Harlan Coben (6 page)

There was no
traffic, so I made it to the mall with plenty of time to spare. I turned the engine off and sat back. I glanced around. I figured that the feds and cops were probably still on me, but I couldn't see them. That was a good thing, I guess.

Now what?

No idea. I waited some more. I fiddled with the radio, but nothing caught my attention. I turned on the CD player/tape deck. When Donald Fagan of Steely Dan began singing “Black Cow,” I felt a slight jerk. I had not listened to this particular tape since, what, my college days. Why did Monica have it? And then, with a renewed pang, I realized that Monica had been the last to use this car, that this may have been the last song she ever heard.

I watched the shoppers prepare for mall entry. I concentrated on the young mothers; the way they flipped open the back door of the minivan; the way they unfolded the baby strollers midair with a magician's flourish; the way they struggled to release their offspring from safety seats that reminded me of Buzz Aldrin's on
Apollo 11
; the way the mothers skirted forward, heads high, smartly pressing the remote control that slid the minivan door to a close.

The mothers, all of them, looked so blasé. Their children were with them. Their safety, what with the five-star side-collision rating and NASA-sleek car seats, was a given. And here I sat with a bag of ransom money, hoping to get my daughter back. The thin line. I wanted to roll down the window and shout out a warning.

We were getting close to drop time. The sun beat down on my windshield. I reached for my sunglasses but then thought better of it. I don't
know why. Would putting on my sunglasses somehow make the kidnapper uneasy? No, I don't think so. Or maybe it would. Better to just leave them off. Take no chances.

My shoulders bunched up. I kept trying to look around without, for some odd reason, looking conspicuous about it. Whenever someone parked near me or walked anywhere in the vicinity of my car, my stomach tightened and I wondered:

Was Tara nearby?

We were at the two-hour mark now. I wanted this over. The next few minutes would decide everything. I knew that. Calm. I needed to stay calm. Tickner's warning reverberated in my head. Would someone simply walk up to my car and blow my brains out?

It was, I realized, a very real possibility.

When the cell phone rang, I started forward. I brought it to my ear and barked a too-quick hello.

The robotic voice said, “Pull out by the west exit.”

I was confused. “Which way is west?”

“Follow the signs for Route Four. Take the overpass. We're watching. If someone follows, we disappear. Keep the phone near your ear.”

I obeyed with gusto; my right hand pressed the phone against my ear to the point where I started losing circulation. My left hand gripped the wheel as if preparing to tear it off.

“Get on Route Four heading west.”

I took the right turn and jug-handled onto the highway. I looked in my rearview mirror to see if anyone was following me. Hard to tell.

The robotic voice said, “You'll see a strip mall.”

“There's a million strip malls,” I said.

“It's on the right, next to a store selling baby cribs. In front of the Paramus Road exit.”

I saw it. “Okay.”

“Pull in there. You'll see a driveway on the left. Take it to the back and kill the engine. Have the money ready for me.”

I understood immediately why the kidnapper had picked this spot. There was only one way in. The stores were all for rent, except for the baby-crib place. That was on the far right. In other words, it was self-contained and directly off a highway. There was no way anyone could come around back or even slow down without being noticed.

I hope the feds understood that.

When I reached the back of the building, I saw a man standing by a van. He wore a red-and-black flannel shirt with black jeans, dark sunglasses, and a Yankee baseball cap. I tried to find something distinct, but the word that came to mind was
average
. Average height, average build. The only thing was his nose. Even from this distance I could see it was misshapen, like an ex-boxer's. But was that real or some kind of disguise? I didn't know.

I checked out the van. There was a sign for “B & T Electricians” of Ridgewood, New Jersey. No phone number or address. The license plate was from New Jersey. I memorized it.

The man raised a cell phone to his lips walkie-talkie style, and I heard the mechanical voice say, “I'm going to approach. Pass the money through the window. Do not get out of the car. Do not say a word to me. When we're safely away with the money, I'll call and tell you where to pick up your daughter.”

The man in red flannel and black jeans lowered the phone and approached. His shirt was untucked. Did he have a gun? I couldn't tell. And even if he did, what could I do about it now? I hit the button to open the windows. They didn't budge. The key needed to be turned. The man was getting closer. The Yankee cap was pulled down until the brim touched the sunglasses. I reached for the key and gave it a tiny twist. The lights on the dashboard sprung to life. I pressed the button again. The window slid down.

