by Lisa Gardner
“In other words, he probably did know,” Bobby filled in. “His wife got pregnant by another man, he kills her, now he’s covering his tracks. That’s not rocket science, D.D. Hell, that’s a national trend.”
“And if we were talking about a normal person, I’d agree with you.”
“Define ‘normal,’ ” Bobby said.
She sighed heavily. This is where things got murky. “Okay, so I’ve been dealing with this guy for two days now. And he’s cool. Arctic cold. Miswired in some deep fundamental way that probably should involve a lifetime of therapy, six kinds of pharmaceuticals, and a total personality transplant. But he is who he is, and I’ve noticed a pattern to his deep freeze.”
“Which is?” Bobby was starting to sound impatient. Okay, so it was almost midnight.
“The more personal something is, the more he shuts down. Like this morning. We’re interrogating his four-year-old daughter in front of him. She’s recounting her mother’s last words, which don’t sound promising, let me tell you. And this guy is leaning against the back wall as if a switch has been disconnected. He’s there, but he’s not there. That’s what I thought tonight when I told him his wife was pregnant. He disappeared. Just like that. We were both in the room together, but he’s gone.”
“Sure I can’t take a crack at him?”
“Fuck you,” D.D. informed him.
“Love you, too, babe.” She heard him yawn again, then rub his face on the other end of the phone. “Okay, so you have one really cool customer who seems to have some kind of tactical background and knows how to hold up under extreme duress. You think he’s former special ops?”
“We ran his prints through the system, but didn’t get any hits. I mean, even if he did top secret, deeply classified James Bond crap, the missions would be off the radar, but military service would put him in the system, right? We’d see that piece of the puzzle.”
“True. What does he look like?”
D.D. shrugged. “Kind of like Patrick Dempsey. Thick wavy hair, deep dark eyes—”
“Oh for heaven’s sake. I’m looking for a suspect, not a blind date.”
She blushed. Definitely, definitely needed to get laid. “Five foot eleven, hundred and seventy pounds, early thirties, dark hair and eyes, no distinguishing marks or facial hair.”
“Build?”
“Fit.”
“Now, see, that does sound like special ops. Big guys can’t make it through the endurance training, which is why you should always look out for the small guy in the room.” Bobby sounded smug as he said this. A former sniper, he fit the small, dangerous model perfectly.
“But he’d have a record,” she singsonged.
“Shit.” Bobby was starting to sound tired. “All right, what kinds of things did light up?”
“Marriage certificate, driver’s license, Social Security number, and bank accounts. Basic stuff.”
“Birth certificate?”
“Still digging.”
“Speeding tickets, traffic citations?”
“Nada.”
“Credit cards?”
“One.”
“When was it opened?”
“Ummm …” D.D. had to think about it, trying to recall what she’d read in the report. “Within the past five years.”
“Let me guess, around the same time as the bank accounts,” Bobby said.
“Now that you mention it, most of the financial activity fell around the same time Jason and his wife moved to Boston.”
“Sure, but where’d the money come from?”
“Again, we’re still digging.”
Longer pause now. “In summary,” Bobby said slowly, “you got a name, a driver’s license, and a Social Security number, with no activity before the past five years.”
D.D. jolted. She hadn’t quite thought of it that way, but now that he mentioned it … “Yeah. Okay. Only activity is from the past five years.”
“Come on, D.D., you tell me. What’s wrong with that picture?”
“Crap,” D.D. exclaimed. She whacked her steering wheel. “ ‘Jones’ is an alias, isn’t it? I knew it. I just knew it. I’ve been saying that all along. More we learn about the family, the more everything feels … just right. Not too busy, not too boring. Not too social, not too anti social. Everything is just right. Goddammit, if they’re with WitSec, I will slit my wrists.”
“Can’t be,” Bobby assured her.
“Why not?” She really didn’t want her case to be part of the witness protection program.
“Because if so, you’d have federal marshals already crawling all over your ass. It’s been forty-eight hours, and the wife’s disappearance is public info. No way they wouldn’t have found you.”
