She risked a quick glance at the hand in the box, noting the gray-green skin and curled fingers. Certainly, this new guy was into conspicuous messaging. The hand looked on the small side to her, and Bea was the most petite of the missing victims, but the flesh seemed relatively plump and free of obvious decay. Maybe, she thought with a sudden chill, this gift means he’s already got a new one.
“Are you cold?” Reed asked at her shiver, ever solicitous with his slightly Southern accent. “I can stay here if you’d like to fetch a jacket.”
“She’s not cold. She’s scared.” Tipton eyed her with a devilish gleam. “What’s the matter, Hathaway? I thought this was everything you always wanted.”
“Nobody goes looking for this,” Reed said quietly, but with the certitude born from experience, and it was enough to shut Tipton up.
Sam rejoined the group, now somewhat winded from traipsing back and forth across her property, shouting orders. Sweat slicked his brow, making his hair stick to his forehead like he was a little boy fresh from the bath. “Jimmy, good, you’re here. I’ve called the hospital for transport to Boston, but I want you to go with the bus—make sure they understand this is special circumstances. We’re not waiting around six weeks for answers on this one.”
“How long could it possibly take ’em for the autopsy?” Tipton said gruffly. “It fits in a goddamn jewelry box.”
They all peered down at the box with the hand in it. Ellery knew the massive backlog of cases at the medical examiner’s office often meant weeks to months of waiting for a complete report, especially for more routine cases. The State had been conducting only external exams on many bodies to try to ease the backlog, a practice that did not meet national standards but was about all the understaffed office could manage these days. Massachusetts was supposed to have at least seventeen full-time examiners but currently employed only nine.
“Somehow I think they’ll clear the decks for this one,” Sam said, “particularly when the press gets hold of the story—as we know they’ll do.”
“Can’t we keep it quiet?” Ellery asked, trying to tamp down the note of desperation from her voice. “At least for now?”
Sam gave her a strange look. “You’re the one who wanted all the noise. I’d think you’d be leading the parade.”
“The press gets the story and we’ll be crawling with news vans and lookie-loos,” she said. She remembered them lined up three rows deep outside the hospital years ago, and how the administrator had led Ellery and her mother out a private entrance on the day she was released so she wouldn’t have to face them all at once.
“I can’t argue that,” Sam said, “but I don’t see how we can keep a lid on this one for long.” He looked Reed up and down, as if seeing him for the first time. “I guess it’s lucky for us that the FBI is already on the scene. Downright prescient of you, Agent Markham.”
Reed blinked his usual owl-like stare. “Ellie’s the one who called me, Chief.”
“Hmm,” Sam said thoughtfully, turning his attention to her. “That she did. What do you say, Ellie? Any ideas on who would want to send you a severed human hand?”
She felt everyone’s eyes on her as she struggled to answer. “No, I have no idea who might have done this.” She hadn’t told Sam about the birthday cards because explaining their significance would mean revealing her whole personal history. However, there was one new development she could share. “But there may have been someone in the woods here the other night.” She pointed with her flashlight toward the trees. “Bump started barking and growling like he heard someone on the property, and when I went to check it out, I found a beer bottle on the ground. It had remnants of beer still in it, so it hadn’t been there very long.” She glanced at Reed before continuing. “Agent Markham has a friend at the State Lab who is analyzing the bottle for us. Maybe she’ll get a hit.”
Even as she said the words, Ellie tended to doubt their veracity. While it was true that careless mistakes brought many a criminal career to a swift end, they were talking about someone who had abducted three people and left no trace of evidence behind, to the point where no one could be sure a crime had even occurred. This did not strike Ellery as someone who was likely to go skulking in her woods and leave a beer bottle with fingerprints on it for them to find.
“You what?” Sam’s sharp question made her flinch. “You not only ignored my direct order to drop your investigation, but you went and logged evidence at the State Lab without my permission or knowledge?”
“It’s not evidence of anything,” Ellery protested. Then she added, “Yet.”
“Do you mind if I have a word with you over here?” Sam snapped.
“Can it wait?” Jittery and tired, she didn’t much feel like another heated exchange over her apparent insubordination. As far as she was concerned, the festooned body part lying on the ground at their feet completely validated every move she had made on this case since day one.
“No, it can’t wait,” Sam replied slowly and evenly, as if she were a dim-witted child.
Reluctantly, Ellie followed him away from the idling cars and the bright headlights, until they stood in her side yard, well clear of the others. “You should have told me,” Sam was saying. “You should have at least had the courtesy to pick up the damn phone, Ellie.”
She was done apologizing. “Someone was out here spying on me, Sam. Someone who may be into dismembering people, if you haven’t noticed. What did you want me to do? Just wait around and—”
“It was me,” he broke in, hissing at her under his breath.
