by Harlan Coben
The battle-ax receptionist-- she looked about fifteen years too old to play the p rison matron in B-movies-- watched the scene play out, the hint of a smile on h er dry, lipstick-caked lips.
Loren said, "I'd like the identity of the woman who purchased the breast i mplants with the serial number 89783348."
"In the first place," Horne said, "these are very old records. SurgiCo didn't k eep the woman's name on record, only the doctor who performed the procedure."
"Fine, that'll be enough."
Horne crossed his arms. "Do you have a subpoena, Detective?"
"It's on its way."
He gave her his smuggest expression, which was saying something. "Well then," he s aid, "I'll return to my office. Please inform Tiffany here when you have it, w ill you?"
The battle-ax preened, smiled widely. Loren pointed at her and said, "You have l ipstick on your teeth." Then she turned her attention back to Randal Horne. "Do y ou mind telling me why you require a subpoena?"
"There are all sorts of new patient privacy laws. We at the Lockwood Corporation b elieve in following them."
"But this woman is dead."
"Still."
"There are no medical secrets here. We know that she had implants. We're just t rying to identify the body."
"There must be other ways, Detective."
"We're trying, believe me. But so far . . ." Loren shrugged.
"Unfortunately that does not change our position."
"But your position, with all due respect, seems a tad fluid, Mr. Horne."
"I'm not sure I understand your point."
"Hold on a sec." Loren started pulling folded papers out of her back pockets. "I h ad time on the ride down here to check the New Jersey cases. It seems that your c ompany has always cooperated with law enforcement in the past. You released r ecords on a cadaver found last July in Somerset County. A Mr. Hampton Wheeler, a ge sixty-six, had his head and fingers cut off in order to avoid i dentification, but the killer forgot he had a pacemaker. Your company helped t he authorities ID him. There was another case--"
"Detective . . . Muse, is it?"
"Inspector."
"Inspector Muse. I'm very busy. Please make yourself comfortable. When your s ubpoena arrives, please feel free to tell Tiffany."
"Wait." Loren glanced at the battle-ax. "Tiffany-- I mean, that can't be her real n ame, right?"
"If you'll excuse me . . ."
"Mr. Horne, you already know I have no subpoena coming-- that I was bluffing."
Randal Horne said nothing.
Loren looked down and spotted the issue of The Third Branch. She frowned and t urned toward Horne. This time she did stand. "You didn't think I was bluffing," s he said, her words coming slowly. "You knew it."
Horne took a step back.
"But in reality," Loren went on, more to herself than to him, "it could have b een true. It would have been tough timing, sure, but I could have called a f ederal judge on my way down here. The subpoena would be a no-brainer. Any m ember of the bench would have rubber-stamped it in five minutes. No judge in t heir right mind would refuse unless . . ."
Randal Horne waited. It was almost as if he hoped she'd put it together.
"Unless someone on the federal level-- the FBI or U. S. attorney's office-- shut y ou down."
Horne cleared his throat and checked his watch. "I really have to go now," he s aid.
"Your company was cooperating with us at first. That's what Eldon said. Suddenly y ou stopped. Why? Why would you suddenly change your mind unless the feds told y ou to?" She looked up. "Why would the feds care about this case?"
"That isn't our concern," he said. Horne then put his hand to his mouth as if h e'd been aghast at his own indiscretion. Their eyes met and she knew that he'd d one her a favor. Horne wouldn't say any more. But he had said enough.
The FBI. They were the ones who had shut her down.
And maybe Loren understood why.
Back at her car Loren ran it through her head.
Who did she know at the FBI?
She had some acquaintances there, but nobody who could help on this level. The f ound-a-lead tingle rushed through her. This was big, no question about it. The FBI had been looking into this case. For some reason they wanted to find whoever w as pretending to be Sister Mary Rose, leaving trip wires and calling cards e verywhere, even with the company who supplied her breast implants.
