by Harlan Coben
Linda Coldren shook her head. “Poor bastard.”
Myron kept still. So did Bucky.
“He’s waited twenty-three years for this moment,” she continued. “And he picks now.”
Myron glanced at Bucky. Bucky glanced back, shaking his head.
Linda Coldren stared at the television until her husband exited to the clubhouse. Then she took a deep breath and looked at Myron. “You see, Mr. Bolitar, Jack has never won a professional tournament. The closest he ever came was in his rookie year twenty-three years ago, when he was only nineteen. It was the last time the U.S. Open was held at Merion. You may remember the headlines.”
They were not altogether unfamiliar. This morning’s papers had rehashed it a bit. “He lost a lead, right?”
Linda Coldren made a scoffing sound. “That’s a bit of an understatement, but yes. Since then, his career has been completely unspectacular. There were years he didn’t even make the tour.”
“He picked a hell of a time to snap his streak,” Myron said. “The U.S. Open.”
She gave him a funny look and folded her arms under her chest. “Your name rings a bell,” she said. “You used to play basketball, right?”
“Right.”
“In the ACC. North Carolina?”
“Duke,” he corrected.
“Right, Duke. I remember now. You blew out your knee after the draft.”
Myron nodded slowly.
“That was the end of your career, right?”
Myron nodded again.
“It must have been tough,” she said.
Myron said nothing.
She made a waving motion with her hand. “What happened to you is nothing compared to what happened to Jack.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You had an injury. It may have been tough, but at least you weren’t at fault. Jack had a six-stroke lead at the U.S. Open with only eight holes left. Do you know what that’s like? That’s like having a ten-point lead with a minute left in the seventh game of the NBA finals. It’s like missing a wide-open slam dunk in the final seconds to lose the championship. Jack was never the same man after that. He never recovered. He has spent his whole life since just waiting for the chance of redemption.” She turned back to the television. The leader board was back up. Jack Coldren was still up by nine strokes.
“If he loses again …”
She did not bother finishing the thought. They all stood in silence. Linda staring at the television. Bucky craning his neck, his eyes moist, his face quivering near tears.
“So what’s wrong, Linda?” Myron asked.
“Our son,” she said. “Somebody has kidnapped our son.”
2
“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” Linda Coldren said. “He said he’d kill him.”
“Who said?”
Linda Coldren took several deep breaths, like a child atop the high board. Myron waited. It took some time, but she finally took the plunge.
“I got a call this morning,” she said. Her large indigo eyes were wide and everywhere now, settling down on no one spot for more than a second. “A man said he had my son. He said if I called the police, he would kill him.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“Just that he’d call back with instructions.”
“That’s it?”
She nodded.
“What time was this?” Myron asked.
“Nine, nine-thirty.”
Myron walked over to the television and picked up one of the framed photographs. “Is this a recent photograph of your son?”
“Yes.”
“How old is he?”
“Sixteen. His name is Chad.”
Myron studied the photograph. The smiling adolescent had the fleshy features of his father. He wore a baseball cap with the brim curled the way kids like to nowadays. A golf club rested proudly on his shoulder like a minuteman with a bayonet. His eyes were squinted as though he were looking into the sun. Myron looked over Chad’s face, as if it might give him a clue or some rare insight. It didn’t.
“When did you first notice that your son was missing?”
Linda Coldren gave her father a quick glance, then straightened up, holding her head high as if she were readying herself for a blow. Her words came slow. “Chad had been gone for two days.”
“Gone?” Myron Bolitar, Grand Inquisitor.
“Yes.”
“When you say gone—”
“I mean just that,” she interrupted. “I haven’t seen him since Wednesday.”
“But the kidnapper just called today?”
“Yes.”
Myron started to speak, stopped himself, softened his voice. Tread gently, fair Myron. Ever gently. “Did you have any idea where he was?”
“I assumed he was staying with his friend Matthew,” Linda Coldren replied.
Myron nodded, as if this statement showed brilliant insight. Then nodded again. “Chad told you that?”
“No.”
“So,” he said, aiming for casual, “for the past two days, you didn’t know where your son was.”
“I just told you: I thought he was staying with Matthew.”
“You didn’t call the police.”
“Of course not.”
Myron was about to ask another follow-up question, but her posture made him rethink his words. Linda took advantage of his indecisiveness. She walked to the kitchen with an upright, fluid grace. Myron followed. Bucky seemed to snap out of a trance and trailed.
“Let me make sure I’m following you,” Myron said, approaching from a different angle now. “Chad vanished before the tournament?”
“Correct,” she said. “The Open started Thursday.” Linda Coldren pulled the refrigerator handle. The door opened with a sucking pop. “Why? Is that important?”
“It eliminates a motive,” Myron said.
“What motive?”
“Tampering with the tournament,” Myron said. “If Chad had vanished today—with your husband holding such a big lead—I might think that someone was out to sabotage his chances of winning the Open. But two days ago, before the tournament had begun …”
“No one would have given Jack a snowball’s chance in hell,” she finished for him. “Oddsmakers would have put him at one in five thousand. At best.” She nodded as she spoke, seeing the logic. “Would you like some lemonade?” she asked.