Again I tried to find something about the man that was distinct. His walk was slightly off balance, as though maybe he'd had a drink or two, but he didn't look nervous. His face was unshaven and patchy. His hands were dirty. His black jeans were ripped in the right knee. His sneakers, canvas high-tops from Converse, had seen better days.

When the man was only two steps from the car, I pushed the bag up to the window and braced myself. I held my breath. Without breaking stride, the man took the money and swirled toward the van. He hurried his step now. The van's back doors opened and he leapt in, the door immediately closing behind him. It was as if the van had swallowed him whole.

The driver gunned the engine. The van sped off and now, for the first time, I realized that there was a back entrance onto a side road. The van shot down it and was gone.

I was alone.

I stayed where I was and waited for the cell phone to ring. My heart pounded. My shirt was drenched in sweat. No other car traveled back here. The pavement was cracked. Cardboard boxes jutted out of the garbage Dumpster. Broken bottles littered the ground. My eyes stared hard at the ground, trying to make out the words on faded beer labels.

Fifteen minutes passed.

I kept picturing my reunion with my daughter, how I would find her and pick her up and cradle her and hush her with gentle sounds. The cell phone. The cell phone was supposed to ring. That was part of what I was picturing. The phone ringing, the robotic voice giving me instructions. Those were parts one and two. Why wasn't the damn phone cooperating?

A Buick Le Sabre pulled into the lot, keeping a decent distance away from me. I did not recognize the driver, but Tickner was in the passenger seat. Our eyes met. I tried to read something in his expression, but he was still pure stoic.

I stared now at the cell phone, not daring to look away. The tick-tick was back, this time slow and thudding.

Ten more minutes passed before the phone grudgingly issued its tinny song. I had it to my ear before the sound had a chance to travel.

“Hello?” I said.

Nothing.

Tickner watched me closely. He gave me a slight nod, though I had no idea why. His driver still had both hands on the wheel at ten and two o'clock.

“Hello?” I tried again.

The robotic voice said, “I warned you about contacting the cops.”

Ice flooded my veins.

“No second chance.”

And then the phone went dead.

There was no
escape.

I longed for the numb. I longed for the comatose state of the hospital. I longed for that IV bag and the free flow of anesthetics. My skin had been torn off. My nerve endings were exposed now. I could feel everything.

Fear and helplessness overwhelmed me. The fear locked me in a room, while the helplessness—the awful knowing that I had blown it and could do nothing to alleviate my child's pain—wrapped me in a straitjacket and turned out the lights. I may very well have been losing my mind.

Days passed in a syrupy haze. Most of the time I sat by the phone—by several phones, actually. My home phone, my cell phone, and the kidnapper's cell phone. I bought a charger for the kidnapper's cell, so I could keep it working. I stayed on the couch. The phones sat on my right. I tried to look away, to watch television even, because I remembered that old saying about a watched kettle never boiling. I still stole glances at those damn phones, fearing that they might somehow flee, willing them to ring.

I tried to mine that supernatural father-daughter connection again, the one that had insisted earlier that Tara was still alive. The pulse was still there, I thought (or at least, made myself believe), beating faintly, the connection now tenuous at best.

“No second chance . . .”

To add to my guilt, I had dreamt last night of a woman other than Monica—my old love, Rachel. It was one of those time-and-reality warp dreams, the ones where the world is totally alien and even contradictory
and yet you don't question any of it. Rachel and I were together. We had never broken up yet we had been apart all these years. I was still thirty-four, but she hadn't aged since the day she left me. Tara was still my daughter in the dream—she had, in fact, never been kidnapped—but somehow she was also Rachel's, though Rachel wasn't the mother. You've probably had dreams like this. Nothing really makes sense, but you don't challenge what you see. When I woke up, the dream faded into smoke the way dreams always do. I was left with an aftertaste and a longing that pulled with unexpected force.

My mother hung around too much. She had just plopped another tray of food in front of me. I ignored it and for the millionth time, Mom repeated her mantra: “You have to keep up your strength for Tara.”

“Right, Mom, strength is the key here. Maybe if I do enough bench presses, that'll bring her back.”

Mom shook her head, refusing to rise to the bait. It was a cruel thing to say. She was hurting too. Her granddaughter was missing and her son was in horrific shape. I watched her sigh and head back to the kitchen. I didn't apologize.

Tickner and Regan visited frequently. They reminded me of Shakespeare's sound and fury signifying nothing. They told me about all the technological wonders that were being utilized in the quest to find Tara—stuff involving DNA and latent prints and security cameras and airports and tollbooths and train stations and tracers and surveillance and labs. They trotted out the tried-and-true cop clichés like “no stone unturned” and “every possible avenue.” I nodded at them. They had me look at mug shots, but the bagman in flannel was not in any of the books.