She nodded to herself. Sure, this was mere speculation, but it made sense. Start w ith the victim: Sister Mary Rose had to be some sort of fugitive or witness.
Someone valuable to the FBI.
Okay, good. Go on.
A long time ago Sister Mary Rose (or whatever her real name was) ran off-- hard t o say how long ago, but she'd been teaching at St. Margaret's, according to Mother Katherine, for seven years. So it had to be at least that long.
Loren stopped, considered the implications. Sister Mary Rose had been a fugitive f or at least seven years. Had the feds been looking for her all that time?
It added up.
Sister Mary Rose had gone into deep, deep hiding. She'd changed her identity, f or certain. Probably started off in Oregon, at that conservative convent Mother Katherine had mentioned. Who knows how long she was there?
Doesn't matter. What does matter is that seven years ago, for whatever reason, s he chose to come east.
Loren rubbed her hands together. Oh, this is good.
So Sister Mary Rose moves to New Jersey and starts teaching at St. Margaret's.
By all accounts she's a good teacher and nun, caring and devoted, living a quiet l ife. Seven years pass. Maybe she thinks she's safe now. Maybe she gets careless a nd reaches out to someone from her old life. Whatever.
Somehow, some way, her past catches up with her. Someone learns who she is. And t hen someone breaks into her small convent room, tortures her, and then s uffocates her with a pillow.
Loren paused, almost as if she were offering up a respectful moment of silence.
Okay, she thought, so now what?
She needed to get the identity from the feds.
How?
Only thing she could think of was classic quid pro quo: Give them something in r eturn. But what did she have?
Matt Hunter, for one.
The feds were probably at least a day or two behind her. Would they have the p hone logs yet? Doubtful. And if they did, if they knew about the call to Marsha Hunter, would they have already figured in a Matt Hunter connection?
Very doubtful.
Loren hit the highway and picked up her cell phone. It was dead. She cursed the d amn thing. The greatest lie-- right up there with "the check is in the mail" and "your call is very important to us"-- is the stated battery life of a cell phone.
Hers was supposed to last a week on standby. She was lucky if the cursed thing g ave her thirty-six hours.
She flipped open the glove compartment and pulled out the charger. One end she j ammed into the cigarette lighter, the other into her phone. The phone's LCD j umped to life and informed her that there were three messages waiting.
The first was from her mother. "Hi, sweetheart," Mom said in a voice strangely t ender. It was her public voice, the one she usually saved for when she thought s omeone might overhear and thus judge her maternal skills. "I thought I'd order u s a pizza from Renato's and pick up a movie at Blockbuster-- the new Russell Crowe is out on DVD-- and, I don't know, maybe we could have a girls' night, just t he two of us. Would you like that?"
Loren shook her head, tried not to be moved, but the tears were there, right b elow the surface. Her mom. Every time she wanted to write her off, to dismiss h er from her life, to hold a grudge, to blame her once and for all for Dad's d eath, she came along and said something surprising and pulled herself back from t he brink.
"Yeah," Loren said softly in the car. "I'd like that a lot."
The second and third messages blew that idea out of the water. They were both f rom her boss, County Prose
cutor Ed Steinberg, and were short and to the point.
The first one said: "Call me. Now." The second one said: "Where the hell are y ou? Call me. Doesn't matter what the hour. Disaster on the way."
Ed Steinberg was not one for overstatement or for having people call at all h ours. He was old-fashioned in that approach. Loren had his home number s omewhere-- not on her, unfortunately-- but she had never used it. Steinberg d idn't like to be bothered during off hours. His motto was: Get a life, it can w ait. He was usually out of the office by five o'clock and she couldn't recall a t ime when she'd seen him in his office after six.
It was six thirty now. She decided to try his office line first. Thelma, his s ecretary, might still be there. She'd know how to reach him. After one ring, t he phone was picked up by Ed Steinberg himself.
This was not a good sign.
"Where are you?" Steinberg asked.
"On the way back from Delaware."
"Come straight back here. We got a problem."
