Gone for Good (2002)

by Harlan Coben

  And you, give me that Game Boy. Hand it over before I stick it down the disposal." I heard the phone being picked up again. "And again I will ask you: What's your interest in the case?"

  I knew enough reporters to know that the way to their hearts is through their byline. "I may have pertinent information on the case."

  "Pertinent," she repeated. "That's a good word there, Will."

  "I think you'll find what I say interesting."

  "Where you calling from anyway?"

  "New York City," I said.

  There was a pause. "A long way from the murder scene."

  "Yes."

  "So I'm listening. What, pray tell, will I find both pertinent and interesting?"

  "First I need to know a few basics."

  "That's not how I work, Will."

  "I looked up your other pieces, Mrs. Sterno."

  "It's miz. And since we're all buddy-buddy, just call me Yvonne."

  "Fine," I said. "You mostly do features, Yvonne. You cover weddings.

  You cover society dinners."

  "They have great eats, Will, and I look fabulous in a black dress.

  What's your point?"

  "A story like this doesn't fall in your lap every day."

  "Okay, you're getting me all hot and bothered here. Your point?"

  "My point is, take a chance. Just answer a few questions. What's the harm? And who knows, maybe I'm legit."

  When she did not respond, I pushed ahead.

  "You land a big murder story like this. But the article doesn't list victims or suspects or any real details."

  "I didn't know any," she said. "The report came in over the scanner late at night. We barely made it in time for the morning edition."

  "So why no follow-up? This had to be a huge event. Why was there only that one piece?"

  Silence.

  "Hello?"

  "Give me a second. The kids are acting up again."

  Only I wasn't hearing any noise this time.

  "I was closed down," she said softly.

  "Meaning?"

  "Meaning we were lucky to get even that much into the paper. By the next morning there were feds all over the place. The local SAC "

  "SAC?"

  "Special Agent in Charge. The head fed in the area. He got my boss to shut the story down. I tried a little on my own, but all I got was a bunch of no-comments."

  "Is that odd?"

  "I don't know, Will. I haven't covered a murder before. But yeah, I'd say it sounds pretty odd."

  "What do you take it to mean?"

  "From the way my boss has been acting?" Yvonne took a deep breath.

  "It's big. Very big. Bigger than a double murder. Your turn, Will."

  I wondered how far I should go. "Are you aware of any fingerprints found at the scene?"

  "No."

  "There was one set belonging to a woman."

  "Goon."

  "That woman was found dead yesterday."

  "Whoa, Nelly. Murdered?"

  "Yes."

  "Where?"

  "A small town in Nebraska."

  "Her name?"

  I leaned back. "Tell me about the homeowner, Owen Enfield."

  "Oh I see. Back and forth. I give, you give."

  "Something like that. Was Enfield one of the victims?"

  "I don't know."

  "What do you know about him?"

  "He's lived there three months."

  "Alone?"

  "According to neighbors, he moved in alone. A woman and child have been hanging around a lot the last few weeks."

  Child.

  A tremor started in my heart. I sat up. "How old was the child?"

  "I don't know. School age."

  "Like maybe twelve."

  "Yeah maybe."

  "Boy or girl."

  "Girl."

  I froze.

  "Yo, Will, you there?"

  "Got a name on the girl?"

  "No. No one really knew anything about them."

  "Where are they now?"

  "I don't know."

  "How can that be?"

  "One of the great mysteries of life, I guess. I haven't been able to track them down. But like I said, I'm off the case. I haven't been trying all that hard."

  "Can you find out where they are?"

  "I can try."

  "Is there anything else? Have you heard the name of a suspect or one of the victims, anything?"

  "Like I said, it's been quiet. I only work at the paper part-time. As you might have been able to discern, I'm a full-time mother. I just caught the story because I was the only one in when it came over the band. But I have a few good sources."

  "We need to find Enfield," I said. "Or at least the woman and girl."

  "Seems like a good place to start," she agreed. "You want to tell me your interest in all this?"

