiting-room chair. He snorted, “A caretaker …”
And then Simon Morrow remembered what he had forgotten.
As Simon Morrow was stepping into his prowler, his cellular phone rang.
“Morrow,” he answered.
“Chief, we just got a 911 call from Juno Alonzo. He says his uncle is missing and that the squad car that was supposed to be watching the church isn’t there,” reported the desk sergeant.
“All right. Get a uniform over there and then call Jeffrey Mark and Lydia Strong and ask them to head over. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“Can do, Chief.”
He hung up with a pang of guilt. No one was going to take this collar from him. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it before. But it didn’t matter now, because he was going to end this thing. And it would be just him.
It was funny how God worked. The ignition in his van had been giving him trouble for weeks. That had been partly why he’d rented the Jeep the night he’d done God’s will for Maria Lopez. Also, he had wanted to see how smart Lydia was. She was smart all right, very smart.
He wasn’t sure he was going to be able to pull that off. He could have easily been caught that day, but he’d had faith and God had seen him through. He’d used a fake license, not a very good fake, that he’d made on his computer, and then laminated it at a Kinko’s. And the credit card … he’d actually changed his name to Vince A. Gemiennes with the social security office. He got a new credit card with that name but gave a false address, 124 Black Canyon Road. But he’d never stopped using his old name, never got a new driver’s license. He’d remembered how his wife had changed her name when they were first married but how it was ages before she changed things like her driver’s license, how her paychecks still came in her maiden name. There was never any problem.
But in the end, he’d been scared. He asked the girl if he could see his file, said he wanted to make sure he had given her the right credit card. She just handed the folder to him because she was busy and he slipped the copies out. She hadn’t seemed especially bright, so he wasn’t worried that she would notice later. Then, when he was done with the Jeep, he just dropped it off and left in his minivan that he had parked in the airport long-term parking lot.
Then, without his even realizing, God had led him to Greg Matthew’s garage. It was the closest to his home, so he’d stopped in there because he couldn’t have the ignition being hateful that way. He had a lot to do and a long way to go and he couldn’t risk another rental. So he’d brought the minivan to be fixed. It wasn’t until Greg had come out