Her mother worked dispatch for a medical courier service and possessed the organizational instincts of someone who genuinely believed every problem could be solved if you just kept making calls. Maya had inherited the phone manner. She was studying communications at Northern Arizona University. Her father called it a degree in talking. She said that was exactly right.
He laughed every time, even though he'd heard it six times by now. She was home for a long weekend when Frank Dillinger took her. He had spent 43 days building the architecture of that morning, the ride share credentials that looked real, the route that avoided every camera he had cataloged on a Thursday afternoon walk 3 weeks before the storage unit outside Winslow, where they stopped for the first 2 days while the noise died down. The sequence after that, north to Williams, west on 40 into Flagstaff on nights, staying off the main arteries, eating in places where people minded their business. Frank Delinger had done this before.
That was the thing most people spent their whole lives not understanding about men like Frank. They were not impulsive. They did not act out of rage or desperation or the momentary failure of ordinary self-control. They were patient and methodical, and they planned the way architects plan, accounting for loadbearing details, contingency routes, structural tolerances. They had a logic so cold and complete that it looked from the outside like calm.
The only thing Frank had not accounted for was a waitress with 9 years on a Friday night shift and a fold she had learned on a Tuesday afternoon and hoped she would never need. Maya spent the first two days in that storage unit trying to stay calm. She focused on details, memorized license plates, counted turns, kept a mental record of every stop, every route change, every conversation she was not supposed to hear. She told herself, "You are gathering information. Information is power.