by Harlan Coben
I looked up at him.
“You and Monica were shot withdifferent thirty-eights.”
“Excuse me?”
He nodded. “Yeah, I found it hard to believe too. I made ballistics check it twice. You and your wife were shot with two different guns, both thirty-eights—and yours seems to be missing.” Regan shrugged theatrically. “Help me understand, Marc.”
I looked at their faces. I didn’t like what I saw. Lenny’s warning came back to me again, firmer this time. “I want to call my lawyer,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Go ahead.”
My mother had been standing by the kitchen door, wringing her hands. How much had she heard? Judging by her face, too much. Mom looked at me expectantly. I nodded, and she went to call Lenny. I folded my arms, but that didn’t feel right. I tapped my foot. Tickner took off the sunglasses. He met my eye and spoke for the first time.
“What’s in the bag?” he asked me.
I just looked at him.
“That gym bag you been groping.” Tickner’s voice, belying his tough looks, had a nerdy cadence to it, a quasi-whine quality. “What’s in it?”
This had all been a mistake. I should have listened to Lenny. I should have called him right away. Now I was not sure how to reply. In the background, I heard my mother urging Lenny to hurry. I was sifting through a response that might work as a semitruthful stall—none were convincing—when a sound ripped my attention away.
The cell phone, the one the kidnappers had sent to my father-in-law, began to ring.
chapter 4
Tickner and Reganwaited for me to answer.
I excused myself, rising before they had a chance to react. My hand fumbled with the phone as I hurried outside. The sun hit me full in the face. I blinked and looked down at the keypad. The phone’s answer button was located in a different spot from mine. Across the street, two girls donning brightly hued helmets were riding neon bikes. Ribbon strips of pink cascaded out of the handlebars of one.
When I was little, this neighborhood sheltered more than a dozen kids my age. We used to meet up after school. I don’t remember what games we played—we were never organized enough for, say, a real game of baseball or anything like that—but they all involved hiding and chasing and some form of feigned (or borderline-real) violence. Childhood in suburbia is purportedly a time of innocence, but how many of those days ended in tears for at least one kid? We would argue, shift alliances, make declarations of friendship and war, and like some short-term memory case, it was all forgotten the next day. A clean slate every afternoon. New coalitions forged. A new kid running home in tears.
My thumb finally touched down on the right button. I pressed it and brought the phone to my ear, all in one move. My heart thumped against my rib cage. I cleared my throat and, feeling like a total idiot, I simply said, “Hello?”
“Answer yes or no.” The voice had the robotic hum of one of those customer-care phone systems, the ones that tell you to press one for service, press two to check the status of an order. “Do you have the money?”
“Yes.”
“You know the Garden State Plaza?”
“In Paramus,” I said.
“In exactly two hours from now, I want you parked at the north lot. That’s near Nordstrom’s. Section Nine. Someone will approach your car.”
“But—”
“If you’re not alone, we disappear. If you’re being followed, we disappear. If I smell a cop, we disappear. There will be no second chances. Do you understand?”
“Yes, but when—”
Click.
I let my hand drop to my side. Numbness seeped in. I did not fight it. The little girls across the street were quarreling now. I couldn’t hear the specifics, but the wordmy popped up a lot, that simple syllable accentuated and drawn out. An SUV sped around the corner. I watched it as though from above. The brakes shrieked. The driver-side door was open before the car had come to a complete stop.
It was Lenny. He took one look at me and picked up his pace. “Marc?”
“You were right.” I nodded toward the house. Regan was standing by the door now. “They think I’m involved.”
Lenny’s face darkened. His eyes narrowed, his pupils shrinking to pinpoints. In sports, you call it putting on your “game face.” Lenny was becoming Cujo. He stared at Regan as if deciding which limb to chew off. “You talked to them?”
“A little.”
Lenny jerked his gaze toward me. “Didn’t you tell them you wanted counsel?”
“Not at first.”
“Damn it, Marc, I told you—”
“I got a ransom demand.”
That made Lenny pull up. I checked my watch. Paramus was a forty-minute ride. With traffic, it could take as much as an hour. I had time, but not much. I started filling him in. Lenny gave Regan another glare and led me farther away from the house. We stopped at the curb, those familiar cloud-gray stones that lie on property lines like sets of teeth, and then, like two children, we squatted deep and sat on them. Our knees were at our chins. I could see Lenny’s skin between the argyle sock and tapered cuff. Squatting like this was uncomfortable as hell. The sun was in our eyes. We both looked off rather than at each other, again just like in our youths. It made it easier to spill it all out.
I spoke quickly. Midway through my recap, Regan began to move toward us. Lenny turned to him and shouted, “Your balls.”
Regan stopped. “What?”
“Are you arresting my client?”
“No.”
Lenny pointed toward Regan’s crotch. “Then I’m going to have them bronzed and hanging from my rearview mirror, if you take another step.”
Regan straightened his spine. “We have some questions for your client.”
“Tough. Go abuse the rights of someone with a lesser lawyer.”
Lenny made a dismissive gesture and nodded at me to continue. Regan did not look happy, but he took two steps back. I glanced at my watch again. Only five minutes had passed since the ransom call. I finished up while Lenny kept the laser glare aimed at Regan.
