Never Look Away: A Thriller

by Linwood Barclay

  “Please, Miles, show some dignity. He knows. Don’t play stupid.”

  Miles took a long swig from the bottle, then moved to a wooden kitchen chair and sat down.

  “Shit,” he said. He had to put the bottle on the table because his hand was starting to shake.

  “You need to know why this is happening,” Oscar said. “It would be wrong for you to die not knowing why this is happening.”

  “Oscar, come on, we go way back. You got to cut me some slack here. I can pay it back.”

  “No,” Oscar said.

  “But I can, with interest. I’ll sell the boat. I’ll sell it tomorrow. And I’ve got some other cash set aside. The thing is, it’s not really all that much. He won’t have to wait for his money. He’ll get it back right away, and that’s a promise. Plus, I’ve got some motorcycles. I was holding them for my brother, but I can sell them and give the money to him. Fuck my brother. Tough shit for him, right? I mean, it’s not like he had to pay for them in the first—”

  The gun went pfft, pfft. Oscar Fine put two bullets in his head. Miles Cooper pitched forward, hit the floor, and that was it.

  Oscar let himself out, walked down the street, got in his Audi, and drove out of Beacon Hill.

  Oscar Fine only had to slow as he approached the security gate at the shipping container yard. The guard in the booth recognized the car and driver and had hit the button to make the gate slowly shift to the right. Oscar waited until there was just enough of an opening, then guided the car into the compound.

  There were thousands of the rectangular boxes, stacked like monstrous colorful LEGO blocks. They came in orange, brown, green, blue, and silver and were labeled Sea Land, Evergreen, Maersk, and Cosco. They were stacked six high in some places, and it was like driving through a narrow steel canyon. The compound took up a good ten acres on the outside of the city. Oscar drove his car to the far side, parked up against a ten-foot fence with coils of barbed wire adorning the top. He got out of the car, taking with him some milk he had bought at a 7-Eleven after driving out of Beacon Hill, and walked over to the square end of an Evergreen container that had two others stacked atop it. He reached into his right pocket, found a key, and unlocked the container door.

  He swung it open, and about four feet inside was a secondary wall and a regular-sized door. He unlocked it with a second key, opened the door toward him, and stepped into what seemed to be almost total blackness, although there was a hint of light.

  He reached along the inside of the secondary wall with his right hand and found a bank of switches. He flipped them all up, and instantly the inside of the container was bathed in light.

  While one might have expected the inside walls to be exactly the same as the outside—metal and vertically ribbed—they were instead smooth and painted a soft moss green. The interior walls, perfectly drywalled, were adorned with large examples of modern art. Underfoot was not metal but gleaming wood flooring. Just inside the door were a leather couch, a matching leather reclining chair, and a 46-inch flat-screen TV mounted to the wall. About halfway down the container was a narrow, gleaming kitchen area with aluminum countertops and dozens of recessed pot lights. Beyond that, an elegant bathroom and bedroom.

  Oscar Fine heard a sound. A second later, something brushed up against his leg.

  He looked down as a rust-colored cat purred softly.

  “I bought you some milk,” Oscar said. It was for the cat that Oscar had left on a couple of nightlights. He set the bottle on the counter, hugged it to himself with his left arm while he uncapped it with his right, and poured some into a bowl on the floor. The cat slinked noiselessly to the bowl and lowered its head down into it.

  Oscar took the gun from his jacket, set it on the counter, then opened an oversized kitchen cabinet door to reveal a refrigerator. Oscar set the milk inside and took out a can of Coke. He popped the lid with his index finger, then poured the drink into a heavy-bottomed glass.

  “How was your day?” he asked the cat.

  Oscar sat on a leather stool at the kitchen counter. A silver laptop lay there, its screen black. He hit a button on the side, and while he waited for the machine to get up and running, he reached for a remote and brought the flat-screen TV to life. It was already on CNN, and he left it there.

  The laptop was ready to go and he checked his mail first. Nothing but spam. If only you could find those people, he thought. They had it coming even more than Miles. He checked a couple of his favorite book-marked sites. One showed how his various investments were doing. Checking that tended to depress him these days. The other site, which always cheered him, featured short videos of kittens falling asleep.

  He glanced up occasionally at the TV while he surfed around.

  Onscreen, the news anchor was saying, “… in an unusual turn of events, a person who makes his living reporting the news finds himself at the center of it. Police are refusing to say whether they believe Jan Harwood is alive or dead, but they have indicated that her husband, David Harwood, a reporter for the Standard, a paper in Promise Falls, north of Albany, is what they are calling a person of interest. The woman has not been seen since she accompanied her husband Friday on a trip to Lake George.”

  Oscar Fine glanced up from his laptop to the television for only a second, not really interested, then back to his computer. Then he looked back up again.

  They had flashed a picture of this missing woman. Oscar Fine only caught a glimpse of the image before the newscast moved on to a shot of a house where it was believed this David and Jan Harwood lived, then another shot of the reporter’s parents’ house, and an older woman coming to the door, telling the media to go away.

  Oscar kept waiting for them to show the woman’s picture again, but they did not.

