Son of the Morning

His expression had been just as pleasant when he shot Ford in the head.

He was inChicago . She checked the date on the newspaper, saw that it was almost two weeks old. Parrish washere. She wasn’t safe, as she’d thought. Her instincts were right; it was time to leave.

"Let’s see," Harmony mused when Grace didn’t answer. "Wouldn’t be the senator; he’s all bullshit.

Forget that Saunders guy; he’s a completewuss , just look at him. The other three… hmm … one looks like a cop, see the bad suit?"

Harmony was systematically, and with irritating accuracy, summing up every person in the photo. In another few seconds she would arrive unerringly at the correct conclusion. To save her the time and trouble, Grace tapped her fingernail once on Parrish’s face.

"Now forget you ever saw him," she advised, her face and voice tense. "If he even thinks you might know something about me, he’ll kill you."

Harmony’s lashes shielded her eyes as she studied the photo. When she finally looked up at Grace, her green gaze was hard and clear. "That man’s evil," she said flatly. "Yougotta get out of here."

The next two days were a flurry of activity. Grace worked furiously on translating as much of the Gaelic as possible, because she wouldn’t have time to work while she was traveling. Harmony made the rounds of yard sales, and came up with some jeans that actually fit Grace, as well as some tight knit tops and a pair of sturdy hiking boots. When they were together, Harmony talked. Grace felt like Luke Skywalker listening to Yoda, but instead of imparting pearls of mystical wisdom Harmony discussed ways of losing a tail, how to travel without leaving tracks, how to get a fake driver’s license and even a fake passport if she didn’t have time or it was too dangerous to acquire the real thing. Harmony knew a lot about how to survive on the streets, and on the run, and that was her gift to Grace.

Her final gift was borrowing a car and driving Grace toMichigan City,Indiana , where she planned to catch a bus. Grace didn’t tell Harmony her intended destination, and Harmony didn’t ask; it was safer for both of them.

"Watch your back," Harmony said gruffly, hugging Grace to her. "And remember everythingMatty and I showed you."

"I will," Grace said. "I do." She hugged Harmony in return, then gathered her bags and trudged into the bus station. Harmony watched the slight figure disappear inside, and blinked twice to dispel the blur from her eyes.

"God, you watch over her," she whispered, giving her orders to the Almighty, then Harmony Johnson got back into the borrowed Pontiac and drove away.

Grace watched from the window, her eyes dry despite the tight ache in her chest. She didn’t know how many more good-byes she could say; maybe it would be best to stay on the go, not staying in anyone place long enough to get attached to people.

But she still had a lot of work to do on the papers, and she needed a safe place in which to do it. She studied a map of the bus routes, then bought a ticket to Indianapolis. Once there, she would decide her next destination, but it had to be something totally unexpected. Parrish hadn’t been in Chicago by accident, she was certain. Somehow, he’d known she was there. His men had been searching for her. She must have been utterly predictable, and soon they would have found her.

That wouldn’t happen again, she promised herself. She was going to ground, in a place where they would never expect to find her, and suddenly she knew exactly where she was going. It was the one place they wouldn’t think to look, the one place where she could keep tabs on Parrish and his movements:Minneapolis .

Chapter 11

THE NAME GRACE TOOK FROM THE CEMETERY IN MINNEAPOLIS was Louisa Patricia Croley. This time she didn’t get a birth certificate. Instead, armed with Harmony’s pearls of illegal wisdom, by that afternoon she had a social security number, an address, and a driver’s license. The last two were fake. The social security number was real, because it had belonged to the real Louisa Patricia Croley. Getting the number had been a snap, and she didn’t need an actual card, just the number.

The next morning she was the owner of a pickup truck, a beige, rusted-out Dodge that nevertheless shifted gears smoothly and did not emit either any strange noises or telltale puffs of smoke. By paying cash, she got the owner to knock four hundred off his asking price. With the title and bill of sale in her possession, she then stood in line to get the title switched to her name – or rather, to LouisaCroley’s name.

Grace was grimly satisfied as she walked back out to the truck. She had wheels now. She could leave any time she wished, and she didn’t have to buy a ticket or worry about disguising herself in case the ticket agent remembered her if anyone came around asking questions. The truck meant liberation.

She rented a cheap room close to downtown, and after a little research applied for a job with the cleaning service that cleaned some of the lavish homes in Wayzata. There was no better pipeline of information than a cleaning service, because no one paid any attention to the cleaners. She knew that Parrish employed a full-time housekeeper, as did some of the other home owners on the lake, but enough of them used an outside service to make the business very lucrative. Not enough of the lucre made it down to the hands of those who did the cleaning, however, so the turnover was fairly high. She was hired immediately.

That night, in her drab little room, she lay in the lumpy bed and thought drowsily of the papers she had just finished translating. In 1321, a man named Morvan of Hay had tried to kill Black Niall, but lost his own head. His father, a clan chieftain whose lands lay to the east, had then launched the entire clan into open warfare with the renegades of Creag Dhu. Niall had been captured during one battle and locked in the Hays’ dungeon, but escaped by unknown means that same night.