Three Harlan Coben Novels (37 page)

I closed my eyes and let it all wash over me. Things had been bad, but for the past six months anyway, there had been an escape for us, a calm and warm center in our daughter. I glanced at the sky now, blinked again, and then looked back down at the dirt that covered my volatile wife. “Monica,” I said out loud. And then I made my wife one last vow.

I swore on her grave that I would find Tara.

A servant or butler or associate or whatever the current term was led me down the corridor and into the library. The décor was understated though unequivocally rich—finished dark floors with simple oriental carpets, old-Americana furniture that was solid rather than ornate. Despite his wealth and large plot of land Edgar was not one for show wealth. The term
nouveau riche
was to him profane, unspeakable.

Dressed in a blue cashmere blazer, Edgar rose from behind his expansive oak desk. There was a feather quill pen on the top—his great-grandfather’s, if I recall—and two bronze busts, one of Washington and one of Jefferson. I was surprised to see Uncle Carson sitting there too. When he’d visited me in the hospital, I had been too frail to embrace. Carson made up for that now. He pulled me close. I held on to him in silence. He, too, smelled of autumn and woodsmoke.

There were no photographs in the room—no family-vacation snapshots, no school portraits, no shot of the man and his missus decked out at a charity formal. In fact, I do not think I had ever seen a photograph anywhere in the house.

Carson said, “How are you feeling, Marc?”

I told him that I was as well as could be expected and turned toward my father-in-law. Edgar did not come around the desk. We did not embrace. We did not, in fact, even shake hands. He gestured toward the chair in front of the desk.

I did not know Edgar very well. We had only met three times. I do not know how much money he has, but even out of these dwellings, even on a city street or at a bus depot, hell, even naked, you could tell
that the Portmans were from money. Monica had the bearing too, the one ingrained over generations, the one that cannot be taught, the one that may literally be genetic. Monica’s choice to live in our relatively modest dwelling was probably a form of rebellion.

She had hated her father.

I was not a big fan of his either, probably because I had met his type before. Edgar thinks himself a pull-up-by-the-bootstraps sort, but he himself earned his money the old-fashioned way: He inherited it. I don’t know many superwealthy people, but I noticed that the more things were handed to you on a silver platter, the more you complain about welfare mothers and government handouts. It is bizarre. Edgar belongs to that unique class of the entitled who have deluded themselves into believing that they somehow earned their status through hard work. We all live with self-justification, of course, and if you have never fended for yourself, if you live in luxury and have done nothing to deserve it, well, that is going to compound your insecurities, I guess. But it shouldn’t make you such a prig, to boot.

I sat. Edgar followed suit. Carson remained standing. I stared at Edgar. He had the plump of the well fed. His face was all soft edges. The normal ruddy on his cheeks, so far from anything rawbone, was gone now. He laced his fingers and rested them on his paunch. He looked, I was somewhat surprised to see, devastated, drawn, and sapless.

I say
surprised
, because Edgar always struck me as pure id, a person whose own pain and pleasure trumped all others’, who believed those who inhabited the space around him were little more than window dressing for his own bemusement. Edgar had now lost two children. His son, Eddie the Fourth, had died while speeding under the influence ten years ago. According to Monica, Eddie veered across the double yellow line and plowed into the semi on purpose. For some reason, she blamed her father. She blamed him for a lot of things.

There is also Monica’s mother. She “rests” a lot. She takes “extended vacations.” In short, she is in and out of institutions. Both times we met, my mother-in-law was propped up for some social affair, well dressed and powdered, lovely and too pale, a vacancy in her eyes, a slur in her speech, a sway in her stance.

Except for Uncle Carson, Monica had been estranged from her family. As you might imagine, I hardly minded.

“You wanted to see me?” I said.

“Yes, Marc. Yes, I did.”

I waited.

Edgar put his hands on his desk. “Did you love my daughter?”

I was caught off guard, but I still said, “Very much,” with no hesitation.

He seemed to see the lie. I worked hard to keep my gaze steady. “She still wasn’t happy, you know.”

“I’m not sure you can blame me for that,” I said.

He nodded slowly. “Fair point.”