Chapter 18
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
FBI FIELD OFFICE
JOHN LAWRENCE BAILEY BUILDING
OFFICE OF THE SPECIAL AGENT IN CHARGE
FOR ADAM YATES IT STARTED out as another day.
At least, that was what he wanted to believe. In a larger sense, no day was ever j ust another for Yates-- at least, not for the past ten years. Each day felt like b orrowed time, waiting eternally for the proverbial ax to fall. Even now, when m ost rational people would conclude that he'd successfully put his past mistakes b ehind him, the fear still gnawed in the back of his brain, tormenting him.
Yates had been a young agent then, working undercover. Now here he was, ten y ears later, the SAC-- Special Agent in Charge-- for all of Nevada, one of the FBI's most plum positions. He had risen up the ranks. In all that time, there h ad not been the smallest inkling of trouble.
So heading into work that morning, it seemed to be another day.
But when his chief advisor, Cal Dollinger, walked into his office, even though n either had spoken about the incident in nearly a decade, something in his old f riend's face told him that this was indeed the day, that all others had merely b een leading up to this.
Yates glanced quickly at the photograph on his desk. It was a family shot-- he, Bess, the three kids. The girls were in their teens now, and no amount of t raining adequately prepares a father for that. Yates stayed seated. He wore his c asual uniform-- khakis, no socks, brightly hued polo shirt.
Cal Dollinger stood over his desk and waited. Cal was huge-- six-seven and nearly t hree hundred pounds. Adam and Cal went way back, having first met as e ight-year-olds in Mrs. Colbert's third-grade class at Collingwood Elementary School. Some men called them Lenny and George, referring to the Steinbeck c haracters in Of Mice and Men. There might be some truth to it-- Cal was big and i mpossibly strong-- but where Lenny had a gentleness, Cal had none. He was a r ock, both physically and emotionally. He could indeed kill a rabbit by petting i t, but he wouldn't care much.
But their bond was even stronger than that. You go back enough years, you pull e ach other out of enough fires, you become like one. Cal could be cruel, no q uestion about it. But like most violent men, it was just a question of black a nd white. Those in his very small white zone-- his wife, his kids, Adam, Adam's f amily-- he'd protect with his dying breath. The rest of the world was black and i nanimate, a distant backdrop.
Adam Yates waited, but Cal could wait longer.
"What is it?" Adam finally asked.
Cal's eyes swept the room. He feared listening devices. He said, "She's dead."
"Which one?"
"The older."
"Are you sure?"
"Her body was found in New Jersey. We ID'd her by the serial numbers on the s urgical implants. She was living as a nun."
"You're kidding."
Cal did not smile. Cal did not kid.
"What about"-- Yates didn't even want to say Clyde's name--"him?"
Cal shrugged. "No idea."
"And the tape?"
Cal shook his head. It was as Adam Yates had expected. It wouldn't end easily.
It would never end at all. He cast one more glance at his wife and children. He l ooked about his spacious office, the commendations on the wall, his nameplate o n the desk. All of it-- his family, his career, his entire life-- seemed wispy n ow, like holding smoke in a hand.
"We should go to New Jersey," he said.
Chapter 19
SONYA MCGRATH WAS SURPRISED to hear the key in the lock.
Today, more than a decade after her son's death, the photographs of Stephen were s till in the same frames on the same side tables. Other photographs had been a dded, of course. When Michelle, Sonya's oldest daughter, got married last year, t hey naturally took photographs. Several were framed over the fireplace. But no p ictures of Stephen had ever been taken down. They could pack away his things, r epaint his room, give his clothes to charity, sell his old car, but Sonya and Clark could never touch those photographs.
