Three Harlan Coben Novels

by Harlan Coben

  “Emma!”

  “I’m here.”

  Emma wore her standard gym-rat garb: maroon athletic shorts, blue high-top Converse all-stars, and a New Jersey Nets jersey. Total clash, which may have been the point. Emma wouldn’t wear anything the least bit feminine. Putting on a dress usually required a negotiation of Middle East sensitivity, with often an equally violent result.

  “What would you like for lunch?” Grace asked.

  “Peanut butter and jelly.”

  Grace just stared at her.

  Emma played innocent. “What?”

  “You’ve been attending this school for how long now?”

  “Huh?”

  “Four years, right? One year of kindergarten. And now you’re in third grade. That’s four years.”

  “So?”

  “In all that time how many times have you asked me for peanut butter in school?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe a hundred?”

  Shrug.

  “And how many times have I told you that your school doesn’t allow peanut butter because some children might have an allergic reaction?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Oh yeah.” Grace checked the clock. She had a few Oscar Mayer “Lunchables,” a rather disgustingly processed premade lunch, that she kept around for emergencies—i.e., no time or desire to fix a lunch. The kids, of course, loved them. She asked Emma softly if she’d like one—softly because if Max heard, that would be the end of buying lunch. Emma graciously accepted it and jammed it into the Batman lunchbox.

  They sat down to breakfast.

  “Mom?”

  It was Emma. “Yep.”

  “When you and Dad got married.” She stopped.

  “What about it?”

  Emma started again. “When you and Dad got married—at the end, when the guy said now you may kiss the bride . . .”

  “Right.”

  “Well”—Emma cocked her head and closed one eye—“did you have to?”

  “Kiss him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have to? No, I guess not. I wanted to.”

  “But do you have to?” Emma insisted. “I mean, can’t you just high-five instead?”

  “High-five?”

  “Instead of kiss. You know, turn to each other and high-five.” She demonstrated.

  “I guess. If that’s what you want.”

  “That’s what I want,” Emma said firmly.

  Grace took them to the bus stop. This time she did not follow the bus to school. She stayed in place and bit down on her lower lip. The calm façade was slipping off again. Now that Emma and Max were gone, that would be okay.

  When she got back to the house, Cora was awake and at the computer and groaning.

  “Can I get you something?” Grace asked.

  “An anesthesiologist,” Cora said. “Straight preferred but not required.”

  “I was thinking more like coffee.”

  “Even better.” Cora’s fingers danced across the keyboard. Her eyes narrowed. She frowned. “Something’s wrong here.”

  “You mean with the e-mails off our spam, right?”

  “We’re not getting any replies.”

  “I noticed that too.”

  Cora sat back. Grace moved next to her and started biting a cuticle. After a few seconds, Cora leaned forward. “Let me try something.” She brought up an e-mail, typed something in, sent it.

  “What was that all about?”

  “I just sent an e-mail to our spam address. I want to see if it arrives.”

  They waited. No e-mail appeared.

  “Hmm.” Cora leaned back. “So either something is wrong with the mail system . . .”

  “Or?”

  “Or Gus is still ticked about that small wee-wee line.”

  “How do we find out which?”

  Cora kept staring at the computer. “Who were you on the phone with before?”

  “Bob Dodd’s nursing home. I’m going to pay him a visit this morning.”

  “Good.” Cora’s eyes stayed on the screen.

  “What is it?’

  “I want to check something out,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing probably, just something with the phone bills.” Cora started typing again. “I’ll call you if I learn anything.”

  • • •

  Perlmutter left Charlaine Swain with the Bergen County sketch artist. He had forced the truth out of her, thereby unearthing a tawdry secret that would have been better left deep in the ground. Charlaine Swain had been right to keep it from him. It offered no help. The revelation was, at best, a sleazy and embarrassing distraction.

  He sat with a doodle pad, wrote the word “Windstar” and spent the next fifteen minutes circling it.

  A Ford Windstar.

  Kasselton was not a sleepy small town. They had thirty-eight cops on the payroll. They worked robberies. They checked on suspicious cars. They kept the school drug problems—suburban white-kid drugs—under control. They worked vandalism cases. They dealt with congestion in town, illegal parking, car accidents. They did their best to keep the urban decay of Paterson, a scant three miles from the border of Kasselton, at a safe distance. They answered too many false alarms emanating from the technological mating call of too many overpriced motion detectors.

  Perlmutter had never fired his service revolver, except on a range. He had, in fact, never drawn his weapon in the line of duty. There had only been three deaths in the last three decades that fell under the possible heading of “suspicious” and all three perpetrators were caught within hours. One was an ex-husband who got drunk and decided to profess his undying love by planning to kill the woman he purportedly adored before turning the shotgun on himself. Said ex-husband managed to get the first part right—two shotgun blasts to the ex’s head—but like everything else in his pathetic life, he messed up the second part. He had only brought two shells. An hour later he was in custody. Suspicious Death Two was a teenage bully stabbed by a skinny, tormented elementary-school victim. The skinny kid served three years in juvie, where he learned the real meaning of being bullied and tormented. The final case was of a man dying of cancer who begged his wife of forty-eight years to end his suffering. She did. She got parole and Perlmutter suspected that it was worth it to her.

