On Borrowed Time

by David Rosenfelt

  “Just keep your cell phone handy,” I said. “I may be calling for you to bail me out of jail.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” she said.

  “Yes, I do.”

  She nodded. “Yeah. I guess you do.” She said she would be back by five o’clock, in time to cook me dinner before I went off to Ardmore Hospital. She kissed me good-bye, not a particularly romantic kiss, at least at first. The second kiss, and then the third, definitely moved the ball into the “romantic” category.

  When we finally broke off the last kiss, she just looked me in the eye and said, maybe a bit wistfully, “Life is complicated, Richard.”

  I smiled. “Mine more than most.”

  “You know what I mean,” she said.

  “Yeah. I know what you mean.”

  Allie and I were falling in love, had fallen in love. We had just moved past my ability to deny it to myself, and probably the same was true for her. I recognized the feeling because I had been in love once before, with the person I’d been spending every minute of every day searching for. A person who may not even exist.

  Life was definitely complicated.

  It was a really long day; I guess waiting to commit my first felony had the effect of making time move slowly. I expected Craig to have everything under control; he wouldn’t knowingly bring us into a situation that had great risk. Unfortunately, the key word was “knowingly.”

  Allie didn’t come home at five o’clock, and by five-thirty I was starting to get worried. I called her on her cell, but it went directly to voice mail. I tried again at least ten times before six-thirty, when I had to head to Ardmore, and then at least another twenty times on the way.

  By the time I got there, I was panicked that something had happened to her; I simply could not think of another reason why she would not be answering her phone for almost three hours.

  I met Craig at a mall parking lot just outside of Ardmore. We discussed what was about to happen, then drove to the hospital in our separate cars and parked in the main lot. Craig got out of his car and into mine, because we were early. It was nine-thirty, and Craig said the guard made his first pass-through at nine forty-five.

  “Allie is missing,” was the first thing I said when I saw him.

  “Yeah?”

  “She didn’t come home tonight, and she’s not answering her phone.”

  Craig said that we needed to focus on our reason for being at the hospital. The plan was for him to stand in the shadows near the building, and when the guard finished his rounds, Craig would do what was necessary to disable the security devices. He thought that would take less than ten minutes, at which time he’d call me, and we’d go in together.

  “You bring your gun?”

  I tapped my pocket. “Right here.”

  He pointed to the glove compartment. “Now put it right there. We get caught, you don’t want them to be able to put ‘armed’ before ‘robbery’ in the charge.”

  Before he got out of the car, he said, “Richard, no matter what happens in there, we need to talk later. I’ve got something you need to hear.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. “What is it?”

  “Later,” he said. “First things first.”

  The call came at exactly 9:56. I didn’t answer it, just got out of the car and walked to the back of the annex, where Craig was waiting. “You ready?” he whispered.

  I took a deep breath. “Ready.”

  I did so and he opened the door. I cringed, expecting an alarm to go off, but there was only silence. Craig was obviously good at this.

  We went inside, and Craig had a small flashlight to guide us through the place. The first room we went into was a large one, in the center, with probably half a dozen desks, each with its own computer screen. The desks were basically clean, these were obviously very neat people, and the drawers that I tried were either locked or empty.

  Along the outside of the room were five offices. Three seemed not to have been in use, and the other two offered nothing of apparent interest to us.

  We went into the other main room, which was the one that Marie Galasso said Frank Donovan should not have been in, but which she reported him as coming out of. This was set up as a small hospital annex, with six beds and a lot of standard hospital equipment, such as intravenous carriers.

  There was also what seemed to be an X-ray room, and another room with a sign that read SURGERY on the door. We went inside each, and they seemed to be as one would expect.

  The entire time we were in there I was thinking about Allie. With all that was going on, there was no way she would leave herself unreachable, unless something was very wrong. My mind was racing with questions of what I could do to find and help her, although my record of finding and helping missing women I loved was fairly dismal.

  We continued to search for anything at all unusual or revealing, but there was simply nothing to be found. Finally, Craig pointed to his watch, silently making the statement that it was time to get out.

  I nodded my agreement; we were learning absolutely nothing by staying there, so there was no reason to risk getting caught. I left and went back to my car to wait for Craig, who was restoring the security equipment back to its original state so as to cover our tracks.

  Within ten minutes he was back, and he got into my car. “Sorry to put you through this, Craig. Waste of time.”

  “No problem,” he said. “Everybody gets bad information sometimes.”

  I nodded. “I guess so.”

  “Richard, I said we needed to talk.”

  “I remember.”

  “I’m a suspicious guy; I like to check things out. I can’t help it, and even though it can be annoying, it usually turns out to be a good thing I checked.”

  I didn’t like where this was going. “Okay…”

  “So I checked out Allison Tynes. I knew you wouldn’t want me to, so I didn’t tell you about it.”

