Three Harlan Coben Novels (14 page)

M
yron was two blocks from home when the cell rang. Win asked, “Did I ever tell you about Cingle Shaker?” “No.”

“She’s a private eye. If she were any hotter, your teeth would melt.”

“That’s swell, really.”

“I’ve had her,” Win said.

“Good for you.”

“I went back for seconds. And we still talk.”

“Yikes,” Myron said.

Win still talking to a woman he’d slept with more than once—in human terms, that was like a marriage celebrating its silver anniversary.

“Is there a reason you’re sharing this warm moment with me right now?” Then Myron remembered something. “Wait, a private eye named Cingle. Hester Crimstein called her when I was being interrogated, right?”

“Exactly. Cingle has gathered some new information on the disappearances.”

“You set up a meet?”

“She’s waiting for you at Baumgart’s.”

Baumgart’s, long Myron’s favorite restaurant serving both Chinese and American dishes, had recently opened a branch in Livingston.

“How will I recognize her?”

“Hot enough to make your teeth melt,” Win said. “How many women at Baumgart’s fit that description?”

Win hung up. Five minutes later Myron entered the restaurant. Cingle didn’t disappoint. She was curvy to the max, built like a Marvel
comic drawing come to life. Myron walked up to Peter Chin, the owner, to say hello. Peter frowned at him.

“What?”

“She’s not Jessica,” Peter said.

Myron and Jessica used to go to Baumgart’s, albeit the original in Englewood, all the time. Peter had never gotten over the breakup. The unspoken rule was that Myron was not allowed to bring other women here. For seven years he had kept that rule, more for himself than Peter.

“It’s not a date.”

Peter looked at Cingle, looked at Myron, made a face that said
Who are you kidding?

“It’s not.” Then: “You realize, of course, I haven’t even seen Jessica in years.”

Peter put a finger in the air. “Years fly by, but the heart stays in the same place.”

“Damn.”

“What?”

“You’ve been reading fortune cookies again, haven’t you?”

“There is much wisdom there.”

“Tell you what. Read Sunday’s
New York Times
instead. Styles section.”

“I already did.”

“And?”

Again Peter raised his finger. “You can’t ride two horses with one behind.”

“Hey, I told you that one. It’s Yiddish.”

“I know.”

“And it doesn’t apply.”

“Just sit down.” Peter dismissed him with a wave. “And order for yourself. I’m not helping you.”

When Cingle stood to greet him, necks didn’t so much turn in her direction as snap. They exchanged hellos and sat down.

“So you’re Win’s friend,” Cingle said.

“I am.”

She studied him for a moment. “You don’t look psychotic.”

“I like to think of myself as the counterbalance.”

There were no papers in front of her.

“Do you have the police file?” he asked.

“There is none. There isn’t even an official investigation yet.”

“So what have you got?”

“Katie Rochester started taking money out at ATMs. Then she ran away. There is no evidence, other than parental protestations, to suggest anything other than that.”

“The investigator who grabbed me at the airport—” Myron began.

“Loren Muse. She’s good, by the way.”

“Right, Muse. She asked me a lot about Katie Rochester. I think they have something solid linking me to her.”

“Yes and no. They have something solid linking Katie to Aimee. I’m not sure it links directly to you.”

“That being?”

“Their last ATM charges.”

“What about them?”

“Both girls used the exact same Citibank in Manhattan.”

Myron stopped, tried to absorb that one.

The waiter came over. New guy. Myron didn’t know him. Usually Peter had the waiter bring over a few free appetizers. Not today.

“I’m used to men staring at me,” Cingle said. “But the owner keeps glaring at me like I urinated on the floor.”

“He misses my old girlfriend.”

“That’s sweet.”

“Adorable.”

Cingle met Peter’s eye, wiggled her fingers to show a wedding band, and yelled in Peter’s direction, “He’s safe. I’m already married.”

Peter turned away.

Cingle shrugged, explained about the ATM charge, about Aimee’s face being clear in the security camera. Myron tried to figure it through. Nothing came to him.

“There’s one more thing you might want to know about.”

Myron waited.

