into the stuffy room. He opened his laptop, keyed in the wireless code, and checked his e-mails. He’d left his phone behind. Even with GPS turned off, it would still make him nervous, but he felt okay with using the laptop, fairly certain it wouldn’t give his location away. There was nothing new from his cousin Kate, just the e-mail she’d sent him on Sunday night that the police had asked to search his apartment. He was still wondering about that. There must have been some way they’d connected him with Audrey, although he didn’t know how. Maybe they’d interviewed other residents in the apartment and Alan had said something. It didn’t really matter. They weren’t going to find anything in his apartment.
Corbin opened a browser window and, for the thousandth time, searched for anything related to a “Henry Wood,” or “Hank Bowman,” or “Hank Wood.” There was nothing. He lay back on the bed and stared at the high ceiling, the ornate molding. The wind whistled through the room, fluttering the curtains, and Corbin closed his eyes, pretended he was a kid again, lying on Annisquam Beach, the salt air moving over him. He fell asleep and dreamed that he was innocent, that the murderers were coming for him, and that he wasn’t one of them.
Chapter 27
A beep from his computer woke Corbin. The hotel room was cold, and he was shivering. He sat up and looked at his computer screen. He had left his e-mail account open, and Kate Priddy had sent him a message in a chat box. Hello there, it said. He stared at it for a long time, his teeth now starting to chatter from the cold. It felt as though she could see him through the computer screen, see where he was. He got up and shut the window, pulled his hoodie back on. Hi, he wrote back.
Did you kill Audrey Marshall?
Corbin, barely breathing, put his fingers on the keyboard. He wanted to write that he knew who killed her, but he wasn’t brave enough. Instead, he wrote to Kate that he hadn’t killed Audrey, and asked if the police thought he had. They say you were in a relationship with her, Kate wrote, and Corbin admitted that he was. He told her their relationship had been secret and that’s why he hadn’t brought it up. He knew how lame it sounded, of course. Why hadn’t he just opened up about his relationship with Audrey as soon as he’d found out she was dead? It wasn’t to protect her anymore.
He promised Kate he hadn’t killed Audrey. It seemed to work, since they were now chatting about the weather and Sanders, the cat. She asked what Audrey was like, then mentioned a friend of Audrey’s who she had met.
Corbin’s skin prickled. He asked her who the friend was.
Jack Ludovico.
Corbin asked what he looked like and she told him he had reddish hair and glasses. It didn’t sound like Henry, but he could have easily dyed his hair.
Corbin quickly googled the name. Nothing. Then googled the name with Henry Wood. Still nothing. They chatted a little more and said goodbye. He felt nauseous at the thought that Henry had possibly met Kate. Corbin had to find him.
Why Ludovico? It sounded familiar to Corbin, and he googled it. The first item that came up was the Ludovico Technique, the aversion therapy from the scene in A Clockwork Orange in which they pry Alex’s eyes open and make him watch violent pornography. It had been Henry’s favorite film, or one of them. He loved all of Stanley Kubrick’s films, and Corbin and Henry had watched many together that summer in New York City when they had been so close. It felt like decades ago. Henry obviously had gotten that particular pseudonym from the film; what about his other false name—Hank Bowman—that he’d used when he lived in Hartford? Corbin punched Kubrick and Bowman into the search engine, and the film 2001 immediately came up. Corbin’s heart began to race, and a flush of excitement went across his skin. He looked at the list of all of Kubrick’s films. They’d watched The Shining together several times. What was Jack Nicholson’s character’s name? Corbin looked it up. It was Jack Torrance. He punched in Henry Torrance. There were a few hits. An actor who’d been in a bunch of B movies. Corbin added Boston, and a mediation consultant came up. There was a Web site, and even though there was