Page 101 of The Shadow Friends

“And Ingrid dies.”

“That’s the exchange, you see. Her life for yours.” She leaned in close enough to see every fine wrinkle on Maggie’s face. Hannah was younger than this woman, but tonight she felt profoundly older. A lifetime of deception had taken its toll on her body, her soul. All she wanted was to fade into obscurity, to return to her homeland and claim the reward she’d been promised. But first she had to kill Ingrid Slocum.

“Which will it be?” Hannah asked.

She waited as Maggie considered her options. Loyalty versus her life. A simple choice on the face of it, and how important was friendship, really? Hannah couldn’t answer that, because she’d never allowed herself such a luxury. Every acquaintanceship had been based on lies, and every lie was rooted in self-preservation.

“Well?” said Hannah.

“Fuck you.”

Hannah sighed. “No matter.” She powered on Maggie’s cell phone and aimed the camera at her. “There’s always another way.”

Chapter 39

Ingrid

This is all my fault, thought Ingrid as she stood with Lloyd and Rodrigo and Officer Mike Batchelder beside Maggie’s abandoned truck. At 11 p.m., the grocery store was now closed, and the empty parking lot offered a wide-open field to any sniper who wanted to take a shot at Ingrid. She should not be standing here. She should be on her way to a new safe house, but she’d had enough of hiding, enough of letting her friends take all the risks. Maggie was now in trouble, maybe already dead, and Ingrid could not stand aside any longer. This was the time for her to don her armor, before anyone else she cared about got hurt.

“After you called, asking about Maggie, I swung by here and found her truck, with all this stuff lying on the ground,” said Mike. He looked down at the two fallen bags and the spilled groceries. A stray onion had rolled a few yards away and now sat in the glow of a parking lot lamp, like a star performer highlighted by stage lights. He pointed to the four grocery bags in the back of Maggie’s pickup truck. “Looks like she was in the middle of loading up these last two bags when she was interrupted.” Mike turned to Lloyd. “When did you last see her?”

“It was eight o’clock,” said Lloyd. “That’s when she left to go shopping.”

“And you’re all staying at her farm?” Mike looked at Ingrid and Rodrigo.

There was a pause, then Rodrigo answered smoothly: “It’s a reunion. You know, old friends from way back.”

Ingrid crouched down to search inside one of the fallen grocery bags, and she stirred up the scent of basil and cilantro as she dug through Maggie’s purchases. She didn’t find what she was looking for in the first bag, so she began digging in the second.

“Ingrid,” said Lloyd. “It’s not safe for you out here. We need to get you inside.”

“It has to be in one of these bags,” she said.

“You’re out in the open here.”

“Maybe it blew away.” She rose to her feet and turned to the bed of Maggie’s pickup. The next bag was heavy with bottles of wine and whisky. So much booze. Maggie knew her friends well.

“Mrs. Slocum?” said Mike. “Can I help you with something?”

“No need,” said Ingrid. “I found it.” She pulled out the grocery store receipt and shone her cell phone light on it. “Eight forty-nine. That’s when she checked out.”

“Two hours ago,” said Rodrigo, and he looked at the unlit store. “Didn’t any of the employees notice this truck when they left for the night?”

“They park around the side of the building,” said Mike. “They wouldn’t have come out this way. I called the manager, asked him to come back and open his office, so we can view the parking lot CCTV. He lives twenty miles away, so it’ll take—”

“We already know who you’re looking for,” said Ingrid. “Her name is Hannah Murray. She’s fifty-two years old, five foot five, brown hair, brown eyes. She drives a black Honda sedan with Massachusetts license plates. And she’s almost certainly armed and dangerous.”

Mike stared at her. “How do you know all this?”

“Just trust me,” said Ingrid. “We do.”

“They’re on their way home now,” said Ingrid, reading Ben’s text message as they drove out of the grocery store parking lot. “But they’re still more than three hours away.”

“In the meantime, we can’t sit still,” said Rodrigo at the wheel of his rental car. He glanced in the rearview mirror at Lloyd, who was sitting in the back seat. “Eyes on the road, Lloyd. Make sure we’re not followed.”

“I’m on it.”

“We need a plan,” said Rodrigo.