Promise Me mb-8

by Harlan Coben

  “The call came from Harry Davis. Did you answer it or did your husband?”

  Her voice was soft. “Jake did.”

  “Davis told him that Aimee had been there, that he was worried. And then Jake ran to his car.”

  “No.”

  Myron paused, considered the answer. “What did he do then?”

  Lorraine shifted in her seat again, looking straight at Erik. “We liked Aimee very much. For God’s sake, Erik, she dated Randy for the past two years.”

  “But then she dumped him,” Myron said.

  “Yes.”

  “How did Randy react to that?”

  “It broke his heart. He cared about her. But you can’t think…” Her voice died off.

  “I’ll ask you again, Mrs. Wolf. After Harry Davis called your house, what did your husband do?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “What could he do?”

  Myron paused.

  “What, you think Jake drove up there and grabbed her? Come on. Even with no traffic it’s half an hour from Livingston to Ridgewood. Do you think Aimee would just wait on the street for Jake to come along?”

  Myron opened his mouth, closed it. He tried to picture it now. Harry Davis had just rejected her. Would she just stand there, on that dark street, for half an hour or more? Did that make sense?

  “So what happened?” Myron asked.

  She said nothing.

  “You get this call from Harry Davis. He’s in a panic about Aimee. What did you and Jake do?”

  Myron made a left. They were on Northfield Avenue now, one of Livingston’s bigger roads. He hit the accelerator harder.

  “What would you have done?” she asked.

  No one replied. Lorraine locked eyes on Myron’s via the rearview.

  “It’s your son,” she went on. “His entire future is on the line. He had this girlfriend. This wonderful sweet girlfriend. Something happened to her. She changed. I don’t know why.”

  Erik squirmed, but he kept the gun on her.

  “All of a sudden she wants no part of him. She has an affair with a teacher. She goes knocking on doors at three in the morning. She’s erratic and if she talks, she could bring your whole world down. So what would you have done, Mr. Bolitar?” She turned to look at Erik. “If the situation was reversed — if Randy had dumped Aimee and started acting like this, threatening to destroy her future — what would you have done, Erik?”

  “I wouldn’t have killed him,” Erik said.

  “We didn’t kill her. All we did… We worried. Jake and I sat up and talked. We wondered how to handle it. We tried to plan it out. First, we’d have Harry Davis change the computer records. Put them back the way they were, if he could. Make it look like there’d been a computer glitch or something. People might suspect the truth, but if they couldn’t prove it, maybe we’d be safe. We tried to think up other scenarios. I know you want to call Randy a drug dealer, but he was just a contact. Every school has a few. I won’t defend it. I remember when I went to Middlebury, I won’t mention his name, but a man who is a leading politician now, he was the supplier. You graduate, it’s over and done with. But now we needed to make sure that it didn’t come out. And mostly we wanted to figure out a way to reach Aimee. We were going to call you, Erik. We thought maybe you could reason with her. Because it wasn’t just Randy’s future. It was hers too.”

  They were getting close to Drew Van Dyne’s house now.

  “That’s a nice story, Mrs. Wolf,” Myron said. “But you left out one part.”

  She closed her eyes.

  “Whose blood is on your carpet?”

  No answer.

  “You heard me call the police. They’re on their way there now. There are tests. DNA and whatever. They’ll find out.”

  Lorraine Wolf still said nothing. They were on Drew Van Dyne’s street now. The homes were smaller and older. The lawns weren’t quite as green. The shrubbery dipped and teetered. Win had told Myron exactly where he’d be standing, otherwise Myron would have never spotted him. He pulled to a stop and looked back at Erik.

  “Stay here a second.”

  Myron put the car in park and moved behind the tree. Win was there.

  Myron said, “I don’t see Van Dyne’s car.”

  “It’s in the garage.”

  “How long has he been here?”

  “How long ago did I call?”

  “Ten minutes ago.”

  Win nodded. “There you go then.”

  Myron looked at the house. It was dark. “No lights on.”

  “I noticed that too.”

