Three Harlan Coben Novels

by Harlan Coben

  Questions like that.

  Scott Duncan came by a week after Sandra’s arrest. When she opened the door, he said, “I found something.”

  “What?”

  “This was in Geri’s stuff,” Duncan said.

  He handed her a beat-up cassette. There was no label on it but faintly, in black ink, someone had written: ALLAW.

  They moved silently into the den. Grace stuck the cassette in her player and pressed the play button.

  “Invisible Ink” was the third song.

  There were similarities to “Pale Ink.” Would a court of law have found Jimmy guilty of plagiarism? It would be a close call, but Grace figured that the answer, after all these years, was probably no. There were plenty of songs that sounded alike. There was also a fine line between influence and plagiarism. “Pale Ink,” it seemed to her, probably straddled that blurry line.

  So much that went wrong did—straddled a blurry line, that is.

  “Scott?”

  He did not turn toward her.

  “Don’t you think it’s time we cleared the air?”

  He nodded slowly.

  She was not sure how to put this. “When you found out your sister was murdered, you investigated with a passion. You left your job. You went all out.”

  “Yes.”

  “It wouldn’t have been hard to find out she had an old boyfriend.”

  “Not hard at all,” Duncan agreed.

  “And you would have found out that his name was Shane Alworth.”

  “I knew about Shane before all this. They dated for six months. But I thought Geri had died in a fire. There was no reason to follow up with him.”

  “Right. But now, after you talked to Monte Scanlon, you did.”

  “Yes,” he said. “It was the first thing I did.”

  “You learned that he’d disappeared right around the time of your sister’s murder.”

  “Right.”

  “And that made you suspicious.”

  “To put it mildly.”

  “You probably, I don’t know, checked his old college records, his old high school records even. You talked to his mom. It wouldn’t have taken much. Not when you’re looking for it.”

  Scott Duncan nodded.

  “So you knew, before we even met, that Jack was Shane Alworth.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I knew.”

  “You suspected him of killing your sister?”

  Duncan smiled, but there was no joy in it. “A man is dating your sister. He breaks up with her. She’s murdered. He changes identity and disappears for fifteen years.” He shrugged. “What would you think?”

  Grace nodded. “You told me you like to shake the cages. That was the way to make progress in a case.”

  “Right.”

  “And you knew that you couldn’t just ask Jack about your sister. You had nothing on him.”

  “Right again.”

  “So,” she said, “you shook the cage.”

  Silence.

  “I checked with Josh at the Photomat,” Grace said.

  “Ah. How much did you pay him?”

  “A thousand dollars.”

  Duncan snorted. “I only paid him five hundred.”

  “To put that picture in my envelope.”

  “Yes.”

  The song changed. Allaw was now singing a song about voices and wind. Their sound was raw, but there was potential there too.

  “You cast suspicion on Cora to distract me from pressuring Josh.”

  “Yes.”

  “You insisted I go with you to see Mrs. Alworth. You wanted to see her reaction when she saw her grandchildren.”

  “More cage shaking,” he agreed. “Did you see the look in her eyes when she saw Emma and Max?”

  She had. She just hadn’t known what it meant or why she ended up living in a condo right on Jack’s route to work. Now, of course, she did. “And because you were forced to take a leave, you couldn’t use the FBI for surveillance. So you hired a private detective, the one who used Rocky Conwell. And you put that camera in our house. If you were going to shake the cage, you’d need to see how your suspect would react.”

  “All true.”

  She thought of the end result. “A lot of people died because of what you did.”

  “I was investigating my sister’s murder. You can’t expect me to apologize for that.”

  Blame, she thought again. So much of it to go around. “You could have told me.”

  “No. No, Grace, I could never trust you.”

  “You said our alliance was temporary.”

  He looked at her. There was something dark there now. “That,” he said, “was a lie. We never had an alliance.”

  She sat up and turned the music down.

  “You don’t remember the massacre, do you, Grace?”

  “That’s not uncommon,” she said. “It’s not amnesia or anything like that. I was hit so hard in the head I was in a coma.”

  “Head trauma,” he said with a nod. “I know all about it. I’ve seen in it lots of cases. The Central Park jogger, for one. Most cases, like yours, you don’t even remember the days before it.”

  “So?”

  “So how did you get into the front pit that night?”

  The question, coming out of nowhere like that, made her sit up. She searched his face for a give. There was none. “What?”

  “Ryan Vespa, well, his father scalped the ticket for four hundred bucks. The members of Allaw got them from Jimmy himself. The only way to get up there was to shell out a ton of dough or know someone.” He leaned forward. “How did you get into that front pit, Grace?”

