by Harlan Coben
“I agree.” Another student walked by and shouted out a “Hi, Louis!” and van de Beek gave him an absentminded nod. “She wouldn’t do something like that. At least, not on her own.”
Simon froze.
“But when Paige left class that day, I noticed that there was a man waiting for her. Not a kid. Not a student. A man I’d guess was about ten years older.”
Aaron, Simon thought. It was Aaron.
Chapter
Thirty-One
All the info I just gave you, you can’t tell anyone,” Elena had said. “Someone could claim that it was obtained illegally—the fruits of a bad act or some such thing. Either way, even if we go to the feds today, it won’t be a priority. It’ll take days, probably weeks, just to get it assigned to someone. We don’t have…”
Elena heard a click on her line. Another call was coming in. The caller ID was blocked. Most people would suspect that it was some kind of spam call, but Lou had arranged something on the phones to prevent that. If she got a call, it was usually something relevant.
And the last person she had given her card to was Alison Mayflower.
“Simon, hold on, I have another call.”
She clicked over. “Hello?”
“Uh, hi.” A woman’s whisper. Not Alison Mayflower. This woman sounded young—twenties, maybe thirties. “Is this Miss Ramirez?”
“This is she. Who is this?”
“Oh, my name isn’t important.”
“Could you speak up?”
“Sorry, I’m a little nervous. I’m calling…I’m calling for a friend of mine. You met her today at a certain café.”
“Go on.”
“She needs to see you—boy, does she need to see you—but she’s afraid.”
Alison Mayflower, Elena recalled, lived with another woman named Stephanie Mars. Could be her on the line.
“I understand,” Elena said in her gentlest voice. “Maybe we can meet someplace where she’d feel comfortable.”
“Yes. Alison really wants that.”
“Can you hold on just one split second?”
“Okay.”
Elena moved fast. “Simon?”
“Yeah, what’s up?”
“Gotta go. Alison Mayflower wants to meet.”
Elena clicked back over. “I know where you two live. I can drive—”
“No!” the young-sounding woman said in a panicked hush. “They’ll follow you! Don’t you see?”
Elena actually put up a calming hand, which of course made no sense when you’re on the phone. “Okay, sure, I see.”
“They’re watching you. They’re watching us.”
The woman sounded more than a little paranoid, but then again, at least three people were dead.
“No worries,” Elena said, keeping her tone even and casual. “Let’s make a plan. Something you two are both comfortable with.”
It took about ten minutes for them to come up with something that seemed to pacify the caller. Elena would take an Uber to the Cracker Barrel Old Country Store near Route 95. She would stand out front. Stephanie—she finally said her name out loud—would flash her lights twice and drive up.
“What kind of car will you be driving?” Elena had asked.
“I’d rather not say. Just in case.”
Elena would then get in the car and be taken to see Alison at a “secret location.” Yes, Stephanie actually used the phrase “secret location.”
“Come alone,” Stephanie said.
“I will. I promise.”
“If we see someone is following you, we’re calling it off.”
They agreed that Stephanie would “call and ring once” as a signal that she was “set up” at the Cracker Barrel. When they were off the phone, Elena sat on the bed and Googled Stephanie Mars. Nothing much came up. Elena changed into her other blue blazer, the one with a little more space for a holster and gun. She thought about calling Simon back but chose instead to send a text letting him know that she hoped to meet with Alison Mayflower soon. Her phone was charging. She let Lou know that she’d be going out for a meet. Lou had put a high-end tracker on her phone, so the home office could know her location if need be 24/7.
An hour passed before the blocked number called again. Elena waited. One ring and a hang up. The signal. Elena had been constantly checking her ride-share apps. One showed a car eight minutes away. It arrived in fifteen.
The Cracker Barrel in South Portland had the same faux rustic exterior that they all did. The front porch held a plethora of rocking chairs, all empty. Elena stood and waited. It didn’t take long. A vehicle flashed its beams at her. Elena surreptitiously took a photo of the car, making sure she got the license plate, and sent it to Lou.
Just in case. You never know.
When the car pulled up, Elena opened the passenger door and looked inside. The driver was an attractive young woman wearing a Red Sox baseball cap.
“Stephanie?”
“Please get in. Quickly.”
Elena wasn’t the most agile, so it took a little time. As soon as she was seated, even before the door was fully closed, Stephanie Mars hit the accelerator.
“Do you have a phone?” Stephanie asked.
“Yes.”
“Put it in the glove compartment.”
“Why?”
“This is just between you and Alison. No recordings, no calls, no texts.”
“I’m not sure I’m comfortable with giving up my phone.”
Stephanie hit the brake. “Then we call this off right now. You’re carrying a gun, right?”
Elena didn’t answer.
“Put your gun in the glove compartment too. I don’t know if you work for them or not.”
“Who is them?”
“Now please.”
“One of the adopted boys is missing. I work for his father.”
“And we’re just supposed to take your word on that?” The young woman shook her head in disbelief. “Please put your phone and gun in the glove compartment. You can have them back after you talk to Alison.”