“We ran a trace on B and T Electricians,” Regan told me that first night. “The company exists, but they use magnetic signs, the kind you can just peel off a truck. Someone stole one two months ago. They never thought it was worth reporting.”

“What about the license plate?” I asked.

“The number you gave us doesn't exist.”

“How can that be?”

“They used two old license plates,” Regan explained. “See, what they do is, they cut the license plates in half and then they weld the left half of one with the right half of the other.”

I just stared at him.

“There is something of a bright side to that,” Regan added.

“Oh?”

“It means we're dealing with professionals. They knew that if you contacted us, we'd be set up at the mall. They found a drop spot that we couldn't get to without being seen. They have us tracking down useless leads with the fake sign and welded license plates. Like I said, they're pros.”

“And that's good because . . . ?”

“Pros usually aren't bloodthirsty.”

“So what are they doing?”

“Our theory,” Regan said, “is that they're softening you up, so they can ask for more money.”

Softening me up. It was working.

My father-in-law called after the ransom fiasco. I could hear the disappointment in Edgar's voice. I don't want to sound unkind here—Edgar was the one who provided the money and made it clear he would do so again—but the disappointment sounded more aimed at me, at the fact that I had not taken his advice about not contacting the police, than at the final outcome.

Of course, he was right about that. I had messed up big time.

I tried to participate in the investigation, but the police were far from encouraging. In the movies the authorities cooperate and share information with the victim. I naturally asked Tickner and Regan a lot of questions about the case. They didn't answer. They never discussed specifics with me. They treated my interrogatories with near disdain. I wanted to know, for example, more about how my wife was found, about why she'd been naked. They stonewalled.

Lenny was at the house a lot. He had trouble meeting my eye because he, too, blamed himself for encouraging me to come forward. The faces of Regan and Tickner fluctuated between guilt because everything had gone so wrong and guilt of another kind, like maybe I, the grieving husband and father, had been behind this from the get-go. They wanted to know about my shaky marriage to Monica. They wanted to know about my missing gun. It was exactly as Lenny had predicted. The more time passed, the more the authorities aimed their sights on the only available suspect.

Yours truly.

After we hit the one-week mark, the police and FBI presence started
fading. Tickner and Regan no longer came by very much. They checked their watches more often. They excused themselves for phone calls involving other cases. I understood that, of course. There had been no new leads. Things were quieting down. Part of me welcomed the respite.

And then, on the ninth day, everything changed.

At ten o'clock, I began to get undressed and ready for bed. I was alone. I love my family and friends, but they began to realize that I needed some time by myself. They had all left before dinner. I ordered delivery from Hunan Garden and, per Mom's earlier instructions, ate for strength.

I looked at the bedside alarm clock. That's how I knew that the time was exactly 10:18
P
.
M
. I glanced at the window, just a casual land sweep. In the dark, I almost missed it—nothing consciously registered anyway—but something snagged my gaze. I stopped and looked again.

There, standing on my walk like a stone, staring at my house, was a woman. I assume that she was staring. I did not know for certain. Her face was lost in the shadows. She had long hair—that much I could see in the silhouette—and she wore a long coat. Her hands were jammed into her pockets.

She just stood there.

I was not sure what to make of it. We were in the news, of course. Reporters stopped by at all hours. I looked up and down the street. No cars, no news vans, nothing. She had come on foot. Again that was not unusual. I live in a suburban neighborhood. People take walks all the time, usually with a dog or spouse or both, but it was hardly earth shattering for a woman to be walking alone.

Then why had she stopped?

Morbid curiosity, I figured.

She looked tall from here, but that was pretty much a guess. I wondered what to do. An uneasy feeling slithered up my back. I grabbed my sweatshirt and threw it over my pajama top. Ditto with a pair of sweatpants and the bottoms. I looked out the window again. The woman stiffened.

She had seen me.

The woman turned and began to hurry away. My chest felt tight. I tried to open the window. It was stuck. I hit the sides to loosen it and
tried again. It grudgingly gave me an inch. I lowered my mouth to the opening.

“Wait!”

She picked up the pace.

“Please, hold up a second.”

She broke into a run. Damn. I turned away and sprinted after her toward the door. I had no idea where my slippers were and there was no time for shoes. I ran outside. The grass tickled my feet. I sprinted in the direction she had gone. I tried to follow, but I lost her.