  “He backed into his garage ten minutes ago and he hasn’t gone into the house yet?”

  Win shrugged.

  There was a grinding noise. The garage door opened. Headlights shone in their faces. The car zoomed out. Win took out his gun, preparing to shoot. Myron put his hand on his friend’s arm.

  “Aimee could be in there.”

  Win nodded.

  The car flew down the drive and squealed right. It drove past the parked car, the one with Erik Biel and Lorraine Wolf in the back. Van Dyne’s Toyota Corolla hesitated and then accelerated.

  Myron and Win sprinted back to the car. Myron got in the driver’s side, Win the passenger’s. In the backseat, Erik Biel still had the gun pointed at Lorraine Wolf.

  Win turned and smiled at Erik. “Hi,” he said.

  Win reached back as though to shake Erik’s hand. Instead, he quickly grabbed Erik’s gun and pulled it away from him. Just like that. One second Erik Biel was holding a gun. The next he wasn’t.

  Myron threw the car into drive as Van Dyne’s vehicle disappeared around the corner. Win looked at the gun, frowned, emptied it out.

  The chase was on. But it wouldn’t last long.

  CHAPTER 51

  It was not Drew Van Dyne driving the car.

  It was Jake Wolf.

  Jake drove fast. He made a few quick turns, but he only drove about a mile. He had a big enough lead. He hit the old Roosevelt Mall, sped around back, shifted into park. He walked across the dark soccer fields in the general direction of Livingston High School. He figured that Myron Bolitar was following him. But he also figured that he had enough of a head start.

  He heard the party noises. After a few more steps, he could start to see the glow of lights. The night air felt good in his lungs. Jake tried to look at the trees, the houses, the cars in the driveways. He loved this town. He loved his life here.

  As he came closer, he could hear the laughter. He thought about what he was doing here. He swallowed and moved behind a row of pine trees on the neighboring property. He found a spot between two of them and looked out at the tent.

  Jake Wolf spotted his son right away.

  It had always been like that with Randy. You never missed him. He stood out, no matter what the circumstance. Jake remembered going to Randy’s first soccer program when the boy was in first grade. There must have been three, four hundred kids, all there, all running and bouncing around like molecules in heat. Jake had arrived late, but it took mere seconds to find his radiant boy in the waves of look-alike children. Like there was a spotlight coming down from above, illuminating his every step.

  Jake Wolf just watched. His son was talking to a bunch of his pals. They were all laughing at something Randy said. Jake stared and felt his eyes well up. There was plenty of blame to go around, he guessed. He tried to think where it all started. With Dr. Crowley maybe. Damn history teacher calls himself doctor. What kind of pretentious crap was that anyhow?

  Crowley was a small, meaningless man with a bad comb-over and slumped shoulders. He hated athletes. You could smell the envy a mile away. Crowley looked at someone like Randy, someone so good-looking and athletic and special, and he saw all his own adolescent failures.

  That was how it all began.

  Randy had written a wonderful essay on the Tet Offensive for Crowley’s history class. Crowley had given him a C-minus. A goddamn C-minus. A friend of Randy’s, a guy named Jo
el Fisher, had gotten an A. Jake read both essays. Randy’s was better. It wasn’t just Jake Wolf who thought so. He tried them both out on various people. He didn’t let them know which essay was his son’s and which was Joel’s.

  “Which is better?” he’d asked.

  And almost all agreed. Randy’s paper — the C-minus paper — was superior.

  It might have seemed like a small thing, but it wasn’t. That paper was three-quarters of the grade. Dr. Crowley gave Randy a C. It kept Randy off the honor roll for that semester, but more than that, more than anything else, it knocked him out of the class’s top ten percent. Dartmouth had been clear. With Randy’s SATs, he needed to be in the top ten percent. If that C had been a B, Randy would have been accepted.

  That was the difference.

  Jake and Lorraine had gone in to talk to Dr. Crowley. They had explained the situation. Crowley wouldn’t budge. He had been dismissive, enjoying his power play, and it took all Jake’s willpower not to put the man through a plate-glass window. But Jake was not about to give up that easy. He’d hired a private eye to dig into the man’s past, but Crowley’s life had been so pathetic, so nothing, so obviously unremarkable, especially next to the bright beacon that was Jake’s son… There was nothing he could use against the man.

