Chasing the Dime: Booktrack Edition

by Michael Connelly Narrated by Jonathan Davis

Overview

Henry Pierce has a whole new life-new apartment, new telephone, new telephone number. But the first time he checks his messages, he discovers that someone had the number before him. The messages on his line are for a woman named Lilly, and she is in some kind of serious trouble. Pierce is inexorably drawn into Lilly's world, and it's unlike any world he's ever known. It is a nighttime world of escort services, websites, sex, and secret identities. Pierce tumbles through a hole, abandoning his orderly life in a frantic race to save the life of a woman he has never met.

Pierce's skills as a computer entrepreneur allow him to trace Lilly's last days with some precision. But every step into Lilly's past takes Price deeper into a web of inescapable intricacy-and a decision that could cost him everything he owns and holds dear.

Author Biography: Michael Connelly is the author of the bestselling series of Harry Bosch novels, and the bestsellers A Darkness More Than Night, Void Moon, Angels Flight, Blood Work, and The Poet. Connelly has won an Edgar Award, a Nero Wolfe prize, a Macavity Award, and an Anthony Award.

Editorial Reviews

A new apartment, a new telephone, a new telephone number. But Henry Price's fresh new life falls to pieces when he listens to his message machine. Voicemails left for someone named Lilly begin to fill his message box and his head. Instead of just changing his number, stubborn Henry attempts to contact Lilly to force this apparently well-endowed "escort" to change hers. But Lilly is nowhere to be found, and before long, Henry Price has been lured out of his universe and into a killer's domain.

Publishers Weekly

Former journalist and Edgar Award winner Connelly (City of Bones) skillfully unfolds a story of obsessive curiosity and taut psychological suspense ideally suited to audio translation. A burgeoning technologies company, broken engagement and new apartment leave little time for 34-year-old workaholic chemist Henry Pierce to even check his messages. But when he does, he realizes his new telephone number was formerly that of a beautiful prostitute named Lilly, who's still receiving dozens of messages, but hasn't been heard from in over a month. Veteran audiobook narrator and actor Davis provides crisp, stage-honed vocals, with his versatile characterizations easily shifting from the Valley talk of an aging surfer/computer hacker to the hesitant pleas of Lilly's johns. Haunted by his own sister's murder, Henry eschews his normal all-business demeanor and plunges head first into the seedy sex underworld, where he befriends a hardened escort, makes a grisly discovery that may prove Lilly's demise, as well as his own, and is fingered as the prime suspect by the cops. Davis's masterful dramatizations deliver the perfect complement to Connelly's sophisticated mystery, sure to attract fans of his Harry Bosch series, as well as new listeners. Simultaneous release with the Little, Brown hardcover (Forecasts, Sept. 16). (Oct.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Once again, Connelly (Blood Work) keeps the reader's heart racing and the pages turning. After a messy breakup, Henry Pierce is just settling into his new apartment and new life. However, any peace he might find ends as soon as he checks his phone messages for the first time. There are several, all left for a woman named Lilly. She apparently had the number before Henry, and the messages seem to indicate that she's in some sort of trouble. Because of an incident deep in his past, Henry decides to locate Lilly and attempt to help her. Needless to say, he quickly finds himself in over his head, dealing with web pornographers, gangsters, and thugs, trusting nobody while trying to save both Lilly and himself. Connelly takes what could have been a typical suspense thriller and turns it into something exceptional through nonstop action and surprising twists. This one will move quickly off the shelves in public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/02.]-Craig Shufelt, Lane P.L., Fairfield, OH Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

