Three Harlan Coben Novels

by Harlan Coben

  “Dina Levinsky came by the house.”

  “Dina the fruitcake?”

  “She’s had it rough,” I said. “You have no idea.”

  Lenny waved off my sympathy. “I don’t understand. What was she doing at your house?” I filled him on the story. Lenny started making a face. When I finished, I was the one who said, “What?”

  “She told you she was better now? That she was married?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s bull.”

  I stopped. “How do you know that?”

  “I do some legal work for her aunt. Dina Levinsky has been in and out of asylums since she was eighteen. She even served time for aggravated assault a few years back. She’s never been married. And I doubt she’s ever had an art exhibit.”

  I did not know what to make of that. I remembered Dina’s haunting face, the way the color ebbed away when she said,“You know who shot you, don’t you, Marc?”

  What the hell had she meant by that anyway?

  “We need to think this through,” Lenny said, rubbing his chin. “I’m going to check with some of my sources, see what I can learn. Call me if anything comes up, okay?”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “And promise me you won’t say another word to them. There is an excellent chance they’ll arrest you.” He raised a hand before I could protest. “They have enough for an arrest and maybe even an indictment. True, thet ’s aren’t all crossed and thei ’s aren’t all dotted. But think about that Skakel case. They had less there and they convicted him. So if they come back in here, promise me you won’t say a word.”

  I promised because, yet again, the authorities were on the wrong track. Cooperating with them would not help find my daughter. That was the bottom line. Lenny left me alone. I asked him to shut off the lights. He did. But the room did not grow dark. Hospital rooms never get totally dark.

  I tried to understand what was happening. Tickner had taken those strange photographs with him. I wished he hadn’t. I wanted to take another look because no matter how I laid it out, those pictures of Rachel at the hospital made no sense. Were they for real? Trick photography was a strong possibility, especially in this digital day and age. Could that be the explanation? Were they phonies, a simple cut-and-paste job? My thoughts veered toward Dina Levinsky again. What had her bizarre visit really been about? Why had she asked if I loved Monica? Why did she think I knew who shot me? I was considering all of this when the door opened.

  “Is this the room belonging to the Stud in Scrubs?”

  It was Zia. “Hey.”

  She entered, gestured at my supine position with a sweep of her hand. “This supposed to be your excuse for missing work?”

  “I was on call last night, wasn’t I?”

  “Yep.”

  “Sorry.”

  “They woke my ass up instead, interrupting, I might add, a rather erotic dream.” Zia pointed with her thumb toward the door. “That big black man down the hall.”

  “The one with the sunglasses on top of a shaved head?”

  “That’s him. He a cop?”

  “An FBI agent.”

  “Any chance you can introduce us? Might make up for interrupting my dream.”

  “I’ll try to do that,” I said, “before he arrests me.”

  “After is okay too.”

  I smiled. Zia sat on the edge of the bed. I told her what had happened. She didn’t offer a theory. She didn’t throw up a question. She just listened, and I loved her for it.

  I was just getting to the part about being a serious suspect when my cell phone started ringing. Both of us, because of our training, were surprised. Cell phones in the hospital were a no-no. I reached it for quickly and brought it to my ear.

  “Marc?”

  It was Rachel. “Where are you?”

  “Following the money.”

  “What?”

  “They did exactly what I thought,” she said. “They dumped the bag, but they haven’t spotted the Q-Logger in the pack of bills. I’m heading up the Harlem River Drive right now. They’re maybe a mile ahead of me.”

  “We need to talk,” I said.

  “Did you find Tara?”

  “It was a hoax. I saw the kid they had with them. It wasn’t my daughter.”

  There was a pause.

  “Rachel?”

  “I’m not doing so good, Marc.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I took a beating. At the park. I’m okay, but I need your help.”

  “Wait a second. My car is still at the scene. How are you following them?”

  “Did you notice a Parks Department van on the circle?”

  “Yes.”

  “I stole it. It’s an old van, easy to hot-wire. I figured it wouldn’t be missed until the morning.”

  “They think we did it, Rachel. That we were having an affair or something. They found photos on that CD. You in front of where I work.”

  Cell-phone-static silence.

  “Rachel?”

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “I’m at New York Presbyterian Hospital.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Banged up. But I’m fine, yeah.”

  “The cops there?”

  “The feds too. A guy named Tickner. You know him?”

  Her voice was soft. “Yes.” Then, “How do you want to play it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you want to keep following them? Or do you want to turn it over to Tickner and Regan?”

  I wanted her back here. I wanted to ask her about those photos and the phone call to my house. “I’m not sure it matters,” I said. “You were right from the beginning. It was a con job. They must have used someone else’s hair.”

  More static.

  “What?” I said.

  “You know anything about DNA?” she asked me.

  “Not much,” I said.

  “I don’t have time to explain it, but a DNA test goes layer by layer. You start seeing things match up. It takes at least twenty-four hours before we can really say with any degree of certainty that there’s a match.”

  “So?”

  “So I just spoke to my lab guy. We’ve only had about eight hours. But so far, that second set of hairs that Edgar got?”

