Harlan Coben (9 page)

And round and round we go.

In sum, when you cut through it all, they—and I—have nothing. No ransom money. No idea who did it. No idea why. And most important: no small corpse.

That is where we are today—a year and a half after the abduction. The file is still technically open, but Regan and Tickner have moved on to new cases. I haven't heard a word from either in nearly six months.
The media gnawed on us for a few weeks, but with nothing new to feed on, they too, slithered toward juicier troughs.

The Dunkin' Donuts Munchkins were gone. Everyone started heading to a parking lot overloaded with minivans. After the game we coaches take our budding athletes to Schrafft's Ice Cream Parlor, a tradition in our town. Every coach in every other league in every other age group follows the same tradition. The place was packed. Nothing like an ice cream cone in the autumn frost to burrow the chill into the bone.

I stood with my Cookies-n-Cream cone and surveyed the scene. Children and fathers. It was getting to be too much for me. I checked my watch. Time for me to leave anyway. I met Lenny's eye and motioned that I was going. He mouthed the words
Your will
at me. In case I didn't get the drift, he even made a signing motion with his hand. I waved that I understood. I got back into my car and flipped on the radio.

For a long while, I sat there and watched the flow of families. I kept my eyes on the fathers mostly. I gauged their reactions to this most domestic of activities, hoping to see a flicker of doubt, something in the eyes that might comfort me. But I didn't.

I'm not sure how long I stayed like that. Not more than ten minutes, I suppose. An old favorite by James Taylor came on the radio. It brought me back. I smiled, started up the car, and made my way toward the hospital.

 

An hour later, I was scrubbing up to perform surgery on an eight-year-old boy with—to use terminology familiar to both layman and professional—a facial smash. Zia Leroux, my medical partner, was there.

I'm not sure why I first chose to be a plastic surgeon. It was neither the siren song of easy dollars nor the ideal of helping my fellowman. I had wanted to be a surgeon pretty much from the get-go, but I saw myself more in the vascular or cardiac fields. Life's turns come in funny ways though. During my second year of residency, the cardiac surgeon who ran our rotation was—what's the phrase?—a total prick. On the other hand, the doctor in charge of the cosmetic surgery, Liam Reese, was incredible. Dr. Reese had that enviable have-it-all feel to him, that combination of good looks, calm confidence, and internal warmth that
naturally drew people. You wanted to please him. You wanted to be like him.

Dr. Reese became my mentor. He showed how reconstructive surgery was creative, a Humpty-Dumpty process that forced you to find new ways to put back together what had been destroyed. The bones in the face and skull are the most complex stretch of skeletal landscape in the human body. We who repair them are artists. We are jazz musicians. If you talk to orthopedic or thoracic surgeons, they can be pretty specific about their procedures. Our work—reconstruction—is never exactly the same. We improvise. Dr. Reese taught me that. He appealed to my inner techno-weenie with talk of microsurgery and bone grafts and synthetic skin. I remember visiting him in Scarsdale. His wife was long legged and beautiful. His daughter was school valedictorian. His son was captain of the basketball team and the nicest kid I've ever met. At the age of forty-nine Dr. Reese was killed in a car crash on Route 684 heading to Connecticut. Somebody might find something poignant in that, but that person wouldn't be me.

When I was finishing up residency, I landed a one-year fellowship to train in oral surgery overseas. I didn't apply to be a do-gooder; I applied because it sounded pretty cool. This trip would be, I hoped, my version of backpacking through Europe. It was not. Things went wrong right away. We got caught up in a civil war in Sierra Leone. I handled wounds so horrible, so unfathomable, that it was hard to believe the human mind could conjure up the necessary cruelty to inflict them. But even in the midst of this destruction, I felt a strange exhilaration. I don't try to figure out why. Like I said before, this stuff gets me jazzed. Maybe part of it was the satisfaction of helping people truly in need. Or maybe I was drawn to this work the same way some are drawn to extreme sports, who need the risk of death to feel whole.

