She wasn’t seen entering or leaving a concert venue. No one saw her going into or checking out of a hotel. There are no sightings or pictures of her riding in a car driving to and from her private plane or entering or stepping out of a concert bus.
Except near her summer house in New England, but evidently, all the people of Westerly, Rhode Island, were Swifties and valued her privacy.
But how did Taylor Swift travel around the world to her concerts and remain unseen?
The Sherwood Forest financial forums weren’t the only internet chat rooms Colleen perused. Every Swifties board had a channel dedicated to pictures of a huge, suspicious trunk that was handled gingerly by her bodyguards, not the roadies, and loaded into the passenger compartment of vans and her private plane instead of being stowed in the luggage compartments.
So that was how Colleen Frost ended up contorted into Tristan’s extra-large roller suitcase.
Her arms were crossed over her chest, and her head was up near the handle. She was kneeling at a slant in the cramped space as the suitcase wheels bumped over the seams in the cement floor of the hangar as he rolled her past the police officers.
She kept absolutely still.
A wiggling suitcase might be interpreted as probable cause.
Just before Tristan had zipped her inside, Jian had made a few phone calls to friends at the airport.
A double line of mechanics and airport security personnel had formed between the plane’s stairs and a large limousine that had pulled into the hangar a few yards away.
Inside the wheeled suitcase, Colleen breathed in the faint scents of cinnamon and wood smoke, like walking back from a hike in the middle of the forest to fried apple pies at the fire. That wasn’t Tristan’s cologne, which was the green of walking on pine needles beside the blue water of a lake. This dark scent was the same one Twist had worn at the Devilhouse when she’d been cradled in a blanket in his arms.
From outside the suitcase, she heard Jian yell, “If you obtain a search warrant for the airplane, the plane’s leasing company can allow you entry. I assume you know which one it is.”
Colleen bit her lip and didn’t make a sound. GetJets, the rental company discreetly printed on the plane’s tail, was notorious on Sherwood Forest’s forums for switching out planes to stymie search warrants and thus protect their clients. They were sticklers for privacy almost as much as Apple.
The suitcase she was in lifted and tilted a little, and then she was laid down on her right side.
Under her shoulder, an engine growled and vibrated, and the suitcase rocked as the limousine accelerated.
The zipper in front of her face slowly parted as Colleen pressed her head backward to make sure it didn’t scrape her nose.
The two sides of the zipper fell away, and Tristan’s face appeared. His cheeks were dark with five o’clock shadow, and the skin between his blue eyes was creased with worry. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Let me out of this thing. I can’t believe that worked. No wonder no one saw Taylor for over two years.”
Tristan and Jian finished unzipping the bag, and Colleen remained sitting in it on the floor between the bench seats of the stretch limousine. “I don’t think we should go to the hotel.”
Jian frowned. “I booked it under a pseudonym.”
Night sky and streetlights sped past the car windows.
Colleen said, “At the very least, we should drive by and make sure no one is waiting for us there.”
“Excellent precaution,” Tristan said.
The limousine sharply turned a corner, flopping Colleen sideways. She grabbed Tristan’s leg for balance and glanced up at him.
He was looking down at where she clutched his calf, his eyes turning the bright blue of the hottest stars, and his voice was low as he rumbled, “Good girl.”
Colleen laid her cheek against his knee. Being hunted by corrupt police was terrifying, but hanging onto Tristan soothed her.
His big hand smoothed her hair as the limousine drove through the night.
13
Out of Options
Colleen
When they neared the hotel, Colleen arranged herself in the suitcase again, just in case whatever.
She rocked in the darkness as the limousine drove.
Jian’s voice called, “Keep driving. We will proceed to a different location.”
A few minutes later, Tristan unzipped the bag. “Two police cars were waiting outside the guest entrance. It was best not to take a chance.”
Colleen sat up, flipping the top of the suitcase back. “Well, damn.”
Jian said, “I can book another hotel, perhaps under a better pseudonym than Isolde Crowne.”
“Don’t you watch Law and Order?” Colleen asked him. “The police will just track his credit cards.”
“Mr. King uses anonymous, disposable credit cards backed by cryptocurrency to pay for most travel expenses.”
Seriously?
“Wow. Secretive, much?” she asked Tristan.
He shrugged. “I use crypto for privacy reasons. Bitcoin, CurieCoin, Ethereum, the whole point of all of them is to evade authorities. I use it to avoid scrutiny. I don’t like people watching what I do and where I am.”
Colleen snorted, “Yeah, you wrote a whole computer program and set it loose on the internet so that facial recognition couldn’t track you. Have you ever had a social media account?”
“Not on the ones that don’t value your privacy.”
“Heh. Typical hacker.”
“Guilty.”
Her thoughts swirled and settled on what he’d said earlier. “But CurieCoin is different from the other ones, though. Bitcoin and Ethereum, yeah, those are just to move money around the black market, pay untraceable bribes, and to buy things with black-market dirty money. The whole point of CurieCoin was to tie up people’s money in GameShack’s streaming services and online video games, like company store money. It’s a total racket.”
Tristan lifted one side of his mouth in a smile. “Yeah, probably.” He turned back to Jian, shaking his head. “When they figure out we haven’t checked into this hotel, they’ll come looking for us. They’ll be looking for us at other hotels. And it’s eleven-thirty at night.”
Jian lowered his voice. “I can inquire at a less appropriate lodging, Mr. King, but the security will be lesser there, too.”
There was an obvious answer to this conundrum, and Colleen fretted about it while Jian and Tristan debated the merits of different options for where to sleep that night, each worse and less suitable than the last. Jian worried about suitability and security. Tristan ran his hand through his hair with fatigue.
Finally, when she could stand the increasingly bad options no longer, Colleen squeezed her eyes shut and blurted, “We could go to my apartment.”
“Absolutely not,” Jian said, and Colleen nearly sighed with relief. “Surely, the police will be staking out her apartment. I assume it’s rented under your name,” he said to her. “It’s the least secure option.”
Colleen thought about it. “Yeah, it’s under my name, but I use a disposable debit card with a limit for the exact amount every month to pay the rent. Some people had problems with the management randomly tacking on fees and deducting them from their checking accounts. So if they’re tracking my credit cards or my bank accounts, it wouldn’t show up.”