A.I.
Chapter 16

We were married about two weeks later, a lovely little ceremony at a small pavilion in a riverside park not far from the place I'd rented. We'd actually had to book a time, it seemed that a lot of couples used the pavilion for the same purpose. We had no friends on hand, of course, no wedding party, but a few passers-by hung around to watch and congratulated us afterwards.

Lee had to use her real name for the license form, of course, but it was meaningless to anybody local, and Spook said he'd buried the digitized record so deep that even he would have trouble finding it. And now, as Lisa Carstairs, she'd be mostly invisible to the meddlesome Feds even without Spook's protection.

There'd been one last loose end to tie up after we got to Charleston. I hadn't had to worry about it when I'd gone on the run, I'd always been kind of a loner except for Lisa and of course there had been all those initial news reports about me being a fugitive. But Lee was more gregarious, there were no official alerts about her, and her friends would be concerned if she just vanished into thin air.

There'd been such a case a few years earlier, a Congressional intern who abruptly disappeared, and there was a big public outcry about it—especially after it turned out she'd got pretty close to one Congressman. The Congressman lost his election, but the hunt for the missing intern went on very publicly for a couple of years until her bones, or what they thought were her bones, turned up in a nearby park; apparently some transient (not the Congressman) had been responsible. Even much later the case kept being revisited on some of those missing-persons TV shows.