“You want my opinion?” he said.
“Yes.”
Still glaring. “I think you should tell them.”
“You sure?”
“Hell, no.”
“Would you?” I said. “I mean, if it was one of your kids?”
Lenny gave it a few seconds. “I can’t put myself in your place, if that’s what you mean. But yeah, I think I would. I play the odds. The odds are better when you tell the cops. Doesn’t mean it works out every time, but they’re experts at this. We’re not.” Lenny put his elbows on his knees and rested his chin in his hands—a pose from his youth. “That’s the opinion of Lenny the Friend,” he went on. “Lenny the Friend would encourage you to tell them.”
“And Lenny the Lawyer?” I asked.
“He would be more insistent. He would strongly urge you to come forward.”
“Why?”
“If you go off with two million dollars and it vanishes—even if you get Tara back—their suspicions will be, to put it mildly, aroused.”
“I don’t care about that. I just want Tara back.”
“Understood. Or should I say, Lenny the Friend understands.”
Now it was Lenny’s turn to check his watch. My insides felt hollow, scooped out canoe-style. I could almost hear the tick-tick. It was maddening. I tried again to do the rational thing, to list the pros on the right, the cons on the left, and then add them up. But the tick-tick would not stop.
Lenny had talked about playing the odds. I don’t gamble. I’m not a risk taker. Across the street one of the little girls shouted, “I’m telling!” She stormed down the street. The other girl laughed at her and got back on her bike. I felt my eyes well up. I wished like hell Monica were here. I shouldn’t be making this decision alone. She should be in on this, too.
I looked back at the front door. Regan and Tickner were both outside
now. Regan had his arms folded across his chest, bouncing on the balls of his feet. Tickner did not move, his face the same placid pool. Were these men I could trust with my daughter’s life? Would they put Tara first, or as Edgar had suggested, would they follow some unseen agenda?
The tick-tick grew louder, more insistent.
Someone had murdered my wife. Someone had taken my child. For the past few days, I had asked myself why—why us?—trying again to stay rational and not allowing myself extended forays in the deep end of the pity pool. But no answer came. I could see no motive and maybe that was most frightening of all. Maybe there was no reason. Maybe it was just pure bad luck.
Lenny stared straight ahead and waited. Tick, tick, tick.
“Let’s tell them,” I said.
Their reaction surprised me. They panicked.
Regan and Tickner tried to hide it, of course, but their body language was suddenly all wrong—the flutter in the eyes, the tightness at the corners of their mouths, the unduly modulated, FM-soft-rock timbre in their tones. The time frame was simply too close for them. Tickner quickly dialed up the FBI specialist on kidnapping negotiations to enlist his help. He cupped his hand around the mouthpiece while he spoke into it. Regan got hold of his police colleagues in Paramus.
When Tickner hung up, he said to me, “We’ll get people to cover the mall. Discreetly, of course. We’re going to try to get men in cars near every exit and on Route Seventeen in both directions. We’ll have people inside the mall by all the entrances. But I want you to listen to me closely, Dr. Seidman. Our expert tells us that we should try to stall him. Maybe we can get the kidnapper to postpone—”
“No,” I said.
“They won’t just run away,” Tickner said. “They want the money.”
“My daughter has been with them for almost three weeks,” I said. “I’m not putting this off.”
He nodded, not liking it, trying to keep up with the placid. “Then I want to put a man in the car with you.”
“No.”
“He can duck down in the back.”
“No,” I said again.
Tickner tried another avenue. “Or better yet—we’ve done this before—we tell the kidnapper that you can’t drive. Hell, you’re just out of the hospital. We have one of our men drive instead. We say it’s your cousin.”
I frowned and looked at Regan. “Didn’t you say you thought my sister might be involved?”
“It’s possible, yes.”
“Don’t you think she’d know if this guy was a cousin or not?”
Tickner and Regan both hesitated and then nodded in unison. “Good point,” Regan said.
Lenny and I exchanged a glance. These were the professionals I was trusting with Tara’s life. The thought was not comforting. I started for the door.
Tickner put a hand on my shoulder. “Where are you going?”
“Where the hell do you think?”
“Sit down, Dr. Seidman.”
“No time,” I countered. “I have to start heading up there. There could be traffic.”
“We can clear the traffic.”
“Oh, and that won’t look suspicious,” I said.
“I highly doubt he’s going to follow you from here.”
I spun on him. “And you’d be willing to risk your child’s life on that?”
He paused just long enough.
“You don’t get it,” I went on, in his face now. “I don’t care about the money or if they get away. I just want my daughter back.”
“We understand that,” Tickner said, “but there is something you’re forgetting.”
“What?”
“Please,” he said. “Sit down.”
“Look, do me a favor, okay? Just let me stand. I’m a doctor. I know the delivering-bad-news drill as well as anyone. Don’t try to play me.”
Tickner held his palms up and said, “Fair enough.” He proceeded to take a long, lingering breath. Stall tactic. I was not in the mood.
“So what is it?” I said.
“Whoever did this,” he began, “they shot you. They killed your wife.”
“I understand that.”
