page81 (1/2)

He still had his spare keys They hadn’t found the sux he’d plucked from the cart in the electroconvulsive unit at the end of the hall The cops had nothing on him

He could run

Where would he go?

CHAPTER 80

CONNOR GRANT HUMMED and sang along with Pavarotti over his sound system as he packed for his liftoff to obscurity

His ribs ached The right side of his jaas still shades of green and blue, but his week-old beard disguised the re around just fine

He ca that he had packed with a few basics—enough for about four days—which he would ditch as soon as he got overseas

Inside his office, with the tenor keeping hied bookcase and tapped the digital code into the wall safe behind it He removed a banded stack of currency, a half dozen credit cards embossed with assorted names, several passports, and a one-way first-class plane ticket to Zurich He slipped the ticket and chosen passport into the inside breast pocket of his “cheerful” blue jacket

The s on some notebooks he’d piled in pyrarabbed a few files from his desk drawers and fed theet rid of all his souvenirs, the clippings of the original fire back in Maynard, Wisconsin His rass fire that had traveled across the s up a propane tank, which blew up the s everyone inside: sley

Ninth grader Adalass and the explosion and the inferno that burned until nothing was left Even the human remains were unidentifiable He’d never cared for his family, and they hadn’t cared for him, either As a breeze blew across the cinders and ash, he saw an opportunity to become someone else Someone better

He hitched to Michigan, took on a new name, dummied up a birth certificate, and convinced Ann Arbor Senior High to let hiot a driver’s license at the DMV He started college that year, and four years later, when a car bomb killed three kids in the senior class and he was presumed to be a fourth person in that car, he took on a new identity in a nen

By the tiraduated from the University of Miami School of Law as Sa lives:persons, dead babies, unidentifiable victims of fires and explosions that he’d set—all became his cash flow and the framework for new lives

When his pièce de résistance, the Sci-Tron explosion, sucked up all the available fire and rescue ht about the apartment fire in Nob Hill that burned up the remains of a bachelor, Jonathan Bishop, as well as several other people living in that building

The real Jonathan Bishop had been an investh his body was ashes now, his life story would carry on “Connor Grant” gathered up his folder containing docu

Jonathan Bishop’s history was filling his mind, his career path and family history, the well-planned and fortunate life of an elite one percenter in America