Chapter Twenty-One
Twenty-One
Despite managing to evade gangster-suit man back at The Whiskey Bent Saloon, Mary barely got any sleep that night.
First, she took a long, warm shower, allowing the strong water jet to massage her stiff neck muscles for almost ten minutes, before opening the bottle of wine from the minibar and spending most of the night sitting awake in bed, rethinking her plan, and trying to figure out where she went wrong – how had he managed to track her down all the way to Nashville?
Mary thought back to every step she had taken after she was granted her identity change, and she just couldn’t pinpoint where her mistake had come from.
She hadn’t told a soul about her new name, not even her lawyer, and the only document she had signed that attested to her name change had been the one at the courthouse, which was a mandatory step to finalize the identity change process – a document that she was told would be kept under lock and key – and that was when Mary remembered what George Oakfield had told her, while explaining the intricacies of the process:
‘Once an identity change is granted and finalized, the documentation for the whole process goes into “lock and key” mode – very, very hard for anyone to get to – but not impossible. And what I mean here is – there are legal and illegal ways of obtaining the information on those records. This is America, where money talks and bullshit walks. And people can be easily bribed.’
‘That must’ve been it,’ Mary said to herself, as she stared out of her hotel room window, down at a completely empty street.
‘One of Nelson’s buddies must’ve managed to bribe someone in the courthouse.
But even so…’ she breathed out frustration, ‘…all that anyone would’ve obtained from the courthouse documents would’ve been my new name – Mary Smith – nothing else.
So how did that guy find me in Nashville? ’
When it came to her money and her bank accounts, Mary had once again followed Oakfield’s advice to the letter.
Once the divorce settlement money hit her old account, she had sat tight and waited until her identity change process was concluded.
That same day, just hours before she had to sign the courthouse papers, finalizing the entire identity change process, Sam walked into her bank in downtown Boston and, to the total disbelief of the bank manager, withdrew everything she had…
to the last penny… and all in cash. Minutes after Samantha Chambers had legally ceased to exist, with a trunkful of money, a newly born Mary Smith drove straight out of Boston and into the city of New York.
Her first stop was the JPMorgan Chase & Co.
bank on Park Avenue, where she deposited some of the money that she had with her.
During the next couple of days, Mary travelled to Pennsylvania, Washington DC, and West Virginia, where she opened three other bank accounts, in three completely different banks.
Each deposit was for a different amount, and once again, George Oakfield had been right on the money.
As Sam signed the court documents to become Mary Smith, she was also given a letter, signed by a District Judge, instructing any bank she chose to accept whatever large cash deposit she offered them – no questions asked.
As for the address registered against her bank accounts, Mary had used a different nameless PO Box for each of them.
She thought about it for a while, and the only conclusion that she could come to was that there really was no feasible way that anyone could’ve tracked her down by following the money.
So how had she been found?
Right then, as Mary had another sip of her wine, she heard the sound of a commercial plane crossing the sky high above the hotel. She looked up and saw its lights blinking against the night clouds.
Two seconds later, her brain engaged, making her heart stutter inside her chest.
‘Oh fuck!’ she said in a whisper. ‘But of course – Kyle fucking Doyle.’
Kyle Doyle was one of Nelson’s best friends and a mammoth of a man – greasy hair, chubby cheeks, and always hiking up his trousers, the ones that every couple of minutes or so would slip down below the pouch of his belly, well fed, as it was, from a daily serving of beer and fried food from one of the many junk food outlets at Logan International Airport in Boston, where he worked.
Doyle was an Assistant Director for the US Federal Air Marshall Service in Massachusetts – a position that would grant him easy access to any national or international flight manifest from any airline flying inside US territory.
And that had been Mary’s mistake.
Just a few days after her identity change process was finalized, once she had secured all four of her new bank accounts, Mary had purchased an airline ticket to Nashville, with the booking being made under her new name – Mary Smith.
She flew out from JFK airport in New York City, not Logan International in Boston, but even so, armed with her new name, Doyle could’ve easily done a search through all the flight manifests from aircrafts flying out of any US airport, starting with all the ones in Massachusetts before branching out to adjacent estates – and New York City was just 230 miles south of Boston.
It had clearly taken Doyle a while to properly narrow the result list down.
There was no telling how many other Mary Smiths would’ve shown up on those flight manifests, but in the days following her first-ever flight to Nashville, Mary flew back and forth between Nashville and New York City twice more, with the second time being the final move.
That must’ve been what had alerted Doyle because five months later, gangster-suit man had finally found her.
Mary walked over to the minibar and poured herself another glass of wine.
From her handbag, she retrieved her burner smartphone and connected to the hotel’s Wi-Fi.
She knew that she needed to start again – find a brand-new city to move to – and since she was sure that she had lost gangster-suit man once she left The Whiskey Bent Saloon through its kitchen door, he too would have to start again, but this time, he would have no passenger manifest to follow because Mary wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice.
She sipped her wine and stepped out onto the room’s balcony.
Despite also being a touristic city, Franklin was, without a doubt, a much quieter town than Nashville.
At that time of night, the streets surrounding The Comfort Inn hotel seemed deserted – no vehicles driving by… no pedestrians walking around anywhere.
Mary welcomed the cooling night breeze that kissed her skin and brushed at her hair, before thinking back to the man outside The Whiskey.
She tried to imagine what he had done after he’d realized that he’d lost her.
The most probable move would’ve been to stake out her apartment, hoping that Mary would turn up to collect a few things before making a run for it.
Going straight from The Broadway to the bus station, the train station, or even the airport, were also possibilities, albeit unlikely.
For that, gangster-suit man would’ve had to have anticipated that after spotting him outside The Whiskey, Mary was not only prepared, but also all set up to get the hell out of Nashville at the blink of an eye – CIA spy style – and the chances of him having predicted that were very slim, to say the least.
As crazy as it might’ve sounded at the time, Mary’s go-bag plan seemed to have already paid off… and with dividends, because while she was already on the move, gangster-suit man was back in Nashville, wondering where the hell she was.
Mary returned to the room, refilled her wine glass and opened up the browser on her cellphone.
After a lot of pondering and a lot of Internet searching, she decided to stick to her original plan and for now, stay within the ‘Bible Belt’, where the biggest concentration of women whose first name was ‘Mary’ resided.
She also decided to stick with the idea of relocating to a large city, instead of a smaller one, for the same reasons as before, but this time she picked a place even larger than Nashville – the fourth largest and most populated city in the USA: Houston, Texas.