But my own pass-the-buck defense didn’t really work on me. Edgar’s words were a fresh body blow. The guilt came roaring back.

“Did you know that she was seeing a psychiatrist?” Edgar asked.

I turned toward Carson first, then back to Edgar. “No.”

“She didn’t want anyone to know.”

“How did you find out?”

Edgar did not reply. He stared down at his hands. Then he said: “I want to show you something.”

I sneaked another look at Uncle Carson. His jaw was set. I thought I saw a tremble. I turned back to Edgar. “Okay.”

Edgar opened his desk drawer, reached in, and pulled out a plastic bag. He raised it into view, gripping the bag at the corner between his forefinger and thumb. It took a moment, but when I realized what I was looking at, my eyes went wide.

Edgar saw my reaction. “You recognize it then?”

I couldn’t speak at first. I glanced over at Carson. His eyes were red. I looked back at Edgar and nodded numbly. Inside the plastic bag was a small swatch of clothing, maybe three inches by three inches. The pattern was one I had seen two weeks ago, moments before being shot.

Pink with black penguins.

My voice was barely a hush. “Where did you get this?”

Edgar handed me a large brown envelope, the kind with bubble wrap on the inside. This too, was protected in plastic. I turned it around. Edgar’s name and address had been printed on a white label. There was no return address. The postmark read New York City.

“It came in today’s mail,” Edgar said. He gestured to the swatch. “Is it Tara’s?”

I think I said yes.

“There’s more,” Edgar said. He reached into the drawer again. “I
took the liberty of putting everything in plastic bags. In case the authorities need to test it.”

Again he handed me what looked like a Ziploc bag. Smaller this time. There were hairs inside. Little wisps of hair. With mounting dread, I realized what I was looking at. My breath stopped.

Baby hair.

From far away, I heard Edgar ask, “Are they hers?”

I closed my eyes and tried to picture Tara in the crib. The image of my daughter, I was horrified to realize, was already fading in the mind’s eye. How could that be? I could no longer tell if I was seeing memory or something I conjured up to replace what I was already forgetting. Damn it. Tears pressed against my eyelids. I tried to bring back the feel of my daughter’s soft scalp, the way my finger would trace the top.

“Marc?”

“They could be,” I said, opening my eyes. “There’s no way for me to know for sure.”

“Something else,” Edgar said. He handed me another plastic bag. Gingerly, I put down the bag with her hair on the desk. I took the new bag. There was a sheet of white paper in it. A note from some kind of laser printer.

If you contact the authorities, we disappear. You will never know what happened to her. We will be watching. We will know. We have a man on the inside. Your calls are being monitored. Do not discuss this over the phone. We know that you, Grandpa, are rich. We want two million dollars. We want you, Daddy, to deliver the ransom. You, Grandpa, will get the money ready. We are enclosing a cell phone. It is untraceable. But if you dial out or use it in any way, we will know. We will disappear and you will never see the child again. Get the money ready. Give it to Daddy. Daddy, keep the money and phone near you. Go home and wait. We will call and tell you what to do. Deviate from what we ask, and you will never see your daughter again. There will be no second chance.

The syntax was odd, to put it mildly. I read the note three times and then I looked up at Edgar and Carson. A funny calm spread over me. Yes, this was terrifying, but receiving this note . . . it was also a relief. Something had finally happened. We could act now. We could get Tara back. There was hope.

Edgar stood and headed toward the corner of the room. He opened
a closet door and pulled out a gym bag with a Nike logo on it. Without preamble, he said, “It’s all here.”

He dropped the bag onto my lap. I stared down at it. “Two million dollars?”

“The bills are not sequential, but we have a list of all the serial numbers, just in case.”

I looked at Carson and then back at Edgar. “You don’t think we should contact the FBI?”

“Not really, no.” Edgar perched himself on the lid of the desk, folding his arms across his chest. He smelled of barbershop bay rum, but I could sense something more primitive, more rancid, that lay just beneath. Up close, his eyes had the dark rings of exhaustion. “It’s your decision, Marc. You’re the father. We’ll respect whatever you do. But as you know, I have had some dealings with the federal authorities. Perhaps my views are colored by my own sense of their incompetence, or perhaps I am biased because I’ve witnessed the degree to which they are ruled by personal agendas. If it were my daughter, I’d rather trust my own judgment than theirs.”

