The Stranger Beside You (12 page)

It was definitely Tom’s handwriting.

What the hell?

There was nothing else, just the four digits.

I sat without breathing for a long time, pondering the numbers, desperate to make sense of their meaning.  I glanced around the room, my mind tired but racing.  Then it hit me.

I set the Bible on the floor and stood up.  I opened the closet door and shoved aside a dozen of Tom’s dress shirts on hangers.  Tom’s big gun safe had a digital keypad.  I had never opened it and had never had reason to know or care about the combination but I dropped to my knees in front of the iron box and rubbed my hands together.  Then I used the keypad to enter five…seven…one…two.

A tiny green light blinked on.  I grabbed the handle and pulled.  The door opened with a click.  So it was true, Tom had been sending me a message!

The safe was mostly empty.  The first thing that caught my attention was that his gun was missing.  That was disturbing.  I removed a couple of file folders and a three-ring binder.  I paged through them and found very little other than family finance stuff, bank records, a copy of our living will, etc.  The binder was filled with investment statements.  Nothing that pointed to the fact that Tom might have been involved in something illegal or that he was having an affair with a beautiful FBI agent.

I briefly scanned through the documents and that’s when I found it.

Taped to the back cover of the binder was a flash memory stick, one of those small devices you can carry on your keychain and plug into a USB port on a computer.  You can store any kind of digital files on there you want.  Video, music, games, text documents, whatever.

I peeled off the tape and held the memory stick in my hand.  Something in my gut told me that whatever was on that thing had nothing to do with our personal finances.  I backed away from the safe.  Tom kept a laptop at his desk in his study.  I raced down the stairs.  Morning light was filtering through the drapes.  I opened his laptop and plugged the memory stick into an empty USB port on the side, then clicked around until I found the removable drive listed on the control panel.  I clicked to open it and held my breath.

It contained a text document and an encrypted file of some kind.  I clicked on the encrypted file and a window opened requiring a user ID and password to gain entry.  I closed the file and clicked on the text document.  It contained four short lines of text that took my breath away.

BE CAREFUL

THEY will be watching

Find Bob’s stash of cash

I’m sorry

I suddenly felt dizzy.  I tried to swallow but my mouth had gone dry.  I stared without blinking until my eyes got so dry that tears began coursing down my cheeks.

It was creepy thinking that my husband had found a way to communicate with me from the grave.

“What did you get yourself involved in?” I whispered.

They will be watching
.

I glanced around.  A chill sizzled up my spine.  The doors and windows were locked, and the drapes and blinds were drawn shut. 

They will be watching
.  Who?  Who was watching?  Who had he been talking about?

It was clear that he had left me a trail of breadcrumbs to follow.  First the Bible verse, then the four-digit combination to his gun safe, and now this.

Tom had cheated on me and then killed his lover to cover his tracks.  The evidence pointing to those facts seemed painfully clear to me.  But where was he leading me, and did I want to go there?  What would I find at the end of his trail of clues?  Was there more to the story than the FBI was telling me?  Is that why Tom had prepared his clues in advance?  Had the truth been so dangerous that he couldn’t risk confiding in me before his death?

My head was spinning. 

I went to the kitchen and filled a glass with water, drank it down quickly and filled the glass again. 

Find Bob’s stash of cash
.  I nodded.  “Okay, Tom,” I said.  “I’m on my way.”

20

The quickest solution would have been to grab Brynn Nelson right away.  They could grab her off the street and stuff her in a car, take her to an isolated location and torture her.  Mr. Z and his men were well trained in torture.  All the loony talk on TV and in Washington about whether or not torture was an effective means of getting information made him laugh.  He could make anyone tell him anything he wanted to know.  But he decided that the quickest solution wasn’t necessarily the smartest choice.

They had watched and listened for months now.  They had listened to Tom and Brynn around the clock; every conversation in bed, at the dinner table, in the car, on the phone, yet never once had Tom Nelson mentioned a word about Mr. Z or any of his men.

