The phone buzzed eight times in the remaining couple of hours it took to reach Minneapolis, the last call coming just as Spud pulled into the gas station to fill up. The stop had been carefully planned. The gas station had no surveillance cameras and there were no banks or ATMs between it and his exit from the interstate. Spud pulled the hood of his sweatshirt up over his head as he put gas in the car.

As the tank filled, he pried Sandy’s phone open, removed the battery, and tossed both into the trash. The gas station would be the end of Sandy’s trail. He paid with one of Sandy’s credit cards and headed back to the highway, now driving north, the direction from which he’d just come.

The rendezvous point had also been carefully chosen, a secluded farm at the edge of the Mississippi River. It was an hour’s drive from where Spud had filled up with gas—a little more than that after a stop to buy him and Pip a couple hamburgers. He ate as he drove, watching as the strip malls and truck plazas gave way to farm fields and woods.

Spud searched for the landmark that would tell him when he was nearing the designated field, a grove of pine trees with a single cottonwood sticking up in the middle. It was dark now, though, and he couldn’t be sure that he’d be able to see the cottonwood tree when he came to it. To make things worse, the field he was looking for had been full of cornstalks before. The crops had now been harvested, so the landscape was mile after mile of dirt.

He began to doubt himself and was about to turn around when he came upon the cottonwood tree silhouetted in the moonlight. With a sigh of relief, he killed his headlights, turned onto the field, and bounced along the tractor path that led to a bluff at the far end. As he neared, he saw a shard of moonlight reflecting off the windshield of a waiting car.

He parked the SUV so that its nose faced the bluff, turned off the engine, and let out a deep breath. The plan had worked.

Someone stepped out of the waiting car, a man with a military haircut and cold eyes. He approached the SUV, walking around to the back passenger side. Spud turned in his seat to watch as the man opened the door and bent down to be face-to-face with Pip in his car seat.

“Hi, Pip,” the man said in a gentle tone. He paused as if to take in Pip’s confused reaction. When Pip didn’t respond, the man smiled and said, “Do you remember me?”

Pip looked hard into the man’s eyes. Then he said, “Daddy?”

CHAPTER 9

In the three years since he had last held his son, Reed Harris had grown accustomed to waiting, in the same way a man who loses his right hand gets accustomed to eating with his left. He waited as the custody battle played out, even when his hearing landed while he was still in jail for assault. They made him wear his orange jumpsuit to court. Of course the judge came down hard on him.