The Boy from the Woods

by Harlan Coben

  “And he let Raymond Stark take the fall.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s one thing to help a buddy out, I guess. But to sit back while another man goes to prison for life.”

  “Scum,” Gavin agreed. “Let’s get the tape ready.”

  Wilde didn’t move. He could, of course, stop them now. He could rise up and point the gun and not let them get back to the computer.

  But he didn’t.

  Wilde waited.

  “I got it keyed up,” Gavin said.

  “All the major networks?” Strauss asked.

  “Plus some bloggers and Twitter accounts.”

  “This is it, my friend. Hit send.”

  One last chance for Wilde to act.

  He heard the click of the key.

  “Done,” Gavin said.

  The relief in his tone was palpable.

  “We need to free the kid,” Strauss said. “You have the coordinates to send to the Maynards?”

  “Do you think we should wait?” Gavin asked.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. They may have more.”

  “More?”

  “More tapes,” Gavin Chambers said. “They could be holding out on us.”

  “We can’t,” Strauss said. “This…it’s gone far enough, Gavin. That boy…”

  “Yeah.” Wilde could hear the devastation now in Gavin’s voice. “Yeah, you’re right.”

  “Hand me the ski mask. Let’s go finish this.”

  Wilde came out from his hiding spot and pointed the gun at them. “No need.”

  Gavin Chambers and Saul Strauss spun toward him. Wilde raised the gun.

  “If you breathe wrong,” Wilde said, “I’ll shoot you both. Gavin, I assume you’re armed?”

  “I am.”

  “Holster under the left armpit?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know the drill. Thumb and index finger. Throw it over here. Do it slowly. Saul?”

  “I’m unarmed.” Saul held up his hands and twirled slowly.

  “Keep your hands on the desk where I can see them. Gavin, toss the gun.”

  Gavin Chambers took the gun out of his holster and tossed it on the floor toward Wilde. Wilde picked it up and stuck it in his waistband.

  “How did you figure it out?” Gavin asked.

  “Lots of things. But the main one was the most basic. I kept wondering how Crash could be kidnapped so close to his own home with someone as good as you guarding him. The simplest answer? He can’t. So you had to be involved.” Wilde looked at Gavin, then at Saul. “I assume you guys hatched this idea after Naomi Pine ran away?”

  “We did,” Gavin said.

  “Made sense. Naomi goes missing. She has a tentative connection to Crash. So you know that if Crash goes missing now, everyone will tie them together. It gave you time. It gave you the ultimate diversion. You even said it to me, Gavin.”

  “Said what?”

  “At my Ecocapsule. The Ghost Army. Everything you did was about tactical deception.”

  “And yet here we are.”

  “Here we are.”

  Gavin smiled. “We overdid it, didn’t we?”

  “You did.”

  “I didn’t expect the Maynards to bring you and Hester in.”

  “Right, that threw you. It’s why you kept insisting I concentrate on Naomi. You knew that even if I was successful in finding her, I’d be no closer to the truth about Crash. The problem is, you both gilded that lily. Saul, you show up at the hotel bar to ask me about Naomi the night Crash disappears. Why? I didn’t realize it at the time, but even if you thought Crash and Naomi were close, why would you ask me to help you? You were just planting the seed so I’d go in the wrong direction. Then you”—Wilde looked back at Gavin—“you show up at the 7-Eleven with some suddenly unearthed secret message that again was supposed to make me think that Naomi was connected to whatever happened to Crash.”

  Gavin nodded, seeing it now. “You asked me for a ride to the Maynards’.”

  “Right.”

  “That’s when you planted the GPS tracker in the car.”

  “You’re a wealthy, successful man. You always have a driver or at least an expensive car. Suddenly you’re in a Chevy Cruze? I figured it was a rental.”

  “But you didn’t know for sure?”

  “I was just covering my bases. Then today Saul conveniently shows up by the school. He claims to have men following me, that he has an inside source at the Maynards’. But who would that be? Hester wouldn’t talk. Neither would my people. The Maynards? Not a chance. So it had to be the kidnapper. You, Gavin.”