  So if Jake Wolf had played by the rules, that would have been it. That would have kept his son out of an Ivy League education — the whim of a nothing like Crowley.

  Uh-uh. No way.

  And so it began.

  Jake swallowed and stared. His son stood in the middle of the party, the sun with dozens of orbiting planets. He had a cup in his hand. Randy had such natural ease. Such poise in everything he did. Jake Wolf stood there, in the shadows, and wondered if there was any way to save it all. He didn’t think so. It was like holding water in your hand. He had tried to sound confident for Lorraine. He thought that maybe he could dump the body in Drew Van Dyne’s house. Lorraine would clean up the stain. It could have still worked.

  But Myron Bolitar had showed up. Jake had spotted him from the garage. He was trapped. Jake hoped to speed away, lose them, dump the body somewhere else. But when he made that first turn and saw that Lorraine was in the backseat, he knew that it was over.

  He’d hire a good attorney. The best. He knew a guy in town, Lenny Marcus. Great defense lawyer. He’d call him, see what they could work out. But in his heart, Jake Wolf knew that it was over. For him, at least.

  That was why he was here now. In the shadows. Watching his beautiful, perfect son. Randy was the only thing he had ever gotten right. His boy. His precious boy. But that was enough. From the first time he had laid eyes on the baby in the hospital, Jake Wolf was mesmerized. He went to every practice he could. He went to every game. It wasn’t just to show support — often, during practices, Jake would stand behind a tree, almost hide, as he was doing now. He just liked to watch his son. That was all. He liked getting lost in this very simple bliss. And sometimes, when he did, he couldn’t believe how lucky he was, how someone like Jake Wolf, also a nothing when you thought about it, could have been part of creating something so miraculous. The world was cruel and awful and you had to do all you could to get that edge, but then every once in a while, he’d look at Randy and realize that there was something other than the dog-eat-dog horror, that there had to be something better out there, some higher being, because here, in front of him, there was indeed perfection and beauty.

  “Hey, Jake.”

  He turned at the sound of the voice. “Hi, Jacques.”

  It was Jacques Harlow, the father of one of Randy’s closest friends and the party host. Jacques came up next to him. They both looked out at the party, at their sons, soaking it in for almost a full minute without speaking.

  “Can you believe how fast it went by?” Harlow said.

  Jake just shook his head, afraid to speak. His eyes never left his son.

  “Hey, how about coming in for a drink?”

  “I can’t. I just had to drop something off for Randy. Thanks though.”

  Harlow slapped his back. “Sure.” He headed back toward the porch.

  It took another five minutes. Jake enjoyed every second. Then he heard the footsteps. He turned and saw Myron Bolitar. Myron had a gun in his hand. Jake Wolf smiled and turned back to his son.

  “What are you doing here, Jake?”

  “What’s it look like?”

  Jake Wolf did not want to move, but he knew that it was time. He soaked up one last look at his son. That was what this felt like. The last time he would see him like this. He wanted to say something to his son, offer some words of wisdom, but Jake wasn’t good with words.

  So instead he turned and raised his hands.

  “In the trunk,” Jake Wolf said. “The body is in the trunk.”

  CHAPTER 52

  Win stood a few feet behind Myron. Just in case. But he could see right away that Jake Wolf was not about to make a move. He was surrendering. For now. There might be something else, something later. Win had dealt with men like Jake Wolf. They never really believe that it’s over. They look for an out, an escape hatch, a loophole, a legal maneuver, something.

  A few minutes earlier, they’d spotted Van Dyne’s car in the Roosevelt Mall lot. Myron and Win had run ahead, leaving Lorraine Wolf and Erik Biel in the car. Erik still had a few nylon cuffs he’d bought at the same store where he’d picked up the ammunition. So they cuffed Lorraine’s hands behind her back and hoped like hell that Erik wouldn’t do something stupid.

