Harlan Coben (17 page)

“There are still
things we can do,” Rachel said. “This stuff is state of the art. Even if they pat you down, we can get away with it. I have a bulletproof vest that has a pinhole camera right in the center.”

“And you don't think they'll find that with a pat-down?”

“Yeah, okay, look, I know you're worried about them finding out, but let's be realistic here. There's an excellent chance this is all a setup. Don't give up the money until you see Tara. Don't get yourself stuck somewhere alone. Don't worry about the Q-Logger—if they're being up front, we'll have Tara before they can search the stacks of money. I know this isn't an easy decision, Marc.”

“No, you're right. I played it safe last time. I think we need to take some chances. But the vest is out.”

“Okay, here's what we're going to do. I'm going to be in the trunk. They may check the backseat to see if someone is lying there. The trunk will be a safer bet. I'll disconnect the wires back there so when the trunk opens, no lights will come on. I'll try to keep up with you, but I have to stay at a safe distance. Make no mistake here. I'm not Wonder Woman. I might lose you, but remember: Don't look for me. Not even casually. These guys are probably pretty good. They'll spot that.”

“I understand.” She was dressed totally in black. I said, “You look like you're going to do a reading in the Village.”

“Kumbaya, my Lord. You ready?”

We both heard the car pull up. I looked out the window and felt my panic needle jump. “Damn,” I said.

“What?”

“That's Regan, the cop on the case. I haven't seen him in more than a month.” I looked at her. Her face was stark white against the black outfit. “Coincidence?”

“No coincidence,” she said.

“How the hell did he find out about the ransom?”

She moved back from the window. “He's probably not here for that.”

“Then what?”

“My guess would be that they got word of my involvement from MVD.”

I frowned. “So?”

“No time to explain. Look, I'm going to go out to the garage and hide. He's going to ask about me. Tell him I went back to D.C. If he presses, tell him I'm an old friend and leave it at that. He's going to want to interrogate you.”

“Why?”

But she was already moving away from me. “Just be firm and get him out of there. I'll wait for you by the car.”

I didn't like it, but now was not the time. “Okay.”

Rachel headed to the garage via the door in the den. I waited until she was out of sight. When Regan hit my front walkway, I opened the door, trying to cut him off at the pass.

Regan smiled. “Were you expecting me?” he asked.

“I heard your car.”

He nodded as if I'd said something that required serious analysis. “Do you have a few moments, Dr. Seidman?”

“Actually, it's a bad time.”

“Oh.” Regan did not break stride. He slid past me and into my front foyer, his eyes taking in everything. “Heading out, are we?”

“What do you want, Detective?”

“Some new information has come to our attention.”

I waited for him to say more.

“Don't you want to know what it is?”

“Of course.”

Regan had a strange, almost serene look on his face. He looked up at the ceiling, as if he were considering what color to paint it. “Where have you been today?”

“Get out, please.”

His eyes were still on the ceiling. “Your hostility surprises me.” But he did not look surprised.

“You said you had some new information. If you do, say it. If not, get out. I'm not in the mood to be questioned.”

He made a well-well face. “We hear that you visited a private detective agency in Newark today.”

“So?”

“So what were you doing there?”

“Tell you what, Detective. I'm going to ask you to leave because I know answering your questions will bring me no closer to finding my daughter.”

He looked at me. “You sure about that?”

“Kindly get the hell out of my house. Now.”

“Suit yourself.” Regan started for the door. When we reached it, he asked, “Where's Rachel Mills?”

“Don't know.”

“She's not here?”

“Nope.”

“No idea at all where she could be?”

“I think she's on her way back to Washington.”

“Hmm. How do you two know each other?”

“Good night, Detective.”

“Okay, sure. But one last question.”

I stifled a sigh. “You've watched too many episodes of
Columbo
, Detective.”

“Indeed I have.” He smiled. “But let me ask it anyway.”

I spread my hands for him to go ahead.

“Do you know how her husband died?”

“He was shot,” I said too quickly, and immediately regretted it. He leaned a little more into my space and kept on me.

“And do you know who shot him?”

I stood without moving.

