Stone Barrington 27 - Doing Hard Time

identity, and Genaro and Majorov will never be able to find you. I’ll give you a wonderful life.”
    She took his face in her hands and kissed him. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, yes, yes.”
    “Oh, where is your car?”
    “In the employees’ parking lot at the hotel. It’s leased. I can have the leasing company pick it up.”
    “Tomorrow I want you to write to the leasing company, then write a letter to Pete Genaro, resigning your job and asking him to wire any money owed to you to your bank account in Vegas. We’ll transfer any funds you have there to an offshore account I have, then I’ll give you the cash. We’ll find a moving company on the Internet, and you can have them pack your belongings and deliver them to a charity. You’ll write to the phone, electric, and gas companies and to the credit card companies, closing your accounts. When all that is done, you will, effectively, have disappeared.”
    “As long as I’m with you,” she said.

Ten days passed. Stone and Dino flew back to New York with Mike Freeman. Stone managed to convince Emma Tweed to come with them for a visit.
    Peter began shooting his new feature, starting with Tessa’s scenes, so that she could finish shooting in under a month. Ben was grateful for Emma’s absence; Tessa moved into the house at The Arrington.
    Five days after it had been left there, the body of Todd German was found in the trunk of his rented Camaro in the parking garage at Shutters, and the two detectives at the West Los Angeles police station had a new murder to solve. They were now getting crazy.
    •   •   •
    Pete Genaro looked up from his desk to find Yuri Majorov filling his doorway.
    “I have had a call from my Phoenix office telling me that the body of Todd German has been found in exactly the same circumstances as the body of Igor Smolensky and in the same place,” he said. “Where is your Charmaine? Did Burnett contact her?”
    Genaro handed him a sheet of stationery. “I received this from Charmaine today,” he said. “I sent someone to her apartment. It was empty, and the lease had been paid up.”
    “I expect you have a skip tracer employed here,” Majorov said.
    “Do you want to find Charmaine that badly?”
    “Where Charmaine is will be Billy Burnett.”
    “Mr. Majorov, if that’s what you want, then I’ll do it. But you should consider that the bodies are stacking up. Do you want that to continue?”
    “What I want is for you to assign a skip tracer to find these people. When he has done that, you will report their location to me, and I will take care of the rest.”
    “As you wish,” Genaro said.
    •   •   •
    Teddy continued working part-time at the Centurion armory, overhauling weapons and interviewing applicants for his job.
    Charmaine followed Teddy’s instructions, shutting down her old life, and she visited an upscale hairdresser in Beverly Hills, who cut her hair shorter and colored it to its natural shade of chestnut brown. She bought new clothes and jewelry, replacing the things she had left behind, paying with cash that Billy had given her.
    One late afternoon, when all that had been accomplished, Billy sat her down with a drink. “You’re going to have a new name,” he said. “What would you like it to be?”
    She thought about that. “When I was a child,” she said, “I hated my name. I always wanted to be Elizabeth and to be called Betsy.”
    “Then that is who you will be,” he said. “Would you like to be Mrs. Barnett?”
    “Very much.”
    “Then that will be done, too. It will all be accomplished by tomorrow evening, then we will go out and celebrate.”
    Teddy didn’t go in to work the following day. He spent the time creating a new identity for Elizabeth Barnett—passport, driver’s license, credit report, work history, and Social Security number, and he had a credit card issued from his Cayman Islands bank and mailed to him in Los Angeles. He also created a birth certificate and a marriage certificate and filed them both in the relevant city and state computers.
    Betsy came home to find her new identity arrayed on the dining room table. “You did all this?” she asked.
    “I did, and it’s all indistinguishable from the genuine article. You exist under your new name on more than a dozen computer systems around the country. You can travel anywhere in the world with these documents. I also removed your application for a casino worker’s card from the Nevada state