Three Harlan Coben Novels (17 page)

T
he cleanup.

Myron had some idea of what Win meant, though they wouldn’t discuss it directly. Win had holdings all over the place, including a tract of land in a secluded section of Sussex County, New Jersey. The property was eight acres. Most of it was undeveloped woods. If you ever tried to trace down ownership, you’d find a holding company from the Cayman Islands. You would find no names.

There was a time when Myron would have been upset over what Win had done. There was a time when he would have mustered up all his moral outrage. He would give his old friend long, complicated musings about the sanctity of life and the dangers of vigilantism and all that. Win would look at him and utter three words:

Us or them.

Win probably could have given the “stalemate” another minute or two. He and the Twins might have come to an understanding. You go, we go, no one gets hurt. That sort of thing. But that wasn’t meant to be.

The Twins were as good as dead the moment Win entered the scene.

The worst part was that Myron no longer felt bad about it. He would shrug it off. And when he’d started doing that, when he knew that killing them was the prudent thing to do and that their eyes would not haunt his sleep . . . that was when he knew it was time to stop doing this. Rescuing people, playing along that flimsy line between good and bad—it robbed a little sliver of your soul.

Except maybe it didn’t.

Maybe playing along that line—seeing the other side of it—just grounded you in awful reality. The fact is this: A million Orville the Art
Teachers or Jeb the Ascots aren’t worth the life of even one innocent, of one Brenda Slaughter or one Aimee Biel or one Katie Rochester or, as in the case overseas, the life of his soldier son, Jeremy Downing.

It might seem amoral to feel this way. But there it was. He applied this thinking to the war too. In his most honest moments, the ones he dare not speak out loud, Myron didn’t care that much about the civilians trying to scrape by in some dump-hole desert. He didn’t care if they got democracy or not, if they experienced freedom, if their lives were made better. What he did care about were the boys like Jeremy. Kill a hundred, a thousand, on the other side, if need be. But don’t let anyone hurt my boy.

Myron sat across from Rochester. “I wasn’t lying before. I’m trying to find Aimee Biel.”

Rochester just stared.

“You know that both girls used the same ATM?”

Rochester nodded.

“There has to be a reason why. It’s not a coincidence. Aimee’s parents don’t know your daughter. They don’t think Aimee knew her either.”

Rochester finally spoke. “I asked my wife and kids,” he said, his voice soft. “None of them think Katie knew Aimee.”

“But the two girls went to the same school,” Myron said.

“It’s a big school.”

“There’s a connection. There has to be. We’re just missing it. So what I need you and your family to do is start searching for that connection. Ask Katie’s friends. Look through her stuff. Something links your daughter and Aimee. We find it, we’ll be that much closer.”

Rochester said, “You’re not going to kill me.”

“No.”

His eyes traveled upstairs. “Your guy made the right move. Killing the Twins, I mean. You let them go, they’d have tortured your mother until she cursed the day you were born.”

Myron chose not to comment.

“I was stupid to hire them,” Rochester said. “But I was desperate.”

“If you’re looking for forgiveness, go to hell.”

“I’m just trying to make you understand.”

“I don’t want to understand,” Myron said. “I want to find Aimee Biel.”

Myron had to go to the emergency room. The doctor looked at the bite on his leg and shook his head.

“Jesus, you get attacked by a shark?”

“A dog,” Myron lied.

“You should put it down.”

Win took that one: “Already done.”

The doctor used sutures and then bandaged it up. It hurt like hell. He gave Myron some antibiotics and pills for the pain. When they left, Win made sure Myron still had the gun. He did.

“You want me to stay around?” Win said.

“I’m fine.” The car accelerated down Livingston Avenue. “Are those two guys taken care of?”

“Gone forever.”

Myron nodded. Win watched his face.

“They’re called the Twins,” Win said. “The older one with the ascot, he would have bitten off your nipples first. That’s how they warm up. One nipple, then the other.”

“I understand.”

“No lecture on overreacting?”

Myron’s fingers touched down on his chest. “I really like my nipples.”

It was late by the time Win dropped him off. Near his front door, Myron found his cell phone on the ground where he’d dropped it. He checked the caller ID. There were a bunch of missed calls, mostly business related. With Esperanza in Antigua on her honeymoon, he should have stayed in touch. Too late to worry about that now.

Ali had also called him.

A lifetime ago he had told her that he’d come by tonight. They had joked about him stopping by for a late-night “nooner.” Man, was that really today?

