by Harlan Coben
“I’ve known him a long time.”
“He told me.”
“That’s why I called Ed. We had a long talk about the case.”
“Right,” Loren said. “And that’s why he sent me here.”
Edna Skylar looked off, out the window. Loren tried to guess her age. Mid-sixties probably, but she wore it well. Dr. Skylar was a handsome woman, short gray hair, high cheekbones, knew how to sport a beige suit without coming across as too butch or overly feminine.
“Dr. Skylar?”
“Could you tell me something about the case?”
“Excuse me?”
“Katie Rochester. Is she officially listed as missing?”
“I’m not sure how that’s relevant.”
Edna Skylar’s eyes moved slowly back to Loren Muse. “Do you think she met up with foul play—”
“I can’t really discuss that.”
“—or do you think she ran away? When I talked to Ed, he seemed pretty sure she was a runaway. She took money out of an ATM in midtown, he said. Her father is rather unsavory.”
“Prosecutor Steinberg told you all that?”
“He did.”
“So why are you asking me?”
“I know his take,” she said. “I want yours.”
Loren was about to protest some more, but Edna Skylar was again staring with too much intensity. She scanned Skylar’s desk for family photographs. There were none. She wondered what to make of that and decided nothing. Skylar was waiting.
“She’s eighteen years old,” Loren tried, treading carefully.
“I know that.”
“That makes her an adult.”
“I know that too. And what about the father? Do you think he abused her?”
Loren wondered how to play this. The truth was, she didn’t like the father, hadn’t from the get-go. RICO said that Dominick Rochester was mobbed up and maybe that was part of it. But there was something to reading a person’s grief. On the one hand, everyone reacts differently. It was true that you really couldn’t tell guilt based on someone’s reaction. Some killers cried tears that’d put Pacino to shame. Others were beyond robotic. Same with the innocent. It was like this: You’re with a group of people, a grenade is thrown in the middle of the crowd, you never know who is going to dive on it and who is going to dive for cover.
That said, Katie Rochester’s father . . . there was something off about his grief. It was too fluid. It was like he was trying on different personas, seeing which one would look best for the public. And the mother. She had the whole shattered-eye thing going on, but had that come from devastation or resignation? It was hard to tell.
“We have no evidence of that,” Loren said in the most noncommittal tone she could muster.
Edna Skylar did not react.
“These questions,” Loren went on. “They’re a bit bizarre.”
“That’s because I’m still not sure what to do.”
“About?”
“If a crime has been committed, I want to help. But . . .”
“But?”
“I saw her.”
Loren Muse waited a beat, hoping she’d say more. She didn’t. “You saw Katie Rochester?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“It’ll be three weeks on Saturday?”
“And you’re just telling us now?”
Edna Skylar was looking out at the parking lot again. The sun was setting, the rays slicing in through the venetian blinds. She looked older in that light.
“Dr. Skylar?”
“She asked me not to say anything.” Her gaze was still on the lot.
“Katie did?”
Still looking off, Edna Skylar nodded.
“You talked to her?”
“For a second maybe.”
“What did she say?”
“That I couldn’t tell anybody that I saw her.”
“And?”
“And that was it. A moment later she was gone.”
“Gone?”
“On a subway.”
The words came easier now. Edna Skylar told Loren the whole story, how she’d been studying faces while walking in New York, how she spotted the girl despite the appearance change, how she followed her down into the subway, how she’d vanished into the dark.
Loren wrote it all down, but fact was, this figured into what she’d believed from the beginning. The kid was a runaway. As Ed Steinberg had already told Skylar, there had been an ATM withdrawal at a Citibank in midtown near the time she vanished. Loren had seen the bank video. The face had been covered by a hood, but it was probably the Rochester girl. The father had clearly been on the over-strict side. That was how it always was with the runaways. The too-liberal parents, their kids often got hooked on drugs. The too-conservative, their kids were the runaways with the sex issues. Might be a stereotype to break it down like that, but Loren had seen very few cases that broke those rules.