“No, thanks.”
“Dad?”
Bucky shook his head. Linda Coldren bent down into the refrigerator.
“Okay,” Myron said, clapping his hand together, trying his best to sound casual. “We’ve ruled out one possibility. Let’s try another.”
Linda Coldren stopped and watched him. A gallon glass pitcher was gripped in her hand, her forearm bunching easily with the weight. Myron debated how to approach this. There was no easy way.
“Could your son be behind this?” Myron asked.
“What?”
“It’s an obvious question,” Myron said, “under the circumstances.”
She put the pitcher down on a wooden center block. “What the hell are you talking about? You think Chad faked his own kidnapping?”
“I didn’t say that. I said I wanted to check out the possibility.”
“Get out.”
“He was gone two days, and you didn’t call the police,” Myron said. “One possible conclusion is that there was some sort of tension here. That Chad had run away before.”
“Or,” Linda Coldren countered, her hands tightening into fists, “you could conclude that we trusted our son. That we gave him a level of freedom compatible with his level of maturity and responsibility.”
Myron looked over at Bucky. Bucky’s head was lowered. “If that’s the case—”
“That’s the case.”
“But don’t responsible kids tell their parents where they’re going? I mean, just to make sure they don’t worry.”
Linda Coldren took out a glass with too much care. She set it on
the counter and slowly poured herself some lemonade. “Chad has learned to be very independent,” she said as the glass filled. “His father and I are both professional golfers. That means, quite frankly, that neither one of us is home very often.”
“Your being away so much,” Myron said. “Has it led to tension?”
Linda Coldren shook her head. “This is useless.”
“I’m just trying—”
“Look, Mr. Bolitar, Chad did not fake this. Yes, he’s a teenager. No, he’s not perfect, and neither are his parents. But he did not fake his own kidnapping. And if he did—I know he didn’t, but let’s just pretend for the sake of argument that he did—then he is safe and we do not need you. If this is some kind of cruel deception, we’ll learn it soon enough. But if my son is in danger, then following this line of thought is a waste of time I can ill afford.”
Myron nodded. She had a point. “I understand,” he said.
“Good.”
“Have you called his friend since you heard from the kidnapper? The one you thought he might’ve been staying with?”
“Matthew Squires, yes.”
“Did Matthew have any idea where he was?”
“None.”
“They’re close friends, right?”
“Yes.”
“Very close?”
She frowned. “Yes, very.”
“Does Matthew call here a lot?”
“Yes. Or they talk by E-mail.”
“I’ll need Matthew’s phone number,” Myron said.
“But I just told you I spoke to him already.”
“Humor me,” Myron said. “Okay, now let’s back up a second. When was the last time you saw Chad?”
“The day he disappeared.”
“What happened?”
She frowned again. “What do you mean, what happened? He left for summer school. I haven’t seen him since.”
Myron studied her. She stopped and looked back at him a little too steadily. Something here was not adding up. “Have you called the school,” he asked, “to see if he was there that day?”
“I didn’t think of it.”
Myron checked his watch. Friday. Five P.M. “I doubt anyone will still be there, but give it a shot. Do you have more than one phone line?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t call on the line the kidnapper called in on. I don’t want the line tied up in case he calls back.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
“Does your son have any credit cards or ATM cards or anything like that?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll need a list. And the numbers, if you have them.”
She nodded again.
Myron said, “I’m going to call a friend, see if I can get an override Caller ID put in on this line. For when he calls back. I assume Chad has a computer?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Where is it?”
“Up in his room.”
“I’m going to download everything on it to my office via his modem. I have an assistant named Esperanza. She’ll comb through it and see what she can find.”
“Like what?”
“Frankly I have no idea. E-mails. Correspondence. Bulletin boards he participates in. Anything that might give us a clue. It’s not a very scientific process. You check out enough stuff and maybe something will click.”
Linda thought about it for a moment. “Okay,” she said.
“How about you, Mrs. Coldren? Do you have any enemies?”
She sort of smiled. “I’m the number one–rated woman golfer in the world,” she said. “That gives me a lot of enemies.”
“Anyone you can imagine doing this?”
“No,” she said. “No one.”
“How about your husband? Anybody who hates your husband enough?”
“Jack?” She forced out a chuckle. “Everyone loves Jack.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She just shook her head and waved him off.
Myron asked a few more questions, but there was little left for him to excavate. He asked if he could go up to Chad’s room and she led him up the stairs.
The first thing Myron saw when he opened Chad’s door were the trophies. Lots of them. All golf trophies. The bronze figure on the top was always a man coiled in postswing position, the golf club over his shoulder, his head held high. Sometimes the little man wore a golf cap. Other times he had short, wavy hair like Paul Hornung in old football reels. There were two leather golf bags in the right corner, both jammed past capacity with clubs. Photographs of Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Sam Snead, Tom Watson blanketed the walls. Issues of Golf Digest littered the floor.