He debated waiting until morning, but Ali might be worried. Plus,
it would be nice,
really
nice, to hear the warmth in her voice. He needed that, in this crazy, exhausting, hurting day. He was sore. His leg throbbed.

Ali answered on the first ring. “Myron?”

“Hey, hope I didn’t wake you.”

“The police were here.”

There was no warmth in her voice.

“When?”

“A few hours ago. They wanted to talk to Erin. About some promise the girls made in your basement.”

Myron closed his eyes. “Damn. I never meant to involve her.”

“She backed your story, by the way.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I called Claire. She told me about Aimee. But I don’t understand. Why would you make the girls promise something like that?”

“To call me, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I overheard them talking about driving with someone who was drunk. I just didn’t want that to happen to them.”

“But why you?”

He opened his mouth but nothing came out.

“I mean, you just met Erin that day. That was the first time you ever talked to her.”

“I didn’t plan it, Ali.”

There was a silence. Myron didn’t like it.

“We okay?” he asked.

“I need a little time with this,” she said.

He felt his stomach clench.

“Myron?”

“Sooo,” he said, stretching out the word, “I guess there’s no rain check on that nooner?”

“This isn’t the time for jokes.”

“I know.”

“Aimee is missing. The police came around and questioned my daughter. This might be routine for you, but this isn’t my world. I’m not blaming you, but . . .”

“But?”

“I just . . . I just need time.”

“ ‘Need time,’ ” Myron repeated. “That sounds a whole lot like ‘need space.’ ”

“You’re making a joke again.”

“No, Ali, I’m not.”

T
here was a reason Aimee Biel wanted to be dropped off on that cul-de-sac.

Myron showered and threw on a pair of sweats. His pants had blood on them. His own. He remembered that old Seinfeld routine about laundry detergent commercials that talk about getting out bloodstains, how if you have bloodstains on your clothes, maybe laundry wasn’t your biggest worry.

The house was silent, except for those customary house noises. When he was a kid, alone at night, those noises would scare him. Now they were just there—neither soothing nor alarming. He could hear the slight echo as he walked across the kitchen floor. The echo only happened when you were alone. He thought about that. He thought about what Claire had said, about him bringing violence and destruction, about him still not being married.

He sat alone at the kitchen table of his empty house. This was not the life he’d planned.

Man plans, God laughs.

He shook his head. Truer words.

Enough wallowing, Myron thought. The “plans” part got his mind back on track. To wit: What had Aimee Biel been planning?

There was a reason she chose that ATM. And there was a reason she chose that cul-de-sac.

It was almost midnight when Myron got back in his car and started north to Ridgewood. He knew the way now. He parked at the end of the cul-de-sac. He turned off the car. The house was dark, just like two nights ago.

Okay, now what?

Myron went through the possibilities. One, Aimee actually went into that house at the end of the cul-de-sac. The woman who’d answered the door before, the slim blonde with the baseball cap, had lied to Loren Muse. Or maybe the woman didn’t know. Maybe Aimee was having a fling with her son or was a friend of her daughter’s, and this woman didn’t know about it.

Doubtful.

Loren Muse was no idiot. She had been at that door a fair amount of time. She would have checked into those angles. If they existed, she would have followed up.

So Myron ruled that out.

That meant that this house had been a diversion.

Myron opened the car door and stepped out. The road was silent. There was a hockey goal at the end of the cul-de-sac. This was probably a neighborhood with kids. There were only eight houses and almost no traffic. The kids probably still played on the street. Myron spotted one of those roll-out basketball hoops in one of the driveways. They probably did that too. The cul-de-sac was a little neighborhood playground.

A car turned down the block, just like when he’d dropped Aimee off.

Myron squinted toward the headlights. It was midnight now. Only eight houses on the street, all with lights out, all tucked in for the evening.

The car pulled up behind his and came to a stop. Myron recognized the silver Benz even before Erik Biel, Aimee’s father, got out. The light was dim, but Myron could still see the rage on his face. It made him look like an annoying little boy.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Erik shouted.

“Same thing as you, I guess.”

Erik came closer. “Claire may buy your story about why you drove Aimee here but . . .”

“But what, Erik?”

He didn’t reply right away. He was still in the tailored shirt and trousers, but the look wasn’t as crisp. “I just want to find her,” he said.

Myron said nothing, letting him talk his way down.

“Claire thinks you can help. She says you’re good at stuff like this.”

“I am.”

“You’re like Claire’s knight in shining armor,” he said with more than a trace of bitterness. “I don’t know why you two didn’t end up together.”