Shock made her close her mouth for a moment. “What?”
“The beer in the woods. It was me.” His jaw worked back and forth in frustration. “You have that bottle printed, and it’s going to come back to me, you understand?”
“What were you doing out there?” He said nothing, and she took a step backward. “How many times have you been out there, watching me?”
“You don’t answer your phone half the time,” he said petulantly. “You don’t ever let me come over. I worry about you out here all alone, Ellie.”
“Bullshit,” she said, running both hands through her hair. “What the hell were you thinking? You have no right. You have no right to spy on me like that!”
“It’s not like that,” he said. “You and me have a relationship.”
“Not anymore we don’t,” she replied hotly. “God, Sam. What the hell?”
“Listen,” he said, reaching for her. She jerked her arm away, but he closed in on her in a hurry. His voice was low and urgent. “Listen, we don’t have the luxury of time here for you to lecture me about my behavior. You have to stop that analysis on the beer bottle, okay? You have to stop it now or the whole thing is going to come out.”
“You mean the whole town will find out what a creeper you are?” She felt angry, violated, and ashamed of herself by how deeply she had misjudged him.
“Tell yourself whatever you want,” he said. “But you fix this. You fix it fast, Ellie, because it’s not just my ass hanging in the wind on this one. This comes out and everyone will find out about you too.”
Prickles of fear broke out across the back of her neck. Her ears started to ring and her tongue swelled inside her mouth. “What … what do you mean by that?”
His eyes were flinty in the low light. “Test me,” he said, “and you’ll find out.” He rotated his neck, cracking it with a terrible pop. “Make that can go away and we’ll pretend none of this ever happened.”
She turned her head away and focused on keeping her breathing even so he could not see her fear. Sam let out a short, irritated chuff. “You should be glad it was me,” he told her, “and not the sicko who’s leaving you body parts. Fact of the matter is, I should probably move in with you until we catch this guy.”
“No.” Ellery snapped her attention back to him. “That’s not happening.”
“Someone should stay out here with you in case this sicko comes back.”
“
I have all the protection I need,” she said, indicating her sidearm.
“I can assign Watkins if you prefer.” His tone actually softened a bit. “I’m serious, Ellie. This guy means business, and you’re out here all by your lonesome.”
“Reed will stay.” The words slipped out before she thought about them, but she knew immediately it was true.
Sam snorted, and the hard tone was back in his voice. “Reed,” he repeated. “He’ll keep you company, will he? Play house? Tell me, Ellie, are you sleeping with him too?”
Her face went hot. “None of your damn business.”
Sam grinned without any humor and nodded to himself. “It would explain a few things, like why he trotted on up here just because you made a phone call.”
“Unlike some people, Agent Markham believed I had a case.”
Sam squinted at the pine trees, which were lined up like sentries in the dark. “Well,” he said finally, “I’d say you’ve made true believers out of all of us now.”
* * *
Much later, after the fireworks had died down completely and the hand was ensconced in a biohazard box and speeding its way toward Boston, Ellery served iced tea for herself and Reed in tall, mismatched glasses. She carried them carefully into the living room, feeling alien in her own home, where she had lived for four years without entertaining a single guest. Bump, too, clearly sensed a disturbance in the force, because instead of passing out on the nearest patch of floor, paws up and snoring, he lay quiet but watchful at Reed’s feet. Reed himself had the file on Bea Nesbit’s disappearance spread out on the coffee table. Maybe Sam had forgotten the files in the furor of the evening, but he had left them behind and so now they had, as far as she knew, a complete picture of everything the police had on the case.
“I’ve at least glanced through all of it now,” Reed said as he accepted the glass. “And I don’t see any reference to Shannon Blessing. I don’t think she was ever questioned about Bea Nesbit or determined to be a witness.”
Ellie sat as far away as she could from him on the other end of the sofa. “I think once everyone saw the videotape and realized there was no one lurking in the shadows to grab Bea, they didn’t bother to examine it further. Shannon wasn’t missing at the time, obviously. Why should it mean anything to anyone back then?”
“It’s not entirely clear it means anything now,” Reed said with a tired sigh. “But it’s a strange enough coincidence that it bears looking into—I think we should go to the gas station tomorrow to check it out. At a minimum, it’s the last location we can confirm for Bea, so it might be helpful to retrace her steps from that night.”
“I’ve tried that several times,” she told him. “It got me nowhere. I did the same for Shannon too—the last place we could confirm she was at was the local craft store, where she was buying pink and white yarn. She told the checkout girl that she was knitting a hat and booties for her soon-to-be niece. We found the hat and the socks already completed inside her apartment, so either Shannon was the world’s fastest knitter, or someone else must have seen her before she went missing.”
“What about Mark Roy?” Reed asked, reaching for the folder.
