"Sweetie, we have to go to the grocery. Can you put your coat on?"

"You mean 'may I,'" the child corrected haughtily.

Ruth really had to stop and think before responding. "No, not in this case, honey. You use 'may' when you're asking permission and 'can' when you're asking if you're able."

"That's too hard to remember."

"I know. But you'll get the hang of it one of these days," she said with encouragement. "You're a really smart girl."

Jessie loved hearing that from her mother. Her daddy had never said anything that nice to her.

"Do you think Daddy's looking for us now?"

Talk about out of the mouths of babes. Ruth had awakened from their nap, uneasy and anxious about the impending hour of six, the moment that she officially became a fugitive. The feeling would probably intensify over the next few weeks, and then maybe she could really start to put it all behind them.

"I don't know, sweetie. But he isn't going to find Karen and Megan Oliver, is he?"

Jessie grinned and shook her head. They were hiding.

"Let's go."

Before going into the grocery, Ruth checked out the pharmacy next door. The elastic bandages big enough for someone's torso were expensive, but the woman back at the trailer needed something in case those ribs were really broken.

Returning from their errands just before dark, Jessie asked to visit Willy, and when Viv said it was okay, they took a quick peek and headed for the trailer. When the groceries were put away, the two shared a cheese pizza before settling in the living room for their first real night together at home.

"Will you play Candy Land with me?" Jessie asked.

"Sure. Do you remember where we put the games?" Ruth had brought as many games, toys, and books as she could squeeze into the little car.

"It's under my bed." To Jessie, this was one of the best things about living with her mom. Her daddy never wanted to play games or read stories or play with toys like her mom did. "I want to be blue!" she called.

"Then I'll be...what color should I be?"

"Red!"

"Okay, I'll be red."

For forty minutes, they took turns drawing the cards and marching their gingerbread men to the castle. Ruth got there first in the first game, and they played again. By skipping the shortcuts, she made sure that Jessie won the second time, and that was always a good stopping point.

Next up was a bath and a book, and soon, the four-year-old was down for the count.

As she had done practically every hour, Ruth returned to the back bedroom to check on the injured woman once again. She'd slept for most of the last twenty-four hours, still fighting the infection and probably the effects of being out in the rain so long. The wounds on her arm and eyebrow were definitely better, though, and maybe tomorrow she'd be well enough to be taken somewhere and dropped off.

Ruth grabbed one of the pillows and headed back out to the couch. Last night, she'd used a thin blanket, but tonight she decided to spread out a sheet on the scratchy upholstery. With any luck, this would be her last night on the couch.

Settling in, she used the remote to turn on the television, lowering the volume so as not to disturb Jessie in the next room. Flipping through the channels, she stopped for a local newscast at ten o'clock. Barely able to hold her eyes open, she listened to the report, her worst fear being that the authorities would be on her trail already, broadcasting her picture and a description of the station wagon with Maine tags.

"Authorities in the metro DC area are seeking your help tonight in finding these two employees of Margadon Industries in Bethesda. Spencer Rollins and James Crowell are wanted in connection with the murder of Henry Estes, a programmer at Margadon. Estes was found strangled in his office late Friday evening; Rollins and Crowell were seen leaving the scene about the time of the murder. If you have information...."

Ruth suddenly sat up, now wide awake and staring at the picture on the screen, her whole body trembling. The mysterious woman down the hall...the woman sleeping in her bed...the woman whose wounds she'd so carefully treated...was wanted for murder. She turned, her heart nearly stopping as she saw the tall figure standing over her shoulder in the hallway.

CHAPTER 12.

"IT'S NOT TRUE," the woman said, falling to a knee as she grabbed the end table for support. "I didn't do it."

"I need you to leave," Ruth pleaded, her voice shaking with fear. How could she have let a murderer into her home, so close to where her daughter slept? "My daughter...."

"It isn't true," the woman repeated. "I didn't kill that man. He was my best friend," she said sadly, her eyes filling with tears.

"Then why don't you go to the police?" Ruth herself had stood and taken a step backward toward the kitchen.

"Because I saw who did it, and now they want to kill me."

Ruth shook again with panic. What if whoever was looking for her came to this place?

"You have to leave."

"I will. I promise. And I won't hurt you," the injured woman pleaded, pulling herself to her feet. "I didn't kill him."

"Was it that other man they showed? Crowell? He's missing too, they said."