“I do,” Myron said. “Because we don’t love each other that way. In fact, in all the time I’ve known Claire, you’re the only man she ever really loved.”

Erik shifted his feet, pretending the words didn’t matter, not quite pulling it off. “When I made the turn, you were getting out of your car. What were you going to do?”

“I was going to try to retrace Aimee’s footsteps. See if I can figure out where she really went.”

“What do you mean, ‘really went’?”

“There was a reason she picked this spot. She used this house as a diversion. It wasn’t her real destination.”

“You think she ran away, don’t you?”

“I don’t think it was a random abduction or anything like that,” Myron said. “She led me to this specific spot. The question is, why?”

Erik nodded. His eyes were wet. “You mind if I tag along?”

He did, but Myron shrugged and started toward the house. The occupants might wake up and call the police. Myron was willing to risk that. He opened the gate. This was where Aimee had gone in. He made the same turn she made, went behind the house. There was a sliding glass door. Erik stayed silent behind him.

Myron tried the glass door. Locked. He ducked down and ran his fingers along the bottom. Some kind of crud had accumulated. Same with the door frame going up.

The door had not been opened in a while.

Erik whispered, “What?”

Myron signaled him to keep quiet. The curtains were pulled closed. Myron stayed low and cupped his hands around his eyes. He looked into the room. He couldn’t see much, but it looked like a standard family den. It was not a teen’s bedroom. He moved toward the back door. That led to a kitchen.

Again no teen bedroom.

Of course Aimee might have misspoken. She might have meant that she went through a back door to get to Stacy’s room, not that the bedroom was right there. But heck, Stacy didn’t even live here. So either way, Aimee had clearly lied. This other stuff—the fact that the door hadn’t been opened and didn’t lead to a bedroom. That was just the icing.

So where had she gone?

He got on all fours and took out his penlight. He shined it on the ground. Nothing. He hoped for footprints, but there hadn’t been much rain lately. He put his cheek flat on the grass, tried to look not so much for prints as any sort of ground indentation. More nothing.

Erik started looking too. He didn’t have a penlight. There was almost no other illumination back here. But he looked anyway and Myron didn’t stop him.

A few seconds later Myron stood. He kept the penlight low. The backyard was half an acre, maybe more. There was a pool with a whole other fence surrounding it. This gate was six feet high and kept locked. It would be hard, though not impossible, to scale. But Myron doubted Aimee had come here for a swim.

The backyard disappeared into woods. Myron followed the property line into the trees. The nice wooden picket fence ran around the side property lot, but once you got into the wooded area, the barrier became wire mesh. It was cheaper and less aesthetic, but back here, mixed in with branches and thicket, what did it matter?

Myron was pretty sure what he would find now.

It was not unlike the Horowitz-Seiden border near his own home. He put his hand on top of the fence and kept moving through the brush. Erik followed. Myron wore Nikes. Erik had on tasseled loafers without socks.

Myron’s hand dipped down near an overgrown pine bush.

Bingo, this was the spot. The fence had caved in here. He shined the penlight. From the rusted-out look of it, the post had buckled years ago. Myron pulled down on the mesh a little and stepped over. Erik did likewise.

The cut-through was easier to find. It ran no more than five, six
yards. It had probably been a longer path years ago, but with the value of land, only the thinnest clump of brush was now used for privacy. If your land could be made usable, you made sure that it was.

He and Erik ended up between two backyards on another cul-de-sac.

“You think Aimee went this way?”

Myron nodded. “I do.”

“So what now?”

“We find out who lives on this street. We try to see if there’s a connection to Aimee.”

“I’ll call the police,” Erik said.

“You can try that. They might care, they might not. If someone she knows lives here, it might just further back up the theory that she’s a runaway.”

“I’ll try anyway.”

Myron nodded. If he were in Erik’s shoes, he would do that too. They moved through the yard and stood on the cul-de-sac. Myron studied the homes as if they might give him answers.

“Myron?”

He looked at Erik.

“I think Aimee ran away,” he said. “And I think it’s my fault.”

There were tears on his cheek.

“She’s changed. Claire and I, we’ve both seen that. Something happened with Randy. I really like that boy. He was so good with her. I tried to talk to her about it. But she wouldn’t tell me. I . . . this is going to sound so stupid. I thought maybe Randy had tried to pressure her. You know. Sexually.”

Myron nodded.

“But what decade do I think we’re living in? They’d been together two years already.”