  Not long after Myron and Win disappeared into the dark, Erik got out of the backseat. He moved toward Van Dyne’s car. He opened the front door. He didn’t know what he was doing exactly. He just knew he had to do something. He slid into the driver’s seat. There were guitar picks on the floor. He remembered his own daughter’s collection, how much she loved them, how her eyes would close when she strummed the strings. He remembered Aimee’s first guitar, a crappy thing he’d bought at a toy store for ten bucks. She’d been only four years old. She banged on it and did a wonderful rendition of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” More like Bruce Springsteen than something you’d see from a preschooler. He and Claire had clapped like mad when she finished.

  “Aimee rocks,” Claire had declared.

  They had all been smiling. They had all been so happy.

  Erik looked out the windshield, back toward his car, back toward Lorraine Wolf. Their eyes met. He had known Lorraine for two years now, since Aimee had first started dating her son. He liked her. Truth be told, he had even semi-fantasized about her. Not that he would have ever done anything about it. Not like that. Just a harmless fantasy for an attractive woman. Normal stuff.

  He looked in the backseat now. There was sheet music, handwritten. He froze. His hand moved slowly. He saw the handwriting and realized that it was Aimee’s. He picked it up, brought it closer, holding it as if it were strands of porcelain.

  Aimee had written this.

  Something caught in his throat. His fingertips touched down on the words, the notes. His daughter had held this paper. She had scrunched up her face the way she always did and delved into her life experiences and produced this. It was a simple thought, really, but suddenly it meant the world to him. His anger was gone. It would be back. He knew that. But at that moment, his heart just felt heavy. There was no anger. Just pain.

  That was when Erik decided to pop the trunk.

  He looked back over at Lorraine Wolf. Something crossed her face. He didn’t know what. He opened the car door and stepped back into the night. He moved toward the trunk, took hold of the hatch with one hand, began to lift it. He heard rustling from the field. He turned and saw Myron come flying into view.

  “Erik, wait….”

  Erik opened the trunk then.

  The black tarp. That was what he saw first. Something wrapped in black tarp. His knees buckled, but he held on. Myron started toward him, but Erik held up a hand as if telling him to stay back. He tried to rip the tarp. I
t wouldn’t give. He pulled and tugged. The tarp held in place. Erik started to panic now. His chest heaved. His breath caught.

  He took out his key chain and dug the end of a key into the plastic. It made a hole. There was blood. He slit the tarp and reached his hands in. They grew wet and sticky. Erik desperately pulled at the tarp, ripping at it as if he were trapped inside, running out of air.

  He saw the dead face and fell back.

  Myron was next to him now.

  “Oh my God,” Erik said. He collapsed. “Oh thank you….”

  It wasn’t his daughter in the trunk. It was Drew Van Dyne.

  CHAPTER 53

  Lorraine Wolf said, “I shot him in self-defense.”

  In the distance Myron could hear the police sirens. Myron stood next to the trunk with Erik Biel and Lorraine Wolf. He had called the police. They’d be here soon. He looked across the field. He could see distant silhouettes of Win and Jake Wolf. Myron had run ahead. Win had taken care of securing their suspect.

  “Drew Van Dyne was in the house,” she went on. “He pulled a gun on Jake. I saw it. He was yelling all kinds of crazy stuff about Aimee—”

  “What stuff?”

  “He said that Jake didn’t care about her. That she was just some dumb slut to him. That she was pregnant. He was ranting.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “We keep guns in the house. Jake likes to hunt. So I got a rifle. I pointed it at Drew Van Dyne. I told him to put down the gun. He wouldn’t. I could see that. So…”

  “No!” It was Wolf who had said that. They were close enough to hear. “I shot Van Dyne!”

  Everyone stared at him. The police sirens sounded.

  “I shot him in self-defense,” Jake Wolf insisted. “He pulled a gun on me.”

  “So why did you stick the body in the trunk?” Myron asked.

  “I was afraid no one would believe that. I was going to bring him home, dump him in his own house. Then I realized that would be stupid.”