"No, if James is really missing, he's probably dead too by now. He was with the killers on Friday night." Spencer slowly stood and slid over the arm of the old leather recliner. "Can I have water? And maybe something to eat? Please?"

Ruth walked nervously into the kitchen area where she ran a glass of water from the tap. "Ice?"

Spencer shook her head as the blonde woman returned, stretching out to hand her the glass.

"I can make you a cheese sandwich...or some soup...or I have some leftover spaghetti I could heat up." It struck Ruth that the moment was actually surreal. Here she was offering dinner options to an accused murderer who was hiding in her house.

"Anything. I'm sorry I'm so much trouble." Her head was still swimming, but she needed a plan for saving her ass, and that wasn't going to happen with her lying in the bed all day. "You've been...I really appreciate everything you've done."

Ruth took the bowl of spaghetti from the refrigerator and spooned some of the sticky pasta into a saucepan, adding a small bit of water so it would stir. From this distance, the stranger wasn't so intimidating, especially since she looked as weak as a kitten.

"So what really happened?"

Off and on all day, Spencer had been trying to make sense of the events of the last two days.

"Henry and I found a problem in one of our routines on Friday afternoon. We're programmers at Margadon," she explained. "He stayed to work on it; I left to go to a friend's party."

Telling the story out loud brought unexpected pangs of guilt. If she'd stayed with Henry, maybe this wouldn't have happened.

"He called me around midnight to say that he'd found something big. He asked me to come back to the office and look at it. I was doing something else and I didn't really want to go, but then he said he'd already called James, so I knew that whatever it was must have been a pretty big deal. Henry didn't get excited about much, and he was wild."

"James. Is that the Crowell guy?" Ruth scooped the now steaming spaghetti onto a plate and grabbed a fork.

"Yeah, James is our boss. He's the controller, the one in charge of the inventory flow. So when I got to work, it was dark...everything was dark. And it shouldn't have been, so that was the first sign that something was weird. I went up to our floor and I could see James and some other guy standing over Henry's terminal. I started to walk in, but they were...I don't know, acting funny. I don't know how to describe it, but it's like they were whispering and nervous. So when I got to the office, I could see in, and Henry was lying on the floor...," Spencer shuddered at the horrible image in her mind, "and he had a power cord tied in a knot around his neck."

Ruth had been waiting to hand the woman the plate, but she set it on the counter when it was clear that she'd lost her composure.

"I tried to get out without anyone seeing me - I would have gone straight to the cops - but they must have seen me go out and the next thing I knew, they were chasing me all over the parking lot. I had to jump the fence on my bike. That's how all this happened," she indicated her injuries.

"So why didn't you go to the police when you got away?"

"Because...because the guys who were chasing me were the feds."

"The feds? You mean the federal government?"

"Yeah, like the FBI or something."

"How do you know?"

"Because the car that stopped me in the parking lot had government plates."

"Maybe they just wanted to talk to you," she reasoned.

"No, see that's what was so weird. The guy that was upstairs with James had to be an agent too, because when he came out chasing me, he went straight to the car. And then they both started chasing me. That's why I got scared and ran."

Ruth wanted to believe every word, but it sounded preposterous. "I still don't understand why you don't just go to the police. I mean, if you told them this story, they'd be able to find these guys and figure out who's really guilty."

Spencer shook her head in frustration. "It's gotten so much more complicated than that. I got away from those guys on Friday night, and I spent the night out in the rain in a park. But the next morning I tried to call my friend and the line went dead right when I was telling her what happened. Next thing I know, I'm getting chased again, this time by the cops and the feds. And one of them was even shooting at me. So if I go to the police, I'm going to end up dead just like Henry. And probably just like James. They'll say I was shot trying to escape or something. I saw what they did and they have to shut me up."

"You called your friend and the line just happened to go dead when you started to tell her about it?" Ruth knew now that the woman was making this up as she went.

"Yeah. Look, I know how that sounds. I don't think I'd believe me either, so I know exactly why you're looking at me like that." The look was one of complete incredulity. "But I swear to god, it's the truth. Or at least it's the truth as I know it. The woman I called is an agent with the IRS, an investigative agent. She's law enforcement, just like these guys. I lost my cell phone when I crashed the bike, so if they found it, they'd know I call her all the time. Outside of Henry and Elena, I really don't have any other friends. Probably the last twenty calls on my log were to one or the other. And these guys had to be listening in when I called. Otherwise, they wouldn't have gotten to me so fast."