Mr. Z had not anticipated Tom Nelson’s death.  There were a thousand possible variables you had to prepare for, but every now and then you still got blindsided.  If Tom Nelson had run to the cops or the feds, Mr. Z would have been prepared.  If he had loaded up his family and tried to make a run for it, or even left his wife and kids behind and made a run for it on his own, Mr. Z and his people would have been ready for that too.  But they couldn’t have foreseen him jumping in front of a subway train. 

Tom Nelson had cheated on his wife and had been very smart and cautious about it.  The affair had surprised them at first, and they had been tempted to intervene and shut it down, but Mr. Z himself had made the judgment call to hold back.  Special Agent Price had been very useful in tracking Daphne Fleming.  He had kept close tabs on her.  He had bugged her office and recorded all her phone conversations.  When they found her body floating in the river, no one had been more shocked than Price.  He simply couldn’t explain it.  Mr. Z had demanded to know the identity of TandD141717, but Price couldn’t deliver. TandD141717 was a mystery.   

They were parked beside a chain-link fence in lower Manhattan.  Finch was at the wheel of the rental car.  He watched the Buick in the rearview mirror.  It parked behind them and Finch watched Garcia get out and walk up alongside the car.  Mr. Z was in the backseat.  

“We’ve got two dead bodies,” Mr. Z said.

Garcia nodded but didn’t speak.

“You were supposed to be watching them.  I want answers.”

“All I know is the feds showed up in the middle of the night and hauled him away.”

“They think he murdered the woman.  How is that possible?”

“It’s not.  I’m sure of it.”

“Why would the feds suspect him?”

“The email.  What does Price say?”

“He’s working on it.”

Mr. Z glanced out the window.  He was itching to know the identity of TandD141717.  Price had come up empty.  Whoever it was had known about the affair and about Fleming’s body and where to find it.  Could TandD141717 be the real killer?  If so, what kind of game was he playing? 

“We have a theory,” Mr. Z said.  “Price thinks Fleming might have had another lover, or maybe a former boyfriend, and this guy flies into a jealous rage, kills her and pins it on him.”

Garcia considered it.  “What about Nelson and the train?”

“Bad luck.”

“Anything’s possible.”

“I have Price looking for the boyfriend.”

“What if there is no boyfriend?  What then?”

“If Tom Nelson didn’t kill her, and an old lover didn’t kill her, I want to know who did.”

“What do you want to do about Brynn Nelson?  Should we grab her?”

“Not yet.”

“Do you think she knows anything?”

“No.”

“What about her children?”

“What about them?”

“When will we grab them?”

“Soon.”

•  •  •

Bob’s stash of cash was a family joke.  Ashton had named his grandfather’s goldfish Sponge Bob.  We had shortened it to Bob.  It was funny.  Bob was the source of a lot of laughs at our house.  We talked about him like he was the fount of all wisdom.  Need advice?  Ask Bob, he knows everything.  Yeah, I know, pretty corny, but I love that stuff.

We called the little gold treasure chest at the bottom of the aquarium “Bob’s stash of cash.”  Tom liked to refer to it as Bob’s walking around money, then he would howl with laughter, and for some reason, Tom had used it as a clue.

I returned to Long Island. 

The nurse wasn’t around and I was glad.  The door to Clancy’s room was open.  Meredith was out of bed now and the nurse had parked her wheelchair in front of the window in Clancy’s room.  She stared vacantly out at nothing much at all.  Tom’s father was still transfixed by the Weather Channel.  There was a Viagra commercial on and I couldn’t help wondering if the sexual nature of the ad would still register with his brain, and if it did, was it possible for him to look at his wife and have any recollection of the good old days, to remember what it had been like to make love to her, considering that he no longer recognized his bride any more than he would a stranger on the street.

I glanced down the hall in both directions, gently closed the door, and kissed Tom’s mother on the cheek.

“Good morning, Meredith.”

She turned her head.  I could see the vacancy in her eyes and smell the chemicals from the perm.  I touched her hair.  “You look like a movie star,” I said.

Her big eyes searched me.  It had to be so lonely being trapped inside there.  The nurse had dressed her in Polyester pants and a floral-pattern blouse.  There was a juice stain on her thigh.  Standing in the room with her made my heart ache.

I looked across the room at the fish tank, then glanced at the door. 