“Does Chad play golf?” Myron asked.
Linda Coldren just looked at him. Myron met her gaze and nodded sagely.
“My powers of deduction,” he said. “They intimidate some people.”
She almost smiled. Myron the Alleviator, Master Tension-Easer. “I’ll try to still treat you the same,” she said.
Myron stepped toward the trophies. “Is he any good?”
“Very good.” She turned away suddenly and stood with her back to the room. “Do you need anything else?”
“Not right now.”
“I’ll be downstairs.”
She didn’t wait for his blessing.
Myron walked in. He checked the answering machine on Chad’s phone. Three messages. Two from a girl named Becky. From the sound of it, she was a pretty good friend. Just calling to say, like, hi, see if he wanted to, like, do anything this weekend, you know? She and Millie and Suze were going to, like, hang out at the Heritage, okay, and if he wanted to come, well, you know, whatever. Myron smiled. Times they might be a-changin’, but her words could have come from a girl Myron had gone to high school with or his father or his father’s father. Generations cycle in. The music, the movies, the language, the fashion—they change. But that’s just outside stimuli. Beneath the baggy pants or the message-cropped hair, the same adolescent fears and needs and feelings of inadequacy remained frighteningly constant.
The last call was from a guy named Glen. He wanted to know if Chad wanted to play golf at “the Pine” this weekend, being that Merion was off-limits because of the Open. “Daddy,” Glen’s preppy taped voice assured Chad, “can get us a tee time, no prob.”
No messages from Chad’s close buddy Matthew Squires.
He snapped on the computer. Windows 95. Cool. Myron used it too. Chad Coldren, Myron immediately saw, used America Online to get his E-mail. Perfect. Myron hit FLASHSESSION. The modem hooked on and screeched for a few seconds. A voice said, “Welcome. You have mail.” Dozens of messages were automatically downloaded. The same voice said, “Good-bye.” Myron checked Chad’s E-mail address book and found Matthew Squires’s E-mail address. He skimmed the downloaded messages. None were from Matthew.
Interesting.
It was, of course, entirely possible that Matthew and Chad were not as close as Linda Coldren thought. It was also entirely possible that even if they were, Matthew had not contacted his friend since Wednesday—even though his friend had supposedly vanished without warning. It happens.
Still, it was interesting.
Myron picked up Chad’s phone and hit the redial button. Four rings later a taped voice came on. “You’ve reached Matthew. Leave a message or don’t. Up to you.”
Myron hung up without leaving a message (it was, after all, “up to him”). Hmm. Chad’s last call was to Matthew. That could be significant. Or it could have nothing to do with anything. Either way, Myron was quickly getting nowhere.
He picked up Chad’s phone and dialed his office. Esperanza answered on the second ring.
“MB SportsReps.”
“It’s me.” He filled her in. She listened without interrupting.
Esperanza Diaz had worked for MB SportReps since its inception. Ten years ago, when Esperanza was only eighteen years old, she was the Queen of Sunday Morning Cable TV. No, she wasn’t on any infomercial, thoug
h her show ran opposite plenty of them, especially that one with the abdominal exerciser that bore a striking resemblance to a medieval instrument of torture; rather, Esperanza had been a professional wrestler named Little Pocahontas, the Sensual Indian Princess. With her petite, lithe figure bedecked in only a suede bikini, Esperanza had been voted FLOW’s (Fabulous Ladies Of Wrestling) most popular wrestler three years running—or, as the award was officially known, the Babe You’d Most Like to Get in a Full Nelson. Despite this, Esperanza remained humble.
When he finished telling her about the kidnapping, Esperanza’s first words were an incredulous, “Win has a mother?”
“Yep.”
Pause. “There goes my spawned-from-a-satanic-egg theory.”
“Ha-ha.”
“Or my hatched-in-an-experiment-gone-very-wrong theory.”
“You’re not helping.”
“What’s to help?” Esperanza replied. “I like Win, you know that. But the boy is—what’s the official psychiatric term again?—cuckoo.”
“That cuckoo saved your life once,” Myron said.
“Yeah, but you remember how,” she countered.
Myron did. A dark alley. Win’s doctored bullets. Brain matter tossed about like parade confetti. Classic Win. Effective but excessive. Like squashing a bug with a wrecking ball.
Esperanza broke the long silence. “Like I said before,” she began softly, “cuckoo.”
Myron wanted to change the subject. “Any messages?”
“About a million. Nothing that can’t wait, though.” Then she asked, “Have you ever met her?”
“Who?”
“Madonna,” she snapped. “Who do you think? Win’s mother.”
“Once,” Myron said, remembering. More than ten years ago. He and Win had been having dinner at Merion, in fact. Win hadn’t spoken to her on that occasion. But she had spoken to him. The memory made Myron cringe anew.
“Have you told Win about this yet?” she asked.
“Nope. Any advice?”
Esperanza thought a moment. “Do it over the phone,” she said. “At a very safe distance.”