  He returned his attention to the laptop, and with his right hand did a Google news search of “Jan Harwood” and “Promise Falls.” That took him to a couple of sites, including that of the Promise Falls Standard, where he found a full story, by Samantha Henry, as well as a picture of the missing woman.

  He clicked on it, blew it up. He stared at it a good minute. The woman’s hair was very different. He remembered her hair as red, but now it was black. And she’d worn heavy makeup, eyelashes like spider’s legs. This woman here, she had a toned-down look. Looked like your average housewife. Okay, better than that. A MILF.

  He clicked again, blew the picture up even more. There it was. The small scar, shaped like an L, on her cheek. She probably thought she’d pancaked it enough to make it invisible the one and only time they’d met. But he’d seen it.

  That scar was all the proof he needed. That, and the throbbing at the end of his left arm, where his hand used to be.

  Oscar Fine had some calls to make.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Duckworth and I had moved away from the open grave containing the body of Leanne Kowalski. I was shaking.

  I said, “I’m gonna be sick.” And I was. Duckworth gave me a few seconds to make sure I wasn’t going to do it again.

  “How can it be her?” I asked. “What’s she doing up here?”

  “Let’s go back to my car,” Duckworth said. He was sweating. He’d been crouching next to me when I first looked at the body, and getting back up had left him short of breath.

  “If Leanne’s here …,” I started.

  “Yes?”

  I felt I had to ask. “Is there another grave? Is this the only one?”

  Duckworth looked at me intently, like he was trying to see inside my head. “Do you think there’s another one?”

  “What?” I said.

  “Come on.”

  We said nothing on the way back to his car. He opened my door for me and helped me into the car like I was an invalid, then got in around the other side. Neither of us spoke for the better part of a minute. Duckworth turned the key ahead far enough to let him put the front windows down. A light breeze blew through the car.

  I turned and looked at him. He was staring straight ahead, hand
s on the wheel, even though the engine was off.

  “Did you already know who it was?” I asked him. “Did you know it was Leanne Kowalski?”

  Duckworth ignored the question and asked one of his own. “When you came up here Friday with your wife, Mr. Harwood, did you bring Leanne Kowalski with you?”

  I rested my head on the headrest and closed my eyes. “What? No,” I said. “Why would we do that?”

  “Did she follow you up here? Did you arrange to meet her up here?”

  “No and no.”

  For a moment I wondered whether Leanne Kowalski could have, somehow, been the woman who sent me the anonymous email, who wanted to meet me at Ted’s. But I couldn’t think of a way for those dots to connect.

  “You don’t think it’s odd that Leanne Kowalski’s body turns up within a mile or two of the place where you claim you were meeting this source of yours?”

  I turned. “Odd? Do I think it’s fucking odd? You’re damn right I think it’s odd. You want me to list the fucking odd things that have happened to me in the last two days? How about this. My wife goes missing. Some stranger tries to grab my son. I find out Jan has a birth certificate for some kid who got run over by a car when she was five, that my wife may not even be who she says she is. She goes into that store and tells the guy a story about not knowing why I’ve brought her up here, like I’ve tricked her. Why the hell did she do that? Why did she lie to him? Why was there no ticket for her to get into Five Mountains? Why did she lie to me about seeing Dr. Samuels about wanting to kill herself? So when you ask me if I think it’s odd that Leanne Kowalski is lying dead over there, yeah, I find that pretty fucking odd. Just like everything else that’s going on.”

  Duckworth nodded slowly. Finally, he said, “And would you think it odd if I told you that a preliminary examination of your car—the one you used to drive up here Friday with your wife—has turned up samples of blood and hair in the trunk, and a crumpled receipt for a roll of duct tape in the glove box?”

  So talkative a moment earlier, I now could find no words.

  “I got the call just before you came back for your car. It’ll be a while before we get back the DNA tests. Want to save us some trouble, tell us what we’re going to learn?”

  It was time to get help.

  Driving home from Lake George, I reached Natalie Bondurant, the lawyer my father had been in touch with, on my cell phone. Once we got the preliminaries out of the way, and she was officially going to act on my behalf, I said, “There’s been a development since you spoke to my father. Actually, a few.”

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “Leanne Kowalski, the woman who worked in the same office as my wife, her body was found not far from where I had driven on Friday with Jan.”

  “So the cops already like you for this thing,” she said, “and now they’ve got this.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are they going to find a second body, Mr. Harwood? Are they going to find your wife, too?”

  “I hope to God not,” I said.

  “Because if they do they’ll be able to nail you for it? Or because you’re still hoping to see your wife come home alive?”

  She had a directness that was disarming.

  “The latter,” I said. “And Detective Duckworth said they’ve found blood and hair in the trunk of my car, plus a receipt for duct tape in the glove compartment.”

  “He may be trying to rattle you. Can you explain those things?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, the hair? Sure, we’re in and out of the trunk, I suppose some stray hairs could fall in, but the other things? No. I don’t know why there’d be blood there, and I haven’t bought a roll of duct tape in a long time.”