And now for something completely Hitchcockian from the chronicler of Harry Bosch (City of Bones): a wrong number that spins into a full-court press against the beleaguered hero’s liberty and life. Henry Pierce, the workaholic chemist who’s about to take his company, Amedeo Technologies, into the stratosphere with a molecular-based computing technology he’s demonstrating to a big backer, hates the apartment he had to find when he was dumped by his fiancée, Amedeo’s ex–intelligence officer Nicole James. What he hates most is the phone number, formerly the property of Lilly Quinlan, an escort whose Internet photo is so dazzling that Henry’s phone is ringing off the hook with calls for her. Most guys would just get the number changed and move on, but Henry, who improbably can’t bother to e-mail all those contacts he already gave the number to, wants Lilly to take it off the L.A. Darling Web page instead—and then, when his best efforts don’t succeed in turning her up, wants to find out why she’s dropped out of sight. Spurred on by his childhood failure to rescue the prostitute sister who fell victim to a serial killer, he puts so many questions to so many unwilling associates of Lilly’s that it’s obvious he’s stepping on some serious toes. As it happens, the police and the bad guys converge on him at exactly the same time, squeezing him into the classic can’t-trust-anyone pose perfectly suited to his combination of brains and paranoia, until even the light switches at his office stop responding to his voice. Has he stepped into somebody else’s nightmare, or has he been the real target all along?

Connelly diabolically teases readers with bits of exposition while scaring thehell out of them in the most accomplished slice of Hitchcock since the Master’s heyday. The result is a tour de force of nerve-shredding suspense.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177300160
Publisher:	Hachette Audio
Publication date:	03/16/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chasing the Dime

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By Michael Connelly

Warner Vision

Copyright © 2002 Hieronymous, Inc.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-446-61162-X

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Chapter One

The voice on the phone was a whisper. It had a forceful, almost desperate quality to it. Henry Pierce told the caller he had the wrong number. But the voice became insistent.

"Where is Lilly?" the man asked. "I don't know," Pierce said. "I don't know anything about her."

"This is her number. It's on the site." "No, you have the wrong number. There is no one named Lilly here. And I don't know anything about any site. Okay?"

The caller hung up without responding. Then Pierce hung up, annoyed. He had plugged in the new phone only fifteen minutes earlier and already he had gotten two calls for someone named Lilly.

He put the phone down on the floor and looked around the almost empty apartment. All he had was the black leather couch he sat on, the six boxes of clothes in the bedroom and the new phone. And now the phone was going to be a problem.

Nicole had kept everything-the furniture, the books, the CDs and the house on Amalfi Drive. She didn't keep it, actually: he had given it all to her. The price of his guilt for letting things slip away. The new apartment was nice. It was high luxury and security, a premier address in Santa Monica. But he was going to miss the house on Amalfi. And the woman who was still living in it.

He looked down at the phone on the beige carpet, wondering if he should call Nicole and let her know he had moved from the hotel to the apartment and had the new number. But then he shook his head. He had already sent her the e-mail with all the new information. To call her would be breaking the rules she had set and he had promised to follow on their last night together.

The phone rang. He leaned down and checked the caller ID screen this time. The call was coming from the Casa Del Mar again. It was the same guy. Pierce thought about letting it ring through to the message service that came with the new phone number, but then he picked up the phone and clicked the talk button.

"Look, man, I don't know what the problem is. You have the wrong number. There is nobody here named-" The caller hung up without saying a word. Pierce reached over to his backpack and pulled out the yellow pad on which his assistant had written down the voice mail instructions. Monica Purl had set up the phone service for him, as he had been too busy in the lab all week preparing for the following week's presentation. And because that was what personal assistants were for.

He tried to read the notes in the dying light of the day. The sun had just slipped beneath the Pacific and he had no lamps yet for the new apartment's living room. Most new places had sunken lights in the ceiling. Not this one. The apartments were newly renovated, with new kitchens and windows, but the building was old. And slab ceilings without internal wiring could not be renovated in a cost- effective way. Pierce didn't think about that when he rented the place. The bottom line was he needed lamps.

He quickly read through instructions on using the phone's caller ID and caller directory features. He saw that Monica had set him up with something called the convenience package-caller ID, caller directory, call waiting, call forwarding, call everything. And she noted on the page that she had already sent the new number out to his A-level e-mail list. There were almost eighty people on this list. People who he would want to be able to reach him at any time, almost all of them business associates or business associates he also considered friends.

Pierce pressed the talk button again and called the number Monica had listed for setting up and accessing his voice mail program. He then followed the instructions provided by an electronic voice for creating a pass code number. He decided on 92102-the day Nicole had told him that their three-year relationship was over.