She asked a few more follow-up questions. There was nothing that they could really do now. The girl was eighteen. There was no reason, from this description, to suspect foul play. On TV, the feds get involved and put a team on it. That doesn’t happen in real life.
But Loren felt a niggling at the base of her brain. Some would call it intuition. She hated that. Hunches . . . that didn’t really work either. She wondered what Ed Steinberg, her boss, would want to do. Nothing, probably. Their office was busy working with the U.S. Attorney on two cases, one involving a possible terrorist and the other a Newark politician on the take.
With their resources so limited, should they pursue what appeared to be an obvious runaway? It was a tough call.
“Why now?” Loren asked.
“What?”
“Three weeks, you didn’t say anything. What made you change your mind?”
“Do you have children, Investigator Muse?”
“No.”
“I do.”
Loren again looked at the desk, at the credenza, at the wall. No family pictures. No sign of children or grandchildren. Skylar smiled, as if she understood what Muse was doing.
“I was a lousy mother.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“I was, shall we say, laissez-faire. When in doubt, I’d let it go.”
Loren waited.
“That,” Edna Skylar said, “was a huge mistake.”
“I’m still not sure I understand.”
“Neither do I. But this time . . .” Her voice faded away. She swallowed, looked down at her hands before turning her gaze to Loren. “Just because everything looks okay, maybe it’s not. Maybe Katie Rochester needs help. Maybe this time I should do more than just let it go.”
The promise in the basement came back to haunt Myron at exactly 2:17 a.m.
Three weeks had passed. Myron was still dating Ali. It was the day of Esperanza’s wedding. Ali came as his date. Myron gave away the bride. Tom—real name Thomas James Bidwell III—was Win’s cousin. The wedding was small. Strangely enough, the groom’s family, charter members of the Daughters of the American Revolution, was not thrilled with Tom’s marriage to a Bronx-born Latina named Esperanza Diaz. Go figure.
“Funny,” Esperanza said.
“What’s that?”
“I always thought I’d marry for money, not love.” She checked herself in the mirror. “But here I am, marrying for love and getting money.”
“Irony is not dead.”
“Good thing. You’re going to Miami to see Rex?”
Rex Storton was an aging movie star they were repping. “I’m flying down tomorrow afternoon.”
Esperanza turned away from the mirror, spread her arms, and gave him a dazzling smile. “Well?”
She was a vision. Myron said, “Wow.”
“You think?”
“I think.”
“Come on then. Let’s get me hitched.”
“Let’s.”
“One thing first.” Esperanza pulled him aside. “I want you to be happy for me.”
&nb
sp; “I am.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“I know.”
Esperanza looked into his face. “We’re still best friends,” she said. “You understand that? You, me, Win, Big Cyndi. Nothing has changed.”
“Sure it has,” Myron said. “Everything has changed.”
“I love you, you know.”
“And I love you.”
She smiled again. Esperanza was always so damned beautiful. She had that whole peasant-blouse fantasy thing going on. But today, in that dress, the word luminous was simply too weak. She had been so wild, such a free spirit, had insisted that she would never settle down with one person like this. But here she was, with a baby, getting married. Even Esperanza had grown up.
“You’re right,” she said. “But things change, Myron. And you’ve always hated change.”
“Don’t start with that.”
“Look at you. You lived with your parents into your mid-thirties. You own your childhood home. You still spend most of your time with your college roommate, who, let’s face it, can’t change.”
He put up his hand. “I get the point.”
“Funny though.”
“What?”
“I always thought you’d be the first to get married,” she said.
“Me too.”
“Win, well, like I said, let’s not even go there. But you always fell in love so easily, especially with that bitch, Jessica.”
“Don’t call her that.”