That made her feel better. Except: “What’s left?”
“He did it. Or she did it. But one of them has a new identity. Figure out which one.”
Coming from Bobby, D.D. took news of a probable alias as expert advice. After all, he’d married a woman who’d had at least twelve names, possibly more. Then it hit her. “Mr. Smith. Fuck. Mr. Smith!”
“Lucky Mr. Smith,” Bobby drawled.
“He’s a cat. Their cat. I never connected the dots. But think about it. The family is Mr. and Mrs. Jones, with their cat, Mr. Smith. It’s an inside joke, dammit! You’re right, they’re mocking us.”
“I vote for Mr. Arctic.”
“Ah shit,” D.D. moaned. “Just my luck. I got a prime suspect who by all appearances is a mild-mannered reporter, with a secret identity. You know who that sounds like, right?”
“I don’t know. Who?”
“Fucking Superman.”
| CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE |
When Jason was fourteen years old, his family had gone to the zoo. He’d been too old and cynical for these kinds of outings, but his little sister, Janie, had been madly in love with anything furry, so for Janie’s sake, he’d agreed to the zoo.
He’d do most things for Janie’s sake, a fact his mother exploited zealously.
They’d made the rounds. Eyed sleeping lions, sleeping polar bears, sleeping elephants. Really, Jason thought, how many sleeping animals did one guy need to see? They bypassed the insect exhibit without a word, but ducked into Reptile World. At ten years of age, Janie didn’t really like snakes, but still liked to squeal while looking at snakes, so it made a crazy kind of sense.
Unfortunately, the key exhibit item—the albino Burmese python—was covered up, with a sign saying, Out to Lunch. Deepest Apologies, Polly the Python.
Janie had giggled, thinking that was pretty funny. Jason had shrugged, because it seemed to him that a python would be yet one more sleeping creature, so he fell into step behind his sister as their father led them toward the door. At the last moment, however, Jason had glanced over and realized the cardboard wasn’t fully covering the glass. From this angle, he could peer right in, and Polly wasn’t out to lunch, Polly was eating lunch, a very cute-looking lunch, too, quivering on the floor while the giant snake unhinged her jaws and began the slow, laborious process of drawing the jackrabbit into her massive yellow coils.
His legs had stopped moving on their own. He’d stood there frozen for a full minute, maybe two, unable to look away, as inch by fluffy brown inch, the freshly asphyxiated body disappeared into the snake’s glistening gullet.
He thought at that moment, staring at the dead bunny. I know exactly how you feel.
Then his father had touched his arm, and he’d followed his dad out the exit into the white-hot blast of Georgia summer.
His father had watched him carefully for the rest of the day. Looking for signs of what? Psychosis? Impending nervous breakdown? Violent outbursts?
It didn’t happen. It never happened. Jason got through each day as he got through the day before, step by painful step, moment by painful moment, a physically scrawny, painfully undersized boy, armed only with his thousand-yard stare.
Until the day he turned eighteen and came into Rita’s inheritance. Had his paren
ts planned him a party? Had Janie bought him a gift?
He’d never know. Because on the morning of Jason’s eighteenth birthday, he’d gone straight to the bank, cashed out two-point-three million dollars, and vanished.
He’d returned from the dead once before. He never planned on hurting his family that badly again.
Sandy was pregnant.
He should do something.
As thoughts went, Sandy’s pregnancy was a curious one. It floated right above him. Something he could state, something he could repeat, and yet the three words refused to sound like English.
Sandy was pregnant.
He should do something.
The police were gone. They had wrapped up their party a little after one A.M. The computer was gone. His iPod, Ree’s Leapster. Some boxes had disappeared from the basement as well, probably cartons of old software. He didn’t know. He didn’t care. He’d signed the evidence logs where they had told him to sign, and none of it had made a bit of difference to him.
He wondered if the baby was his.