I was not sure what to say or do. Edgar took care of that. He clapped his hands once and then gestured toward the door.

“The note says that you should go home and wait. I think it’s best if we obey.”

The same driver
was there. I slid into the backseat, the Nike bag pressed against my chest. My emotions rocketed between abject fear and the strangest tinge of elation. I could get my daughter back. I could blow it all.

But first things first: Should I tell the police?

I tried to calm myself, to look at it coldly, at a distance, weigh the pros and cons. That was impossible, of course. I am a doctor. I have made life-altering decisions before. I know that the best way to do that is to remove the baggage, the ardent excess, from the equation. But my daughter’s life was at stake. My own daughter. To echo what I said in the beginning: my world.

The house Monica and I bought is literally around the corner from the house I grew up in and where my parents still reside. I am ambivalent about that. I really don’t like living so close to my parents, but I dislike the guilt of abandoning them even more. My compromise: Live near them and then travel a lot.

Lenny and Cheryl live four blocks away, near the Kasselton Mall, in the house where Cheryl’s parents had raised her. Cheryl’s parents moved to Florida six years ago. They keep a condo up here in neighboring Roseland so they can visit their grandchildren and escape the molten-lava summers of the Sunshine State.

I don’t particularly like living in Kasselton. The town has changed very little over the past thirty years. In our youth, we scoffed at our parents, their materialism, their seemingly aimless values. Now we are our parents. We have simply replaced them, pushed Mom and Dad into whatever retirement village would have them. And our children have
replaced us. But Maury’s Luncheonette is still on Kasselton Avenue. The fire department is still mostly volunteer. The Little League still plays at Northland Field. The high-tension wires are still too close to my old elementary school. The woods behind the Brenners’ house on Rockmont Terrace is still a place where kids hang out and smoke. The high school still gets between five and eight national merit finalists a year, though when I was younger the list was more Jewish while today it tilts toward the Asian community.

We turned right on Monroe Avenue and drove past the split-level where I was raised. With its white paint and black shutters, with its kitchen, living room, and dining room up three steps on the left and its den and garage entrance two steps down on the right, our house, though a bit more threadbare than most, was pretty much indistinguishable from the other cookie-cutters on the block. What did make it stand out, the only thing really, was the wheelchair ramp. We put it in after my dad’s third stroke when I was twelve years old. My friends and I liked to skateboard down it. We built a jump out of plywood and cinder blocks and put it at the bottom.

The nurse’s car was in the driveway. She comes in during the days. We don’t have someone full time. My father has been confined to a wheelchair for more than two decades now. He cannot speak. His mouth has an ugly down-hook curve on the left side of it. Half his body is totally paralyzed and the other half is not that much better.

When the driver made the turn at Darby Terrace, I saw that my house—our house—looked the same as it had a few weeks before. I didn’t know what I’d expected. Yellow crime-scene tape maybe. Or a big bloodstain. But there was nothing hinting at what had occurred two weeks earlier.

When I’d bought the house, it’d been in foreclosure. For thirty-six years the Levinsky family had lived there, but no one really knew them. Mrs. Levinsky had been a seemingly sweet woman with a facial tic. Mr. Levinsky was an ogre who always yelled at her out on the lawn. He scared us. One time, we saw Mrs. Levinsky run out of the house in a nightgown, Mr. Levinsky chasing her with a shovel. Kids cut through every yard but theirs. When I was fresh out of college, rumors surfaced that he had abused his daughter Dina, a sad-eyed, stringy-haired waif I’d gone to school with since the first grade. Looking back on it, I must
have been in a dozen classes with Dina Levinsky and I don’t remember ever hearing her speak above a whisper and only then when forced to by well-meaning teachers. I never reached out to Dina. I don’t know what I could have done, but I still wished that I’d tried.

Sometime during that year out of college, when the rumors of Dina’s abuse began to take root, the Levinskys had upped and moved away. No one knew where. The bank took over the house and began to rent it out. Monica and I made an offer a few weeks before Tara was born.