  “Kind of convenient that they’ve found those things, then,” Natalie Bondurant said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence building up around you.”

  She had me take her through things from the beginning. I tried to tell everything as simply as possible, as though I were spelling it all out in a news story. Give her the overall picture first, then start zeroing in on the details. I told her about my trip to Rochester, the revelation that Jan might not be who she’d been claiming to be.

  “How do you explain that?” she asked.

  “I can’t. I asked Detective Duckworth whether she might be one of those relocated witnesses, but I don’t think he took me seriously, after I’d already told him Jan had been acting depressed the last few weeks, and he couldn’t find anyone else to back up that story.”

  Natalie was quiet a moment, then said, “You’re in a load of trouble.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “What the police don’t have is a body,” she said. “They’ve got this Leanne Kowalski’s, but they don’t have your wife’s. That’s good news. Not just because we want your wife to come back alive, but it means the police don’t have a solid case yet. That doesn’t mean they might not be able to build one without a body. Plenty of people have gone to jail for murder where a body was never found.”

  “You’re not cheering me up.”

  “That’s not my job. My job is to keep your ass out of jail, or if you end up going there, to make it for as short a time as possible.”

  If I hadn’t been driving, I would have closed my eyes. We had been talking so long, I was nearly home. It was just after eight.

  A thought occurred to me.

  “There was something weird about the grave,” I said. “About where they found Leanne’s body.”

  “What?”

  “That hole that was dug, to put Leanne into. It was right by the side of the road. It wasn’t much of a grave, either. Just enough to put somebody into it and cover it with a bit of dirt. All somebody had to do was go a few more feet into the woods and they could have buried her where she wouldn’t have been seen. Why someone would try to bury her that close to the road, even a road that’s not very well traveled, seems stupid.”

  “You’re saying she was meant to be found,” Natalie said.

  “It hadn’t occurred to me until now, but yeah. I wonder.”

  “Come to my office tomorrow morning at eleven,” she said. “Bring your checkbook.”

  “Okay,” I said. I was driving back into my parents’ neighborhood.

  “And don’t have any more conversations with the police without me present,” she said.

  “Got it,” I said. I made the turn onto my parents’ street. The house was just up ahead.

  There was a mini media circus on the street out front.

  Two TV news vans. Three cars. People milling about.

  Shit.

  “And,” Natalie Bondurant said, “no talking to the press.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said, and ended the call.

  I was guessing that if there were this many reporters at my parents’ house, my own house was probably staked out as well. One of the news vans was half blocking the driveway, so I had to park at the curb on the opposite side of the street.

  I didn’t see any way around this. I wanted to see my parents, and I desperately needed to see my son.

  I got out of my father’s car and started striding across the street. A reporter and cameraman jumped out of each of the news vans and called out my name. Young people with notepads and digital recorders got out of the three cars. Samantha Henry emerged from a faded red Honda Civic that I’d thought looked familiar. She wore a pained, apologetic look on her face as she approached, one that seemed to say, Hey, look, I’m sorry, I’m just doing my job.

  The reporters swarmed me, shouting out questions.

  “Mr. Harwood, any word on your wife?”

  “Mr. Harwood, do you know what’s happened to your wife?”

  “Why do the police consider you a suspect?”

  “Did you kill your wife, Mr. Harwood?”

  I resisted my first inclination, which was to push my way through them and run into the house. Natalie’s advice was fresh in
my mind, but I’d worked in newspapers long enough to know how guilty brushing past the press, refusing to say anything, would make me look. So I stopped, held up my palms in a bid to show I was willing to take their questions if they’d just hold up.

  “I’ll say a few words,” I said as the two cameramen maneuvered for good shots. I needed a moment to compose myself, collect my thoughts. Then I said, “My wife, Jan Harwood, went missing yesterday morning while we were at Five Mountains with our son. I’ve been doing everything I can to find her, and I’m hoping and praying that she’s all right. If you’re watching this, honey, please get in touch and let me know you’re okay. Ethan and I love you, we miss you, and we just want you to get home safely. Whatever’s happened, whatever it might be, we can work it out. We can work through it together. And to anyone else who’s watching, if anyone has seen Jan or knows anything about where she might be or what might have happened to her, I beg you, please get in touch with me or with the police. All I want is for my wife to come home.”

  One of the more beautifully coiffed TV reporters pushed a microphone into my face and said, “We have information that you felt compelled to tell the police that you did not kill your wife. Why did you feel you had to say that? Are you officially a suspect?”

  “I said it because it’s the truth,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. I glanced at the house, saw my mother watching me through the curtains. “I understand that the police have to consider every possibility in a case like this, including looking at the spouse of a missing person. I get that. That’s just standard procedure.”

  “But are you a suspect?” she persisted. “Do the police believe your wife has been murdered?”

  “There’s no evidence anything’s happened to my wife,” I said.

  “Is that because you’ve done a good job getting rid of the body?” she asked.

  I tried very hard to stay calm. “I won’t dignify that with a response.”

  The second most beautifully coiffed reporter, from the other TV station, asked, “How do you explain the fact that there’s no evidence your wife was even with you at Five Mountains?”