“Do you, Marc?”

“Good night, Detective.”

“She killed him, Marc. A bullet to the head at close range.”

“That,” I said, “is a load of bull.”

“Is it? I mean, are you sure?”

“If she killed him, why isn't she in jail?”

“Good question,” Regan said, backing down the walkway. When he reached the end of the walkway, he added, “Maybe you should ask her.”

Rachel was in
the garage. She looked up at me. She suddenly looked small, I thought. And I saw fear in her face. The car trunk was open. I moved toward the driver-side door.

“What did he want?” she asked.

“What you said.”

“He knew about the CD?”

“He knew we'd been at MVD. He didn't say anything about the CD.”

I slid into the car. She let it drop. Now was not the time to raise any new issues. We both knew that. But again I questioned my judgment here. My wife had been murdered. So had my sister. Someone had tried very hard to kill me. Stripping it bare, I was trusting a woman I really didn't know. I was trusting her not only with my life, but with my daughter's. How stupid when you think about it. Lenny had been right. It was not so simple. In truth, I had no idea who she was or what she'd become. I had deluded myself into making her something she might not be, and now I wondered what it might cost me.

Her voice cut through my haze. “Marc?”

“What?”

“I still think you should wear the bulletproof vest.”

“No.”

My tone was firmer than I'd wanted. Or maybe not. Rachel climbed into the trunk and closed it. I put the duffel bag with the money on the seat next to me. I hit the garage-door opener under the sun-visor and started the car.

We were on our way.

 

When Tickner was nine years old, his mother bought him a book of optical illusions. You'd look at a drawing of, say, an old lady with a big nose. You'd look a little longer and then, poof, it appeared now to be a young woman with her head turned. Tickner had loved the book. When he got a little older, he moved on to those Magic Eyes, staring for however long it took for the horsey or whatever to appear in the swirling colors. Sometimes it would take a long time. You'd even start to wonder if there was anything there at all. And then, suddenly, the image surfaced.

That was what was happening here.

There were moments in a case, Tickner knew, that altered everything—just like those old optical illusions. You are viewing one reality and then, with a gentle tilt, reality changes. Nothing is as it appeared.

He had never really bought the conventional theories on the Seidman murder-kidnapping. They all felt too much like reading a book with missing pages.

Over the years, Tickner had not dealt with that many murders. They were, for the most part, left to the local cops. But he knew plenty of homicide investigators. The best ones were always off center, overly theatrical, ridiculously imaginative. Tickner had heard them talk about a point in the case where the victim “reaches out” from the grave. The victim “talks” to them somehow, pointing them toward the killer. Tickner would listen to his nonsense and nod politely. It always sounded like a load of hyperbole, just one of those meaningless things cops say because the general public laps it up.

The printer still whirred. Tickner had seen twelve photos already.

“How many more?” he asked.

Dorfman looked at the computer screen. “Six more.”

“Same as these?”

“Pretty much, yeah. I mean, same person.”

Tickner stared down at the photographs. Yes, the same person was featured in all of them. They were all in black and white, all taken without the subject knowing, probably from a distance with a zoom lens.

The reach-from-the-grave stuff—it no longer sounded so silly. Monica Seidman had been dead for eighteen months. Her murderer had gone free. And now, with all hope lost, she seemed to have risen from the dead to point a finger. Tickner looked again and tried to understand.

The subject of the pictures, the person Monica Seidman was pointing at, was Rachel Mills.

 

When you take the eastern spur of the New Jersey Turnpike north, the night skyline of Manhattan beckons. Like most people who see it nearly every day, I used to take it for granted. No more. For a while afterward, I thought I could still see the Towers. It was as though they were bright lights I'd stared at for a long time, so that even when I closed my eyes, their images were still there, imbedded. But like any sunspot, the images eventually began to fade. It is different now. When I drive this route, I still make myself look for them. Even tonight. But sometimes I forget precisely where those towers stood. And that angers me more than I can express.