Her daughter Michelle, like many brides, had chosen to do the standard group p hotographs before the marriage ceremony. The groom, a nice guy named Jonathan, h ad a large extended family. They took all the usual shots. Sonya and Clark had g amely posed-- with their daughter, with their daughter and soon-to-be s on-in-law, with Jonathan's parents and the new bride and groom, whatever, but t hey balked when the photographer called for the "McGrath family photograph," t he one that would have consisted of Sonya and Clark and Michelle and Cora, Michelle's younger sister, because all any of them would ever see, even after t his joy-filled day, was the giant hole in the "McGrath family photograph" where Stephen still belonged.
The big house was silent tonight. It had been that way since Cora started c ollege. Clark was "working late again"-- a euphemism for "sleeping with the b imbette"-- but Sonya didn't care. She didn't question his hours because their h ome was even lonelier, even more silent, when Clark was here.
Sonya swirled the brandy in the snifter. She sat alone in the new theater room, i n the dark, cuing up a movie on DVD. She'd rented something with Tom Hanks-- his p resence, even in crummy movies, oddly comforted her-- but she hadn't hit the p lay button yet.
God, she thought, am I really this pitiful?
Sonya had always been a popular woman. She had many true and wonderful friends.
It would be easy to blame them, to say that they slowly disengaged themselves f rom her after Stephen's death, that they had tried to be dutiful but after a w hile, you can only take so much, and so they made one excuse, and then another, g radually drifting away, cutting ties.
But that would not be fair to them.
It might be true in some small part-- there had certainly been a detachment of s orts-- but Sonya had been far more responsible for that than any of her friends.
She pushed them away. She did not want comfort. She did not want company or c amaraderie or commiseration. She didn't want to be miserable either, but p erhaps that was the easiest and ergo best alternative.
The front door opened.
Sonya turned on the small lamp next to her movie-theater recliner. It was dark o utside, but in this airless room that didn't matter. The shades blocked out all l ight. She heard the footsteps in the marble foyer and then on the polished h ardwood floors. They were coming toward her.
She waited.
A moment later, Clark stepped into the room. He said nothing, just stood there.
She studied him for a moment. Her husband looked somehow older, or maybe it had b een a long time since she had really studied the man she'd married. He'd chosen n ot to go distinguished gray and took to coloring his hair. The coloring was d one, as with all things Clark, meticulously, but it still didn't look right.
His skin had an ashen tone. He looked thinner.
"I was just going to put on a movie," she said.
He stared at her.
"Clark?"
"I know," he said.
He did
not mean that he knew that she was putting on a movie. He meant something e lse entirely. Sonya did not ask for clarification. There was no need. She sat v ery still.
"I know about your visits to the museum," he went on. "I've known for a long t ime."
Sonya debated how to reply. Countering with an "I know about you too" was the o bvious move, but it would be both too defensive and entirely irrelevant. This w as not about an affair.
Clark stood, his hands at his sides, his finger itching but not clenching.
"How long have you known?" she asked.
"A few months."
"So how come you didn't say anything before now?"
He shrugged.
"How did you find out?"
"I had you followed," he said.
"Followed? You mean like you hired a private investigator?"
"Yes."
She crossed her legs. "Why?" Her voice raised a notch, stung by this strange b etrayal. "Did you think I was sleeping around?"
"He killed Stephen."
"It was an accident."
"Really? Is that what he tells you when you have your little lunches? Do you d iscuss how he accidentally murdered my son?"
"Our son," she corrected him.
He looked at her then, a look she had seen before but never directed at her.
"How could you?"
"How could I what, Clark?"
"Meet with him. Offer him forgiveness--"
"I've never offered him anything of the sort."
"Comfort then."
"It's not about that."
"Then what is it about?"
"I don't know." Sonya rose to her feet. "Clark, listen to me: What happened to Stephen was an accident."
He made a noise of derision. "Is that how you comfort yourself, Sonya? By t elling yourself it was an accident?"
"Comfort myself?" A dark chill ripped through her. "There is no comfort, Clark.
Not for a second. Accident, murder-- Stephen is dead either way."
He said nothing.
"It was an accident, Clark."
"He's convinced you of that, eh?"
"Actually, just the opposite."