by Harlan Coben
“Articulate,” Win said.
“I think I got a tail.”
“Hold please.” Maybe ten seconds passed. Then: “The newspaper on the corner.”
Win keeps a variety of telescopes and binoculars in his office. Don’t ask.
“Yep.”
“Good Lord,” Win said. “Could he be any more obvious?”
“Doubt it.”
“Where’s the pride in his work? Where’s the professionalism?”
“Sad.”
“That, my friend, is the whole problem with this country.”
“Bad tails?”
“It’s an example. Look at him. Does anybody really stand on a street corner and read a newspaper like that? He might as well cut out two eyeholes.”
“Uh-huh,” Myron said. “You got some free time?”
“But of course. How would you like to play it?”
“Back me up,” Myron said.
“Give me five.”
Myron waited five minutes. He stood there and studiously avoided looking at the tail. He checked his watch and huffed a bit as though he expected someone and was getting impatient. When the five minutes passed, Myron walked straight over to the tail.
The tail spotted his approach and ducked into the newspaper.
Myron kept walking until he stood directly next to the tail. The tail kept his face in the newspaper. Myron gave him Smile 8. Big and toothy. A televangelist being handed a hefty check. Early Wink Martindale. The tail kept his eyes on the newspaper. Myron kept smiling, his eyes wide as a clown’s. The tail ignored him. Myron inched closer, leaned his über-wattage smile within inches of the tail’s face, wriggled his eyebrows.
The tail snapped closed the newspaper and sighed. “Fine, hotshot, you made me. Congratulations.”
Still with the Wink Martindale smile: “And thank you for playing our game! But don’t worry, we won’t let you go home empty-handed! You get the home version of Incompetent Tail and a year’s subscription to Modern Doofus.”
“Yeah, right, see you around.”
“Wait! Final Jeopardy! round. Answer: He or she hired you to follow me.”
“Bite me.”
“Ooo, sorry, you needed to put that in the form of a question.”
The tail started walking away. When he looked back, Myron gave him the smile and a big wave. “This has been a Mark Goodson-Bill Todman production. Good-bye, everybody!” More waving.
The tail shook his head and continued down the street, joining another stream of people. Lots of people in this stream; Win happened to be one of them. The tail would probably find a clearing and then call his boss. Win would listen in and learn all. What a plan.
Myron headed to his rented car. He circled the block once. No more tails. At least none as obvious as the last. No matter. He was driving out to the Mayor estate on Long Island. It didn’t much matter if anyone knew.
He spent his time in the car working on the cell phone. He had two arena football players—indoor football on a smaller field, for those who don’t know—both of whom were hoping to scratch a bench spot on an NFL roster before the waiver wire closed down. Myron called teams, but nobody was interested. Lots of people asked him about the murder. He brushed them off. He knew his efforts were fairly futile, but he stuck to it. Big of him. He tried concentrating on his work, tried to lose himself in the numb bliss of what he did for a living. But the world kept creeping in. He thought about Esperanza in jail. He thought about Jessica in California. He thought about Bonnie Haid and her fatherless boys at home. He thought about Clu in formaldehyde. He thought about his father’s phone call. And strangely, he kept thinking about Terese alone on that island.
He blocked out the rest.
When he reached Muttontown, a section of Long Island that had somehow escaped him in the past, he turned right onto a heavily wooded road. He drove about two miles, passing maybe three driveways. He finally reached a simple iron gate with a small sign that read THE MAYORS. There were several security cameras and an intercom. He pressed the button. A woman’s voice came on and said, “May I help you?”
“Myron Bolitar to see Sophie Mayor.”
“Please drive up. Park in front of the house.”
The gate opened. Myron drove up a rather steep hill. Tall hedges lined both sides of the driveway, giving the aura of being a rat in a maze. He spotted a few more security cameras. No sign of the house yet. When he reached the top of the hill, he hit upon a clearing. There was a slightly overgrown grass tennis court and croquet field. Very Norma Desmond. He made another turn. The house was dead straight ahead. It was a mansion, of course, though not as huge as some Myron had seen. Vines clung to pale yellow stucco. The windows looked leaded. The whole scene screamed Roaring Twenties. Myron half expected Scott and Zelda to pull up behind him in a slick roadster.
This part of the driveway was made up of small loose pebbles rather than pavement. His tires crunched them as it drew closer. There was a fountain in the middle of the circular drive, about fifteen feet in front of the door. Neptune stood naked with a triton in his hand. The fountain, Myron realized, was a smaller version of the one in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence. Water spouted up but not very high or with much enthusiasm, as if someone had set the water pressure on “light urination.”
Myron parked the car. There was a perfectly square swimming pool on his right, complete with lily pads floating on the top. A poor man’s Giverny. There were statues in the gardens, again something from old Italy or Greece or the like. Venus de Milo–like except with all the limbs.
He got out of the car and stopped. He thought about what he was about to unearth, and for a brief moment he considered turning back. How, he wondered again, do I tell this woman about her missing daughter melting on a computer diskette?
No answer came to him.
