Truth or Die Read Online Free PDF Page A

…

CHAPTER 8
    I ALL but lunged for the pad, gripping it beyond tight while staring at the indentations she’d left behind.
    Another impression.
    I could make out a letter here, a letter there. An
S
followed by something, followed by a
B
. Or was that a
6
?
    I flipped on the nearby lamp for more light, angling the pad every which way, trying to decipher the ever-so-slight grooves in the paper. It could’ve been a name, but all my money was on it being an address. It was where Claire was going. It had to be. But I still couldn’t make it out.
    I thought for a few seconds, racking my brain. Before I knew it, I was dashing across my living room and into my office, grabbing a pencil, followed by a piece of paper from my printer tray.
This could work
, I thought.
    Laying the paper over the pad, I began gently making a rubbing, like people do with tombstones and other memorials. But the printer paper was too thick. I needed something thinner. I knew exactly where to find it, too.
    It was an invitation I’d just received to a legal aid benefit being held at the New York Public Library. Pretty hard to miss the irony, given that Claire would have been my plus-one.
    The invitation itself was on a thick stock, but all I could see in my head was what had been inserted to protect the embossed type: a piece of vellum as thin as tracing paper. Perfect.
    I riffled through my pile of mail, finding the invite and the vellum. Laying it on the legal pad, I again began gently rubbing the pencil back and forth. Like magic, the letters started to appear before my eyes. Letters
and
numbers.
    It was an address, all right. Downtown on the West Side. She’d also written
1701
below it. Was that an apartment number?
    I turned on my laptop, grabbing my keys and throwing on a baseball cap while waiting for it to power up. Quickly, I Googled the address.
    The first result was the only one I needed to see. This wasn’t someone’s home. Claire had been heading to the Lucinda Hotel, room 1701.
    Now I was, too.

CHAPTER 9
    AN INTERRUPTION.
    That was what Owen Lewis was waiting for in room 1701 of the Lucinda Hotel. The tiny camera, no bigger than a lipstick cylinder, was taped to the exit sign above the entrance to the stairwell, wirelessly transmitting to his laptop the same image of the long, empty hallway outside his door. It was monotony in black and white. A continuous loop of stillness and silence, over and over. Uninterrupted.
    For anyone else, it would’ve been the most boring movie of the century. To Owen, it was easily the scariest. Especially how it might end.
    She said she’d be here in twenty minutes. That was hours ago. Did they get to her? Am I next?
    He’d thought about leaving town, but it was already so late. There were no buses, trains, or planes he could catch at this hour, and he knew you had to be twenty-five to rent a car. His driver’s license couldn’t get him a beer, let alone a Buick.
    All in all, the only real option was a taxi, but that didn’t feel like a good idea, for some reason. Just his gut instinct.
    No, he would wait it out until morning, stick with his plan.
    It was a good plan, extremely well thought out, with the highest attention to every detail. Of course, when you’re sporting an IQ that approaches the boiling point of water, anticipation is your stock in trade. You see the future before others do. You live it, too.
    “The Boy Genius!” declared his hometown paper back in Amherst, New Hampshire, in a front-page story when Owen was only four. By then, he had memorized the periodic table, could read and write in three languages, and was doing complex algebra. The photo accompanying the article showed him shaking hands with Steve Jobs at a “Pioneers of Tomorrow” conference at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino.
    For an entire year after that, Owen wore only a black mock turtleneck everywhere he went.
    Elementary school was finished at age six, junior high at eight, and then high school when he was