“So you don’t think that was it?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know.” He went silent.

“You said it was your fault.”

Erik nodded.

“When I drove Aimee here,” Myron said, “she begged me not to say anything to you and Claire. She said that things weren’t good with you two.”

“I started spying on her,” Erik said.

That wasn’t a direct answer to the question, but Myron let it go. Erik was working up to something. Myron would need to give him room.

“But Aimee . . . she’s a teenage girl. Remember those years? You learn how to hide things. So she was careful. I guess that she was more practiced than I was. It’s not that I didn’t trust her. But it’s part of a parent’s job to keep tabs on their children. It doesn’t do much good because they know it.”

They stood in the dark, staring at the houses.

“But what you don’t realize is that even while you’re spying on them, maybe every once in a while, they turn the tables on you. Maybe they suspect something’s wrong and they want to help. And maybe the child ends up keeping tabs on the parent.”

“Aimee spied on you?”

He nodded.

“What did she find, Erik?”

“That I’m having an affair.”

Erik almost collapsed with relief when he said it. Myron felt blank for a second, totally empty. Then he thought about Claire, about how she was in high school, about the way she’d nervously pluck her bottom lip in the back of Mr. Lampf’s English class. A surge of anger coursed through him.

“Does Claire know?”

“I don’t know. If she does, she’s never said anything.”

“This affair. Is it serious?”

“Yes.”

“How did Aimee find out?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know for sure that she did.”

“Aimee never said anything to you?”

“No. But . . . like I said. There were changes. I would go to kiss her cheek and she’d pull back. Almost involuntarily. Like I repulsed her.”

“That might be normal teenage stuff.”

Erik hung his head, shook it.

“So when you were spying on her, trying to check her e-mails, besides wanting to know what she was up to . . .”

“I wanted to see if she knew, yes.”

Again Myron flashed to Claire, this time to her face on her wedding day, starting a new life with this guy, smiling like Esperanza had on Saturday, no doubts about Erik even though Myron had never warmed to him.

As if reading his mind, Erik said, “You’ve never been married. You don’t know.”

Myron wanted to punch him in the nose. “You say so.”

“It doesn’t just happen all at once,” he said.

“Uh-huh.”

“It just starts to slip away. All of it. It happens to everyone. You grow apart. You care but in a different way. You’re about your job, your family, your house. You’re about everything but the two of you. And then one day you wake up and you want that feeling back. Forget the sex. That’s not really it. You want the passion. And you know you’re never going to get it from the woman you love.”

“Erik?”

“What?”

“I really don’t want to hear this.”

He nodded. “You’re the only one I’ve told.”

“Yeah, well, I must live under a lucky star then.”

“I just wanted . . . I mean, I just needed . . .”

Myron held up a hand. “You and Claire are none of my business. I’m here to find Aimee, not play marriage counselor. But let me just make something clear because I want you to know exactly where I stand: If you hurt Claire, I’ll . . .”

He stopped. Stupid to go that far.

“You’ll what?”

“Nothing.”

Erik almost smiled. “Still her knight in shining armor, eh, Myron?”

Man, Myron
really
wanted to punch him in the nose. He turned away instead, turned toward a yellow house with two cars in the driveway. And that was when he saw it.

Myron froze.

“What?” Erik said.

He quickly averted his gaze. “I need your help.”

Erik was all over that. “Name it.”

Myron started walking back toward the path, cursing himself. He was still rusty. He should have never let that show. The last thing he needed was Erik going off half-cocked. He needed to hash it out without Erik.

“Are you good with a computer?”

Erik frowned. “I guess so.”

“I need you to go online. I need you to put all the addresses on this street into a search engine. We need a list of who lives here. I need you to go home right away and do that for me.”

“But shouldn’t we do something now?” Erik asked.

“Like what?”

“Knock on doors.”

“And say what? Do what?”

“Maybe someone is holding her hostage right here, right on this very block.”

“Very, very doubtful. And even so, knocking on doors will probably get them to panic. And once we knock on one door at this hour, that person will call the police. The neighbors will be warned. Listen to me, Erik. We need to figure out what’s what first. This could all be a dead end. Aimee might not have taken that path.”

“You said you thought she did.”

“Thought. That doesn’t mean much. Plus maybe she walked five blocks after that. We can’t just stumble around. If you want to help, go home. Look those addresses up. Get me some names.”

They were through the path now. They moved past the gate and walked back to their cars.

“What are you going to do?” Erik asked.

“I have a few other leads I want to follow up on.”