He would take Ree and run, he thought idly. There was a thin metal box up in the attic, tucked behind a thick piece of insulation, which contained two pieces of fake ID and approximately twenty-five thousand dollars in large bills. The pile of cash was surprisingly small, the metal lockbox no bigger than a hardcover novel. He knew the police couldn’t have discovered it during their search, because it was the kind of find that would have immediately engendered conversation.
He would climb the stairs to the attic, retrieve the box, slip it into his computer case. He would rouse Ree from her bed, shear her long brown curls, and top them with a red baseball cap. Throw on a pair of denim overalls and a blue polo shirt and she would make an excellent Charlie, traveling alone with her freshly shaved father.
They’d have to sneak out the back to avoid the press. Climb over the fence. He’d find a car a few blocks away and hotwire a ride. The police would expect them to hit South Station, so instead he’d drive them to the Amtrak station on 128. There, he’d park the first stolen car, and help himself to a second. The police would eye all trains going south, because that’s what people did, right? They headed south, maybe into New York, where it was easy for anyone to get lost.
Ergo, he’d drive the second stolen vehicle due north, all the way to Canada. He’d stick “Charlie” in the trunk and don a sports jacket and thick, black-rimmed glasses. Just another businessman crossing the border for Lasik. The border patrol was used to such things.
Then, once he and Ree hit Canada, they would disappear. It was a huge country, lots of land and deep green woods. They could find a small town and start over again. Far away from Max. Far away from the suspicions of the Boston police.
Ree could pick a new name. He’d get a job, maybe at the general store.
They could make it for years. As long as he never got back on a computer.
Sandy was pregnant.
He should do something.
He didn’t know what.
Upon further contemplation, he couldn’t run. Not yet. He needed to save Ree. It would always come down to Ree. But he wanted, he needed, to know what had happened to Sandy. And he wanted, he needed, to know about the baby. He felt that in the past forty-eight hours, fate had taken his legs right out from under him. And now, perversely, it was dangling a carrot.
He might be a father.
Or Sandy really did hate him after all.
If he couldn’t run, then he needed a computer. Actually, he needed his computer and he needed to understand just what Sandy had done. How much had thirteen-year-old Ethan taught her?
Best he knew, the family computer was still safely stashed at the offices of the Boston Daily. But how to retrieve it? He could drag Ree with him over to the offices. Police would shadow him this time, and probably two or three reporters as well. His mere presence would make them suspicious. What kind of grieving husband woke his kid in the middle of the night to go to work two nights in a row?
If the police grew suspicious enough, they might check out the computers at the Boston Daily. Particularly if Ethan Hastings kept talking to them. How much had Sandy found? What pieces had she put together without ever confronting him on the subject? She should’ve been angry. Furious. Frightened.
But she had never said a word.
Had she taken a lover by then? Is that what this came down to? She’d found a lover, and then, once she’d stumbled upon the computer files, made her decision to leave Jason. Except then she’d discovered she was pregnant. His? The other man’s? Maybe she’d tried to break it off with her lover. Maybe that had made the other man angry, and he’d taken steps.
Or maybe, on Wednesday night, armed with her newfound training from Ethan Hastings, Sandy had discovered Jason’s computer files. At that moment, she’d realized she was carrying a monster’s child. So she’d … what? Fled into the night without even her wallet or a change of clothes? Decided to save one child by abandoning the other?
It didn’t make any sense.
Which brought him back to the only other new man he knew of in Sandy’s life—Ethan Hastings. Perhaps the boy had assumed a more intimate relationship with Sandy. Perhaps she’d tried to tell him he was mistaken. Given all the hours he’d spent with her, trying to help her outwit her own husband, Ethan had taken this personally. So he’d come to the house in the middle of the night and …
The youngest killer in America had been sentenced for a double homicide at the tender age of twelve, so as far as Jason was concerned, Ethan Hastings met the age requirement for possible homicidal maniac. The logistics of murder, however, seemed complicated. How would a thirteen-year-old boy get to Jason’s house? Ride his bike? Walk? And how would a kid as scrawny as Ethan Hastings dispose of a grown woman’s body? Drag her out by her hair? Fling her over his handlebars?