No choice. Elena took out her phone and gun. She popped open the glove compartment in front of her, dropped them inside, and closed it again. It wouldn’t take long to retrieve them if there was an emergency.
Elena studied Stephanie Mars’s profile. She had red-to-auburn hair, probably cut short—hard to say for sure with that baseball cap on—and was, in a word, beautiful. High cheekbones. Flawless skin. She kept both hands on the wheel at ten and two, focusing hard on the road as though she were new to driving.
“Before I let you see Alison, I need to ask you a few questions.”
“Okay,” Elena said.
“Who exactly hired you?”
Elena was going to say that she was not at liberty to divulge, but her client had already told her that it would be okay, that he didn’t care who knew. “Sebastian Thorpe. He adopted a boy he named Henry.”
“And Henry is missing?”
“That’s right.”
“Any clue where he is?”
“That’s what I’m working on.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t understand what?”
“How old is Henry Thorpe?”
“Twenty-four.”
“How could his adoption have anything to do with his life now?”
“It might not.”
“She’s a good person, you know. Alison, I mean. She’d never hurt anyone.”
“And I don’t want to hurt her,” Elena said. “I only want to find my client’s son. But that’s the thing. If Alison did do something illegal—”
“She’d never.”
“I know. But if something about these adoptions was not completely by the book, and if she doesn’t cooperate, well, then it’s on her. All the walls come crashing down.”
“That sounds like a threat.”
“It’s not meant to. It’s meant to convey the severity of the situation. I’m Alison’s best chance to do the right thing—and s
tay out of legal trouble.”
Stephanie Mars regripped the steering wheel, her hands shaking. “I don’t know what’s best.”
“I don’t want to hurt either one of you.”
“Do you promise you won’t tell anyone about this?”
Elena couldn’t really make that promise. It depended on what Alison Mayflower said. Still, a small deception at this stage was the least of her worries right now. “Yes, I promise.”
The car veered to the right.
“Where is she?” Elena asked.
“My aunt Sally has a summer cabin.” The younger woman actually managed a smile. “It’s where Alison and I first met. They’re friends, Aunt Sally and Alison. So, see, my aunt has a barbecue to open the season every year, and six years ago, Alison and I were both invited. I know she’s older than I am, but, well, you’ve seen her. She’s young in so many ways. We met by the grill in the backyard—she makes the best skirt steak…Alison, I mean—and we started talking and…” She shrugged, smiled, sneaked a glance at Elena. “That was it.”
“Sounds nice,” Elena said.
“You have someone?”
The pang. Always the pang.
“No,” Elena said. Then she added, “I used to, but he died.”
Elena couldn’t say why she told her that. Could be a subconscious ploy to bond. Could be that she just felt it needed to be said.
“His name was Joel.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“We’re almost there.”
They pulled into the drive. At the end of it, there was a log cabin, the genuine article, not the snap-together look or faux-Cracker-Barrel-type situation. Elena couldn’t help but smile.
“Aunt Sally has good taste.”
“Yeah, she does.”
“Is she here?”
“Sally? No. She’s still in Philly, won’t be up for months. I come here on my own once a week, kinda like a caretaker. No one really knows about the place, and you can see cars coming a mile away, so Alison thought it’d be safe.” She put the car into park and looked at Elena with her big eyes.
“We’re putting our trust in you. Come on.”
As they got out of the car, two words came to mind: “green” and “quiet.” Elena took in a deep breath of seriously fresh air. Nice. Her leg ached. That old wound, her constant companion. Stephanie Mars had told her about her initial chance encounter with Alison at a barbecue here. Fate, destiny, chaos, however two souls get thrown together. Joel loved to tease that he and Elena had the best “meet cute” in history, and while she’d wave him off, maybe Joel was right.
During a raid on a white-supremacist militia compound outside Billings, Montana, Elena had been shot in the “high upper leg”—a nicer way of saying “ass.” The shot didn’t hurt as much as you might think, at least not right away. It was more embarrassing than painful, and Elena, being one of the rare Hispanic women on the job, had felt as though she’d let down herself and her people.
It was at the nearby hospital, while she was recovering, her butt propped up on one of those inflatable tire-like devices so there was no undue pressure on her wound, that Special Agent Joel Marcus first came into her room—and boom, into her life.
“Little did I know,” Joel often joked, “how much I’d enjoy seeing that ass up in the air in the future.”
She half smiled at the memory as Stephanie pushed open the door and called out, “Alison? Honey?”
No answer.
Without conscious thought, Elena started reaching for her piece, but of course, it was back in the car. Stephanie Mars hurried inside the house. Elena came through the door right behind her. Stephanie veered left and moved faster. Elena turned her head in that direction and was about to follow.
But the younger woman had stopped moving. She slowly turned back toward Elena.
The younger woman’s beautiful face broke into a smile, just as Elena felt something cold press against the back of her skull.
Their eyes met—Elena’s sad brown and the young woman’s wild green.
And Elena knew.
She thought of Joel when she heard the click and hoped, in the moment before the gun exploded, that she’d be with him again.
Chapter
Thirty-Two
Ash stood over Elena’s dead body.