“No, I don’t think you do. Think about it a second. We can’t just let you go in on your own. Whoever did this tried to end your life. They shot you twice and left you for dead.”
“Marc,” Regan said, moving closer, “we threw some wild theories at you before. The problem is, that’s all they are. Theories. We don’t know what these guys are really after. Maybe this is just a simple kidnapping, but if it is, it’s not like any we’ve seen before.” His interrogation face was gone now, replaced with an aw-shucks, eyebrow-raised attempt at openness. “What we do know with certainty is that they tried to kill you. You don’t try to kill the parents, if you’re just after ransom.”
“Maybe they planned on getting the money from my father-in-law,” I said.
“Then why did they wait so long?”
I had no answer.
“Maybe,” Tickner went on, “this isn’t about kidnapping at all. At least, not at first. Maybe that’s become a sideline. Maybe you and your wife were the targets all along. And maybe they want to finish the job.”
“You think this is a setup?”
“It’s a strong possibility, yes.”
“So what are you advising?”
Tickner took that one. “Don’t go alone. Buy us some time so we can prepare properly. Let them call you back.”
I looked at Lenny. He saw it and nodded. “That’s not possible,” Lenny said.
Tickner turned at him hard. “With all due respect, your client is in grave danger here.”
“So is my daughter,” I said. Simple words. This decision was a no-brainer when you kept it simple. I pulled away and started toward my car. “Keep your people at a distance.”
chapter 5
There was notraffic, so I made it to the mall with plenty of time to spare. I turned the engine off and sat back. I glanced around. I figured that the feds and cops were probably still on me, but I couldn’t see them. That was a good thing, I guess.
Now what?
No idea. I waited some more. I fiddled with the radio, but nothing caught my attention. I turned on the CD player/tape deck. When Donald Fagan of Steely Dan began singing “Black Cow,” I felt a slight jerk. I had not listened to this particular tape since, what, my college days. Why did Monica have it? And then, with a renewed pang, I realized that Monica had been the last to use this car, that this may have been the last song she ever heard.
I watched the shoppers prepare for mall entry. I concentrated on the young mothers; the way they flipped open the back door of the minivan; the way they unfolded the baby strollers midair with a magician’s flourish; the way they struggled to release their offspring from safety seats that reminded me of Buzz Aldrin’s onApollo 11 ; the way the mothers skirted forward, heads high, smartly pressing the remote control that slid the minivan door to a close.
The mothers, all of them, looked so blasé. Their children were with them. Their safety, what with the five-star side-collision rating and NASA-sleek car seats, was a given. And here I sat with a bag of ransom money, hoping to get my daughter back. The thin line. I wanted to roll down the window and shout out a warning.
We were getting close to drop time. The sun beat down on my windshield. I reached for my sunglasses but then thought better of it. I don’t know why. Would putting on my sunglasses somehow make the kidnapper uneasy? No, I don’t think so. Or maybe it would. Better to just leave them off. Take no chances.
My shoulders bunched up. I kept trying to look around without, for some odd reason, looking conspicuous about it. Whenever someone parked near me or walked anywhere in the vicinity of my car, my stomach tightened and I wondered:
Was Tara nearby?
We were at the two-hour mark now. I wanted this over. The next few minutes would decide everything. I knew that. Calm. I needed to stay calm. Tickner’s warning reverberated in my head. Would someone simp
ly walk up to my car and blow my brains out?
It was, I realized, a very real possibility.
When the cell phone rang, I started forward. I brought it to my ear and barked a too-quick hello.
The robotic voice said, “Pull out by the west exit.”
I was confused. “Which way is west?”
“Follow the signs for Route Four. Take the overpass. We’re watching. If someone follows, we disappear. Keep the phone near your ear.”
I obeyed with gusto; my right hand pressed the phone against my ear to the point where I started losing circulation. My left hand gripped the wheel as if preparing to tear it off.
“Get on Route Four heading west.”
I took the right turn and jug-handled onto the highway. I looked in my rearview mirror to see if anyone was following me. Hard to tell.
The robotic voice said, “You’ll see a strip mall.”
“There’s a million strip malls,” I said.
“It’s on the right, next to a store selling baby cribs. In front of the Paramus Road exit.”
I saw it. “Okay.”
“Pull in there. You’ll see a driveway on the left. Take it to the back and kill the engine. Have the money ready for me.”
I understood immediately why the kidnapper had picked this spot. There was only one way in. The stores were all for rent, except for the baby-crib place. That was on the far right. In other words, it was self-contained and directly off a highway. There was no way anyone could come around back or even slow down without being noticed.
I hope the feds understood that.
When I reached the back of the building, I saw a man standing by a van. He wore a red-and-black flannel shirt with black jeans, dark sunglasses, and a Yankee baseball cap. I tried to find something distinct, but the word that came to mind wasaverage . Average height, average build. The only thing was his nose. Even from this distance I could see it was misshapen, like an ex-boxer’s. But was that real or some kind of disguise? I didn’t know.
I checked out the van. There was a sign for “B & T Electricians” of Ridgewood, New Jersey. No phone number or address. The license plate was from New Jersey. I memorized it.