  “Eliminate the possible and whatever remains,” Saul said, quoting Arthur Conan Doyle, “no matter how improbable, is the truth.”

  “Exactly. So when Saul drove me up to Sing Sing, I planted another GPS locator in his car. After you dropped me back near the Maynards’, you drove up to this rest stop. You didn’t stay long. Just to feed the kid, I guess. Look in on him. But the day before, according to the locator in Gavin’s Cruze, he had stopped here too. Why would both of you be in this fairly remote rest stop? You two had to be in on this together. Oh, and the finger coordinates being where I was found as a kid. Again, overkill. The only reason someone would do that would be to mess with my head. Of course, I got stuff wrong too. Like I figured you just rendezvoused at this rest stop. Met up, discussed things, whatever. But when I arrived just now, I was surprised to see it was closed.”

  “How did you sneak in here anyway? We have sensors by all the entrances.”

  “But not in the back. There’s a Dairy Queen.”

  “So you found Crash in the Dunkin’ Donuts hut.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Probably at the hospital. Rola took him.”

  “So Rola knows about this?”

  Wilde chose not to reply.

  “You get why we did this,” Saul said. “You see the danger, right?”

  “It took me a while to remove the blinders of self-interest,” Gavin said. “You become so enmeshed in a charismatic leader, seduced by all that he can give you, that you can’t see past his bullshit. Then Saul started pleading his case to me.”

  “You didn’t need much persuasion,” Saul said. “You were already starting to see.”

  “Maybe I was—the pill popping, the erratic behavior, the ease with which he could manipulate. I liked his idea of tearing down the social order to rebuild, but as I spent more time with him, it became clear that Rusty doesn’t want to rebuild. Rusty wants to destroy this country. He wants to pull us apart by the seams.”

  “We two old men don’t agree on much,” Saul said. “I’m on one side of the political aisle. Gavin is on the other. But we are both Americans.”

  “Our views, opposite as they might seem, are in the realm of normalcy.”

  “That’s not what Rusty wants. Rusty wants to make everyone choose a side, turn everyone into an extremist.”

  “Seems it worked,” Wilde said, still holding the gun on them.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You two kidnapped a child. You cut off his finger. If that’s not being an extremist…”

  Their faces fell. Both of them.

  Gavin said, “You think we wanted to do that?”

  “Doesn’t matter what you wanted.”

  “You tell me,” Saul Strauss said. “Would Dash Maynard have given up the tape any other way?”

  “Again: Doesn’t matter. You made the choice.” Wilde said it slowly and with emphasis: “You. Cut. Off. A. Boy’s. Finger.”

  Gavin Chambers lowered his head. Saul Strauss tried to hold his high, but his mouth was quaking.

  “Crash was drugged up when we did that, unconscious,” Saul said. “We kept the pain and trauma to a minimum.”

  “You disfigured him. Then you threatened to cut off his arm. Suppose the Maynards didn’t send the tape. Would you have gone through with that? Would you have sent them his
arm?”

  Gavin Chambers finally looked up. “How far would you go to save millions of lives, Wilde?”

  “This isn’t about me.”

  “We’re all soldiers here, so it damn well is,” Gavin said. “This battlefield might not be as obvious, but lives are at stake. Millions. So if disfiguring or killing one person, even an innocent kid, could save millions of lives, would you do it?”

  “That’s a pretty slippery slope you’re standing on, Colonel.”

  “The frontline troops are always standing on a slippery slope. You know that. Would we have rather cut off our own fingers to save those lives? Of course. But that wasn’t the choice. Life isn’t lived in the black and white, Wilde. People like to think so nowadays. All the online outrage, things are either all good or all bad. But life is lived in the gray. Life is lived in the nuances.”

  “Even now,” Saul added, “you standing there holding a gun on us. Gavin and I are willing to pay the price for what we did. We felt we had no choice. But we’ve now saved Raymond—”

  “Righting a tremendous wrong,” Gavin added. “Nothing hypothetical about that.”

  “—and on a much larger scale, we maybe saved this country. That tape we just sent out could change the course of history.”