The door opened. A woman in casual clothes led him through a corridor and into a large room with high tin ceilings and lots of windows and a semidisappointing view of more white statues and woods. The interior was art deco, but it didn’t try too hard. Nice. Except, of course, for the hunting trophies. Taxidermy birds of some sort sat on the shelves. The birds looked upset. Probably were. Who could blame them?
Myron turned and stared at a mounted deer. He waited for Sophie Mayor. The deer waited too. The deer seemed very patient.
“Go ahead,” a voice said.
Myron turned around. It was Sophie Mayor. She was wearing dirt-smeared jeans and a plaid shirt, the very essence of the weekend botanist.
Never short of a witty opening gambit, Myron countered, “Go ahead and what?”
“Make the snide remark about hunting.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Come, come, Myron. Don’t you think hunting is barbaric?”
Myron shrugged. “I never really thought about it.” Not true, but what the hey.
“But you don’t approve, do you?”
“Not my place to approve.”
“How tolerant.” She smiled. “But you of course would never do it, am I right?”
“Hunt? No, it’s not for me.”
“You think it’s inhumane.” She gestured with her chin to the mounted deer. “Killing Bambi’s mother and all.”
“It’s just not for me.”
“I see. Are you a vegetarian?”
“I don’t eat much red meat,” Myron said.
“I’m not talking about your health. Do you ever eat any dead animals?”
“Yes.”
“So do you think it’s more humane to kill, say, a chicken or a cow than it is to kill a deer?”
“No.”
“Do you know what kind of awful torture that cow goes through before it’s slaughtered?”
“For food,” Myron said.
“Pardon?”
“Slaughtered for food.”
“I eat what I kill, Myron. Your friend up there”—she nodded to the patient deer—“she was gutted and eaten. Feel better?”
Myro
n thought about that. “Uh, we’re not having lunch, are we?”
That got a small chuckle. “I won’t go into the whole food chain argument,” Sophie Mayor said. “But God created a world where the only way to survive is to kill. Period. We all kill. Even the strict vegetarians have to plow fields. You don’t think plowing kills small animals and insects?”
“I never really thought about it.”
“Hunting is just more hands-on, more honest. When you sit down and eat an animal, you have no appreciation for the process, for the sacrifice made so that you could survive. You let someone else do the killing. You’re above even thinking about it. When I eat an animal, I have a fuller understanding. I don’t do it casually. I don’t depersonalize it.”
“Okay,” Myron said, “while we’re on the subject, what about those hunters who don’t kill for food?”
“Most do eat what they kill.”
“But what about those who kill for sport? I mean, isn’t that part of it?”
“Yes.”
“So what about that? What about killing merely for sport?”
“As opposed to what, Myron? Killing for a pair of shoes? Or a nice coat? Is spending a full day outdoors, coming to understand how nature works and appreciating her bountiful glory, is that worth any less than a leather pocketbook? If it’s worth killing an animal because you prefer your belt made of animal skin instead of something man-made, is it not worth killing one because you simply enjoy the thrill of it?”
He said nothing.
“I’m sorry to ride you about this. But the hypocrisy of it all drives me somewhat batty. Everyone wants to save the whale, but what about the thousands of fish and shrimp a whale eats each day? Are their lives worthless because they aren’t as cute? Ever notice how no one ever wants to save ugly animals? And the same people who think hunting is barbaric put up special fences so the deer can’t eat their precious gardens. So the deers overpopulate and die of starvation. Is that better? And don’t even get me started on those so-called ecofeminists. Men hunt, they say, but women are too genteel. Of all the sexist nonsense. They want to be environmentalists? They want to stay as close to a state of nature as possible? Then understand the one universal truth about nature: You either kill or you die.”
They both turned and stared at the deer for a moment. Proof positive.
“You didn’t come here for a lecture,” she said.
Myron had welcomed this delay. But the time had come. “No, ma’am.”
“Ma’am?” Sophie Mayor chuckled without a hint of humor. “That sounds grim, Myron.”
Myron turned and looked at her. She met his gaze and held it.
“Call me Sophie,” she said.
He nodded. “Can I ask you a very personal, maybe hurtful question, Sophie?”
“You can try.”
“Have you heard anything from your daughter since she ran away?”
“No.”
The answer came fast. Her gaze remained steady, her voice strong. But her face was losing color.
“Then you have no idea where she is?”
“No idea.”
“Or even if she’s …”
“Alive or dead,” she finished for him. “None.”
Her voice was so monotone it seemed on the verge of a scream. There was a quaking near her mouth now, a fault line starting to give way. Sophie Mayor stood and waited for his explanation, afraid perhaps to say any more.
“I got a diskette in the mail,” he began.
She frowned. “What?”
“A computer diskette. It came in the mail. I put it in my A drive, and it just started up. I didn’t have to hit any keys.”
“Self-starting program,” she said, suddenly the computer expert. “That’s not complicated technology.”
Myron cleared his throat. “A graphic came on. It started out as a photograph of your daughter.”
Sophie Mayor took a step back.
“It was the same photograph that’s in your office. On the right side of the credenza.”
