Jan Coffey Suspense Box Set: Volume Two: Three Complete Novels: Road Kill, Puppet Master, Cross Wired

by Jan Coffey

  “Mind if I sit here, Dr. Mendes?”

  Almost everyone, Alanna thought, looking up. A new hire. She’d been introduced to the young engineer right before the holidays. She’d also seen her on her floor twice during the days between Christmas and New Years, when just a skeleton crew had been working. There were over a hundred and fifty people who worked in her group. It was a miracle that Alanna remembered the engineer at all. She looked up at the round, cheerful face and decided she didn’t care to remember her name.

  Alanna motioned vaguely at the four unoccupied rows of seats in front of her and looked back down at her cell phone. “There are plenty of seats.”

  “You probably don’t remember me,” the engineer said, dropping her briefcase and lunch pack on the seat in front of Alanna. She didn’t sit down, though, and Alanna was forced to look up again.

  Some of the other riders were directing surprised looks back at them.

  “I’m Jill Goldman,” the young woman continued, extending her hand. “I’m working with Phil Evans, who works for you. He’s been telling me so much about you and the all your work on STEREO project. I’ve read every one of your publications. And when I was interviewed by NASA, I was astounded to think that I would actually be able to work beside you and—”

  “I remember you,” Alanna interrupted, deciding there was no point in being an absolute bitch. She shook the woman’s hand briefly. “Look, Ms. Goldman, I have to get this done before we arrive at building 23.”

  She moved her briefcase from the floor to the seat beside her. She snapped it open and took out a pen, hoping that would make her point about the seat not being available.

  “Sure, sure…I understand.” Jill slipped into the seat in front of her.

  Alanna made a mental note to talk to Phil today. He could explain some ground rules to the young woman.

  Jill turned around in her seat. “Did you have a nice New Year’s Eve?”

  Alanna decided to write an email to Phil, instead. Right now.

  “This was the first New Year’s Eve my husband and I spent as married couple,” Jill said, leaning her head back against the glass. She was staring into space, caught up for a moment in her own little world, not even realizing that her question had gone unanswered. She refocused her attention on Alanna. “We were married the weekend before I started working here at Moffett. The Friday of Thanksgiving weekend. We had a small ceremony at my parent’s house. The immediate family and a handful of friend came over. It was just perfect. Just the way we both wanted it to be.”

  As much as Alanna wanted to brush her off, the tone of the young woman’s voice and the date tugged a string deep inside. She stared down at the cell phone. A haze covered her vision.

  That was supposed to be Alanna’s wedding weekend, too. Ray and Alanna had planned to be married the day after Thanksgiving. A small ceremony. Just a handful of friends and her grandmother. She hadn’t wanted to wear a wedding dress, just a suit. Ray had talked her into choosing a white suit.

  The rush of emotions tore at the façade she forced herself to maintain. Alanna closed her eyes, remembering how on the same Friday night this Jill Goldman had been married, she had checked into the hotel in Carmel where she and Ray had planned to spend their wedding weekend. Locked up in that suite, she’d shed so many tears, rehashed it all. Guilt. Denial. More guilt. Why had she encouraged him to go on that trip?

  It wasn’t her fault. A freak explosion, the police had said. An accident.

  Alanna felt a single tear squeeze past her eyelids. She brushed it away.

  “Oh, my God,” Jill whispered. “It was you they were talking about. I’m so sorry. I heard half a conversation—I didn’t know. I never realized it was you. It was your fiancée who died on that boating thing this past fall just before the STEREO satellite launch. How horrible that must have been! I am so sorry.”

  A lump the size of a basketball had lodged itself in Alanna’s throat, but it didn’t matter. She felt the bus pull away from the first stop at Moffett Field, the Microsoft facility. She didn’t want to talk about this. She shoved her things into the briefcase and closed the top.

  Jill’s voice was hushed. She was apologizing again, but Alanna couldn’t hear it. She’d thought she was done with these sharp, slashing cuts of emotion. The antidepressants she’s been given by her doctor before Christmas had been helping. Until now. She needed air. She needed to walk. She needed to screw her head on straight before she arrived at work.