  “My boyfriend got tickets.”

  “That would be Todd Woodcroft? The one who never visited you at the hospital?”

  “Yes.”

  “You sure about that? Because before you said you don’t remember.”

  She opened her mouth and then closed it. He leaned closer.

  “Grace, I talked to Todd Woodcroft. He didn’t go to the concert.”

  Something inside her chest lurched to the side. Her body went cold.

  “Todd didn’t visit you because you’d broken up with him two days before the show. He thought it’d be weird. And you know what, Grace? Shane Alworth broke up with my sister on that same day. Geri never went to the concert. So who do you think Shane took instead?”

  Grace shivered and felt the tremor spread. “I don’t understand.”

  He pulled out the photograph. “This is the original Polaroid I had blown up and put into your envelope. My sister wrote the date on the back. The picture was taken the day before the concert.”

  She shook her head.

  “That mystery woman on the far right, the one we can barely see? You thought it was Sandra Koval. Well, maybe, Grace—just maybe—that’s you.”

  “No . . .”

  “And maybe, while we’re looking for more people to blame, maybe we should wonder about the pretty girl who distracted Gordon MacKenzie so the others could get to Jimmy X. We know it wasn’t my sister or Sheila Lambert or Sandra Koval.”

  Grace kept shaking her head, but then she flashed back to that day at the beach, the first time she laid eyes on Jack, that feeling, that instant grab of the gut. Where had that come from? It was the kind of thing you feel . . .

  . . . when you’ve met someone before.

  The strangest sort of déjà-vu. The kind where you’ve already connected with someone, gotten that first head rush of infatuation. You hold hands, and when the turmoil begins, there’s that stomach-dropping feel of his hand slipping from yours. . . .

  “No,” Grace said, more firmly now. “You got it wrong. It can’t be. I’d have remembered that.”

  Scott Duncan nodded. “You’re probably right.”

  He stood and popped the cassette out of the machine. He handed it to her. “This is all just crazy conjecture. I mean, for all we know, maybe that mystery woman was the reason Shane didn’t go backstage. Maybe she talked him out of it.
Or maybe he realized that there was something more important right there, in that front pit, than anything he could find in a song. Maybe, even three years later, he made sure he found it again.”

  Scott Duncan left then. Grace stood and headed into her studio. She had not painted since Jack’s death. She put the cassette into her portable player and pressed the play button.

  She picked up a brush and tried to paint. She wanted to paint him. She wanted to paint Jack—not John, not Shane. Jack. She thought it would come out muddled and confused, but that wasn’t what happened at all. The brush soared and danced across the canvas. She started thinking again about how we can never know everything about our loved ones. And maybe, if you think about it hard, we don’t even know everything about ourselves.

  The cassette ended. She rewound it and started it again. She worked in a delirious and delightful frenzy. Tears ran down her cheeks. She did not brush them away. At some point she glanced at a clock. Soon it would be time to stop. School would be letting out. She had to get the kids. Emma had piano today. Max had traveling-team soccer practice.

  Grace grabbed her purse and locked the door behind her.

  • • •

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  www.penguin.com/cobenchecklist

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author wishes to thank the following for their technical expertise: Mitchell F. Reiter, MD, Chief, Division of Spine Surgery, UMDNJ (aka “Cuz”); David A. Gold, MD; Christopher J. Christie, United States attorney for the state of New Jersey; Captain Keith Killion of the Ridgewood Police Department; Steven Miller, MD, Director of Pediatric Emergency Medicine, Children’s Hospital of New York Presbyterian; John Elias; Anthony Dellapelle (the nonfictional one); Jennifer van Dam; Linda Fairstein; and Craig Coben (aka “Bro”). As always, if there are errors, technical or otherwise, the fault is with these people. I’m tired of being the fall guy.

  A nod of gratitude to Carole Baron, Mitch Hoffman, Lisa Johnson, and all at Dutton and Penguin Group USA; Jon Woods, Malcolm Edwards, Susan Lamb, Juliet Ewers, Nicky Jeanes, Emma Noble and the gang at Orion; Aaron Priest, Lisa Erbach Vance, Bryant and Hil (for helping me over that first hump), Mike and Taylor (for helping me over the second one), and Maggie Griffin.

  Characters in this book may share a name with people I know, but they are still completely fictional. In fact, this entire novel is a work of fiction. That means I make stuff up.

  A special thanks to Charlotte Coben for Emma’s poems. All rights reserved, as they say.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Harlan Coben is the author of ten previous novels, including the New York Times bestsellers No Second Chance (chosen as the first ever International Book-of-the-Month Club selection), Gone for Good, and Tell No One. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and family.