Out of habit, I took the lower level of the George Washington Bridge. There was no traffic at this hour. I drove through the E-ZPass. I had managed to keep myself distracted. I flipped stations between two talk radio shows. One was a sports station where lots of guys named Vinny from Bayside called up and complained about inept coaches and how much better they'd be at the job. The other station featured two beyond-puerile Howard Stern rip-offs who thought it was funny for a college freshman to call his mother and tell her he had testicular cancer. Both were, if not entertaining, mildly distracting.

Rachel was in the trunk, which was totally weird if I thought about it. I reached for the cell phone and flipped on the two-way radio feature. My finger pressed down on the call button and almost instantly I heard the robotic voice say, “Take the Henry Hudson north.”

I put the phone to mouth, walkie-talkie style. “Okay.”

“Tell me the moment you get on the Hudson.”

“Right.”

I got into the left lane. I knew the way. This area was familiar to me. I had done a fellowship at New York Presbyterian, which resided about ten blocks south. Zia and I had roomed with a cardiac resident named Lester in an Art Deco building at the tail end of Fort Washington Avenue in upper, upper Manhattan. When I lived here, this section of the city was known as the far northern point of Washington Heights. Now I had noticed several realtors redubbing it “Hudson Heights” so as to differentiate it, in both substance and cost, from its lower-class roots.

“Okay, I'm on the Hudson,” I said.

“Take your next exit.”

“Fort Tryon Park?”

“Yes.”

Again I knew it. Fort Tryon floats cloudlike high above the Hudson River. It is a quiet and restful jagged cliff, New Jersey on its west, Riverdale-Bronx on its east. The park is a mishmash of terrains—walkways of harsh stone, fauna from a bygone era, terraces of stone, nooks and crannies of cement and brick, thick brush, rocky slopes, open grass. I had spent plenty of summer days on her green lawns, adorned in shorts and T-shirt, Zia and unread medical books my companions. My favorite time here: summer, right before dark. The orange glow bathing the park in something almost ethereal.

I put on my blinker and glided onto the exit ramp. There were no cars and few lights. The park was closed at night, but the roadway stayed open for through traffic. My car chugged up the steep road and entered what felt like a medieval fortress. The Cloisters, a former quasi-French monastery that was now part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, held middle ground. It houses a fabulous collection of medieval artifacts. Or so I'm told. I've been in this park a hundred times. I've never been inside the Cloisters.

It was, I thought, a smart place for a ransom drop—dark, quiet, filled with serpentine trails, stone cliffs, sudden drops, thick woods, paved and unpaved walks. You could get lost here. You could hide here for a very long time and never be found.

The robotic voice asked, “Are you there yet?”

“I'm in Fort Tryon, yes.”

“Park near the café. Get out and walk up to the circle.”

 

Riding in the trunk was noisy and jarring. Rachel had brought a padded blanket, but there was not much she could do about the noise. A flashlight stayed in her satchel. She had no interest in turning it on. Rachel had never minded the dark.

Sight could be distracting. The dark was a good place to think.

She tried to keep her body loose, riding bumps, and wondered about Marc's behavior right before they left. The cop at the house had, no doubt, said something that shook him. About her? Probably. She wondered what exactly he had said and how she should react.

Didn't matter now. They were on their way. She had to concentrate on the task at hand.

Rachel was falling back into a familiar role. There was a pang here.
She missed being with the FBI. She had loved her job. Yes, perhaps it was all she had. It was more than her escape—it was the only thing she really enjoyed doing. Some people pushed through the nine-to-five so they could go home and live their lives. For Rachel, it was the opposite.

After all these years apart, here was something that she and Marc had in common: They'd both found careers they loved. She wondered about that. She wondered if there was a connection, if their careers had become some kind of true-love substitute. Or was that looking at it too deeply?

Marc still had his job. She did not. Did that make her more desperate?

No. His child was gone. Game, set, match.

In the darkness of the trunk, she smeared her face with black makeup, enough to take the shine away. The car started climbing upward. Her gear was packed and ready.

She thought about Hugh Reilly, the son of a bitch.