When I came back, Zia and I set up One World, and we were on our way. I love what I do. Perhaps our work is like an extreme sport, but it also has a very—pardon the pun—human face. I like that. I love my patients and yet I love the calculating distance, the necessary coldness, of what I do. I care about my patients so much, but then they are gone—intense love mixed with fleeting commitment.

Today's patient presented us with a rather complicated challenge. My patron saint—the patron saint of many in reconstructive surgery—is the French researcher René LeFort. LeFort tossed cadavers off a tavern
roof onto their skulls to see the natural pattern of fracture lines in the face. I bet this impressed the ladies. Today we name certain fractures for him—more specifically, LeFort type I, LeFort type II, LeFort type III. Zia and I checked the films again. The Water view gave us the best look, but the Caldwell and lateral backed it up.

Simply put, the fracture line on this eight-year-old was a LeFort type III, causing a complete separation of the facial bones and the cranium. I could pretty much rip off the boy's face like a mask if I wanted to.

“Car accident?” I asked.

Zia nodded. “Father was drunk.”

“Don't tell me. He's fine, right?”

“He even remembered to put on his own seat belt.”

“But not his son's.”

“Too much trouble. What with him being tired from raising a glass so many times.”

Zia and I started our life's journey in two very different places. Like the Stories' classic seventies song “Brother Louie,” Zia is black as the night while I am whiter than white (my skin tone, as described by Zia: “underwater fish belly”). I was born at Beth Israel Hospital in Newark and grew up on the suburban streets of Kasselton, New Jersey. Zia was born in a mud hut in a village outside of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Sometime during the reign of Papa Doc, her parents became political prisoners. No one knows too many details. Her father was executed. Her mother, when released, was damaged goods. She grabbed her daughter and escaped on what might liberally be dubbed a raft. Three passengers died on the journey. Zia and her mother survived. They made their way to the Bronx where they took up residence in the basement of a beauty parlor. The two spent their days quietly sweeping hair. The hair, it seemed to Zia, was inescapable. It was on her clothes, clinging to her skin, in her throat, in her lungs. She lived forever with that feeling that a stray strand was in her mouth and she couldn't quite pull it out. To this day, when Zia gets nervous, her fingers play with her tongue, as though trying to pluck out a memento of her past.

When the surgery was over, Zia and I collapsed onto a bench. Zia untied her surgical mask and let it fall to her chest.

“Piece of cake,” she said.

“Amen,” I agreed. “How did your date go last night?”

“It sucked,” she said. “And I don't mean that literally.”

“Sorry.”

“Men are such scum.”

“Don't I know it.”

“I'm getting so desperate,” she said, “I'm thinking of sleeping with you again.”

“Gasp,” I said. “Woman, have you no standards?”

Her smile was blinding, the bright white against the dark skin. She was a shade under six feet tall with smooth muscles and cheekbones so high and sharp you feared they might pierce her skin. “When are you going to start dating?” she asked.

“I date.”

“I mean, long enough to have a sexual encounter.”

“Not all women are easy as you, Zia.”

“Sad,” she said, giving my arm a playful punch.

Zia and I slept together once—and we both knew that it would never happen again. It was how we met. We hooked up during my first year of medical school. Yep, a one-night stand. I have had my fair share of one-night stands, but only two have been memorable. The first led to disaster. The second—this one—led to a relationship I will cherish forever.

It was eight o'clock at night by the time we got out of our scrubs. We took Zia's car, a tiny thing called a BMW Mini, to the Stop & Shop on Northwood Avenue and picked up some groceries. Zia chatted without letup as we wheeled carts down the aisles. I liked when Zia talked. It gave me energy. At the deli counter Zia pulled a call number. She looked at the specials board and frowned.

“What?” I said.

“Boar's Head ham on sale.”

“What about it?”

“Boar's Head,” she repeated. “What marketing genius came up with that name? ‘Say, I have an idea. Let's name our premium cold cuts after the most disgusting animal imaginable. No, check that. Let's name it after its head.' ”

“You always order it,” I said.

She thought about it. “Yeah, I guess.”

We moved to the checkout line. Zia put her stuff up front. I placed the divider down and unloaded my cart. A portly cashier began to ring up her items.

