Three Harlan Coben Novels

by Harlan Coben

  “Sure, why?”

  “They might try, I don’t know, to track me down using mine.”

  “They can do that?”

  “Beats the hell out of me.”

  She shrugged and dug out her cell. It was a tiny thing, the size of a compact mirror. “You really think Tara is alive?”

  “I don’t know.”

  We hurried up the parking garage’s cement steps. The stairwell stank, as always, of urine.

  “This is insane,” she said. “You know that, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I got my pager. You need me, you page me.”

  “I will.”

  We stopped at the car. Zia handed me the keys.

  “What?” I said to her.

  “You got a pretty big ego, Marc.”

  “This your idea of a pep talk?”

  “Just don’t let it get you hurt or anything,” Zia said. “I need you.”

  I hugged her and slipped into the driver’s seat. I started north on the Henry Hudson, dialing Rachel’s number. The night was clear and still. The lights from the bridge made the dark water look like a star-filled sky. I heard two rings and then Rachel picked up. She didn’t say anything and then I realized why. She probably had Caller ID and didn’t recognize the number.

  “It’s me,” I said. “I’m using Zia’s phone.”

  Rachel asked, “Where are you?”

  “About to get on the Hudson.”

  “Keep going north to the Tappan Zee. Cross it and start heading west.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “By that huge Palisades Mall.”

  “In Nyack,” I said.

  “Right. Keep in phone touch. We’ll find a place to hook up.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  Tickner was on his mobile phone, filling in O’Malley. Regan hurried back into the lounge. “Seidman’s not in his room.”

  Tickner looked annoyed. “What do you mean, he’s not in his room?”

  “How many different ways are there to interpret that, Lloyd?”

  “Did he go down to X ray or something?”

  “Not according to the nurse,” Regan said.

  “Damn. The hospital has security cameras, right?”

  “Not on every room.”

  “But they have to cover the exits.”

  “They must have a dozen exits here. By the time we get the tapes and review them—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Tickner thought about it. He put the phone back to his ear. “O’Malley?”

  “I’m here.”

  “You heard?”

  “Yup.”

  “How long will it take you to get phone logs from both Seidman’s hospital room and cell phone?” Tickner asked.

  “Immediate calls?”

  “It would have to have been in the past fifteen minutes, yeah.”

  “Give me five.”

  Tickner pressed the “end” button. “Where’s Seidman’s lawyer?”

  “I don’t know. I think he said he was leaving.”

  “Maybe we should give him a ring.”

  “He didn’t hit me as the helpful type,” Regan said.

  “That was before, when we thought his client was a wife-and-baby killer. We’re now theorizing that an innocent man’s life is in danger.” Tickner handed Regan the business card Lenny had given him.

  “Worth a shot,” Regan said, and began dialing.

  I caught up with Rachel just over the north New Jersey–south New York border town of Ramsey. Using our phones we managed to hook up in the parking lot of the Fair Motel on Route 17 in Ramsey, New Jersey. The motel was a no-tell, complete with a sign proudly readingCOLOR TV ! (as if most motels were still using black and white) where all the letters (and the exclamation point) are a different color, in case you don’t know what the wordcolor means. I always liked the name. The Fair Motel. We’re not great, we’re not terrible. We’re, well, Fair. Honesty in advertising.

  I pulled into the lot. I was scared. I had a million questions for Rachel, but in the end, it all boiled down to different variations of the same thing. I wanted to know about her husband’s death, sure, but more than that, I wanted to know about those damn private-eye pictures.

  The lot was dark, most of the light coming off the highway. The stolen Parks Department van sat by a Pepsi machine on the far right side. I pulled next to it. I never saw Rachel leave the van, but the next thing I knew she had slid into the passenger seat next to me.

  “Start moving,” she said.