"Let me tell you how I see it," the blonde woman started. "You say that you saw your friend dead. Your boss was there and so was this other guy. Maybe they found him like that and they saw you run away. The reason they're trying to catch you is because they think you're the killer."

Spencer drew a deep breath and blew it out.

"Henry was my best friend," she said simply. "We've worked three feet away from each other for the last six years. We pushed each other; we challenged each other. That's why he stayed late on Friday. We found a problem and he wanted to find the answer because it was all this great big puzzle to him. He loved that, and so did I. I'd have been there too if I hadn't made plans for Friday night. It was our code and it had this big ass glitch in it and we both wanted it fixed. That's why I dropped what I was doing and came back to the office when he called me."

Again, her eyes clouded with tears as she shook her head sadly. "You have no idea how unreal it is that somebody would kill a person like Henry. He never hurt a soul, even when people gave him a reason to."

"What do you mean?"

"Henry was Albino. People made fun of him a lot, but it just rolled off his back. He was one of the nicest people I ever knew."

As Ruth listened to the woman talk about her friend, and as she heard and saw the sadness in her story, she became wholly convinced that the woman in her house was not Henry's murderer. But she just couldn't buy that federal agents had done such a deplorable deed.

"You need to tell them that, just like you've told me. If they could hear how you talk about him, they'd have to believe you."

"It isn't a matter of believing me. Those assholes already know I didn't do it, because they're the ones that did." she said angrily.

"Can't you hear how bizarre that sounds? It's like something right out of a spy novel or something. Why would federal agents kill your friend?" Ruth could see the growing frustration, but maybe the programmer was too close to everything to look at it all objectively.

"Because he found something in the code!" Spencer said with exasperation. She never really grasped that others didn't understand programming the way she did.

"I don't know what that means," Ruth groaned. She too was growing frustrated.

The dark haired woman blew out another deep breath.

"It's like this. We have these programs to keep track of production. Margadon makes pharmaceuticals...drugs. You need certain amounts of A, B, and C to make D. We track everything by lot number so we not only know how much A goes in, but what box it came out of, and where it ends up. You ever hear those stories about products being taken of the shelves because there's something wrong?"

Ruth nodded.

"Well, that's how we know which lot numbers are affected when something like that happens. We might find out that there was something wrong with a shipment of B, so we have to recall all of D that was put together with that shipment. You with me?"

"I think so. You wrote some sort of accounting program to track what went into pharmaceutical products and then you found a glitch in it."

"Exactly! But what we found - what Henry found - was that we weren't putting enough of one of the active ingredients into the batches of Kryfex that we're making for a government contract. But then, somebody fucked with our program so they could cover it up. That way, they're billing the government the full amount, but they're shorting the key ingredient, which also just happened to be the most expensive ingredient. And somebody is pocketing the difference."

Spencer was seeing it better herself now that she was saying it all out loud. Could the government contract have anything to do with why the feds were involved in this?

"I'm confused. You mean you were shorting the shipments but charging the same thing?"

"More or less, that's right."

"So maybe that's why the feds were there, because they found out about it and were investigating."

Spencer shook her head. "No, the feds were there because James must have called them when Henry told him what he'd found. Something was going down in the office when I got up there. They were fucking around with Henry's computer and neither one of them acted like they gave a shit that there was a guy lying there with a goddamned power cord tied around his neck." Again, her eyes filled with tears as she thought of the terror Henry had known in his last minutes.

After a few long quiet minutes, Ruth stood up to get the plate from the kitchen. "Here, you need to eat."

"Thank you." She'd had a single bite of a sweet roll in the last two days. "I guess I should also say thanks for taking care of me these last couple of days and for not just calling the cops."

Ruth chuckled at the irony. "Fat chance of that," she mumbled.

Spencer heard it, but let it go.

"Look, I don't mean to be unsympathetic, but you can't stay here. I can take you somewhere, to a friend's house or something, but I really don't want to be in the middle of this. I've got my own problems."

Spencer nodded solemnly. She didn't want to cause any trouble for this woman or her little girl.

"Can you take me back to where I hid my bike in the morning? It's near that Wal-Mart."

"Sure."

"I'll, uh...stay out here on the couch tonight. You can have your bed back."

"That's okay. You could probably use another good night's sleep. How's the arm?"

"It's better."