Son of the Morning Read online

  It wasn’t.

  Conrad lay quietly in bed, lights off, but the city was never dark and the bland hotel walls were washed with muted, flickering colors from a plethora of neon. The latest computer list lay on the desk, put aside for now. Some things were best reserved for the night, but others had to wait for busy daylight and normal office hours. The delay didn’t bother him; he was a patient man. Grace wasn’t going anywhere, at least not yet. She had gone to ground somewhere in the massive urban sprawl, and she would stay there as long as she felt safe. She was a scholar, a researcher; she would research. The libraries in Chicago were very good. Yes, he was confident she would remain in Chicago for a while, and all the time he would be looking for her. She wouldn’t know he was close until he was ready to pounce.

  Mr. Sawyer had a small army of men out combing the streets, but Conrad didn’t put any faith in that tactic. The people who operated in the underground economy weren’t about to answer any questions truthfully, for one thing, and for another, Grace had proven herself capable of quite a few disguises. By now she could have shaven her head and dressed in leather, so relying on description was a waste of time.

  Conrad preferred his own methods. To him it was simple: if anyone on the run remained in one place for long, he or she would have to establish an identity. For some it would be as uncomplicated as selecting a name. That worked so long as there was no need for credit, or a driver’s license, or you didn’t try to work in a legitimate place that demanded a social security number. In the long run it was smarter to establish a documented identity, and Grace St. John had impressed him with her intelligence.

  The process was simple, but slow. To document an identity, one had to have a birth certificate. To get a birth certificate, one had to have a real name. Obviously, using a living person’s name could be complicated when the two identities began colliding with each other, as would inevitably happen, so the best thing was to go to a cemetery and read tombstones. Find someone who had been born at approximately the same time as you were, within a couple of years either way, but who had died young. Sometimes the parents’ names were on the tombstone, too: something along the lines of “Beloved Daughter of John and Jane Doe.” Bingo, you had the information you needed to get a birth certificate.

  Requests for birth certificates would go to the state capital, in this case Springfield. Getting a birth certificate was fairly easy; it was getting a full set of identification papers that would take time. Next she would have to get a social security number, and the federal government was slow. He had time to focus on the birth certificate requests.

  With the Foundation’s resources, gaining access to the Illinois state computer system had taken a mere phone call. He had been surprised, however, by the volume of requests. It was amazing how many people needed to prove their existence, whether for social security claims, passport applications, or whatever. The sheer numbers involved were what was slowing him down.

  He could automatically delete those requests for men, but again there were a lot of people with ambiguous names. Shelley, for instance. Male or female? And what about Lynn, or Marion, or Terry? Those people had to remain on his list until he could check them out.

  Nor did he have a specific date of request, which made his task more difficult. She couldn’t have made a request any sooner than the day after he had almost caught her in Eau Claire, but what if she waited a few days, a week, maybe even a couple of weeks? That uncertainty added literally hundreds of people to the list, from all over the state. He narrowed the focus to the Chicago area, but that still left hundreds because he figured at least a fourth of the state’s entire population lived in the metro area.

  Checking out that many people took time, and the list grew every day. Some of the people who requested birth certificates had moved in the meantime; they had to be located, and sometimes they had moved out of state. Some had gone on vacation, but until he had traced them he didn’t dare eliminate them from his list. Grace could be hiding behind any of those names, even the most improbable. He would not underestimate her again.

  “Girl, you look like shit,” Matty said genially, uncoiling his compact, graceful body from the tattered sofa in his apartment.

  “Thanks,” Grace muttered. She was tired from sitting up nights trying to decipher Gaelic. Her eyes felt gritty, she had the energy of a slug, and she had burned her hand that day when she picked up a pan to wash and discovered it had just been taken from the oven. Harmony had tended the burn, scowling the entire time, and then had insisted on accompanying Grace to Matty’s for another “lesson,” just to make certain something else didn’t happen to her.

  “Just skin hangin’ on a rack of bones,” Harmony pronounced, still scowling. “I can’t get her to eat, no matter what I cook. She’s done lost ten pounds or more since she’s been living in my house, which ain’t exactly the best advertisement I could have.”

  Grace looked down at herself. She was used to Harmony’s complaints that she didn’t eat enough, but still she was surprised now when she really looked at herself, and saw her bony wrists, her body lost within the baggy folds of clothes that had once been the right size. She knew she’d lost weight, a lot of weight, that first horrible week after the murders, but she hadn’t realized she was still losing weight. She was thin, and verging on downright skinny. She had to use a safety pin to tighten the waistband of her jeans so that they didn’t slide right off. Even her underwear was too big these days, and loose panties weren’t comfortable.

  “I told her she don’t need to be wearing those baggy clothes,” Harmony continued, folding bonelessly onto the couch and crossing her long legs. “But does she listen to me? You tell her.”

  “Harmony’s right,” Matty said, frowning at Grace. “Don’t give no sumbitch nothing to grab. You ain’t got no size to you, Julia, and you ain’t got no meanness. You’ll fight if you’re cornered, but the thing is, you gotta keep from gettin’ cornered, ’cause then your chances go way down. Are you listenin’ to me?” It wasn’t like him to give a shit about anybody, but he worried about Julia. Something bad had happened to her, and she was still on the run. She didn’t talk about it, but he could see it in her eyes. Hell, he was used to shootings and stabbings, drug overdoses, gang violence, little kids with big, scared, uncomprehending eyes, so he didn’t know exactly what it was about Julia that got to him, but something did. Maybe it was because she looked so frail, so that sometimes he thought he could almost see right through her, or maybe it was the sadness that wrapped around her like a coat. She never smiled, and her big blue eyes just looked… empty. The look in her eyes made him hurt inside, and Matty was a man who made a point of not letting people close enough to him that he’d be hurt if anything happened to them. He’d failed with Julia.

  “I’m listening,” Grace said obediently. “I listen to Harmony, too. I just can’t afford a bunch of new clothes.”

  “You heard of yard sales?” Harmony asked. “Take your nose outta your books once in a while and look around. People sell old jeans for four or five dollars, and usually you can get ’em for a dollar if you stand around long enough complainin’ that five bucks is too much.”

  “I’ll look,” Grace promised. Yard sales. She’d never been to one in her life, but if she could get jeans in her size for a dollar, she was about to become a yard-sale fanatic. She was getting tired of holding her clothes up with safety pins, and tired of her underwear wandering around inside her jeans.

  “Okay, enough of shoppin’,” Matty said impatiently. “I’m tryin’ to teach you how to stay alive. Pay attention here.”

  Matty’s method of teaching didn’t involve gyms or dojos, because he said fights generally didn’t happen there. They happened on the streets, in houses, where people went about their business and lived their lives. A couple of times he’d taken her down to an alley for her lesson, which involved him attacking her from a variety of directions, tackling her or simply wrapping his arms around her and throwing her to the ground, and she