  I turned to confront her, but her face made me pull up short. “Jesus, are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Her right eye was swollen over like a boxer’s who had gone the distance. There were yellow-purple bruises around her neck. Her face had a giant red mark across both cheeks. I could see scarlet indentations from where her attacker had dug in his fingers. The fingernails had even broken the skin. I wondered if there was deeper trauma to her face, if whatever blow she took to the eye had been powerful enough to break a bone. I doubted it. A break like that would normally knock someone out of commission. Then again, best-case scenario and these were only surface wounds: It was amazing she was still upright.

  “What the hell happened?” I asked.

  She had her Palm Pilot out. The screen was dazzlingly bright in the dark of the car. She looked down at it and said, “Take Seventeen south. Hurry, I don’t want to get too far behind.”

  I put the car in reverse, backed up, started down the highway. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the bottle of Vioxx. “These should help deaden the pain.”

  She pulled off the top. “How many should I take?”

  “One.”

  Her index finger scooped it out. Her eyes never left the Palm Pilot’s screen. She swallowed it down and said thanks.

  “Tell me what happened,” I said.

  “You first.”

  I filled her in as best I could. We stayed on Route 17. We passed the Allendale and Ridgewood exits. The streets were empty. The shops—and, man, there were lots of them, the entire highway pretty much one continuous strip mall—were all closed up. Rachel listened without interrupting. I glanced at her as I drove. She looked in pain.

  When I finished, she asked, “Are you sure it wasn’t Tara in the car?”

  “Yes.”

  “I called my DNA guy again. The layers are still matching up. I don’t get that.”

  Neither did I. “What happened to you?”

  “Somebody jumped me. I was watching you through the night-vision goggles. I saw you put down the money bag and start walking. There was a woman in the bushes. Did you see her?”

  “No.”

  “She had a gun. I think she planned on killing you.”

  “A woman?”

  “Yes.”

  I wasn’t sure how to react to that. “Did you get a good look at her?”

  “No. I was about to call out a warning when this monster grabbed me from behind. Strong as hell. He lifted me off my feet by my head. I thought he was going to rip my skull off.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Anyway, a cop car drove by. The big guy panicked. He punched me here”—she pointed to the swollen eye—“and it was lights-out. I don’t know how long I was lying on the pavement. When I woke up, the cops were all over the place. I was huddled in a corner in the dark. I guess they didn’t see me or figured I was a homeless guy sleeping one off. Anyway, I checked the Palm Pilot. I saw the money was on the move.”

  “Which direction?”

  “South, walking near 168th Street. Then suddenly they went still. See, this thing”—she gestured to the screen—“works two ways. I zoom in, I can get as close as a quarter mile. I go out a little farther, like right now, I get more an idea than an exact address. Right now, based on the speed, I figure they’re driving about six miles ahead of us still on Route Seventeen.”

  “But when you first spotted them, they were on 168th Street?”

  “
Right. Then they start heading downtown fast.”

  I thought about it. “The subway,” I said. “They took the A train from the 168th Street stop.”

  “That’s what I figured. Anyway, I stole the van. I started downtown. I was near the seventies when all of a sudden they started going east. This time it was more stop and go.”

  “They were stopping for lights. They had a car now.”

  Rachel nodded. “They sped up on the FDR and Harlem River Drive. I tried to cut across town, but that took too long. I fell behind by five, six miles. Anyway, you know the rest.”

  We slowed for night construction near the Route 4 interchange. Three lanes became one. I looked at her, at the bruises and the swelling, at the giant handprint on her skin. She looked back at me and didn’t say a word. My fingers reached out and caressed her face as gently as I knew how. She closed her eyes, the tenderness seemingly too much, and even in the midst of all this we both knew that it felt right. A stirring, an old one, a dormant one, started deep inside of me. I kept my eyes on that lovely, perfect face. I pushed back her hair. A tear escaped her eye and ran down her cheek. She put her hand on my wrist. I felt the warmth start there and spread.