Her breakup with Marc—and everything after—was his fault. Hugh had been her dearest friend in college. That was what he wanted, he told her. Just to be her friend. No pressure. He understood that she had a boyfriend. Had Rachel been naïve or purposefully naïve? Men who want to “just be friends” do so because they hope to be next in line, as though friendship were an on-deck circle, a good place for practice swings before heading to the plate. Hugh had called her in Italy that night with nothing but the best of intentions. “I just think you should know,” he said, “as your friend.” Right. And then he told her what Marc had done at some stupid frat party.

Yes, enough blaming herself. Enough blaming Marc. Hugh Reilly. If that son of a bitch had just minded his own business, what would her life be like right now? She couldn't say. Ah, but what had her life become? That was easier to answer. She drank too much. She had a bad temper. Her stomach bothered her more than it should. She spent too much time reading
TV Guide
. And let's not forget the pièce de résistance: She had gotten herself ensnared in a self-destructive relationship—and gotten herself out of it in the worst way possible.

The car veered and climbed upward, forcing Rachel to roll back. A moment or two later, the car stopped. Rachel lifted her head. The cruel musings fled.

It was game time.

 

From the old fort's lookout tower, some two hundred fifty feet above the Hudson River, Heshy had one of the most stunning views of the Jersey Palisades, stretching from the Tappan Zee Bridge on the right to the George Washington Bridge on his left. He actually took the time to appreciate it before he got to the matter at hand.

As though on cue, Seidman took the exit off the Henry Hudson Parkway. No one followed. Heshy kept his eyes on the road. No car slowed. No car sped up. No one was trying to make it look as though they weren't following.

He spun around, lost sight of the car for a brief moment, then spotted it again as it came back into view. He could see Seidman in the driver's seat. No one else was visible. That didn't mean much—someone could be ducking down in the back—but it was a start.

Seidman parked the car. He turned off the engine and opened the door. Heshy lifted the microphone to his mouth.

“Pavel, you ready?”

“Yes.”

“He's alone,” he said, speaking now for Lydia's benefit. “Proceed.”

 

“Park near the café. Get out and walk up to the circle.”

The circle, I knew, was Margaret Corbin Circle. When I reached the clearing, the first thing I spotted, even in the dark, was the bright colors of the children's playground near Fort Washington Avenue at 190th Street. The colors still leapt out. I'd always liked this playground, but tonight the yellows and blues taunted me. I thought of myself as a city boy. When I lived near here, I'd imagined staying in this neighborhood—too sophisticated was I for the vanilla suburbs—and of course, that meant that I would bring my children to this very park. I took that as an omen, but I didn't know of what.

The phone squawked. “There's a subway station on the left.”

“Okay.”

“Take the stairs down toward the elevator.”

I might have suspected this. He would put me on the elevator and then on the A train. It would be difficult, if not impossible, for Rachel to follow me.

“Are you on the stairs?”

“Yes.”

“At the bottom, you'll see a gate on the right.”

I knew where it was. It led to a smaller park and was locked except for weekends. It had been set aside as something of a small picnic area. There were Ping-Pong tables, though you had to bring your own net and paddles to play. There were benches and eating areas. Kids used it for birthday parties.

The wrought-iron gate, I remember, was always locked.

“I'm there,” I said.

“Make sure no one sees you. Push open the gate. Slip through and quickly close it.”

I peered inside. The park was black. Distant streetlights reached out and gave the area no more than a dull glow. The duffel bag felt heavy. I adjusted it up my shoulder. I looked behind me now. No one. I looked to my left. The subway elevators were still. I put my hand on the gate door. The padlock had been cut. I gave the area one more quick glance because that was what the robotic voice had told me to do.

No sign of Rachel.

The gate creaked when I pushed it open. The echo ripped through the still night. I slipped through the opening and let the dark swallow me whole.

 

Rachel felt the car rock as Marc got out.

She made herself wait a full minute, which felt like two hours. When she thought that it was probably safe, Rachel lifted the trunk an inch and peeked out.

She saw no one.

Rachel had a gun with her, a fed-issue Glock .22 40-caliber semiautomatic, and she carried her night-vision goggles, Rigel 3501 military-grade Gen. 2+. The Palm Pilot that could read the Q-Logger transmitter was in her pocket.