  Alanna pushed to her feet.

  “Are you okay?” Jill placed a hand on her sleeve.

  “I’m fine,” Alanna managed to say. She started toward the front of the bus. She could feel the curious glances of a few of the riders as she passed.

  “You getting off at the next stop, Alanna?” a voice asked. It was another project manager in Building 23.

  She nodded and walked past him, too. The shuttle slowed down at the stop. Alanna cleared her voice, tried to paste on a fake smile. She pulled on her sunglasses, despite the fact that the day was overcast. Too many people were getting out at this stop. She knew some of them. She would have no privacy.

  At the last moment, she dropped into a vacated seat. She slid to the window and stared out at the departing riders and the commuters. Men and women, casually dressed, juggled coffees and briefcases and purses as they made their way along the sidewalks. Engineers, researchers, clerical workers, technical types. They were so young, she thought. They seemed to be getting younger every year.

  The bus door swung closed, and they pulled away from the curb. Two stops more, she told herself. She could manage two stops.

  Alanna froze.

  She saw him on the sidewalk. Only for an instant, but she couldn’t be mistaken. He was walking toward the bus stop they’d just left. He was wearing a blue blazer and carrying a leather briefcase. His hair was longer, curlier. She stared at his face as the bus flashed past him, her breath crushed from her chest. She whirled in her seat, staring at his back for only a second, and then he was gone.

  It was Ray.

  Stunned, she sat still, unable to grasp what had just happened.

  It couldn’t have been Ray. He was dead. It was a freak accident. He was gone.

  Alanna was on her feet in an instant.

  “Stop!” She scrambled toward the door. “Stop the bus!”

  CHAPTER 3

  DESPAIR

  Brooklyn, New York

  His hand shook. The stack of mail slipped to the floor and scattered around his feet. David Collier read the letter from the insurance company for the second time.

  At present, no recognized studies provide evidence that the aforementioned treatment is viable. We regret to inform you…

  They were rejecting his daughter.

  “Daddy…is everything okay?”

  We regret to inform you…

  David bent down to pick up the pieces of mail. He tried to pull himself together.

  “Absolutely, honey,” he said quietly. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  He put the bag of groceries he’d brought in on the kitchen counter and dumped the mail next to it.

  The small apartment smelled like a hospital. David couldn’t bring himself to look up at Leah. The eight-year-old was lying in the rented hospital bed they kept where a dining table should be. His little girl was halfway through the day’s peritoneal dialysis. The visiting nurse put aside the magazine she was reading and changed one of the plastic bags on the elaborate set up.

  “How is it going?” he asked her.

  The dour woman gave a firm nod and leaned back in her seat, once again lost in her reading.

  The home treatment was one that David’s wife, Nicole, had been trained in last year. As far as time and Leah’s comfort, this was so superior to what the child had gone through in the clinics and hospitals since the first time the doctors discovered the rare kidney disease.

  This method used the lining of Leah’s abdominal cavity, the peritoneum, as a filter. David knew
all the specifics. All the details. A catheter was placed in Leah’s belly to pour a solution containing dextrose into the abdominal cavity. While the solution was there, it pulled wastes and extra fluid from the blood. Later, the solution was drained from the belly, along with the wastes and extra fluid. The cavity was then refilled, and the cleaning process continued.

  Not pleasant to think about, but it was keeping his daughter alive.

  The dialysis could be done at home, usually while Leah slept, without a health professional present. Since Nicole’s death, though, there’d been a change in schedule. David wasn’t trained in the procedure. A visiting nurse had to come to the house to set up and monitor it. And this had to be done during the day, which meant for those two days every week, Leah was not going to school. But that wasn’t the extent of it. David had met with Leah’s doctors yesterday. They were planning to increase the dialysis. Starting next week, it would be every day. Her kidney function was rapidly failing. David had guessed at a need for change in treatments before he was told. Every day, he could see the steady decline in her health. She was losing weight again and she had no energy.

