Chapter 23: Gone

"Call the police," I said.

Dad looked at me over the stack of wires.

"All of it, Dad. The payments, the letter, the phones. Tonight."

For five weeks I'd kept my mouth shut so the money would keep going out on the first.

Now the money had gone out all at once.

There was nothing left to protect.

Dad picked up the phone on the sideboard.

His voice was steady until he had to say her name.

Then it wasn't.

I went out the front door and down the driveway in the dark.

Dez was already out of the gray Ford, walking up to meet me.

He'd seen Brendan's face in the window.

"She ran," I said. "With the emergency fund. Two million four hundred thousand."

He didn't swear.

He just put his hand on the back of my neck, once, warm, and then took out his phone.

By midnight there were six police cars in the turnaround.

By two in the morning there were two federal agents at the dining room table in navy windbreakers.

Brendan went upstairs to his old room and came back down with the manila envelope and the two sealed phones.

He set them in front of the agents himself.

"I took these out of her safe on Monday," he said. "I should have called you Monday."

Nobody told him it was okay.

He didn't ask them to.

Mom sat beside me on the sofa with the navy mittens in her lap.

She wasn't crying anymore.

She was holding my hand so hard my rings would have cut if I'd owned any.

At four-fifteen an agent's phone buzzed.

They'd found the white Range Rover.

The top floor of a parking garage at O'Hare, keys on the driver's seat.

A one-way ticket to Miami in her name for a six a.m. flight.

"She's not on that plane," I said.

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