  “What about them?”

  “They match yours.” I wasn’t sure I heard correctly. Rachel made a sound that might have been a sigh. “In other words, he hasn’t ruled out that you’re the father. Just the opposite, in fact.”

  I nearly dropped the phone. Zia saw it and moved closer. Again I focused and compartmentalized. Process. Rebuild. I considered my options. Tickner and Regan would never believe me. They would not allow me to go. They’d probably arrest us. At the same time, if I told them, I might be able to prove our innocence. On the other hand, proving my innocence was irrelevant.

  Was there a chance my daughter was still alive?

  That was the only question here. If she was, then I had to resort to our original plan. Confiding in the authorities, especially with their fresh suspicions, would not work. Suppose there was, as the ransom note said, a mole? Right now, whoever had picked up that bag of money had no idea that Rachel was onto them. But what would happen if the cops and feds got involved? Would the kidnappers run, panic, do something rash?

  There was something else here that I should be considering: Did I still trust Rachel? Those photographs had shaken my faith. I didn’t know what to believe anymore. But in the end, I had no choice but to treat those doubts as a distraction. I needed to focus on one goal. Tara. What would give me the best chance of finding out what really happened to her?

  “How badly hurt are you?” I asked.

  “We can do this, Marc.”

  “I’m on my way, then.”

  I hung up and looked at Zia.

  “You have to help me get out of here.”

  Tickner and Regan sat in the doctors’ lounge down the hall. A lounge seemed a strange name for this thre
adbare dwelling with too much light and a rabbit-ear TV set. There was a minifridge in the corner. Tickner had opened it. There were two brown-bag lunches in it, both with names written on them. It reminded him of elementary school.

  Tickner collapsed on a couch with absolutely no springs. “I think we should arrest him now.”

  Regan said nothing.

  “You were awfully quiet in there, Bob. Something on your mind?”

  Regan started scratching the soul patch. “What Seidman said.”

  “What about it?”

  “Don’t you think he had a point?”

  “You mean that stuff about him being innocent?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, not really. You buy it?”

  “I don’t know,” Regan said. “I mean, why would he go through all this with the money? He couldn’t have known we’d learn about that CD and decide to track him with E-ZPass and find him at Fort Tryon Park. And even if he had, why go through all that? Why jump on a moving car? Christ, he’s lucky he wasn’t killed. Again. Which brings us back to the original shooting and our original problem. If he and Rachel Mills did this together, why was he nearly killed?” Regan shook his head. “There are too many holes.”

  “Which we are filling in one by one,” Tickner said.

  Regan made a yes-no with a head tilt.

  “Look at how many we plugged today by learning about Rachel Mills’s involvement,” Tickner said. “We just need to get her in here and sweat them both.”

  Regan looked off again.

  Tickner shook his head. “What now?”

  “The broken window.”

  “The one at the crime scene?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about it?”

  Regan sat up. “Play along with me, okay? Let’s go back to the original murder-kidnapping.”

  “At the Seidman house?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay, go.”

  “The window was broken from the outside,” Regan said. “That could be how the perp gained entry to the house.”

  “Or,” Tickner added, “Dr. Seidman broke the window to throw us off.”

  “Or he had an accomplice do it.”

  “Right.”

  “But either way, Dr. Seidman would have been in on the broken window, right? If he was involved, I mean.”

  “Where are you going with this?”

  “Just stay with me, Lloyd. We think Seidman was involved. Ergo, Seidman knew that the window had been broken to make it look like, I don’t know, a random break-in. Agreed?”

  “I guess.”

  Regan smiled. “Then how come he never mentioned the broken window?”

  “What?”

  “Read his statement. He remembers eating a granola bar and then—bam—nothing. No sound. No one sneaking up on him. Nothing.” Regan spread his hands. “Why doesn’t he remember hearing the window break?”

  “Because he broke it himself to make it look like an intruder.”

  “But see, if that’s the case, he would have kept the broken window in his story. Think about it. He breaks the window to convince us the perp broke in and shot him. So what would you say if you were him?”

  Now Tickner saw where he was heading. “I’d say, ‘I heard the window break, I turned and bam, the bullets hit me.’ ”

  “Exactly. But Seidman did none of that. Why?”

  Tickner shrugged. “Maybe he forgot. He was seriously injured.”

  “Or maybe—just stay with me—maybe he’s telling the truth.”

  The door opened. An exhausted-looking kid in scrubs looked in. He saw the two cops, rolled his eyes, left them alone. Tickner turned back toward Regan. “But wait a second, you’ve caught yourself in a Catch-22.”

  “How so?”

  “If Seidman didn’t do it—if it really was a perp who broke the window—why didn’t Seidman hear it?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t remember. We’ve seen this a million times. A guy getting shot and hurt that seriously loses some time.” Regan smiled, warming up to this theory. “Especially if he saw something that totally shocked him—something he wouldn’t want to remember.”

  “Like his wife being stripped down and killed?”

  “Like that,” Regan said. “Or maybe something worse.”

  “What’s worse?”