He decided not to record a personal greeting. He would rather hide behind the disembodied electronic voice that announced the number and instructed the caller to leave a message. It was impersonal, but it was an impersonal world out there. He didn't have time to make everything personal. When he was finished setting up the program a new electronic voice told him he had nine messages. Pierce was surprised by the number-his phone had not been put into service until that morning-but immediately hopeful that maybe one was from Nicole. Maybe several. He suddenly envisioned himself returning all the furniture Monica had ordered for him online. He saw himself carrying the cardboard boxes of his clothes back inside the house on Amalfi Drive.

But none of the messages were from Nicole. None of them were from Pierce's associates or associates/friends, either. Only one was for him-a "welcome to the system" message delivered by the now familiar electronic voice. The next eight messages were all for Lilly, no last name mentioned. The same woman he had already fielded three calls for. All the messages were from men. Most of them gave hotel names and numbers to call back. A few gave cell numbers or what they said was a private office line. A few mentioned getting her number off the net or the site, without being more specific.

Pierce erased each message after listening to it. He then turned the page on his notebook and wrote down the name Lilly. He underlined it while he thought about things. Lilly-whoever she was-had apparently stopped using the number. It had been dropped back into circulation by the phone company and then reassigned to him. Judging by the all-male caller list, the number of calls from hotels and the tone of trepidation and anticipation in the voices he had listened to, Pierce guessed that Lilly might be a prostitute. Or an escort, if there was a difference. He felt a little trill of curiosity and intrigue go through him. Like he knew some secret he wasn't supposed to know. Like when he called up the security cameras on his screen at work and surreptitiously watched what was going on in the hallways and common areas of the office.

He wondered how long the phone number would have been out of use before it was reassigned to him. The number of calls to the line in one day indicated that the phone number was still out there-probably on the website mentioned in a few of the messages-and people still believed it was Lilly's valid number.

"Wrong number," he said out loud, though he rarely spoke to himself when he wasn't looking at a computer screen or engaged in an experiment in the lab. He flipped the page back and looked at the information Monica had written down for him. She had included the phone company's customer service number. He could and should call to get the number changed. He also knew it would be an annoying inconvenience to have to resend and receive e-mail notifications correcting the number. Something else made him hesitate about changing the number. He was intrigued. He admitted it to himself. Who was Lilly? Where was she? Why did she give up the telephone number but leave it on the website? There was a flaw in the logic flow there, and maybe that was what gripped him. How did she maintain her business if the website delivered the wrong number to the client base? The answer was that she didn't. She couldn't. Something was wrong and Pierce wanted to know what and why. It was Friday evening. He decided to let things stand until Monday. He would call about changing the number then.

Pierce got up from the couch and walked through the empty living room to the master bedroom, where the six cardboard boxes of his clothing were lined against one wall and a sleeping bag was unrolled alongside another. Before moving into the apartment and needing it, he hadn't used the sleeping bag in almost three years-since a trip to Yosemite with Nicole. Back when he had time to do things, before the chase began, before his life became about only one thing.

He went onto the balcony and stared out at the cold blue ocean. He was twelve floors up. The view stretched from Venice on the south side to the ridge of the mountains sliding into the sea off Malibu to the north. The sun was gone but there were violent slashes of orange and purple still in the sky. This high up, the sea breeze was cold and bracing. He put his hands in the pockets of his pants. The fingers of his left hand closed around a coin and he brought it out. A dime. Another reminder of what his life had become. The neon lights on the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica Pier were on and flashing a repetitive pattern. It made him remember a time two years earlier when the company had rented the pier's entire amusement park for a private party celebrating the approval of the company's first batch of patents on molecular memory architecture. No tickets, no lines, no getting off a ride if you were having fun. He and Nicole had stayed in one of the open yellow gondolas of the Ferris wheel for at least a half hour. It had been cold that night, too, and they huddled against each other. They'd watched the sun go down. Now he couldn't look at the pier or even a sunset without thinking about her. In acknowledging this about himself, he realized he had rented an apartment with views of the very things that would remind him of Nicole. There was a subliminal pathology there that he didn't want to explore.