“Whatever. Anyway, you were the one who bought the American dream—get married, have two-point-six kids, invites friends to barbecues in the backyard, the whole thing.”
“And you never did.”
Esperanza smiled. “Weren’t you the one who taught me, Men tracht und Gott lacht”?
“Man, I love it when you shiksas speak Yiddish.”
Esperanza put her hand through the crook of his arm. “That can be a good thing, you know.”
“I know.”
She took a deep breath. “Shall we?”
“You nervous?”
Esperanza looked at him. “Not even a little.”
“Then onward.”
Myron walked her down the aisle. He thought it would be a flattering formality, standing in for her late father, but when Myron gave Esperanza’s hand to Tom, when Tom smiled and shook his hand, Myron started to well up. He stepped back and sat down in the front row.
The wedding was not so much an eclectic mix as a wonderful collision. Win was Tom’s best man while Big Cyndi was Esperanza’s maid of honor. Big Cyndi, her former tag-team wrestling partner, was six-six and comfortably north of three hundred pounds. Her fists looked like canned hams. She had not been sure what to wear—a classic peach maid of honor dress or a black leather corset. Her compromise: peach leather with a fringed hem, sleeveless so as to display arms with the relative dimensions and consistency of marble columns on a Georgian mansion. Big Cyndi’s hair was done up in a mauve Mohawk and pinned on the top was a little bride-and-groom cake decoration.
When trying on the, uh, dress, Big Cyndi had spread her arms and twirled for Myron. Ocean tides altered course, and solar systems shifted. “What do you think?” she asked.
“Mauve with peach?”
“It’s very hip, Mr. Bolitar.”
She always called him Mister; Big Cyndi liked formality.
Tom and Esperanza exchanged vows in a quaint church. White poppies lined the pews. Tom’s side of the aisle was dressed in black and white—a sea of penguins. Esperanza’s side had so many colors, Crayola sent a scout. It looked like the Halloween parade in Greenwich Village. The organ played beautiful hymns. The choir sang like angels. The setting could not have been more serene.
For the reception, however, Esperanza and Tom wanted a change of pace. They rented out an S&M nightclub near Eleventh Avenue called Leather and Lust. Big Cyndi worked there as a bouncer and sometimes, very late at night, she took to the stage for an act that boggled the imagination.
Myron and Ali parked in a lot off the West Side Highway. They passed a twenty-four-hour porn shop called King David’s Slut Palace. The windows were soaped up. There was a big sign on the door that read now under new management.
“Whew.” Myron pointed to the sign. “It’s about time, don’t you think?”
Ali nodded. “The place had been so mismanaged before.”
When they ducked inside Leather and Lust, Ali walked around as though she were at the Louvre, squinting at the photos on the wall, checking out the devices, the costumes, the bondage material. She shook her head. “I am hopelessly naïve.”
“Not hopelessly,” Myron said.
Ali pointed at something black and long that resembled human intestines.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Dang if I know.”
“Are you, uh, into . . . ?”
“Oh no.”
“Too bad,” Ali said. Then: “Kidding. So very much kidding.”
Their romance was progressing, but the reality of dating someone with young kids had set in. They hadn’t spent another full night together since that first. Myron had only offered up brief hellos to Erin and Jack since that party. They weren’t sure how fast or slow they should go in their own relationship, but Ali was pretty adamant that they should go slow where it concerned the kids.
Ali had to leave early. Jack had a school project she’d promised to help him with. Myron walked her out, deciding to stay in the city for the night.
“How long will you be in Miami?” Ali asked.
“Just a night or two.”
“Would it make you retch violently if I say I’ll miss you?”
“Not violently, no.”
She kissed him gently. Myron watched her drive off, his heart soaring, and then he headed back to the party.
Since he planned on sleeping in anyway, Myron started drinking. He was not what one would call a great drinker—he held his liquor about as well as a fourteen-year-old girl—but tonight, at this wonderful albeit bizarre celebration, he felt in the mood to imbibe. So did Win, though it took far more to get him buzzed. Cognac was mother’s milk to Win. He rarely showed the effects, at least on the outside.
