Free Never Look Away by Linwood Barclay Page A

glancing out the rear window again, "but I think that blue car back there has been following us ever since we left our place."

SIX
    It was maybe a quarter of a mile behind us, too far to be sure what make of car it was, definitely too far to read a license plate. But it was some kind of American sedan, General Motors or Ford, in dark blue, with tinted windows.
    "It's been following us since we left?" I said.
    "I'm not positive," Jan said. "It does kind of look like a million other cars. Maybe there was one blue car behind us when we were driving out of Promise Falls, and that's a different blue car."
    I was doing just under seventy miles per hour, and eased up slightly on the accelerator, letting the car coast down to just over sixty. I wanted to see whether the other car would pull into the outside lane and pass us.
    A silver minivan coming up on the blue car's tail moved out and passed it, then slid into the long space between us.
    "I can't quite see it," I said, glancing at both my side and rearview mirrors, while not taking my eyes off the road ahead. Even slowing down, we were gaining on a transport truck.
    Jan was about to turn around in her seat but I told her not to. "If someone's following us, I don't want them to know we've spotted them."
    Aren't they going to figure that out since we've slowed down?"
    "I've only slowed a little. If he's on cruise control or something, he's going to catch up to us pretty soon."
    The van had moved back into the passing lane and whipped past us and the truck ahead. I looked in the mirror. The blue car loomed larger there, and I could see now that it was a Buick with what appeared to be New York plates, although the numbers were not distinct, as the plate was dirty. "He's catching up," I said.
    "So maybe it's nothing," Jan said, sounding slightly relieved. "And it is a pretty long highway, without that many exits. It's not like he can just turn off anywhere."
    I put on my blinker to move over a lane. Slowly we overtook the truck.
    "That's true," I said, but I wasn't feeling any less tense. I was puzzling out the implications if in fact the blue car was tailing us.
    It would seem to indicate that someone knew I was meeting with this anonymous source. I couldn't think of any other possible reason why anyone would want to follow me.
    And if someone was tailing me to this rendezvous, it meant, in all likelihood, that the email the woman had sent me had been intercepted, found, something. Maybe it had been found on her computer. Or she'd told someone she was going to meet with a reporter.
    Could this be a setup? But if so, who was doing it? Reeves? Sebastian? What would be the point of that?
    I passed the truck, moved back into the right lane. Now I couldn't see the car at all, and I had to maintain my speed or the truck was going to have to pull out and pass me. Gradually, I put some distance between the truck and us.
    Jan was checking the mirror on her door. "I don't see him," she said. "You know what? I think--you're going to love this--maybe I'm just a bit paranoid today. God knows, with everything else I've been feeling, that might actually make sense."
    Which was worse? To find out we were being followed, or that Jan, already troubled with on-again, off-again depression, was starting to think people were following her?
    The blue car passed the truck, moved in front of it.
    "He's back," I said.
    "Why don't you speed up a bit," Jan suggested. "See if he does the same."
    I eased the car back up to seventy. Gradually, the blue car shrank in my rearview mirror.
    "He's not speeding up," Jan said. "You see? It's just me losing a few more marbles. You can relax."
    By the time we got off at the Lake George exit, I'd stopped checking my mirror every five seconds. The car was probably back there, but it had fallen from sight. Jan was visibly relieved.
    It was 4:45 p.m., and my sense of the Google map I'd printed out before we'd left told me we were only five minutes away from Ted's Lake-view