When I got back inside my house, I called Regan and told him what had happened. It sounded stupid even as I said it. A woman had been standing in front of my house. Big deal. Regan, too, sounded thoroughly unimpressed. I convinced myself that it was nothing, just a nosy neighbor. I climbed back into bed, flipped the television, and eventually I closed my eyes.

The night, however, was not over.

It was four in the morning when my phone rang. I was in the state I now refer to as sleep. I never fall into true slumber anymore. I hang above it with my eyes shut. The nights struggle by like the days. The separation between the two is the flimsiest of curtains. At night, my body manages to rest, but my mind refuses to shut down.

With my eyes closed, I was replaying the morning of the attack for the umpteenth time, hoping to stir a new memory. I started where I am now: in the bedroom. I remembered my alarm clock going off. Lenny and I were going to play racquetball that morning. We'd started playing every Wednesday about a year before, and so far, we had progressed to the point where our games had improved from “pitiful” to “almost remedial.” Monica was awake and in the shower. I was scheduled for surgery at 11:00
A
.
M
. I got up and looked in on Tara. I headed back to the bedroom. Monica was out of shower now and putting on her jeans. I went down to the kitchen, still in my pajamas, opened the cabinet to the right of the Westinghouse refrigerator, chose the raspberry granola bar over the blueberry (I had actually told this detail to Regan recently, as if it might be relevant), and bent over the sink while I ate. . . .

Bam, that was it. Nothing until the hospital.

The phone rang a second time. My eyes opened.

My hand found the phone. I picked it up and said, “Hello?”

“It's Detective Regan. I'm with Agent Tickner. We'll be over in two minutes.”

I swallowed. “What is it?”

“Two minutes.”

He hung up.

I got out of bed. I glanced out the window, half expecting to see that woman again. No one was there. My jeans from yesterday were crumpled on the floor. I slid them on. I pulled a sweatshirt over my head and made my way down the stairs. I opened the front door and peered out. A police car turned the corner. Regan was driving. Tickner was in the passenger seat. I don't think that I had ever seen them arrive in the same vehicle.

This, I knew, would not be good news.

The two men stepped out of the car. Nausea swept over me. I had prepared myself for this visit since the ransom had gone wrong. I'd even gone so far as to rehearse in my mind how it would all happen—how they would deliver the hammer blow and how I would nod and thank them and excuse myself. I practiced my reaction. I knew precisely how it would all go down.

But now, as I watched Regan and Tickner head toward me, those defenses fled. Panic set in. My body began to shiver. I could barely stand. My knees wobbled, and I leaned against the door frame. The two men moved in step. I was reminded of an old war movie, the scene where the officers come to the mother's house with solemn faces. I shook my head, wishing them away.

When they reached the door, the two men pushed inside.

“We have something to show you,” Regan said.

I turned and followed. Regan flicked on a lamp, but it didn't provide much light. Tickner moved to the couch. He opened his laptop computer. The monitor sprang to life, bathing him in an LCD-blue.

“We had a break,” Regan explained.

I moved closer.

“Your father-in-law gave us a list of the serial numbers on the ransom bills, remember?”

“Yes.”

“One of those bills was used at a bank yesterday afternoon. Agent Tickner is bringing up a video feed right now.”

“From the bank?” I asked.

“Yes. We downloaded the video onto his laptop. Twelve hours ago, someone brought a hundred-dollar bill to this bank in order to get smaller notes. We want you to take a look at the video.”

I sat next to Tickner. He pressed a button. The video started up immediately. I expected black-and-white or poor, grainy quality. This feed had neither. The angle was shot from above in almost too-brilliant color. A bald man was talking to a teller. There was no sound.

“I don't recognize him,” I said.

“Wait.”

The bald man said something to the teller. They appeared to be sharing a good-natured chuckle. He picked up a slip of paper and waved a good-bye. The teller gave a small wave back. The next person in line approached the booth. I heard myself groan.

It was my sister, Stacy.

The numb I had longed for suddenly flooded me. I don't know why. Perhaps because two polar emotions pulled at me simultaneously. One, dread. My own sister had done this. My own sister, whom I loved dearly, had betrayed me. But, two, hope—we now had hope. We had a lead. And if it was Stacy, I could not believe that she would harm Tara.

“Is that your sister?” Regan asked, pointing his finger at her image.

“Yes.” I looked at him. “Where was this taken?”

“The Catskills,” he said. “A town called—”

“Montague,” I finished for him.

Tickner and Regan looked at each other. “How do you know that?”

But I was already heading for the door. “I know where she is.”