  A beeping sound came from the corridor. They could hear the nearby nurse’s station. Someone was bitching about a shift time or schedule change.

  “We said we’re missing something,” Regan said slowly. “We’ve been saying that from the beginning. But maybe it’s just the opposite. We’ve beenadding something.”

  Tickner frowned.

  “We keep adding Dr. Seidman. Look, we both know the score. In cases like this, the husband is always involved. Not nine times out of ten—ninety-nine times out of a hundred. Every scenario we’ve devised includes Seidman.”

  Tickner said, “And you think that’s wrong?”

  “Listen to me a second. We’ve had Seidman in our sights from the get-go. His marriage was not idyllic. He got married because his wife was pregnant. We seized on all that. But if their marriage had been friggin’Ozzie and Harriet , we’d still say, ‘Nah, no one is that happy,’ and leap on that. So whatever we’ve stumbled across, we’ve tried to fit it into that reality: Seidman had to be involved. So for just a second, let’s take him out of the equation. Let’s pretend he’s innocent.”

  Tickner shrugged. “Okay, so?”

  “Seidman talked about a connection with Rachel Mills. One that’s lasted all these years.”

  “Right.”

  “He sounded a little obsessed with her.”

  “A little?”

  Regan smiled. “Suppose the feeling was mutual. Check that. Suppose it was more than mutual.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now remember. We’re assuming Seidman didn’t do it. That means he’s telling us the truth. About everything. About when he last saw Rachel Mills. About those photographs. You saw his face, Lloyd. Seidman isn’t that great an actor. Those pictures shocked him. He didn’t know about them.”

  Tickner frowned. “Hard to say.”

  “Well, there was something else I noticed about those pictures.”

  “What?”

  “How come that private eye didn’t get any pictures of the two of them together? We have her outside the hospital. We have him coming out. We have her going out. But none of them together.”

  “They were careful.”

  “How careful? She was hanging outside his place of work. If you’re being careful, you don’t do that.”

  “So what’s your theory?”

  Regan smiled. “Think about it. Rachel had to know Seidman was inside the building. But did he have to know she was outside?”

  “Wait a second,” Tickner said. A smile started coming to his face. “You think she was stalking him?”

  “Maybe.”

  Tickner nodded. “And—whoa—we’re not talking about just any woman here. We’re talking about a well-trained federal agent.”

  “So one, she would know how to run a professional kidnapping operation,” Regan added, raising a finger. He raised another. “Two, she would know how to kill someone and get away with it. Three, she would know how to cover her tracks. Four, she would know Marc’s sister, Stacy. Five”—the thumb now—“she’d be able to use her old contacts to find and set the sister up.”

  “Holy Christ.” Tickner looked up. “And what you said before. About seeing something so horrible Seidman doesn’t remember.”

  “How about seeing the love of your life shooting you? Or your wife. Or . . .”

  They both stopped.

  “Tara,” Tickner said. “How does the little girl fit into all this?”

  “A way of extorting money?”

  Neither one of them liked that. But whatever other answers they came up with, they liked those even less.

  “We can add something else,” Tickner said.

  “Wha
t?”

  “Seidman’s missing thirty-eight.”

  “What about it?”

  “His gun was in a lockbox in his closet,” Tickner said. “Only someone close to him would know where it was hidden.”

  “Or,” Regan added, seeing something else now, “maybe Rachel Mills brought her own thirty-eight. Remember that two were used.”

  “But that raises another question: Why would she need two guns?”

  Both men frowned, ran a few new theories through their heads, and came up with a solid conclusion. “We’re still missing something,” Regan said.

  “Yep.”

  “We need to go back and get some answers.”

  “Like?”

  “Like why did Rachel skate on the murder of her first husband?”

  “I can ask around,” Tickner said.

  “Do that. And let’s get a man on Seidman. She has four million dollars now. She might want to eliminate the only guy who can still tie her to this.”

  chapter 31

  Zia found myclothes in the closet. Bloodstains darkened my jeans, so we decided to go with surgical scrubs. She ran down the hall and found me a pair. Wincing from the cracked ribs, I slipped them on and tied the string waist. It would be a slow go. Zia checked to see if the coast was clear. She had a backup plan in case the feds were still watching. Her friend, Dr. David Beck, had been involved in a major federal case a few years ago. He knew Tickner from that. Beck was on call. If it came to it, he was waiting at the end of the hall and would try to slow them down with some sort of reminiscence.

  In the end, we didn’t need Beck. We simply walked out. No one questioned us. We made our way through the Harkness Pavilion and out into the courtyard north of Fort Washington Avenue. Zia’s car was parked in the lot on 165th and Fort Washington. I moved gingerly. I felt sore as hell, but basically all right. Marathon running and heavy lifting would be out, but the pain was controllable and I had full range of motion. Zia had slipped me a bottle of Vioxx, the fifty-milligram big-boys. They’d be good because they worked without making you drowsy.

  “If anyone asks,” she said, “I’ll tell them I took public transportation and that my car is home. You should be okay for a while.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Actually, can I also trade cell phones?”