Jason sat down at the kitchen counter, his head spinning. He was tired. Bone-deep weary. These were the moments he had to be careful. Because his thoughts might wander, and he’d suddenly find himself in a room that always smelled like fresh-turned earth and decaying fall leaves. He would feel the whisper of hundreds of spider-webs brushing across his cheeks and hair. Then he would see the quick scrabble of one fat hairy body, or two or three, dashing across his tennis shoe, or down his pant leg, or across his shoulder, frantically looking for escape.
Because you had to escape. There were things in the dark much worse than shy, panic-stricken spiders.
He wanted to think of Janie. The way she and she alone had welcomed him home with a huge hug. He wanted to remember how it had been sitting on the floor beside her, dutifully drawing unicorns while she prattled away on the importance of the color purple, or why she wanted to live in a castle when she grew up.
He wanted to remember the look on her twelfth birthday, when he had saved all his money to take her horseback riding for the day, because they weren’t the kind of family that could ever afford a pony.
And he wanted to believe that the morning of his eighteenth birthday, when she had woken up and discovered his room once again empty, that she hadn’t cried, that she hadn’t missed him. That he hadn’t broken his little sister’s heart all over again.
Because he was getting an education these days. He was learning that to be the family of the missing person was in its own way just as terrible as being the missing person. He was learning that living with so many questions was harder than being the person who had all the answers.
And he was learning that deep in his heart, he was terrified that the Burgerman was still alive and well. Somehow, some way, the monster from Jason’s youth had returned to take his family from him.
Jason paced for another ten minutes. Or maybe it was twenty or thirty. Clock was ticking, each minute inching toward another morning without his wife.
Max would return.
The police as well.
And more press. Cable news shows now. The likes of Greta Van Susteren and Nancy Grace. They would apply their own kin
d of pressure. A beautiful wife missing for days. The dark mysterious husband with a shady past. They’d crack open his life for the world to see. And somewhere in Georgia, some people would connect some dots and place phone calls of their own.…
Then both Max and the police would have real ammunition to take his daughter from him. How long did he have? Noon? Two o’clock? Maybe they’d break the story just in time to headline the five o’clock cycle. That would score them ratings. Some news anchorman would see his star soar.
And Jason … How in the world would he ever say goodbye to his daughter?
Worse, what would happen to her? Her mother gone, now dragged away from the only father she had ever known … Daddy, Daddy, Daddy …
He had to think. He had to move.
Sandy was pregnant.
He needed to do something.
Couldn’t access his computer. Couldn’t confront Ethan Hastings. Couldn’t run. What to do? What to do?
It came to him, shortly after two A.M.: his last course of action.
It would involve leaving his daughter, sleeping alone upstairs. In four years, he’d never done such a thing. What if she woke up? Found the house once again empty and started screaming hysterically?
Or what if there was someone else out there, someone lurking in the shadows, waiting for Jason to make his first mistake so he could swoop in and grab Ree? She knew something more about Wednesday night. D.D. believed it; he did, too. If someone had abducted Sandy, and if that same someone knew Ree had been a witness …
D.D. had sworn the cops were watching his house. A promise or a threat. He had to hope it was a little of both.
Jason went upstairs, changing into black jeans and a black sweatshirt. He paused outside Ree’s door, straining his ears for any sound of movement. Then, when the silence unnerved him, he had to crack the door open to reassure himself that his four-year-old daughter was still alive.
She slept in a rounded huddle, one arm thrown over her face, Mr. Smith tucked into the curve of her knees.
And Jason remembered clearly then, vividly, the moment he’d first watched her slide into the world. How wrinkly and small and blue. The flail of her fists. The tight, screwed-up pucker of her wailing mouth. The way he instantaneously, absolutely fell in love with every square inch of her. His daughter. His lone miracle.