She’d landed facedown, head turned to the side at an unnatural angle, eyes open. Blood flowed out of the back of her head, but Ash had already put down a tarp to make cleanup easier. Dee Dee put a hand on his arm and squeezed. He looked up at her and saw that smile. A man knows his great love’s various smiles. That was what they said—the smile when she was happy or the smile when she was genuinely laughing or the smile when she peered into the eyes of the man she loved, all that.
Ash knew this smile—the smile she saved for extreme violence—and he didn’t like it.
“Is it different for you?” Dee Dee asked him. “Killing a woman instead of a man.”
Ash was not in the mood. “Where’s her phone?”
“It’s still in the glove compartment.”
Ash had put a battery-operated jamming device in the glove compartment, so if someone was tracking her whereabouts—and he suspected that they might be—they’d be getting a no-signal. “Pull the car around back and bring me the phone.”
Dee Dee put her hands on either side of his face. “You okay, Ash?”
“I’m fine, but we have to move fast.”
She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek and hurried outside. Ash started to wrap the body in the tarp. They’d already dug a hole, so that no one would find her. When Dee Dee brought him Elena’s phone, he would send out a few “I’m fine” texts to anyone looking for her. It would take a few days, probably more, before someone started seriously investigating Elena Ramirez’s disappearance.
By then, Ash and Dee Dee would be done with the jobs. There’d be no clues.
“Ironic,” Dee Dee had said when Ash told her the plan. And while the actual meaning of the word “ironic” seemed elusive to Ash—he remembered people saying that Alanis Morissette had gotten it wrong in that song—it seemed to fit here. Elena Ramirez had been hired to find a “missing” Henry Thorpe. But Thorpe had been dead the whole time. And now, Elena Ramirez would be “missing” too.
Dee Dee came back into the house with the phone and jammer. “Here you go.”
“Finish wrapping her up.”
She mock-saluted him. “You’re in a mood.”
Ash bent down next to the body and picked up Elena’s hand. There should still be enough electrical impulse traveling through her body, so that her thumb could still unlock her phone. He pressed the phone against the pad.
Bingo.
The phone’s wallpaper was a photograph of Elena smiling widely, her arms wrapped around a far taller man who was smiling just as wide.
Dee Dee looked over his shoulder. “Do you think that’s her Joel?”
“I’d suspect so, yes.” Ash had listened to the whole conversation in the car because Dee Dee kept her phone on. “Do you even have an Aunt Sally?” he asked her.
“No.”
He shook his head in amazement. “You’re good.”
“Do you remember our middle school production of West Side Story?”
Ash had worked building the sets. She’d been one of the Sharks girls.
“I should have been Maria—I killed the audition—but Mr. Orloff gave it to Julia Ford because her father owned that Lexus dealership.”
Dee Dee didn’t say this with anger or pity. She was being accurate. Ash was enamored, no doubt about it, but Dee Dee had real star quality. You could just see it. Everyone in the auditorium, even though she’d just been in the chorus, couldn’t take their eyes off her.
Dee Dee could have been a great actress, a big star, but what kind of break was she, a foster beauty constantly fending off male adults, going to get?
His tone was tender. “You were great in that play, Dee Dee.”
“I mean it.”
“Thank you, Ash.”
He clicked on the Settings key and then found the Privacy icon. From there, he tapped Location Services and scrolled all the way to the bottom to where it said System Services. He scrolled again and found Significant Locations. When he pressed to see it, the screen asked for the thumb again. He grabbed Elena’s and used it. Then he changed the password so he could get in without the thumb next time.
People don’t realize how much of their privacy they casually give away. On any iPhone at any time, you could do what Ash was now doing: see the complete history of where the phone’s owner—in this case, Elena Ramirez—had recently visited.
“Damn,” he said.
“What?”
“She’s been to the tattoo parlor.”
“We had to figure that was a possibility, Ash. That’s why we had to act fast.”
He checked through the list of locations and saw several spots in New York City. Most recently, Elena Ramirez had been at Columbia Medical Center near 168th Street. Ash wondered why. Then he noticed something more troubling.
“She’s been to the Bronx.”
Dee Dee finished tying the rope around the tarp. “Same location?”
He clicked it and nodded.
“Oh, that’s not good,” Dee Dee said.
“We have to hurry.”
He scanned through her phone log and texts. The most recent text, coming in eight minutes ago, read:
Have you met with Alison yet? Please fill me in when you can.
Dee Dee saw the look on his face. “What is it?”
“Someone else is getting close.”
“Who?”
Ash flipped the phone around, so Dee Dee could read the screen. “We’re going to have to do something about a guy named Simon Greene.”
Chapter
Thirty-Three
Simon collapsed into a seat on the subway. He stared out the window across the car without focusing, letting the underground whirl whiz by in a hazy blur. He tried to comprehend what he’d just learned. Nothing made sense. He’d gotten more pieces to the puzzle, important pieces, perhaps even an explanation of what had started his daughter’s spiral into drug addiction. But the more pieces he got, the less clear the final image was becoming.