  David hadn’t been able to get up his courage to tell the eight year old the bad news.

  “Any mail for me?” Leah asked, stretching a hand toward him.

  David knew what his daughter wanted. She wanted to have him sit on the edge of the bed and wait with her until they were done. Leah wasn’t too keen on this specific nurse. They’d had her in a couple of times before. David went through a large visiting nurse agency that accepted their insurance. Liking a specific person seemed to be the kiss of death. They never came back. On the other hand, the sour ones were always repeats.

  This one hadn’t said more than two words to him. He had a feeling she hadn’t been any more talkative with her patient.

  Leah smiled when David sat down on the bed beside her. “So, anything good?” she asked, some of the strain gone from her pale face.

  David gave a cursory glance at the mail he’d dropped on the counter. The insurance denial topped bills and bills and bills. There was no end to it. They were breaking him. And the letter today threatened to destroy what he had left of his family. Leah had been through a kidney transplant once already. Her body had its way of rejecting the organ. The doctors had predicted it would happen within a six-month to a one-year window. They were almost at ten months, and it was happening.

  Then, the last time they were at the hospital, one of the doctors had told David about the research that was going on in Germany. They were cloning a person’s kidney. He thought Leah would be a perfect candidate for the study.

  An endeavor like that cost a lot of money, though, and David had gone through everything he had. He looked over at the mail again. With the rejection by the insurance company, he didn’t know where else he could turn.

  “Anything good, daddy?”

  David caressed Leah’s soft brown hair. He shook his head. “Sorry, love. Nothing good.”

  He reached down, picked up the morning newspaper off the floor, and glanced at the headlines he’d already read earlier in the day. He couldn’t trust his emotions right now.

  “It’ll be okay,” Leah whispered to him.

  David was shaken by the tone, by the gentleness and love that it conveyed. There was so much of Nicole in their daughter. There had been so many times over these past four years that David had been on the verge of a breakdown—of doing something stupid. The world was against them. Everything that could go wrong had gone wrong. His job, Nicole’s and Leah’s health, the financial strains, the legal troubles that had dogged him. Nicole had held him together, though. She’d been able to keep him in one piece and standing straight, facing life’s challenges each day. Her enthusiasm for life and her optimism had been contagious.

  But now Nicole was gone, and he had to be as strong as his wife…for Leah’s sake.

  “Is there anything in that bag that is going to melt?” The eight-year-old asked, once again filling the shoes of the adult in their life.

  He chuckled and ruffled her short hair as he got up. “Yes, there is.”

  “Popsicles?” she asked brightly, a child again.

  He nodded. “Popsicles.”

  As Leah’s kidney functions were dropping almost daily, she was having difficulty with urination. As a result, she couldn’t drink like healthy children. Chewing ice cubes was one way David got liquids into her. Popsicles were a treat that they splurged on every now and then.

  In the adjoining kitchen, he opened a drawer and shoved the delinquent notices from the counter into it. He’d go through them when Leah was sleeping.

  “Tell your father about the phone call.”

  David and Leah both stared at the nurse, surprised that she had spoken.

  “What phone call?”

  “I’m sorry, Dad, I know you always tell me not to answer it and let the machine pick up. But the phone was right here and I picked it up without thinking.” She held up the phone that was lying on the bed.

  David didn’t even answer the calls himself. These days every one of them was from some collection agency. He definitely didn’t want to expose his daughter to their practiced rudeness.

  “That’s fine, honey,” he said. He picked up another handset from the counter in the kitchen and checked the ID on the last incoming call. It showed as unknown.

  “The man didn’t leave a name or phone number. But I told him that you’d be back in half an hour, and he said he’ll call again.”

  David made a mental note to make sure the call went directly to his answering machine. Whenever possible, he avoided speaking with creditors when Leah was awake. He went back to putting away the groceries. The box of popsicles looked lost in the spacious empty freezer.

  “He said the call was about a job offer.”