“There’s a woman named Edna Skylar. She’s a doctor over at St. Barnabas. The cops are keeping this under heavy wraps because
Rochester’s father is a nutjob, but apparently, Dr. Skylar spotted Katie Rochester on the street in Chelsea.”

She told him the story, about how Edna Skylar had followed the girl into the subway, that she was with a man, what Katie said about not telling anyone.

“Did the police look into it?”

“Look into what?”

“Did they try to figure out where Katie was, who the guy was, anything?”

“Why? Katie Rochester is eighteen years old. She gathered money before she ran. She’s got a connected father who was probably abusive in some fashion. The police have other things to worry about. Real crimes. Muse is handling a double homicide in East Orange. Manpower is short. And what Edna Skylar saw confirmed what they already knew.”

“That Katie Rochester ran away.”

“Right.”

Myron sat back. “And the fact that they both used the same ATM?”

“Either a startling coincidence . . .”

Myron shook his head. “No way.”

“I agree. No way. So either that or they both planned to run away. There was a reason they both chose that ATM. I don’t know what. But maybe they planned this together. Katie and Aimee went to the same high school, right?”

“Right, but I haven’t found any other connection between them.”

“Both eighteen, both graduating high school, both from the same town.” Cingle shrugged. “There has to be something.”

She was right. He’d need to speak to the Rochesters, see what they knew. He’d have to be careful. He didn’t want to open that side of things up. He also wanted to talk to the doctor, Edna Skylar, get a good description of the man Katie Rochester was with, see exactly where she was, what subway she was riding, what direction she was heading in.

“Thing is,” Cingle said, “if Katie and Aimee are runaways, there might be a reason they ran.”

“I was just thinking the same thing,” Myron said.

“They might not want to be found.”

“True.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Find them anyway.”

“And if they want to stay hidden?”

Myron thought about Aimee Biel. He thought about Erik and he thought about Claire. Good people. Reliable, solid. He wondered what could possibly make Aimee run away from them, what could have been so bad that she’d pull something like this.

“Guess I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it,” he said.

Win sat by himself in the corner of the dimly lit strip club. No one bothered him. They knew better. If he wanted someone near him, he’d let them know.

The song on the jukebox was one of the most putrid songs from the eighties, Mr. Mister’s “Broken Wings.” Myron claimed that it was the worst song of the decade. Win countered that “We Built This City on Rock-n-Roll” by Starship was worse. The argument lasted an hour without resolution. So, as they often did in situations like this, they went to Esperanza to end the tie-breaker, but she sided with “Too Shy” by Kajagoogoo.

Win liked to sit in this corner booth and look out and think.

There was a major-league baseball team in town. Several of the players had come to the “gentlemen’s club,” a truly inspired euphemism for strip joint, to unwind. The working girls went crazy. Win watched a stripper of questionably legal age hit on one of the team’s top pitchers.

“How old did you say you were?” the stripper asked.

“Twenty-nine,” the pitcher said.

“Wow.” She shook her head. “You don’t look
that
old.”

A wistful smile played on Win’s lips. Youth.

Windsor Horne Lockwood III was born to great wealth. He did not pretend otherwise. He did not like multibillionaires who bragged about their business acumen when they’d started out with Daddy’s billions. Genius is almost irrelevant in the pursuit of enormous riches
anyway. In fact, it can be a hindrance. If you are smart enough to see the risks, you might try to avoid them. That type of thinking—safe thinking—never led to great wealth.

Win started life in the lush Main Line of Philadelphia. His family had been on the board of the stock exchange since its inception. He had a direct descendant who’d been this country’s first secretary of the treasury. Win was born with not only a silver spoon in his mouth, but an entire silver place setting at his feet.

And he looked the part.

That had been his problem. From his earliest years, with his towhead blond hair and ruddy complexion and delicate features, with his face naturally set in an expression that looked smug, people detested Win on sight. You looked at Windsor Horne Lockwood III and you saw elitism, undeserved wealth, someone who would always look down his porcelain-sculpted nose at you. All your own failures rose up in a wave of resentment and envy—just by gazing upon this seemingly soft, coddled, privileged boy.

It had led to ugly incidents.