  The two men waited now for Wilde to say something.

  After a few moments passed, Gavin put his hand on Saul Strauss’s arm. “Oh man.”

  “What?” Saul said.

  “Wilde gets it.”

  Strauss frowned. “What do you mean?”

  Gavin met Wilde’s eye. “I mean Wilde has been hiding in this garage since before you arrived.”

  “So?”

  “So he waited, Saul. He waited for you to get here. He waited until we sent out the tape.”

  Silence.

  Strauss saw it now. He turned to face Wilde too. “You could have stopped us. You could have popped out with that gun two minutes earlier.”

  “And the tape would never have seen the light of day,” Gavin added.

  “But you didn’t do that, Wilde.” Both men were nodding along now. “You came out with us on that slippery slope.”

  Wilde said nothing.

  “In the end,” Gavin said, “we’re just three soldiers.”

  “One last mission. You let us complete it.”

  “In my case,” Gavin said, taking a step in front of Saul, “a suicide mission.”

  Wilde finally spoke. “Wait, what?”

  “I’ll be okay in prison,” Saul said. “I’ll still be able to speak out. I can still be a voice.”

  “But I’m an old man and I don’t want to face that,” Gavin said. He stood and reached out his hand. “Let me have my gun back, Wilde. Warrior to warrior. Let me end this on my terms.”

  Suicide.

  “No,” Wilde said.

  “Then I’ll run at you. I’ll force you to shoot me.”

  “That’s not what’s going to happen either,” Wilde said. “Listen closely. You had your mission, I had mine. Mine was to find two missing kids. I rescued one. I then stayed behind to search these premises for the other. That’s what I’ll tell Rola. Naomi isn’t here, is she?”

  “No,” Saul said, confused. “We don’t know anything about that.”

  “Then my mission here is complete.”

  “I don’t understand,” Saul said.

  “Yeah,” Wilde said, “I think you do.”

  Wilde didn’t say another word. He just lowered the gun and walked away.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Three Weeks Later

  Hester was finishing up a meeting with Simon Greene, the rich financial advisor who was captured on a viral video punching what looked like a vagrant in Central Park. She liked Greene, felt that he was getting a bad rap, but more important, the call from the Manhattan DA indicated that they wouldn’t be pressing charges, in part because no one could locate the supposed victim.

  Hester walked Greene to her office door.

  Simon Greene thanked her. Hester gave him a buss on the cheek. That was when she saw her seated in the waiting room. Hester stormed over to her executive assistant Sarah McLynn and said, “Why is Delia Maynard here?”

  “She asked for fifteen minutes. She said it was important.”

  “You should tell me these things.”

  “I did.”

  “When?”

  “Did you check your texts?”

  “A text isn’t telling me.”

  “How many times have we gone over this? You told me not to interrupt you and to inform you of schedule changes via text.”

  “I did?”

  “You did. Now you have fifteen minutes before your next client gets here. It’s a billable fifteen minutes, and Delia Maynard is a client. Should I tell her to go home or—”

  “Stop already. You’re a bigger nag than I am. Send her in.”

  Hester had not seen Delia Maynard since that awful day at the manor three weeks ago—right before the finger was found. Sarah showed Delia into the office and closed the door behind her. The two women stood and stared at one another for a long moment.

  “How is your son?” Hester asked.

  “Better,” Delia said. “They were able to attach the finger.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “Physically, he’s doing fine.”

  “And mentally?”

  “There are nightmares. It seems the kidnappers, whoever they were, treated him well, but…”

  “I understand. And you’ve decided not to involve the police?”

  “That’s right.”

  “No one asked you how his finger got severed?”

  “The doctor did, of course. We said it was a fishing incident. I don’t think she bought it, especially since it was hours between the time the finger arrived at the hospital and the time Crash got there, but there’s nothing that can be proved.”

  “So no one else knows about the kidnapping.”

  “No one.”