  As for gunshots, well, there had been plenty in Kasselton but almost all were self-inflicted. Perlmutter wasn’t much on politics. He wasn’t sure of the relative merits of gun control, but he knew from personal experience that a gun bought for home protection was more likely—much, much, much more likely—to be used by the owner to commit suicide than to ward off a home invasion. In fact, in all his years in law enforcement, Perlmutter had never seen a case where the home gun had been used to shoot, stop, or scare away an intruder. Suicides by handguns, well, they were more plentiful than anyone wanted to let on.

  Ford Windstar. He circled it again.

  Now, after all these years, Perlmutter had a case involving attempted murder, bizarre abduction, unusually brutal assault—and, he suspected, much more. He started doodling again. He wrote the name Jack Lawson in the top left-hand corner. He wrote the name Rocky Conwell in the top right-hand corner. Both men, possibly missing, had crossed a toll plaza in a neighboring state at the same time. He drew a line from one name to the other.

  Connection One.

  Perlmutter wrote out Freddy Sykes’s name, bottom left. The victim of a grievous assault. He wrote Mike Swain on the bottom right. Shot, attempted murder. The connection between these two men, Connection Two, was obvious. Swain’s wife had seen the perpetrator of both acts, a stout Chinese guy she made sound like the Son of Odd Job from the old James Bond film.

  But nothing really connected the four cases. Nothing connected the two disappearing men to the work of Odd Job’s offspring. Except perhaps for one thing:

  The Ford Windstar.

  Jack Lawson had been driving a blue Ford Windstar when he disappeared. Mini O
dd Job had been driving a blue Ford Windstar when he left the Sykes residence and shot Swain.

  Granted this was a tenuous connection at best. Saying “Ford Windstar” in this suburb was like saying “implant” at a strip club. It wasn’t much to go on, but when you add in the history of this town, the fact that stable fathers do not really just go missing, that this much activity never happens in a town like Kasselton . . . no, it wasn’t a strong tie, but it wasn’t far off for Perlmutter to draw a conclusion:

  All of this was related.

  Perlmutter had no idea how this was all related, and he really didn’t want to think about it too much quite yet. Let the techies and lab guys do their jobs first. Let them scour the Sykes residence for fingerprints and hairs. Let the artist finish the sketch. Let Veronique Baltrus, their resident computer weenie and an honest-to-God knockout, sift through the Sykes computer. It was simply too early to make a guess.

  “Captain?”

  It was Daley.

  “What’s up?”

  “We found Rocky Conwell’s car.”

  “Where?”

  “You know the Park-n-Ride on Route 17?”

  Perlmutter took off his reading glasses. “The one down the street?”

  Daley nodded. “I know. It doesn’t make sense. We know he left the state, right?”

  “Who found it?”

  “Pepe and Pashaian.”

  “Tell them to secure the area,” he said, rising. “We’ll check the vehicle out ourselves.”

  chapter 23

  Grace threw on a Coldplay CD for the ride, hoping it’d distract her. It did and it didn’t. On one level she understood exactly what was happening to her with no need for interpretation. But the truth, in a sense, was too stark. To face it straight on would paralyze. That was where the surrealism probably derived from—self-preservation, the need to protect and even filter what one saw. Surrealism gave her the strength to go on, to pursue the truth, to find her husband, as opposed to the eye of reality, stark and naked and alone, which made her want to crouch into a small ball or maybe scream until they took her away.

  Her cell phone rang. She instinctively glanced at the display before hitting the hands-free. Again, no, not Jack. It was Cora. Grace picked up and said, “Hey.”

  “I won’t classify the news as bad or good, so let me put it this way. Do you want the weird news first or the really weird news?”

  “Weird.”

  “I can’t reach Gus of the small wee-wee. He won’t answer his calls. I keep getting his voice mail.”

  Coldplay started singing, appropriately enough, a haunting number entitled “Shiver.” Grace kept both hands on the wheel, perfectly placed at ten and two o’clock. She stayed in the middle lane and drove exactly the speed limit. Cars flew by on both her right and left.

  “And the really weird news?”

  “Remember how we tried to see the calls from two nights ago? I mean, the ones Jack might have made?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, I called the cell phone company. I pretended I was you. I assumed you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Correct assumption.”

  “Right. Anyway, it didn’t matter. The only call Jack’s made in the past three days was to your cell phone yesterday.”

  “The call he made when I was at the police station.”

  “Right.”

  “So what’s weird about that?”

  “Nothing. The weird part was on your home phone.”

  Silence. She stayed on the Merritt Parkway, her hands on the wheel at ten and two o’clock.

  “What about it?”

  “You know about the call to his sister’s office?” Cora asked.

  “Yeah. I found that one by hitting redial.”

  “And his sister—what’s her name again?”

  “Sandra Koval.”