  I thought about that. "You up for rattling cages, Yvonne?"

  "Yeah, Will. Yeah, I am."

  "Are you any good?"

  "Want a demonstration?"

  "Sure."

  "You may be calling me from New York City, but you're actually from New Jersey. In fact though there must certainly be more than one Will Klein out there my bet is you're the brother of an infamous murderer."

  "An alleged infamous murderer," I corrected her. "How did you know?"

  "I have Lexis-Nexis on my home computer. I plugged in your name and that's what came up. One of the articles mentioned that you now live in Manhattan."

  "My brother had nothing to do with any of this."

  "Sure, and he was innocent of killing your neighbor too, right?"

  "That's not what I mean. Your double murder has nothing to do with him."

  "Then what's your connection?"

  I let loose a breath. "Someone else who was very close to me."

  "Who?"

  "My girlfriend. Her fingerprints were the ones found at the scene."

  I heard the kids act up again. It sounded like they were running through the room making siren noises. Yvonne Sterno did not yell at them this time. "So it was your girlfriend who was found dead in Nebraska?"

  "Yes."

  "And that's your interest in this?"

  "Part of it."

  "What's the other part?"

  I was not prepared yet to tell her about Carly. "Find Enfield," I said.

  "What was her name, Will? Your girlfriend."

  "Just find him."

  "Hey, you want us to work together? You don't hold out on me. I can find out in five seconds by looking it up anyway. Just tell me."

  "Rogers," I said. "Her name was Sheila Rogers."

  I heard her typing some more. "I'll do my best, Will," she said. "Hang tight, I'll call you soon."

  Chapter Thirty.

  I had a strange quasi-dream.

  I say "quasi" because I was not fully asleep. I floated in that groove between slumber and consciousness, that state where you sometimes stumble and plummet and need to grab the sides of the bed. I lay in the dark, my hands behind my head, my eyes closed.

  I mentioned earlier how Sheila had loved to dance. She even made me join a dance club at the Jewish Community Center in West Orange, New Jersey. The JCC was close to both my mother's hospital and the house in Livingston. We'd go out every Wednesday to visit my mother and then at six-thirty head for our meeting with our fellow dancers.

  We were the youngest couple in the club by and this is just a rough estimate seventy-five years, but man, the older folks knew how to move.

  I'd try to keep up, but there was simply no way. I felt self-conscious in their company. Sheila did not. Sometimes, in the middle of a dance, she would let go of my hands and sway away from me. Her eyes would close. There would be a sheen on her face as she totally disappeared in the bliss.

  There was one older couple in particular, the Segals, who'd been dancing together since a USO gathering in the forties. They were a handsome, graceful couple. Mr. Segal always wore a white ascot. Mrs.

&nb
sp; Segal wore something blue and a pearl choker. On the floor, they were pure magic. They moved like lovers. They moved like one. During the breaks, they were outgoing and friendly to the rest of us. But when the music played, they saw only each other.

  On a snowy night last February we thought that the club would probably be canceled, but it wasn't Mr. Segal showed up by himself. He still wore the white ascot. His suit was impeccable. But one look at the tightness in his face and we knew. Sheila gripped my hand. I could see a tear escape from her eye. When the music started, Mr. Segal stood, stepped without hesitation onto the dance floor, and danced by himself. He put out his arms and moved as though his wife were still there. He guided her across the floor, cradling her ghost so gently that none of us dared disturb him.

  The next week Mr. Segal did not show at all. We heard from some of the others that Mrs. Segal had lost a longtime battle with cancer. But she danced until the end. The music started up then. We all found our partners and took to the floor. And as I held Sheila close, impossibly close, I realized that, sad as the Segal story was, they'd had it better than anyone I had ever known.

  Here was where I entered the quasi-dream, though from the beginning I recognized that it was just that. I was back at the JCC Dance Club.

  Mr. Segal was there. So were a bunch of people I had never seen before, all without partners. When the music started, we all danced by ourselves. I looked around. My father was there, doing a clumsy solo fox-trot. He nodded at me.