“You hungry?” she asked me.

I shrugged. “Guess I could go for a couple of slices at Garbo's.”

“Let's do it.” Zia's eyes drifted over my shoulder and then jerked to a stop. She squinted and something crossed her face. “Marc?”

“Yeah.”

She waved it off. “Nah, can't be.”

“What?”

Still staring over my shoulder, Zia gestured with her chin. I turned slowly and when I saw her, I felt it in my chest.

“I've only seen her in pictures,” Zia said, “but isn't that . . . ?”

I managed a nod.

It was Rachel.

The world closed in around me. It shouldn't feel this way. I knew that. We had broken up years ago. Now, after all this time, I should be smiling. I should feel something wistful, a passing nostalgia, a poignant remembrance of a time when I was young and naïve. But no, that was not what was going on here. Rachel stood ten yards away and it all flooded back. What I felt was a still-too-powerful yearning, a longing that tore through me, that made both the love and heartbreak feel fresh and alive.

“You okay?” Zia said.

Another nod.

Are you one of those who believe that we all have one true soul mate—one and only one preordained love? There, across three Stop & Shop checkout lanes and under a sign reading
EXPRESS LANE
—15
ITEMS OR LESS
, stood mine.

Zia said, “I thought she got married.”

“She did,” I said.

“No ring.” Then Zia punched my arm. “Oooh, this is exciting, isn't it?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Exhilaration city.”

Zia snapped her fingers. “Hey, you know what this is like? That crappy old album you used to play. The song about meeting the old lover in the grocery store. What's the name of it?”

The first time I'd seen Rachel, when I was a lad of nineteen years, the effect was relatively gentle. There was no big boom. I'm not even sure that I found her overly attractive. But as I'd soon learn, I like a woman whose looks grow on you. You start off thinking, Okay, she's pretty
decent looking, and then, a few days later, maybe it's something she says or the way she tilts her head when she says it, but then, wham, it's like getting hit by a bus.

It felt like that again now. Rachel had changed but not by much. The years had made that sneaky beauty harden maybe, more brittle and angled. She was thinner. Her dark blue-black hair was pulled back and tied into a ponytail. Most men like the hair down. I've always liked it tied back, the openness and exposure of it, I guess, especially with Rachel's cheekbones and neck. She wore jeans and a gray blouse. Her hazel eyes were down, her head bent in that pose of concentration I knew so well. She had not seen me yet.

“ ‘Same Old Lang Syne,' ” Zia said.

“What?”

“The song about the lovers in the grocery store. By Dan Somebody. That's the title. ‘Same Old Lang Syne.' ” Then she added: “I think that's the title.”

Rachel reached into her wallet and plucked out a twenty. She began to hand it to the cashier. Her gaze lifted—and that was when she saw me.

I can't say exactly what crossed her face. She did not look surprised. Our eyes met, but I did not see joy there. Fear, perhaps. Maybe resignation. I don't know. I also don't know how long we both stood there like that.

“Maybe I should move away from you,” Zia whispered.

“Huh?”

“If she thinks you're with a chick this hot, she'll conclude that she has no chance.”

I think I smiled.

“Marc?”

“Yeah.”

“The way you're standing like that. Gaping like a total whack job. It's a little scary.”

“Thanks.”

I felt her hand push on my back. “Go over and say hello.”

My feet started moving, though I don't remember the brain issuing any commands. Rachel let the cashier bag her groceries. She stepped toward me and tried to smile. Her smile had always been spectacular, the kind that makes you think of poetry and spring showers, a dazzler
that can change your day. This smile, however, was not like that. It was tighter. It was pained. And I wondered if she was holding back or if she could no longer smile like she used to, if something had dimmed the wattage permanently.

We stopped a yard away from each other, neither sure if the proper protocol called for a hug, a kiss, a handshake. So we did none of the above. I stood there and felt the hurt everywhere.

“Hi,” I said.

“Good to see you still have all the smooth lines, ” Rachel replied.

I feigned a rakish grin. “Hey, baby, what's your sign?”