He wondered why he was even bothering to dig his quarters out of the coin return chute. Who would he ever have occasion to call?
It was over, he saw now. Thats what hed been on the verge of realizing, that was the nasty little thought hed kept at bay. And the pipe dream that had sustained him all the way back from Iowa, the mad fantasy that everything would be peaches and cream the minute he got back to his own apartment, was now so clearly impossible he wondered how hed ever been dim enough to entertain it, let alone take it as gospel.
Hed somehow managed to regard New York as a haven, safe and sacrosanct. For years hed made it a rule never to accept assignments in the city, and while hed had to break the rule on a couple of occasions, most of the time hed adhered to it. The rest of the country, and hed covered a great deal of it at one time or another, was where he went to do his work. New York, his home, was where he came when the work was done.
But, however much people both in and out of the city might prefer to think otherwise, New York was part of America. New Yorkers watched the same newscasts and read the same newspaper stories. They might be better than most people at minding their own business, and it was not uncommon for an apartment dweller to be unable to identify people in his own building by name, but that hardly meant they turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to everything around them.
His picture had been all over TV and in every newspaper with the possible exception of Linns Stamp News . (And it might even turn up there, if James McCue had managed to figure out just who it was whod bought those Swedish reprints from him.) How many people lived within a block or two of Keller? How many knew him from the building, or had run into him at the deli, or at the gym, or anywhere in that unassuming life hed been idealizing just minutes ago?
That life to which he could never return.
He went through the paper again, more carefully this time, and in a story hed skimmed earlier he found evidence that at least one of Kellers neighbors had noticed his resemblance to the furtive chap in the photograph. Commenting on the multiple sightings of the fugitive, the journalist alluded to an unnamed Turtle Bay resident whod become
a person of interest to the police only because of some apparent uncertainty as to the nature of his occupation, and his frequent trips out of town.
That would be enough to warrant a visit. Would they turn up anything incriminating in his apartment?
He couldnt think of anything. Theyd find his laptop computer, and theyd turn his hard drive inside and out, but back when he bought the thing hed known that email had a half-life longer than uraniums, and that a couple of sentences wafting through the ether would leave a trail that could outlive the sender. He and Dot had never sent each other an email, and vowed they never would.
Well, that would be an easy promise to keep, wouldnt it?
Hed used his computer mostly in connection with his hobby corresponding with dealers, surfing for information, buying stamps on eBay, bidding in auctions. Hed checked airline websites before his flight to Des Moines, but he hadnt bought his ticket online because he was going to be flying as Holden Blankenship. So hed made the reservation over the phone, and there wouldnt be any record of it on his computer.
Could they tell what sites hed visited, and when? He wasnt sure, but figured the guiding principle that when it came to technology, anybody could do anything probably applied. One thing he was pretty sure they could do was pull up his phone records and establish that hed called an airline a day or two before Blankenship flew to Des Moines, but at this point it didnt matter, at this point none of it mattered, because hed finally managed to attract their attention, and that was all it took. Hed come as far as he had in life by staying out of the spotlight, and now he was in it, and that was the end of it.
The end of John Paul Keller. If he stayed alive, which seemed very iffy indeed, it would have to be somewhere else, and under some other name. He wouldnt miss the first two names; hardly anyone had ever used them, and hed been called Keller by just about everybody since boyhood. That was who he was, and when he filled something out with his initials he sometimes thought they stood for Just Plain Keller.
He couldnt be Keller anymore. Keller was over and done with and, when he thought about it, he realized that everything in Kellers life was already gone, so what difference could it make if the name vanished along with it?
The money, for one thing. Hed had, at last report, something in excess of two and a half million dollars in stocks and bonds, all of it in an Ameritrade online account set up and managed by Dot. The money would still be there, it wouldnt vanish with her death, but it might as well be gone for all the good it would do him. He had no idea what name shed used on the account or how a person might go about accessing it.