  “Sandra Koval, right. She told you that she wasn’t there. That they never talked.”

  “Yes.”

  “The phone call lasted nine minutes.”

  A small shudder skipped through Grace. She forced her hands to stay at two and ten. “Ergo she lied.”

  “It would seem.”

  “So what did Jack say to her?”

  “And what did she say back?”

  “And why did she lie about it?”

  “Sorry to have to tell you,” Cora said.

  “No, it’s good.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “It’s a lead. Before this, Sandra was a dead end. Now we know she’s somehow involved.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “I don’t know,” Grace said. “Confront her, I guess.”

  They said good-bye and Grace hung up. She drove a little farther, trying to run the scenarios through her head. “Trouble” came on the CD player. She pulled into an Exxon station. New Jersey didn’t have self-serve, so for a moment Grace just sat in her car, not realizing that she had to fill it up herself.

  She bought a bottle of cold water at the station’s mini-mart and dropped the change into a charity can. She wanted to think this through some more, this connection to Jack’s sister, but there wasn’t time for finesse here.

  Grace remembered the number of the Burton and Crimstein law firm. She took out her phone and pressed in the digits. Two rings later she asked to be connected to Sandra Koval’s line. She was surprised when Sandra herself said, “Hello?”

  “You lied to me.”

  There was no reply. Grace walked back toward her car.

  “The call lasted nine minutes. You talked to Jack.”

  More silence.

  “What’s going on, Sandra?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why did Jack call you?”

  “I’m going to hang up now. Please don’t try to contact me again.”

  “Sandra?”

  “You said he called you already.”

  “Yes.”

  “My advice is to wait until he calls again.”

  “I don’t want your advice, Sandra. I want to know what he said to you.”

  “I think you should stop.”

  “Stop what?”

  “You’re on a cell phone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m at gas station in Connecticut.”

  “Why?”

  “Sandra, I want you to listen to me.” There was a burst of static. Grace waited for it to pass. She finished filling the tank and grabbed her receipt. “You’re the last person to talk to my husband before he disappeared. You lied to me about it. You still won’t tell me what he said to you. Why should I tell you anything?”

  “Fair point, Grace. Now you listen to me. I’m going to leave you with one last thought before I hang up: Go home and take care of your children.”

  The line went dead. Grace was back in the car now. She hit redial and asked to be connected to Sandra’s office. Nobody answered. She tried again. Same thing. So now what? Try to show up in person again?

  She pulled out of the gas station. Two miles later Grace saw a sign that said STARSHINE ASSISTED LIVING CENTER. Grace was not sure what she’d been expecting. The nursing home of her youth, she guessed, those one-level edifices of plain brick, the purest form of substance-over-style that, in a perverse way, reminded her of elementary schools. Life, alas, was cyclical. You start in one of those plain brick buildings, you end there. Turn, turn, turn.

  But the Starshine Assisted Living Center was a three-story faux Victorian hotel. It had the turrets and the porches and the bright yellow of the painted ladies of old, all set against a ghastly aluminum siding. The grounds were manicured to the point where everything looked a tad too done, almost plastic. The place was aiming for cheery but it was trying too hard. The whole effect reminded Grace of Epcot Center at Disney World—a fun reproduction but you’d never mistake it for the real thing.

  An old woman sat on a rocking chair on the front porch. She was reading the paper. She wished Grace a good morning a
nd Grace did likewise. The lobby too tried to force up memories of a hotel from a bygone era. There were oil paintings in gaudy frames that looked like the kind of thing you’d buy at one of those Holiday Inn sales where everything was $19.99. It was obvious that they were reproductions of classics, even if you had never seen Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party or Hopper’s Nighthawks.

  The lobby was surprisingly busy. There were elderly people, of course, lots of them, in various states of degeneration. Some walked with no assistance, some shuffled, some had canes, some had walkers, some had wheelchairs. Many seemed spry; others slept.

  The lobby was clean and bright but still had that—Grace hated herself for thinking like this—old-people smell, the odor of a sofa turning moldy. They tried to cover it up with something cherry, something that reminded Grace of those dangling tree fresheners in gypsy cabs, but there are some smells that you can never mask.

  The singular young person in the room—a woman in her mid-twenties—sat behind a desk that was again aiming for the era but looked like something just bought at the Bombay Company. She smiled up at Grace.

  “Good morning. I’m Lindsey Barclay.”

  Grace recognized the voice from the phone. “I’m here to see Mr. Dodd.”

  “Bobby’s in his room. Second floor, room 211. I’ll take you.”

  She rose. Lindsey was pretty in a way that only the young are, with that enthusiasm and smile that belong exclusively to the innocent or the cult recruiter.

  “Do you mind taking the stairs?” she asked.

  “Not at all.”

  Many of the residents stopped and said hello. Lindsey had time for every one of them, cheerfully returning each greeting, though Grace the cynic couldn’t help but wonder if this was a bit of a show for the visitor. Still Lindsey knew all the names. She always had something to say, something personal, and the residents seemed to appreciate that.