Every time I think about that phrase, I need to bite down and fight back the tears and remind myself of what’s at stake. Before Rachel’s visit, my son was dead, murdered, perhaps even by my hands. Now I believed the total opposite: Matthew is alive, and I’d been set up. Why, how—I had no idea. One step at a time.
The first step is Hilde Winslow.
After I rolled out of Philip’s car at that outlet mall, I called Rachel to pick me up. She was at a diner. I explained to her where to go and when to be there. Meanwhile I headed into the employee parking lot. The stores were just opening, so most employees were beginning their shifts. That gave me time. Rachel, I knew, was from New Jersey. When the cops put an APB on her car, that’s what they would be focused on—New Jersey license plates in Maine. I found a beat-up Honda Civic with screws loose enough to take off both license plates. Would the owner notice? Probably not for a while. Most people don’t check to make sure their license plates are in place before they drive. But even so, even if Mr./Mrs. Beat-Up Honda noticed, it would be hours from now after their shift. We would have the head start we needed.
Rachel had wisely done as I asked—maxed out all her credit cards at ATM machines. She used three credit cards, two with an $800 maximum, one with $600. Along with the money the Mackenzies had given me, I was financially flush enough to last a little while anyway. The police would at some point figure out where Philip had really dropped me off. Philip’s story, whatever he concocted, wouldn’t hold water for more than a day or two.
Once Rachel arrived at the back of the outlet mall’s parking lot where I was hiding, I hopped in and told her to just keep driving. Two miles later, we spotted a closed-down restaurant. I told Rachel to pull in behind it. When we were out of sight, I quickly switched out the license plates, so that her white Toyota Camry, one of the most common cars in the world, now had Maine license plates.
“What now?” Rachel asked me.
I knew the manhunt would be massive and immediate, but I also knew that law enforcement is not all-consuming or all-encompassing. The key to any plan was to have a goal. I had but one: Find my son. Period. The end. That was my sole focus.
So what did that mean in a practical sense?
Follow any lead. The biggest one I had—the only one—was Hilde Winslow. She had not only lied on the stand, but she’d changed her name and moved to New York City. So that became my plan: Get to Hilde Winslow as fast as I could. Figure out why she lied.
Once I had a destination, it became all about how to divert and obfuscate and muddy the waters. The police would soon realize that Rachel had visited me in prison and put some kind of tracker on her phone. They would also do the same with Philip’s and Adam’s phones, both in my possession. I’d already shut them down.
“Is your phone on?” I asked her.
“Yes. Oh shit, they can trace that, right? Should I power it down or something?”
“Wait,” I tell her.
“Why?”
Once a phone was off, the cell provider wouldn’t be able to track us anymore, but they’d be able to tell the police where we were when the phone was last on. I had Rachel drive in the opposite direction of my destination. Once we’d headed far enough north so that the police would conclude that we were likely heading toward the Canadian border rather than New York City, I had Rachel power down her phone. If we kept it on longer, it would be too much, I concluded—overplaying our hand. Now it would appear as though we started our escape and realized after about ten or fifteen minutes of driving that we needed to turn the phone off.
“So now what?” Rachel asked.
I was about to have her make a U-turn and start back toward New York, but I wasn’t sure that the phone ping alone would do enough to divert, obfuscate, and muddy.
“Keep heading north,” I said.
Twenty minutes later, we stopped at a store in Katahdin that sold survival equipment. I checked for security cameras near the pumps. None there. Not that it mattered. They’d know that I was here soon enough. Rachel filled up her car while I, shopping quickly yet not conspicuously （or so I hoped）， bought survival equipment, the kind of stuff I assumed people used to hike and camp for an extended period of time. I paid for it all with the Mastercard Adam said that he would “forget” to cancel. I figured the police would still find out about the card, but it might take a little longer. If not, when the full APB hit, the old man who rang me up would remember my face.
That was okay too.
With this deed done, Rachel and I headed north for another half a mile （just in case someone asked eventually which way the car had gone） before turning around and driving south. We found a Salvation Army donation bin behind an office complex on the outskirts of Boston. I dumped the survival gear in it. According to a sign on the donation box, the next pickup was four days away. Good. If somehow the Salvation Army got suspicious of the stuff or called the police, it wouldn’t matter. Even if they found us on CCTV up here, so what? We’d be long gone. I just hoped the authorities would buy that I was hiding in the woods.
We then turned around and started the long drive south. At a pharmacy near Milford, Connecticut, I stayed in the car while Rachel bought me a burner phone, clippers, shaving gear, and glasses with the lowest prescription possible. She ended up choosing sunglasses that lightened when you were inside. Perfect. At the next truck stop, I entered the bathroom wearing a baseball cap pulled down low. I rarely shave in prison, maybe once a week when it gets itchy, so my beard was somewhere between stubble and full growth. I shaved now so that only a mustache remained. Then I cut off all my hair and shaved my head and donned the glasses.
Even Rachel was impressed with my disguise. “I almost didn’t let you back in the car.”
When we got close to the George Washington Bridge, I had Rachel pull off on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. We backed into a spot where I could put her New Jersey license plates back. Then I tossed the Maine ones into an outdoor trash can. If the police were fully on this now—and I suspected that they were—they’d probably pick up her New Jersey plate when she crossed the Washington Bridge. I warned her about that. We had been rehearsing what she should do when the police either pulled her over or came to her house.
“I’m making a lot of problems for you,” I say.
“Don’t worry about it,” Rachel replies. “He’s my nephew, remember?”
“You were a good aunt,” I say.
“The best,” she replies with a hint of a smile.
“But if it gets bad, if you get arrested—”
“I’ll be fine.”
“I know. But if you get backed into a corner, tell them I forced you to do this at gunpoint.”
“You better go.”
The Mount Eden Avenue stop on the 4 train was next door. I got on the subway and took it thirty-five minutes south to 14 Street–Union Square in Manhattan. Once there, I found a Nordstrom Rack and bought the cheapest blazer, dress shirt, and tie I could find. It may have been overkill with the shaved head and mustache and glasses, but if someone did figure out I was in New York City, they probably wouldn’t look for a man in a sports blazer and tie.
From there, it was a ten-minute walk to Hilde Winslow’s address on Twelfth Street. I stopped on the way for a slice of pepperoni pizza and a Pepsi. When I took the first bite, I felt woozy. I know it is beside the point, but I don’t think I ever experienced anything so wonderfully mundane as that first bite of New York City pizza as a free man; it ignited something long extinguished, filling me with memory and color and texture. I was back in Revere Beach at Sal’s with Adam and Eddie and TJ, the whole gang, and man, did that feel right.