  A jolt ran through David. He turned to his daughter.

  “A job offer?” he repeated.

  A job offer.

  Four years ago, David had been the CFO of a hot, new international banking consortium. Heady stuff. A guest interview with Lou Dobbs. Even a glowing article in the Wall Street Journal about the management team. Good things never seem to last, though, David thought. Not in his life.

  The title, the paycheck, the perks, the future had all come crashing down on him when his boss had embezzled a hundred and eighty million dollars before disappearing—but not before arranging everything to look as if David was behind it all. He was to be the fall guy…caught in the act, it appeared.

  After months of spending his own money on lawyers, David had been lucky to walk away free, but that had been the end of any possibility of working in finance. Now he didn’t have enough to cover all his family’s monthly expenses, never mind Leah’s medical bills.

  “Is that what he said?”

  Leah shrugged. “I think so.”

  David tried to remember who might still be looking at his resume. It didn’t matter. People make mistakes. All they had to do was Google him, and that resume would go in the round file. There was still enough inaccurate information out there to bury him twice over.

  The phone rang. He looked at the display. Unknown.

  “I told you he’d call back,” Leah said, giving him the thumbs-up as he disappeared into the bedroom.

  Already knowing the end result of this call, he answered the phone anyway. No sense leaving the poor guy hanging.

  CHAPTER 4

  FEAR

  Greenwich, Connecticut

  Kei Galvin couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t sit for more than a few minutes at a time. She was restless, worried, a total mess.

  The African violet on the coffee table lay dead, their vibrant purple flowers only a memory against the drooping green leaves. She couldn’t bring herself to touch them. She hadn’t checked the greenhouse for two days. The spring bulbs she’d started there in pots three weeks ago needed watering, but she couldn’t rouse herself to spend time on them. She’d stopped taking her morning
walk with her neighbor. She’d missed two doctor’s appointments yesterday. She couldn’t focus.

  “I think we’ve waited long enough,” she told her husband when he came back into their sitting room, carrying a cup of tea for her.

  “I didn’t know we’ve been waiting.”

  At any other time she would have appreciated his sense of humor. But not now. “He hasn’t gone back to his hotel room. He doesn’t answer his cell phone. He hasn’t called.”

  “We don’t know if he’s gone back to his room or not. The two different desk people I spoke to on the phone just didn’t know. We only know that at the time of our calls, he hasn’t been there,” Steven said reasonably. “And you know how it goes with the cell phone. He’s not in New York City, with reception everywhere he goes. He’s twenty-three years old, sweetheart. We don’t have to hear from him every day. You have to—”

  She whirled to face her husband. “Don’t do this to me. I know my child. He knows me. He knows when I’m worried about him, and it doesn’t matter where he’s traveling or what time it is. He always calls or emails or somehow lets me know he’s okay.”

  “And he will this time, too,” Steven said softly. He put the cup down on the coffee table and placed both hands on Kei’s shoulders, pushing her to sit down. “It’s only been four days since he called.”

  “Eight days since I spoke to him,” Kei corrected.

  “Four days ago…he left a message.”

  She was back on her feet again, resuming her pacing. “Do we know anyone in Istanbul?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “You have to know someone. Your company—”

  “I sold my business, honey. It’s been two years. I don’t have the contacts I used to have.”

  “Did you have offices in Turkey?”

  Steven ran a hand through his hair. Her mind ran on one track. She wouldn’t hear reason. Waiting was out of the question. They’d been married nearly thirty years. He knew Kei better than she knew herself. She was all love, emotions, affection. Kei wouldn’t rest until they heard from Nathan. This had been the way their marriage had gone since the day Nathan was born. Their son always came first. Steven didn’t begrudge him that, of course. He was certainly not neglected. And Nathan was their only child. For all the years that Steven had been building his company and living and breathing the air that was trapped inside those concrete walls, Kei had played the part of both parents. There was no denying it, the result was a bond between Kei and Nathan that ran deeper than the father-son relationship Steven had with him.