Months later, when we first settled in, I’d stay awake at night and listen for—I don’t know—sounds of some sort, for signs of the house’s past, of the unhappiness within. I would try to figure out which bedroom had been Dina’s and try to imagine what it’d been like for her, what it was like now, but there were no clues here. As I said earlier, a house is mortar and brick. Nothing more.

Two strange cars were parked in front of my house. My mother was standing by the front door. When I got out, she rushed me like those newscasts of returning POWs. She hugged me hard, and I got a whiff of too much perfume. I was still holding the Nike bag with the money, so it was hard for me to reciprocate.

Over my mother’s shoulder, Detective Bob Regan stepped out of my house. Next to him stood a large black man with a gleaming shaved head and designer sunglasses. My mother whispered, “They’ve been waiting for you.”

I nodded and moved toward them. Regan cupped a hand over his eyes, but only for effect. The sun was not that strong. The black man remained stonelike.

“Where have you been?” Regan asked. When I didn’t reply right away, he added, “You left the hospital more than an hour ago.”

I thought about the cell phone in my pocket. I thought about the bag of money in my hand. For now, I’d go for the semitruth. “I visited my wife’s grave,” I said.

“We need to talk, Marc.”

“Step inside,” I said.

We all moved back into the house. I stopped in the foyer. Monica’s body had been found less than ten feet from where I now stood. Still in the entranceway, my eyes scanned the walls, looking for any telltale sign of violence. There was only one. I found it fairly quickly. Above the
Behrens lithograph near the stairwell, a bullet hole—one created from the only bullet that had not hit either Monica or me—had been spackled over. The spackle was too white for the wall. It would need a coat of paint.

I stared at it for a long moment. I heard a throat being cleared. It snapped me out of it. My mother rubbed my back and then headed to the kitchen. I showed Regan and his buddy to the living room. They took the two chairs. I took the couch. Monica and I hadn’t truly decorated yet. The chairs dated back to my college dorm and looked it. The couch had come from Monica’s apartment, a too-formal hand-me-down that looked like something kept in storage at Versailles. It was heavy and stiff and, even in its heyday, had had very little padding.

“This is Special Agent Lloyd Tickner,” Regan began, motioning toward the black man. “He’s with the FBI.”

Tickner nodded. I nodded back.

Regan tried to smile at me. “Good to see you’re feeling better,” he began.

“I’m not,” I said.

He looked puzzled.

“I won’t be better until I have my daughter back.”

“Right, of course. About that. We have a few follow-up questions, if you don’t mind.”

I let them know I didn’t.

Regan coughed into his fist, buying himself time. “You have to understand something. We need to ask these questions. I don’t necessarily like it. I’m sure you don’t either, but these questions need to be asked. You understand?”

I didn’t really, but this was no time to encourage elaboration. “Go ahead,” I said.

“What can you can tell us about your marriage?”

A warning light flashed across my cortex. “What does my marriage have to do with anything?”

Regan shrugged. Tickner remained still. “We’re just trying to put some pieces together, that’s all.”

“My marriage has nothing to do with any of this.”

“I’m sure you’re right, but look, Marc, the truth is, the trail is getting cold here. Every day that passes hurts us. We need to explore every avenue.”

“The only avenue I’m interested in is the one that leads to my daughter.”

“We understand that. That’s the main focus of our investigation. Finding out what happened to your daughter. And you too. Let’s not forget that someone tried to kill you too, am I right?”

“I guess.”

“But, see, we can’t just ignore these other issues.”

“What other issues?”

“Your marriage, for example.”

“What about it?”

“When you got married, Monica was already pregnant, right?”

“What does that . . . ?” I stopped myself. I wanted to attack with both barrels, but Lenny’s words roared back at me. Don’t talk to the cops without him present. I should call him. I knew that. But something about their tone and posture . . . if I stopped now and said I wanted to call my lawyer, it would make me look guilty. I had nothing to hide. Why feed into their suspicions? It would only distract them. Of course, I also knew that this was how they worked, how the police played the game, but I’m a doctor. Worse, a surgeon. We often make the mistake of thinking we’re smarter than everyone else.

I went with honesty. “Yes, she was pregnant. So?”

“You’re a plastic surgeon, correct?”