They will be watching
.

Could they be following me?  Had they seen me at the house?  Would they have trailed me from New Jersey?  I had watched my rearview mirror on the drive back to Long Island, looking for any sign of suspicious cars on the road behind me.  Every time someone passed me on the road, I did my best to shrink down into my seat.  I had no idea who I was looking for, or what they would even look like if I saw them.

They will be watching
.

I stood at the fish aquarium and looked down into the water.  A few flakes of uneaten fish food still floated at the surface and one of the red plastic plants had toppled over.  Bob was down there investigating.  The motorized filter was humming.  The lid of the treasure chest yawned open, a jet of silky bubbles rising to the surface.  I dipped my fingers in but Bob didn’t appear to notice me.  Then the lid of the treasure chest lazily settled shut and I stared nervously down at it. 

What the hell were you trying to tell me, Tom?

Again, I glanced over my shoulder at the door.  I looked past Meredith at the window.  There was no one visibly lurking outside in the bushes. 

Bob skirted away quickly to find safety as I dipped my arm in up to the elbow and got my fingers around the treasure chest and lifted it from out of the landscape of blue rocks.  I wiped my hand on my pant leg and shook the water off the toy-size treasure chest, then looked at it. 

Find Bob’s stash of cash.

Okay, Tom.  Now what?

I turned it over so I could see the bottom side.  There was nothing there.  I wanted to cry.  I had made it this far based on his cryptic clues because Tom and I had developed a kind of shorthand way of each understanding the way the other thought.  Not like we were psychic or anything, we simply understood each other very well, but Bob’s stash of cash was looking like a dead end.

I went back in with my arm and fished around some more.  I scoured the bed of rock and pushed around the fake vegetation as Bob flittered around nervously, like the end of the world was drawing near.  There was nothing left to find. 

The only sound in the room was the low volume on the Weather Channel and the hypnotic hum of the water pump.  There was no reason to tell them goodbye.  They never even knew I was there.  So I palmed Bob’s treasure chest and ducked out of the room.

I was nearly to the front exit when I heard someone call my name.  My heart jumped into my throat.  It was a woman’s voice.

“Mrs. Nelson?  Is that you?”

I turned and saw the nurse but I didn’t stop.  I raised my hand to wave goodbye and then hurried outside.  There was no one waiting in the parking lot to jump me, but I quickened my pace anyway.  I hit the button on the armrest and locked all four doors, then popped on my sunglasses and slouched down in my seat.

I held the plastic treasure chest and turned it over in my hands.  It was very light.  The lid opened on a hinge and a couple of small holes were drilled through the fake bounty inside to allow the air bubbles to escape.  I shook it.  There was something inside, but there was no way to open it, so how could Tom have inserted anything? 

Then I spotted the seam.  It looked pretty evident that the treasure chest had been sawed in half with some kind of blade and then glued back together.  Interesting.  I turned it in my hands again, tracing the seam around all four sides.  I tried to snap it apart but the glue was too strong. So I glanced around the car for something to smash it with.

I got out and knelt down and whacked it against the asphalt.  The sound echoed and I glanced around nervously.  The crazy thing still didn’t break, so I whacked it again.  A small piece of plastic from one corner snapped off and left a small scuff on the ground but still it held together.

“
Damn it
.”

I opened the trunk.  Tom had always kept me stocked with a few emergency supplies, but I needed something solid and heavy.  I lifted the flap of carpet that hides the spare tire and spotted the hand jack.  It was held in place by an oversize wing nut.  

I lifted it out of the car and placed it on the ground between my feet, then set the plastic treasure chest on the asphalt about eighteen inches from my toes.  I lifted the hand jack up and quickly slammed it down.  The metal jack hit with a thundering clang and the plastic treasure chest shattered into pieces. 

I saw a flash of white amid the debris and spotted a small chunk of Styrofoam.  I picked it up and studied it.  There was a narrow slot cut into it, with a key inside.  I busted the Styrofoam apart and shoved the key into my pocket.  I tossed the hand jack back into the trunk and jumped into the car.  My heart was racing.  I pulled out of the parking lot, drove two miles, and turned onto the highway.