“That was Lucy’s junior year of high school,” she said. “The school portrait.”
Myron nodded, though he didn’t know why. “After a few seconds her image started melting on the screen.”
“Melting?”
“Yes. It sort of dissolved into a puddle of, uh, blood. Then a sound came on. A teenage girl laughing, I think.”
Sophie Mayor’s eyes were glistening now. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I.”
“This came in the mail?”
“Yes.”
“On a floppy disk?”
“Yes,” Myron said. Then he added for no reason: “A three-and-a-half-inch floppy.”
“When?”
“It arrived in my office about two weeks ago.”
“Why did you wait so long to tell me?” She put a hand up. “Oh, wait. You were out of the country.”
“Yes.”
“So when did you first see it?”
“Yesterday.”
“But you saw me this morning. Why didn’t you tell me then?”
“I didn’t know who the girl was. Not at first anyway. Then when I was in your office, I saw the photograph on the credenza. I got confused. I wasn’t sure what to say.”
She nodded slowly. “So that explains your abrupt departure.”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“Do you have the diskette? My people will analyze it.”
He reached into his pocket and withdrew it. “I don’t think it’ll be any help.”
“Why not?”
“I took it to a police lab. They said it automatically reformatted itself.”
“So the diskette is blank?”
“Yes.”
It was as though her muscles had suddenly decided to flee the district. Sophie Mayor’s legs gave way. She dropped to a chair. Her head lolled into her hands. Myron waited. There were no sounds. She just sat there, head in hands. When she looked up again, the gray eyes were tinged with red.
“You said something about a police lab.”
He nodded.
“You used to work in law enforcement.”
“Not really.”
“I remember Clip Arnstein saying something about it.”
Myron said nothing. Clip Arnstein was the man who had drafted Myron in the first round for the Boston Celtics. He also had a big mouth.
“You helped Clip when Greg Downing vanished,” she continued.
“Yes.”
“I’ve been hiring private investigators to search for Lucy for years. Supposedly the best in the world. Sometimes we seem to get close but …” Her voice drifted off, her eyes far away. She looked at the diskette in her hand as if it had suddenly materialized there. “Why would someone send this to you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you know my daughter?”
“No.”
Sophie took a couple of careful breaths. “I want to show you something. Wait here a minute.” It took maybe half that time. Myron had just begun to stare into the eyes of some dead bird, noting with some dismay how closely they resembled the eyes of some human beings he knew, and Sophie was back. She handed him a sheet of paper.
Myron looked at it. It was an artist’s rendering of a woman nearing thirty years of age.
“It’s from MIT,” she explained. “My alma mater. A scientist there has developed a software package that helps with age progression. For missing people. So you can see what they might look like today. He made this up for me a few months ago.”
Myron looked at the image of what the teenage Lucy might look like as a woman heading toward thirty. The effect was nothing short of startling. Oh, it looked like her, he guessed, but talk about ghosts, talk about life being a series of what-ifs, talk about the years slipping away and then smacking you in the face. Myron stared at the image, at the more conservative haircut, the small frown lines. How painful must it be for Sophie Mayor to look at this?
“Does she look fa
miliar at all?” Sophie asked.
Myron shook his head. “No, I’m sorry.”
“You’re sure?”
“As sure as you can be in these situations.”
“Will you help me find her?”
He wasn’t sure how to answer. “I can’t see how I can help.”
“Clip said you’re good at these things.”
“I’m not. But even if I were, I can’t see what I can do. You’ve hired experts already. You have the cops—”
“The police have been useless. They view Lucy as a runaway, period.”
Myron said nothing.
“Do you think it’s hopeless?” she asked.
“I don’t know enough about it.”
“She was a good girl, you know.” Sophie Mayor smiled at him, her eyes misty with time travel. “Headstrong, sure. Too adventurous for her own good. But then again I raised Lucy to be independent. The police. They think she was simply a troubled kid. She wasn’t. Just confused. Who isn’t at that age? And it wasn’t as if she ran off in the middle of the night without telling anyone.”
Against his better judgment Myron asked, “Then what happened?”
“Lucy was a teenager, Myron. She was sullen and unhappy, and she didn’t fit in. Her parents were college math professors and computer geeks. Her younger brother was considered a genius. She hated school. She wanted to see the world and live on the road. She had the whole rock ’n’ roll fantasy. One day she told us she was going off with Owen.”
“Owen was her boyfriend?”
She nodded. “An average musician who fronted a garage band, certain that his immense talent was being held back by them.” She made a lemon-sucking face. “They wanted to run off and get a record deal and become famous. So Gary and I said okay. Lucy was like a wild bird trapped in a small cage. She wouldn’t stop flapping her wings no matter what we did. Gary and I felt we had no choice in the matter. We even thought it might be good for her. Lots of her classmates were backpacking through Europe. What was the difference?”
She stopped and looked up at him. Myron waited. When she didn’t say anything, he said, “And?”
“And we never heard from her again.”
Silence.
She turned back to the mounted deer. The deer looked back at her with something akin, it seemed, to pity.