  Part of me—and, yes, I know how this will sound—wanted to forget this quest. The kidnapping had been a hoax. My daughter was gone. My wife was dead. Someone was trying to kill me. It was time to start again, a new chance, a way, this time, to get it right. I wanted to turn the car around and start heading in the other direction. I wanted to drive—keep driving—and never ask about her dead husband and those pictures on the CD. I could forget all that, I knew I could. My life was filled with surgical procedures that altered the surface, that helped people begin anew, that improved what was visible and thus what was not. That could be what would happen here. A simple face-lift. I would make my first incision the day before that damn frat party, pull the fourteen-year-old folds across time, close the suture at now. Stick the two moments together. Nip and tuck. Make those fourteen years disappear, as though they’d never happened.

  Rachel opened her eyes now and I could see that she was thinking pretty much the same thing, hoping I’d call it off and turn around. But of course, that could not be. We blinked. The construction cleared. Her hand left my forearm. I risked another glance at Rachel. No, we were not twenty-one years old anymore, but that didn’t matter. I saw that now. I still loved her. Irrational, wrong, stupid, naïve, whatever. I still loved her. Over the years, I might have convinced myself otherwise, but I had never stopped. She was still so damn beautiful, so damn perfect, and when I thought of how close she’d just come to death, those giant hands smothering away her breath, those niggling doubts began to soften. They wouldn’t go away. Not until I knew the truth. But no matter what the answers were, they would not consume me.

  “Rachel?”

  But she suddenly sat up, her eyes back on the Palm Pilot.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “They’ve stopped,” Rachel said. “We’ll be on them in two miles.”

  chapter 32

  Steven Bacard replacedthe phone’s receiver.

  You slip-slide into evil, he thought. You cross the line for just one moment. You cross back. You feel safe. You change things, you believe, for the better. The line is still there. It’s still intact. Okay, maybe there’s a smudge there now, but you can still see it clearly. And next time you cross, maybe that line smudges a little more. But you have your bearings. No matter what happens to that line, you remember where it is.

  Don’t you?

  There was a mirror above the fully stocked bar in Steven Bacard’s office. His interior decorator had insisted that all people of prestige had to have a place to toast their successes. So he had one. He didn’t even drink. Steven Bacard stared at his reflection and thought, not for the first time in his life: Average. He had always been average. His grades in school, his SAT and LSAT scores, his law-school ranking, his bar score (he passed it on the third attempt). If life were a game where children choose sides for kickball, he’d be picked in the middle of the pack, after the good athletes and before the really bad ones—in that cusp for those who leave no mark.

  Bacard became a lawyer because he believed that being a JD would give him a level of prestige. It didn’t. No one hired him. He opened up his own pitiful office near the Paterson courthouse, sharing space with a bail bondsman. He ambulance-chased, but even as a member of this small-time pack, he couldn’t distinguish himself. He managed to marry a woman slightly above his station, though she reminded him of that as often as she could.

  Where Bacard had indeed been below average—waybelow average—was in sperm count. Try as he might—and Dawn, his wife, didn’t really like him to try—he could not impregnate his wife. After four years, they tried to adopt. Again, Steven Bacard fit into the abyss of the great unspectacular, which made finding a white baby—something Dawn truly craved—nearly impossible. He and Dawn traveled to Romania, but the only children available were too old or born drug addled.

  But it was there, overseas in that god-deserted place, that Steven Bacard finally came up with an idea that, after thirty-eight years, made him rise above the crowd.

  “Problem, Steven?”

  The voice startled him. He turned away from his reflection. Lydia stood in the shadows.

  “Staring in the mirror like that,” Lydia said, adding a tsk-tsk at the end. “Wasn’t that Narcissus’s downfall?”

  Bacard could not help it. He began to tremble. It wasn’t just Lydia, though, in truth, she often had that effect on him. The phone call had set him on edge. Lydia popping up like that—that was the clincher. He had no idea how she’d gotten in or how long she’d been standing there. He wanted to ask what had happened tonight. He wanted details. But there was no time.

