Son of the Morning

Grace rocked back and forth, pushing the pain deep inside, forcing herself tothink. Ford had bought her safety with his life, and it would be a betrayal beyond bearing if she wasted his sacrifice by making bad decisions.

A slew of late-night withdrawals, allafter the estimated times of death, would cement her appearance of guilt.Kristian would know what time she had left theSiebers ‘ house, and Ford and Bryant had been killed at roughly that time. They had both been partially undressed, and in Bryant’s bedroom.. Parrish had set up the situation with his usual thoroughness; any cop alive would believe she had walked in on a homosexual encounter between her husband and her brother, and killed them both. Her subsequent disappearance was another point against her.

The men with Parrish had been professional in their manner; they wouldn’t have done anything sloppy like leave fingerprints. No neighbors would have seen strange cars parked at the house, because they had parked elsewhere and walked to the house. There were no witnesses, no evidence to point to anyone except her.

And even if by some miracle she convinced the police she was innocent, she had no proof Parrish had killed them. She hadseen him do it, but she couldn’t prove she had. Moreover, to the cops’ way of thinking, he wouldn’t have had a motive, while she obviously had plenty of motive. What could she offer as proof? A batch of papers written in a tangle of ancient languages, which she hadn’t even deciphered yet, and which Parrish could have gotten from her at any time simply by telling her to turn them over to him?

There was no motive,at least none she could prove. And if she turned herself in, Parrish would get the papers, and she would end up dead. He would make certain of it. It would be made to look as if she’d hung herself, or perhaps a drug overdose would cause a brief scandal about the presence of drugs in jails and prisons, but the end result would be the same.

She had to stay alive, and out of police hands. It was the only chance she had of finding outwhy Parrish had killed Ford and Bryant-and avenging them.

To stay alive, to stay free, she had to have money. To get money, she had to use the ATMs no matter how guilty it made her look.

Would the police freeze her bank account? She didn’t know, but if they did they would probably need a court order to do it. That should give her a little time – time she was wasting by huddling behind a trash bin, instead of walking across the street to the ATM and getting out what she could, while she could.

But she felt numb, almost incapable of functioning. The thirty yards might as well have been a hundred miles.

The shiny black surface of the wet pavement reflected the distorted, surreal image of the lights: the brightly colored hues of neon, the stark white of the streetlights, the never ending, monotonous progression of the traffic light through green, yellow, red, over and over, exerting its control over nonexistent traffic. Attwo A.M. there was only an occasional car, and none at all for the past five minutes. No one was in sight. Now was the time to approach the ATM.

But still she crouched there, hidden from view and partially protected from the rain by the overhang of the building and the bulk of the trash bin. Her hair was plastered to her head, her sodden braid hanging limp and rain-heavy down her back. Her clothes were soaked, and even though the night was still unusually warm byMinneapolis standards, the dampness had leached the heat from her body so that she shivered with cold.

She clutched a garbage bag to her chest; it was a small bag, the type sometimes used to line the trash cans in public buildings. She had liberated it from just such a can in the ladies’ rest room of the public library. The computer and the precious papers were protected inside the case, but when it had started raining she had panicked at the possibility of them getting wet, and all she could think of using to protect them was a plastic bag.

Maybe it hadn’t been smart, going to the library. It was, after all, a public place, and one she frequented. On the other hand, how often did the police search libraries for suspected murderers? It was impossible for Parrish to have gotten a good look at her through that tiny slit in the bedroom curtains, but he certainly guessed she was the one lurking outside the window and had seen everything. He and his men were searching for her, but even though Ford had told them she’d gone to the library she doubted they would think she had goneback to one to hide.

The police might not even have been notified of the murders yet. Parrish couldn’t report them without bringing himself into the picture, which he wouldn’t want to do. The neighbors wouldn’t have heard anything, since the shots had been silenced.

No. The police knew. Parrish wouldn’t take the chance of letting days go by before the bodies-her mind stumbled on the word, but she forced herself to finish the thought-were discovered. Was there any way for forensics to tell if the pistol had been fitted with a silencer? She didn’t think so. All Parrish would have to do would be to call in a "suspicious noise, like gunshots," at their address, and use a pay phone so nothing would show up on the 911 records.

Both Parrish and his henchmen, and the police, were looking for her. Still, she had gone to the main branch of the library. Instinct had led her there. She was numb with shock and horror, and the library, as familiar to her as her own house, had seemed like a haven. The smell of books, that wonderful mingling of paper and leather and ink, had been the scent of sanctuary. Dazed, at first she had simply wandered among the shelves, looking at the books that had defined the boundaries of her life until a few short hours ago, trying to recapture that sense of safety, of normalcy. It hadn’t worked. Nothing would ever be normal again. Finally she had gone into the rest room, and stared in bewilderment at the reflection in the mirror. That white faced, blank-eyed woman wasn’ther, couldn’t possibly be Grace St. John, who had spent her life in academia and who specialized in deciphering and translating ancient languages. The Grace St. John she was familiar with, the one whose face she had seen countless times in other mirrors, had happy blue eyes and a cheerful expression, the face of a woman who loved and was loved in return. Content. Yes, she had been content. So what if she was just a little too plump, so what if she could have been the poster girl for Bookworms Anonymous? Ford had loved her, and that WBS" what had counted in her life. "