  I watched the others dance. They all clearly felt the presence of their dearly departed. They looked into their partners' ghostly eyes.

  I tried to follow suit, but something was wrong. I saw nothing. I was dancing alone. Sheila would not come to me.

  Far away, I heard the phone ring. A deep voice on the answering machine penetrated my dream. "This is Lieutenant Daniels of the Livingston Police Department. I am trying to reach Will Klein."

  In the background, behind Lieutenant Daniels, I heard the muffled laugh of a young woman. My eyes flew open, and the JCC Dance Club disappeared. As I reached for the phone, I heard the young woman whoop another laugh.

  It sounded like Katy Miller.

  "Perhaps I should call your parents," Lieutenant Daniels was saying to whoever was laughing.

  "No." It was Katy. "I'm eighteen. You can't make me "

  I picked up the phone. "This is Will Klein."

  Lieutenant Daniels said, "Hi, Will. This is Tim Daniels. We went to school together, remember?"

  Tim Daniels. He'd worked at the local Hess station. He used to wear his oil-smeared uniform to school, complete with his name embroidered on the pocket. I guessed that he still liked uniforms.

  "Sure," I said, totally confused now. "How's it going?"

  "Good, thanks."

  "You're on the force now?" Nothing gets by me.

  "Yep. And I still live in town. Married Betty Jo Stetson. We have two daughters."

  I tried to conjure up Betty Jo, but nothing came. "Wow, cong rats "Thanks, Will." His voice grew grave. "I, uh, read about your mother in the Tribune. I'm sorry."

  "I appreciate that, thanks," I said.

  Katy Miller started laughing again.

  "Look, the reason I'm calling is, well, I guess you know Katy Miller?"

  "Yes."

  There was a moment of silence. He probably remembered that I'd dated her older sister and what fate had befallen her. "She asked me to call you."

  "What's the problem?"

  "I found Katy on the Mount Pleasant playground with a half-empty bottle of Absolut. She's totally blitzed. I was going to call her parents "

  "Forget that!" Katy shouted again. "I'm eighteen!"

  "Right, whatever. Anyway, she asked me to call you instead. Hey, I remember when we were kids. We weren't perfect either, you know what I mean?"

  "I do," I said.

  And that was when Katy yelled something, and my body went rigid. I hoped that I'd heard wrong. But her words, and the almost mocking way she shouted them, worked like a cold hand pressed against the back of my neck.

  "Idaho!" she yelled. "Am I right, Will? Idaho!"

  I gripped the receiver, sure I heard wrong. "What is she saying?"

  "I don't know. She keeps yelling out something about Idaho, but she's still pretty wasted."

  Katy again: "Friggin' Idaho! Potato! Idaho! I'm right, aren't I?"

  My breath had gone shallow.

  "Look, Will, I know it's late, but can you come down and get her?"

  I found my voice enough to say, "I'm on my way."

  Chapter Thirty-One.

  Squares crept up the stairs rather than risk the noise from the elevator waking Wanda.

  The Yoga Squared Corporation owned the building. He and Wanda lived on the two floors above the yoga studio. It was three in the morning.

  Squares slid open the door. The lights were out. He stepped into the room. The streetlights provided harsh slivers of illumination.

  Wanda sat on the couch in the dark. Her arms and legs were crossed.

  "Hey," he said very softly, as if afraid of waking someone up, though there was no one else in the building.

  "Do you want me to get rid of it?" she said.

  Squares wished that he had kept his sunglasses on. "I'm really tired, Wanda. Just let me grab a few hours of sleep."

  "No."

  "What do you want me to say here?"

  "I'm still in the first trimester. All I'd have to do is swallow a pill. So I want to know. Do you want to get rid of it?"

  "So all of a sudden it's up to me?"

  "I'm waiting."

  "I thought you were the great feminist, Wanda. What about a woman's right to choose?"

  "Don't hand me that crap."

  Squares jammed his hands in his pockets. "What do you want to do?"