  “We do indeed have a problem,” Bacard said.

  “Tell me.”

  Her eyes chilled him. They were big and luminous and beautiful and yet you sensed nothing behind them, only a cold chasm, windows to a house long abandoned.

  What Bacard had discovered while in Romania—what had finally helped him rise above the pack—was a way to beat the system. Suddenly, for the first time in his life, Bacard was on a roll. He stopped chasing ambulances. People started looking up to him. He was invited to fund-raisers. He became a sought-after speaker. His wife, Dawn, started to smile at him again and ask him about his day. He even appeared on News 12 New Jersey when the cable station needed a certain kind of legal expert. He stopped, however, when a colleague overseas reminded him of the danger of too much publicity. Besides, he no longer needed to attract clients. They found him, these parents searching for a miracle. The desperate have always done that, like plants stretching through the dark for any sliver of sunlight. And he, Steven Bacard, was that sunlight.

  He pointed to the phone. “I just got a call.”

  “And?”

  “The ransom money is bugged,” he said.

  “We switched bags.”

  “Not just the bags. There’s some kind of device in the money. Between the bills or something.”

  Lydia’s face clouded over. “Your source didn’t know about this before?”

  “My source didn’t know about any of it until just now.”

  “So what you’re telling me,” she said slowly, “is that while we stand here the police know exactly where we are?”

  “Not the police,” he said. “The bug wasn’t planted by the cops or the feds.”

  That seemed to surprise her. Then Lydia nodded. “Dr. Seidman.”

  “Not exactly. He has a woman named Rachel Mills helping him. She used to be a fed.”

  Lydia smiled as if this explained something. “And this Rachel Mills—this ex-fed—she’s the one who bugged the money?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she following us right now?”

  “No one knows where she is,” Bacard said. “No one knows where Seidman is either.”

  “Hmm,” she said.

  “Th
e police think this Rachel woman is involved.”

  Lydia lifted her chin. “Involved in the original kidnapping?”

  “And the murder of Monica Seidman.”

  Lydia liked that. She smiled and Bacard felt a fresh shiver slink down his back. “Was she, Steven?”

  He teetered. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Ignorance is bliss, that it?”

  Bacard chose to say nothing.

  Lydia said, “Do you have the gun?”

  He stiffened. “What?”

  “Seidman’s gun. Do you have it?”

  Bacard did not like this. He felt as if he were sinking. He considered lying, but then he saw those eyes. “Yes.”

  “Get it,” she said. “How about Pavel? Have you heard from him?”

  “He’s not happy with any of this. He wants to know what’s going on.”

  “We’ll call him in the car.”

  “We?”

  “Yes. Now let’s hurry, Steven.”

  “I’m coming with you?”

  “Indeed.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Lydia put her fingers to her lips. “Shh,” she said. “I have a plan.”

  Rachel said, “They’re on the move again.”

  “How long did they stop?” I asked

  “Maybe five minutes. They could have met up with someone and transferred the money. Or maybe they were just getting gas. Turn right here.”

  We pulled up on Centuro Road off Route 3. Giants Stadium loomed in the distance. About a mile up, Rachel pointed out the window. “They were somewhere over there.”

  The sign readMETROVISTA and the parking lot appeared to be a never-ending expanse, disappearing in the distant marsh. MetroVista was a classic New Jersey office complex, built during the great expanse of the eighties. Hundreds of offices, all cold and impersonal, sleek and robotic, with too many tinted windows not letting in enough sunlight. The vapor lights buzzed and you could imagine, if not actually hear, the drone of worker bees.

  “They weren’t stopping for gas,” Rachel muttered.

  “So what do we do?”

  “Only thing we can,” she said. “Let’s keep following the money.”

  Heshy and Lydia headed west toward the Garden State Parkway. Steven Bacard followed in the car behind them. Lydia ripped open the wads of bills. It took her ten minutes to find the tracking device. She dug it out from the money crevice.