  Now I was both annoyed by where he was going and fearful of what he would say when he got there. Was he going to tell me why Allie was missing?

  “Spit it out, Craig.”

  “Richard, she doesn’t have a twin sister, never did, and she’s not from where she said she’s from.”

  It was as if he’d shot a jolt of electricity through me. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I said it as clearly as I can. She’s not who you think she is.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not possible. It is simply not possible.”

  “I found this out by getting her prints off a glass in your apartment. Her real name is Nancy Beaumont. She’s done time for fraud and extortion. I’ve got the documents here.” He handed me an envelope that he had in his jacket.

  “No…” My head was spinning.

  “Richard, I’m sorry.”

  “You’re also wrong. I don’t know where you got your information, but it’s bullshit.”

  “Take it home and look through it,” he said.

  “You don’t get it,” I said, getting angry at Craig in a burst of classic kill-the-messenger. “Somebody out there has been manipulating everything in my life. Since day one, nothing has been as it seemed to be, because they’re out there pulling the strings.”

  “Richard—”

  I interrupted. “Now they’re doing it to you; they’re setting you up with false information, because—”

  “Look through it. Okay?”

  “—because Allie is real. I know it, Craig. I know it. You cannot tell me otherwise, so don’t try.”

  I drove home in a daze.

  Craig’s revelation was so stunning, so bizarre, so absolutely impossible, that I didn’t fully have the power to comprehend it. As I neared my house, I had finally decided that it could not possibly be true. Of course, I was aware enough to realize that a lot of things that could not possibly be true had already come to pass, so I was left with one dominant emotion.

  I was scared.

  I didn’t try to reach Allie on the way h
ome, mainly because I didn’t know what I would say if I reached her. I was still very worried about her, but first I needed to get things straight in my own mind.

  I stopped on a street about a mile from my apartment and parked there. I turned on the interior light, took a deep breath, and opened Craig’s envelope.

  It was all there. Nancy Beaumont’s prison record, complete with mug shot, except the person in the shot was Allie. Copies of press clippings about her arrest, again with Allie’s picture in them. Copies of photographs of the real Allison Tynes, along with her twin sister Julie, from their high school yearbook, but they looked nothing at all like Allie and Jen.

  It was all there, but it could not possibly be true. I would not allow it to be true. If a person could be made not to exist, then these documents could be wrong.

  They simply had to be wrong.

  I drove the rest of the way home hoping that Allie would be there, but not knowing what I was going to say if she was. The most important thing would be not what I said, but what I saw in her reaction; that would tell me what I needed to know.

  She wasn’t there when I got home, and still didn’t answer her phone. I was fairly positive by that point that she was not coming back. What I didn’t know was why.

  Her clothes and possessions were all still there, which was among the things that puzzled me. She knew where I was going, and that I would be out all night. If her departure was voluntary, there was no reason she would have had to leave those things behind; there would have been plenty of time to pack up her things and take them with her.

  I guess that was one difference between Allie and Jen; when Jen disappeared, it was without a trace. Allie left plenty of traces. I was still thinking of her as Allie; I instinctively wasn’t buying in to the Nancy Beaumont identification.

  But all of this could not be a coincidence; Craig’s investigation and Allie’s disappearance had to be connected. And the obvious conclusion, were I inclined to draw it, was that she somehow knew that Craig had learned the truth and had run away.

  Except it could not be the truth. Not if I wanted to keep what was left of my sanity. I was in love with Allie, and for one of the rare times in my life, I was fine with emotion trumping logic.

  At eight A.M. there was a knock on the door. I had been up for two hours, so it didn’t startle me, but nor did it fill me with hope. Allie had a key; she wouldn’t have to knock. But we have a doorman downstairs, so someone else would have had to have been buzzed up.

  I took my gun out of the drawer and put it in my pocket, and briefly reflected that in my fear and confusion I was starting to rely on it.

  “Who is it?”

  “FBI.”

  That instantly explained the buzzer exemption; I looked through the keyhole and saw two men. “Let me see your ID,” I said.

  The larger of the two men took out something and held it to the peephole. I couldn’t read it, but it looked sort of official. Since Kentris had told me that they were involved on some level with the case, I figured it was legit and opened the door.

  He still had his ID open, and they asked if they could come in. I said that they could, and they introduced themselves as Agent Emmett Luther and Agent Carlos Soriano. Luther seemed to be in charge and did most of the talking.

  “You filed a statement with the New York Police Department about Philip Garber.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s what we’d like to talk to you about.”

  It struck me how fast my statement had made its way to federal authorities, and how fast they showed up at my door. I couldn’t imagine the bureaucracy would ordinarily move that fast, especially since this was not a matter of life and death. Philip Garber was already dead, and if the news reports were to be believed, his death was considered a tragic accident.

  They’d obviously had me in their sights, and when the Garber report came in from NYPD with my name attached, it triggered this reaction and visit.