  Wanda turned her head to the side. He could see the profile, the long neck, the proud bearing. He loved her. He had never loved anyone before, and no one had ever loved him either. When he was very small, his mother liked to burn him with her curling iron. She finally stopped when he was two years old on the very day, coincidentally, that his father beat her to death and hung himself in a closet.

  "You wear your past on your forehead," Wanda said. "We don't all have that luxury."

  "I don't know what you mean."

  Neither of them had turned on the light. Their eyes were adjusting, but everything was a murky haze and maybe that made it easier.

  Wanda said, "I was valedictorian of my high school class."

  "I know."

  She closed her eyes. "Let me just say this, okay?"

  Squares nodded for her to proceed.

  "I grew up in a wealthy suburb. There were very few black families. I was the only black girl in my class of three hundred. And I was ranked first. I had my pick of colleges. I chose Princeton."

  He knew all this already, but he said nothing.

  "When I got there, I started to feel like I didn't measure up. I won't go into the whole diagnosis, about my lack of self-worth and all that.

  But I stopped eating. I lost weight. I became anorexic. I wouldn't eat anything I couldn't get rid of. I would do sit-ups all day. I dropped under ninety pounds and I would still look at myself in the mirror and hate the fatty who stared back at me."

  Squares moved closer to her. He wanted to take her hand. But idiot that he was, he did not.

  "I starved myself to the point where I had to be hospitalized. I damaged my organs. My liver, my heart, the doctors still are not sure how much. I never went into cardiac arrest, but for a while, I think I was pretty close. I eventually recovered I won't go into that either but the doctors told me that I'd probably never get pregnant. And if I did, I'd most likely not be able to carry to term."

  Squares stood over her. "And what does your doctor say now?" he asked.

  "She makes no promises." Wanda looked at him. "I've never been so scared in my life."

  He felt his heart crumble in his chest. He wanted to
sit next to her and put his arms around her. But again something held him back and he hated himself for it. "If going through with this is a risk to your health " he began.

  "Then it's my risk," she said.

  He tried to smile. "The great feminist returns."

  "When I said I was scared, I wasn't just talking about my health."

  He knew that.

  "Squares?"

  "Yeah."

  Her voice was nearly a plea. "Don't shut me out, okay?"

  He did not know what to say, so he settled for the obvious. "It's a big step."

  "I know."

  "I don't think," he said slowly, "that I'm equipped to handle it."

  "I love you."

  "I love you too."

  "You're the strongest man I've ever known."

  Squares shook his head. Some drunk on the street started scream-singing that love grows where his Rosemary goes and nobody knows but him. Wanda uncrossed her arms and waited.

  "Maybe," Squares began, "we shouldn't go through with this. For the sake of your health, if nothing else."

  Wanda watched him step back and away. Before she could reply, he was gone.

  I rented a car at a twenty-four-hour place on 37th Street and drove out to the Livingston police station. I had not been in these hallowed halls since the Burnet Hill Elementary School class trip when I was in first grade. On that sunny morning, we were not allowed to see the station's holding cell where I now found Katy because, like tonight, someone had been in it. The idea of that that maybe a big-time criminal was locked up just yards from where we stood was about as cool an idea as a first-grader can wrap his brain around.

  Detective Tim Daniels greeted me with too firm a handshake. I noticed that he hoisted his belt a lot. He jangled or his keys or cuffs or whatever did whenever he walked. His build was beefier than in his youth, but his face remained smooth and unblemished.

  I filled out some paperwork and Katy was released into my custody. She had sobered up in the hour it took me to get out there. There was no laugh in her now. Her head hung low. Her face had taken on a classic teenage-sullen posture.

  I thanked Tim again. Katy did not even attempt a smile or wave. We started for the car, but when we were out in the night air, she grabbed my arm.

  "Let's take a walk," Katy said.

  "It's four in the morning. I'm tired."

  "I'll throw up if I sit in a car."

  I stopped. "Why were you yelling about Idaho on the phone?"