At the age of ten Win had gotten separated from his mother at the Philadelphia Zoo. A group of students from an inner-city school had found him in his little blue blazer with the crest on the pocket and beaten the hell out of him. He’d been hospitalized and nearly lost a kidney. The physical pain was bad. The shame of being a scared little boy was far worse.

Win never wanted to experience that again.

People, Win knew, made snap judgments based on appearances. No great insight there. And yes, there were the obvious prejudices against African-Americans or Jews or what-have-you. But Win was more concerned with the more garden-variety prejudices. If, for example, you see an overweight woman eating a doughnut, you are repulsed. You make snap judgments—she is undisciplined, lazy, sloppy, probably stupid, definitely lacking in self-esteem.

In a strange way, the same thing happened when people saw Win.

He had a choice. Stay behind the hedges, safe in the cocoon of privilege, live a protected albeit fearful life. Or do something about it.

He chose the latter.

Money makes everything easier. Oddly enough, Win always considered Myron to be a real-life Batman, but the Caped Crusader had started off as Win’s childhood role model. Bruce Wayne’s only superpower was tremendous wealth. He used it to train himself to be a crime fighter. Win did something similar with his money. He hired former squad leaders from both Delta Force and the Green Berets to train him as if he were one of their most elite. Win also found the world’s top instructors on firearms, on knives, on hand-to-hand combat. He secured the services of martial artists from a wide variety of countries and either flew them to the family estate in Bryn Mawr or traveled overseas. He spent a full year with a reclusive martial-arts master in Korea, high in the hills in the southern part of the country. He learned about pain, how to inflict it without leaving marks. He learned about intimidation tactics. He learned about electronics, about locks, about the underworld, about security procedures.

It all came together. Win was a sponge when it came to picking up new techniques. He worked hard, ridiculously hard, training at least five hours every day. He had naturally fast hands, the hunger, the desire, the work ethic, the coldness—all the ingredients.

The fear went away.

Once he was sufficiently trained, Win started hanging out in the most drug-infested, crime-ridden corners of the city. He would go there wearing blue blazers with crests or pink polos or loafers without socks. The bad people would see him and lick their lips. There would be hate in their eyes. They would attack. And Win would answer.

There may be better fighters out there, Win assumed, especially now that he was growing older.

But not many.

His cell phone rang. He picked it up and said, “Articulate.”

“We got a wiretap on a guy named Dominick Rochester.”

The call was from an old colleague Win hadn’t heard from in three years. No matter. This was how it worked in their world. The wiretap did not surprise him. Rochester was supposedly connected. “Go on.”

“Someone leaked to him your friend Bolitar’s connection to his daughter.”

Win waited.

“Rochester has a more secure phone. We’re not sure. But we think he called the Twins.”

There was silence.

“Do you know them?”

“Just by reputation,” Win said.

“Take what you heard and put it on steroids. One of them has some kind of weird condition. He doesn’t feel pain, but man, does he like to inflict it. The other one, his name is Jeb—and yeah, I know how this is going to sound—he likes to bite.”

“Do tell,” Win said.

“We once found some guy the Twins worked over with just Jeb’s teeth. The body . . . I mean, it was a red puddle. He bit out the guy’s eyes, Win. I still don’t sleep when I think about it.”

“Maybe you should buy a night-light.”

“Don’t think I haven’t thought of it. They scare me,” the voice on the phone said, “like
you
scare me.”

Win knew that in this man’s world, that was about as big a compliment as he could pay the Twins. “And you believe that Rochester called them right after he heard about Myron Bolitar?”

“Within minutes, yeah.”

“Thank you for the information.

“Win, listen to what I’m saying. They’re absolutely nuts. We know about this one guy, a big old mafia don from Kansas City. He hired them. Anyway, it didn’t work out. The mafia don pisses them off, I don’t know how. So the don, no fool, he tries to buy them off, make peace. Nothing doing. The Twins get a hold of his four-year-old grandson. Four years old, Win. They send him back in chewed-up pieces. Then—get this—
after
they’re done, then they accept the don’s money. The
same
amount of money he’d already offered. They didn’t ask for a penny more. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”