Tonight it didn’t matter. Win’s stretch limo was already waiting. It would take them back uptown.
Win’s apartment in the Dakota was worth about a billion dollars and had a décor that reminded one of Versailles. When they arrived, Win carefully poured himself an obscenely priced vintage port, Quinta do Noval Nacional 1963. The bottle had been decanted several hours ago because, as Win explained, you must give vintage port time to breathe before consumption. Myron normally drank a chocolate Yoo-hoo, but his stomach was not in the mood. Plus the chocolate wouldn’t have time to breathe.
Win snapped on the TV, and they watched Antiques Roadshow. A snooty woman with a lazy drawl had brought in a hideous bronze bust. She started telling the appraiser a story about how Dean Martin in 1950 offered her father ten thousand dollars for this wretched hunk of metal, but her daddy, she said with an insistent finger-point and matching smirk, was too wily for that. He knew that it must be worth a fortune. The appraiser nodded patiently, waited for the woman to finish, and then he lowered the boom:
“It’s worth about twenty dollars.”
Myron and Win shared a quiet high five.
“Enjoying other people’s misery,” Win said.
“We are pitiful,” Myron said.
“It’s not us.”
“No?”
“It’s this show,” Win said. “It illuminates so much that is wrong with our society.”
“How so?”
“People aren’t satisfied just to have their trinket be worth a fortune. No, it is better, far better, if they bought it on the cheap from some unsuspecting rube. No one considers the feelings of the unsuspecting yard salesman who was cheated, who lost out.”
“Good point.”
“Ah, but there’s more.”
Myron smiled, sat b
ack, waited.
“Forget greed for the moment,” Win went on. “What really upsets us is that everybody but everybody lies on Antiques Roadshow.”
Myron nodded. “You mean when the appraiser asks, ‘Do you have any idea what it’s worth?’ ”
“Precisely. He asks that same question every time.”
“I know.”
“And Mr. or Mrs. Gee-Whiz act like the question caught them totally off guard—as if they’d never seen the show before.”
“It’s annoying,” Myron agreed.
“And then they say something like, ‘Gasp-oh-gasp, I never thought of that. I have no idea what it might be worth.’ ” Win frowned. “I mean, please. You dragged your two-ton granite armoire to some impersonal convention center and waited in line for twelve hours—but you never, ever, not in your wildest dreams wondered what it might be worth?”
“A lie,” Myron agreed, feeling the buzz. “It’s up there with ‘Your call is very important to us.’ ”
“And that,” Win said, “is why we love when a woman like that gets slammed. The lies. The greed. The same reason why we love the boob on Wheel of Fortune who knows the solution but always goes for the extra spin and hits Bankrupt.”
“It’s like life,” Myron pronounced, feeling the booze.
“Do tell.”
But then the door’s intercom buzzed.
Myron felt his stomach drop. He checked his watch. It was one-thirty in the morning. Myron just looked over at Win. Win looked back, his face a placid pool. Win was still handsome, too handsome, but the years, the abuse, the late nights of either violence or, as with tonight, sex, were starting to show just a little.
Myron closed his eyes. “Is that a . . . ?”
“Yes.”
He sighed, rose. “I wish you’d told me.”
“Why?”
They’d been down that road before. There was no answer to that one.
“She’s from a new place on the Upper West Side,” Win said.
“Yeah, how convenient.”
Without another word Myron headed down the corridor toward his bedroom. Win answered the door. As much as it depressed him, Myron took a peek. The girl was young and pretty. She said, “Hi!” with a forced lilt in her voice. Win did not reply. He beckoned her to follow him. She did, teetering on too-high heels. They vanished down the corridor.
As Esperanza had noted, some things refuse to change—no matter how much you’d like them to.