He put the dime on his thumbnail and flipped it into the air. He watched it disappear into the darkness. There was a park below, a strip of green between the building and the beach. He had already noticed that homeless people snuck in at night and slept in sleeping bags under the trees. Maybe one of them would find the fallen dime. The phone rang. He went back into the living room and saw the tiny LED screen glowing in the darkness. He picked up the phone and read the screen. The call was coming from the Century Plaza Hotel. He thought about it for two more rings and then answered without saying hello.

"Are you calling for Lilly?" he asked. A long moment of silence went by but Pierce knew someone was there. He could hear television sounds in the background.

"Hello? Is this call for Lilly?" Finally a man's voice answered. "Yes, is she there?" "She's not here at the moment. Can I ask how you got this number?" "From the site." "What site?"

The caller hung up. Pierce held the phone to his ear for a moment and then clicked it off. He walked across the room to return the phone to its cradle when it rang again. Pierce hit the talk button without looking at the caller ID display.

"You've got the wrong number," he said. "Wait, Einstein, is that you?"

Pierce smiled. It wasn't a wrong number. He recognized the voice of Cody Zeller, one of the A-list recipients of his new number. Zeller often called him Einstein, one of the college nicknames Pierce still endured. Zeller was a friend first and a business associate second. He was a computer security consultant who had designed numerous systems for Pierce over the years as his company grew and moved to larger and larger spaces.

"Sorry, Code," Pierce said. "I thought you were somebody else. This new number is getting a lot of calls for somebody else."

"New number, new place, does this mean you're free, white and single again?" "I guess so." "Man, what happened with Nicki?" "I don't know. I don't want to talk about it."

He knew talking about it with friends would add a permanency to the end of their relationship. "I'll tell you what happened," Zeller said. "Too much time in the lab and not enough between the sheets. I warned you about that, man."

Zeller laughed. He'd always had a way of looking at a situation or set of facts and cutting away the bullshit. And his laughter told Pierce he was not overly sympathetic to his plight. Zeller was unmarried and Pierce could never remember him in a long-term relationship. As far back as college he promised Pierce and their friends he would never practice monogamy in his lifetime. He also knew the woman in question. In his capacity as a security expert he also handled online backgrounding of employment applicants and investors for Pierce. In that role he worked closely at times with Nicole James, the company's intelligence officer. Make that former intelligence officer. "Yeah, I know," Pierce said, though he didn't want to talk about this with Zeller. "I should've listened." "Well, maybe this means you'll be able to take your spoon out of retirement and meet me out at Zuma one of these mornings."

Zeller lived in Malibu and surfed every morning. It had been nearly ten years since Pierce had been a regular on the waves with him. In fact, he had not even taken his board with him when he moved out of the house on Amalfi. It was up on the rafters in the garage.

"I don't know, Code. I've still got the project, you know. I don't think my time is going to change much just because she-"

"That's right, she was only your fiancée, not the project." "I don't mean it like that. I just don't think I'm-" "What about tonight? I'll come down. We'll hit the town like the old days. Put on your black jeans, baby." Zeller laughed in encouragement. Pierce didn't. There had never been old days like that. Pierce had never been a player. He was blue jeans, not black jeans. He'd always preferred to spend the night in the lab looking into a scanning tunneling microscope than pursuing sex in a club with an engine fueled by alcohol.

"I think I'm going to pass, man. I've got a lot of stuff to do and I need to go back to the lab tonight." "Hank, man, you've got to give the molecules a rest. One night out. Come on, it will straighten you out, shake up your own molecules for once. You can tell me all about what happened with you and Nicki, and I'll pretend to feel sorry for you. I promise."

Zeller was the only one on the planet who called him Hank, a name Pierce hated. But Pierce was smart enough to know that telling Zeller to stop was out of the question, because it would prompt his friend to use the name at all times.

"Call me next time, all right?"

Zeller reluctantly backed off and Pierce promised to keep the next weekend open for a night out. He made no promises about surfing. They hung up and Pierce put the phone in its cradle. He picked up his backpack and headed for the apartment door.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Chasing the Dime by Michael Connelly Copyright ©2002 by Hieronymous, Inc. . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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