Barclay, Linwood Novel 08 - Never saw it coming

scene.
    Justin: Outside! Not inside.
    Wedmore: Then how did you get this check? Signed by Mr. Garfield. Made out to you, in your own handwriting?
    Justin: I . . . I . . .
    Wedmore: If you’ve got something physical, something that puts Keisha there instead of you, let me have it.
    Justin: She was all bloody! Search her house for her clothes.
    Wedmore: We did that, Justin. Didn’t find anything. Her house, her car looked clean.
    Justin: Then she cleaned up! People do that after they kill someone! They clean up!
    Wedmore: Is that what you did, Justin? Got all cleaned up after you killed Mr. Garfield?
    Justin: I want that lawyer.

Thirty-four
    “So you’re going to come to San Francisco with me?” Matthew asked his mother.
    “Yeah, but we’re not going to stay with my cousin,” Keisha said. “What I’m thinking is, we find a place to stay, maybe not right in the city, ’cause it’s expensive there, but just outside. See what it’s like, maybe even move there.”
    “I don’t know,” the boy said.
    “I think we need a fresh start,” she said. “I can’t even go back into that house after what happened there. We’re never spending another night in that place.”
    “Will someone get all my stuff?”
    “I’m going in just long enough to pack,” Keisha said. She still had Gail’s five thousand dollars. She was entitled to that money. It wasn’t evidence she had to get rid of. Not like that fragment of an endorsed check Justin’s parents had given her, with his signature on the back. She’d flushed that down the toilet before the police arrived, after she’d copied his signature onto the blank check Garfield had written her that morning. All those fake signatures she’d put on Social Security checks for her mom had paid off.
    She’d cut it fine. Justin started waking up seconds after she’d planted the money and the check in the pockets of his jacket. So far, the story was hanging together. They had more on him than they did on her. And Justin’s parents hadn’t pushed yet to have her charged with scamming them. Maybe they had enough on their plate right now, getting a lawyer to defend him on two counts of murder. Or maybe Marcia Taggart didn’t want it made public how she and her husband had been duped.
    Not just by Keisha, but by her own son.
    It seemed like a good time to get out of town. Start over. Turn her life around. Get a job. Maybe she could work at one of those makeup counters in a big department store. She’d be okay with secretarial work, too. Keisha was organized, she could run someone’s office, do correspondence, stuff like that.
    And if it took a while to get a decent job, she could always, temporarily—not forever, that was for sure—read a few fortunes, she supposed. Check an astrological chart for someone.
    If she got really pressed, help someone get in touch with a dead loved one.
    Or even someone who was, you know, unaccounted for at the moment.
    Tell people what they wanted to hear.
    Give them hope .
    Girl has to make a living.

Don’t miss Linwood Barclay’s brand-new thriller,

    Available from New American Library
    In September, 2012.

Prologue
    It was just by chance he turned down Orchard Street and saw the window when he did. It easily could have been a week from now, or a month, even a year. But it turned out that this was going to be the day.
    Sure, he would have wandered down here eventually. Sooner or later, when he got to a new city, he hit every street. He always started out intending to be methodical about it—follow one street from beginning to end, then head over a block and backtrack on a parallel street, like doing the aisles in a grocery store—but then he’d get to a cross street and something would catch his eye, and all good intentions would be abandoned.
    That was how it turned out when he got to Manhattan, even though, of all the cities he’d visited, it was the one that most lent itself to being explored in an orderly fashion, at least those parts of the city north of Fourteenth Street, which was laid out in that perfect grid of streets and avenues. South of that, once you got into the West Village and Greenwich Village and SoHo and Chinatown, well, it was chaos down there, but that didn’t bother him. It certainly wasn’t any worse than in London or Rome or Paris or even Boston’s North End, and he’d loved exploring those cities.
    He’d turned south onto Orchard from Delancey, but his actual starting point for this stroll had been