  “Everything I know is in my statement,” I said.

  Luther smiled without humor. “I don’t think so.”

  The man annoyed me. These people were hovering over this situation and probably knew more about it than I would ever know, but I was sitting there in the dark, and they were pumping me for information.

  “Where is Jennifer?” I asked. With what I had just been told about Allie, I no longer knew who or what Jennifer was, but I still needed to find out.

  “The way this works is that we ask the questions,” Luther said.

  “Not anymore,” I said.

  “This is not the approach you want to take here,” Luther said. “It won’t end well for you.”

  “That’s okay. My previous approaches haven’t worked out so well either. Time to try something new.”

  “I’m going to ask you again,” Luther said. “What do you know about Garber’s death that was not in your statement?”

  “Nothing. Not a thing. I’ve been wracking my brain trying to think of something, out of a patriotic desire to help you guys. Maybe if you told me some of the things that you know it would jog my memory; I’ve had some memory issues lately. You’ve got my phone number in case you think of something, right?”

  Luther didn’t say anything, and, after a few seconds of thinking about it, took out his own card and handed it to me. “And now you’ve got my number. I suggest you use it, before it’s too late.”

  “Too late for what?”

  But that was another one of the questions he was not about to answer, and they just walked out.

  I wasn’t going to update Kentris on everything that had happened.

  For one thing, I wasn’t prepared to tell him that I had broken into the hospital annex building, since he was, after all, a cop. I also had an emotional reaction about verbalizing what Craig had discovered about Allie. It was childish, but it felt like if I said it, that in itself would give it some credibility. Besides, there was nothing Kentris could do about it either way.

  What I did tell him when I called was that Allie was missing, and that I was worried.

  “Any idea where she is?” he asked.

  “She was watching Lassiter; that’s all I know for sure. Do I need to file a missing persons report?”

  “Wouldn’t do you any good. She hasn’t been missing long enough; the local cops wouldn’t touch it yet. If they ever would.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s not like you’re married. They’d look at it like you were living together for a short time and she bailed out. Maybe she’ll come back, maybe not. But if they filed a report every time something like this happened, they wouldn’t have time to do anything else. Plus—”

  I interrupted him. “She left her things behind.”

  “Then that makes it more likely that they’ll take it seriously, but not much, and not yet. Especially in this case.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Richard, you have some recent experience with reporting women missing. Your credibility in that particular area is not exactly through the roof, you know?”

  I didn’t respond, because I knew what he was saying was true. If I reported another woman missing, one who looked identical to the pictures I had put out in the media of Jen, they would laugh at me. And they would probably be right in doing so.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ll send out the report. It will have the same effect as if the local cops did it, though that is close to nothing.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “I still think you’re holding back,” he said.

  “Nice talking to you.”

  I spent the rest of the morning trying to figure out what to do next. Whether or not Allie was who she said she was, she was probably with Sean Lassiter. Either she was part of his conspiracy, which I still found impossible to believe, or he had done something to her, since she was supposed to be following him the day she disappeared. It was Lassiter I had to go after, but I needed to think of an effective way to do that.
>
  For the time being I called Marie Galasso on her cell phone. She answered it guardedly, and I realized she was probably at work. “Hello?”

  “Marie, do you know who this is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can we meet again? I need to speak with you.”

  She hesitated, and then said, “Yes.”

  “Same place? Five o’clock?”

  “Yes.”

  It wasn’t much, but it was the best conversation I had had in a while.

  I drove up to Ardmore, a trip I was becoming all too familiar with. I got there at four-thirty, parked behind the school, and waited for Marie Galasso. She got there at precisely five o’clock, and got out of the car looking nervous. Everything felt the same as the last time we’d done this, except this time Allie wasn’t there. Which meant it felt entirely different.

  “Hello, Marie. Thank you for coming.”

  She had her own agenda. “Have you learned anything about Mr. Donovan and his wife? Was it my fault?”

  “It was not your fault.” I wasn’t really lying, since I considered my overheard conversation with Allie to be the immediate reason the Donovans were killed. But I could see the relief in her face when I let her off the hook, so I was glad I had eased her mind. “But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Okay.”

  “Last night … I was in the annex building.”

  “I didn’t see you there,” she said.

  “I know, I went in after it was closed.”

  She seemed surprised. “What about the guards?”

  “That’s not important,” I said. “There was almost nothing in there. The desks were clean; the offices were empty. The place looked almost deserted.”

  “Really? My desk is always a mess, and that’s true of a lot of people there.”

  “Were you told—”

  She interrupted me as she remembered something. “Yesterday? We were all given yesterday off; they said there was a concern about some bacteria they were working with, and they needed to sterilize the place.”

  Just my luck. “Oh.”

  “So I guess they cleaned up,” she said. “Although it looked pretty much the same this morning.”