  Delia had no idea Gavin Chambers and Saul Strauss had kidnapped her son. Hester knew, of course. Three weeks ago, Wilde had confided in her and her only. She didn’t like what Wilde had done in the end. You don’t work outside of the system. The system may be flawed, but you don’t cut off children’s fingers, even to save a wrongly convicted man or even to save—ugh, such dramatics—the world.

  She hadn’t seen Wilde in three weeks either.

  “So why are you here, Delia?”

  “To say goodbye.”

  “Oh?”

  “We are taking the family and moving overseas for a while.”

  “I see.”

  “Since that tape became public, you can’t imagine what it’s been like.”

  “I think I can.”

  “There are constant death threats coming from Rusty supporters. They think Dash made it up or doctored it to destroy their hero.”

  “Fake news,” Hester said.

  “Yes. As our attorney, you know that Dash can’t comment or authenticate it.”

  Hester swallowed hard. “Right. It would be self-incrimination.”

  Dash Maynard had committed felonies that night by moving the dead body. Hester had wanted to work Raymond Stark’s case pro bono, but unfortunately, she couldn’t because of the conflict of interest in her representing the Maynards. Her hands were also tied. She wanted Dash more than anything to come forward, but as his attorney, she had to advise him against it.

  The system was flawed, but it was still the system.

  She didn’t think Dash would come forward anyway. She also didn’t think it would help. That was the worst part of it all. At first, the release of the tape seemed to destroy Rusty Eggers once and for all.

  At first.

  But mythical beasts don’t die, do they? When you try to kill them, they come back stronger. So: The tape was a fake. If it wasn’t an outright fake, it was doctored. If it wasn’t doctored, it all happened thirty years ago, so it didn’t ma
tter. If it mattered, Rusty Eggers said on the tape that he killed the man in self-defense and that’s not a crime. If it’s a crime, it was thirty years ago, when Rusty Eggers was just a young student, and well, someone tried to kill him so he had no choice but to defend himself. And if the death was later blamed on an innocent black man, that was the police’s fault, not Rusty Eggers’s. Blame that crooked cop Kindler. Blame the racist system. And if it’s not racism, Raymond Stark had a criminal record, even as a seventeen-year-old, so he probably would have ended up in prison on another charge. Maybe Stark did other crimes that night, who knows? Maybe Raymond Stark was involved in Christopher Anson’s killing anyway. If it was self-defense, maybe Raymond Stark joined forces with Christopher Anson to attack Rusty Eggers. Maybe Raymond Stark and Christopher Anson together tried to rob Rusty Eggers and Raymond Stark ran off with the knife. Maybe that was why the knife was on him.

  Like that.

  Most of the media scoffed at these theories, which just made the Eggers supporters, coming from both the far right and the far left, dig in their heels and back their man even more.

  “You said that you would never tell,” Delia said.

  “Sorry?”

  “No matter what. Even if it was to stop Hitler. If something was told to you under attorney-client privilege, you’d never tell.”

  “That’s right.” Hester didn’t like the way this was headed. “You also told me that there was nothing on those tapes.”

  “I didn’t know about that tape,” Delia said. “I had no idea that tape existed. I had no idea Dash helped Rusty dump the body in an alley.”

  “Okay.”

  “Because I was gone by then.”

  Hester felt an icy hand touch down on her spine. “Sorry?”

  “The two of them fought a lot. Rusty and Christopher. A lot of it was over me. Thirty years ago. You know how it was. Girls were things. Shiny objects. So I guess they had a big fight in the bar that night. I was dating Rusty then. We were getting serious. Rusty had gotten a plum assignment from the senator. Christopher had been overlooked. I don’t know. Who cares anymore? So Christopher knocked on the door. I let him in. He was drunk. He tried to kiss me. I told him no. He didn’t stop. No girl was going to say no to Christopher Anson, especially not his rival’s girlfriend. You can guess what happened next. I hate the term ‘date rape’ or ‘acquaintance rape.’ Thirty years ago, it was pathetically considered ‘boys being boys.’ When I shouted for him to stop, he punched me in the mouth. I ran into the kitchen. He raped me right there on the floor. He was about to rape me again. Tell you the truth? I don’t even remember reaching into the drawer or picking up the knife.”