The change of subjects threw me. “That’s right.”

“You and your partner travel overseas and repair cleft palates, serious facial trauma, burns, that kind of thing?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“You travel a lot then?”

“A fair amount,” I said.

“In fact,” Regan said, “in the two years before your marriage, isn’t it fair to say that you were probably out of the country more than you were in it?”

“Possibly,” I said. I squirmed against the padless cushion. “Could you tell me what the relevance of any of this is?”

Regan gave me his most disarming smile. “We’re just trying to get a complete picture here.”

“Picture of what?”

“Your work partner”—he checked his notes—“a Ms. Zia Leroux.”

“Dr. Leroux,” I corrected.

“Dr. Leroux, yes, thank you. Where is she now?”

“Cambodia.”

“She’s performing surgery on deformed children over there?”

“Yes.”

Regan tilted his head, feigning confusion. “Weren’t you originally scheduled to take that trip?”

“A long time ago.”

“How long ago?”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“How long ago did you take yourself off the schedule?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Eight, nine months ago maybe.”

“And so Dr. Leroux went instead, correct?”

“Yes, that’s correct. And the point of that is . . . ?”

He wouldn’t bite. “You like your job, don’t you, Marc?”

“Yes.”

“You like traveling overseas? Doing this commendable work?”

“Sure.”

Regan scratched his head too dramatically, pretending in the most obvious way to be bewildered. “So if you like the traveling, why did you cancel and let Dr. Leroux go in your place?”

Now I saw where he was heading. “I was cutting back,” I said.

“On travel, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I had other obligations.”

“Those obligations being a wife and daughter, am I correct?”

I sat up and met his eye. “Point,” I said. “Is there a point to all this?”

Regan settled back. The silent Tickner did likewise. “Just trying to get a complete picture, that’s all.”

“You said that already.”

“Yeah, hold on, give me a second here.” Regan flipped through the pages of his notebook. “Jeans and a red blouse.”

“What?”

“Your wife.” He pointed at his notes. “You said that she was wearing jeans and a red blouse that morning.”

More images of Monica flooded me. I tried to stem the tide. “So?”

“When we found her body,” Regan said, “she was naked.”

The tremors began in my heart. They spread down my arms, tingling my fingers.

“You didn’t know?”

I swallowed. “Was she . . . ?” My voice died in my throat.

“No,” Regan said. “Not a mark on her, other than the bullet holes.” He did that help-me-understand head-tilt again. “We found her dead in this very room. Did she often parade in here with no clothes on?”

“I told you.” Overload. I tried to process this new data, keep up with him. “She was wearing jeans and a red blouse.”

“So she was dressed already?”

I remembered the sound of the shower. I remembered her coming out, throwing her hair back, lying on the bed, working the jeans over the hips. “Yes.”

“Definitely?”

“Definitely.”

“We’ve been through the whole house. We can’t find a red blouse. Jeans, sure. She had several pairs. But no red blouse. Don’t you think that’s odd?”

“Wait a second,” I said. “Her clothes weren’t near her body?”

“Nope.”

This made no sense. “I’ll look in her closet, then,” I said.

“We already did that, but sure, go ahead. Of course, I’d still like to know how clothes she was wearing ended up back in her closet, wouldn’t you?”

I had no answer.

“Do you own a gun, Dr. Seidman?”

Another subject shift. I tried to keep up, but my head was spinning. “Yes.”

“What kind?”

“A Smith and Wesson thirty-eight. It belonged to my father.”

“Where do you keep it?”

“There’s a compartment in the bedroom closet. It’s on the top shelf in a lockbox.”

Regan reached behind him and pulled out the metal lockbox. “This it?”

“Yes.”

“Open it.”

He tossed it to me. I caught it. The gray-blue metal was cold. But more than that, it felt shockingly light. I moved the wheels to the right combination and flipped it open. I poked through the legal documents—the car title, the deed on the house, the property survey—but that was just to get my bearings. I knew right away. The gun was gone.

“You and your wife were both shot with a thirty-eight,” Regan said. “And yours seems to be missing.”

I kept my eyes on the box, as if I expected the weapon to suddenly materialize in it. I tried to put it together, but nothing was coming to me.