“Mark completed his mail rounds on July eleventh last year and didn’t show up for work the next day. I’ve traced his route a dozen times since then, but it’s not like that helps any—he went over the whole damn town.” She sat forward and placed her glass on the table next to Reed’s, where she was struck anew by how odd the two looked together. Usually, her glass sat alone, and that was how she liked it. She felt itchy and strange. He wasn’t an overly large man, but he seemed to be everywhere now. When he shifted his weight, the couch moved under her own body.
“Well, maybe we can do that tomorrow too,” Reed said. “Trace Mark’s mail route.”
“Want to know where it ends?” she said, because the delicious irony had always intrigued her.
“Where?”
“Sam’s house. Chief Parker.”
Reed blinked at her for a moment. Honestly, the man probably had a genius IQ but he had a knack for looking totally befuddled by the most ordinary pieces of information. “Ah,” he said finally. “The chief. He seemed to have more heated words for you again this evening.”
Suddenly, she remembered the beer bottle and regretted even mentioning Sam’s name. “He was just spooked by the hand,” she said. “We don’t get that sort of thing happening around here.”
“Did you tell him yet?” When she did not answer, he persisted. “About Coben.”
Ellie ducked her head, and the silence stretched between them. “No,” she admitted at length. “And I won’t, not unless I absolutely have to.”
“Someone gift-wrapped a severed hand for you and left it on your doorstep. I think that time may have come, don’t you?”
“It’s not Coben who did it. You said so yourself.”
“No, but it’s someone who knows his history—and yours.”
She curled deeper into the couch cushions, away from him, and shook her head. Here he was in her living room, voicing the fear she’d carried alone for years now, but it gave her no comfort to know he saw the danger too. “Even if it’s someone who is imitating Coben, we can mention that without having to get into my connection with the case.”
“Ellery.” Reed’s tone was gentle, but exasperated.
“Look,” she said, more sharply than she’d intended. “I get that this is academic for you. You solved the case and wrote a really lovely book, I’m sure. So you can go on TV and give lectures and make movies or whatever else you did to celebrate the victory the last time. You earned it, and I won’t deny that. But here? This life? It’s mine. If I tell the department who I am, then it gets out to everyone, you understand me? That’s it, it’s over. Everyone would know, and they would never look at me the same again. They’d know these scars aren’t from some bike accident when I was a kid. They’d know how he took me and locked me up, how he cut me, how he … he…” Reed had to know everything that had happened on Coben’s farm, but she hadn’t talked about it in years. She barely had the words. “They’ll know what he did with the farm tools,” she finished in a whisper, unable to look at him.
After Ellie was rescued, the doctor at the hospital had directed the news of Coben’s brutality to her mother, even though Ellie was sitting right there. It’s possible she’ll never be able to have children. We just can’t say for sure.
To her utter horror, tears had started to leak down her cheeks. She swiped them away angrily, and she felt more than saw Reed moving around the room. A moment later, he pressed a tissue into her hand. “I’m sorry,” he said softly.
“I don’t want you to be sorry,” she said, crumpling the tissue in her fist. “Everyone will be sorry. That’s the whole damn point.”
Her cell phone buzzed, indicating a text. Grateful for the interruption, she sniffed hard and whipped it out, figuring it had to be Brady. It was.
At bar with friends—keeping the party going! I’d say come join us but there’s this story going around about a murder at your place tonight?
She typed back: Can’t talk about it.
So it’s true?
Can’t talk about it.
There was a short silence and then his reply came through: Are you ok? I can come over …
The last thing she wanted was more male company. I’m ok, she wrote quickly. Reed’s here.
Ok. Call me if you need anything.
She put the phone aside and resumed her huddle at the end of the sofa. “Rumors are starting to circulate,” she said. “Brady heard there was a murder out here tonight.” The press would not be far behind.
Reed appeared to digest this bit of news. “Brady—is he your boyfriend?”
She closed her eyes wearily. “Why is everyone so damn interested in my love life tonight?”
“Because like it or not, you’re at the center of this, Ellery. The details of your life are going to matter.” He paused significantly. “All of them.”
“You don’t know that,” she protested weakly. “I didn’t know Bea at all, and Shannon, only a little bit. Mark, I only talked to him when I had to sign for a package or something. These people had no particular bearing on my life, so I don’t know why we have to start categorizing every last bit of information about me.”
“The birthday cards,” he reminded her.
“They may not mean anything.” She’d spent years believing otherwise, but now that he was saying it, she didn’t want it to be true. “You don’t know for sure.”
“I know,” he said. “Because you told me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Back at the beginning, when Bea was just a single missing persons case and Shannon and Mark were still walking around town just like they always did, back then, Ellie, you knew something was up, because you saved that first card.”
She looked down at her hands and thought back to the day she had slid the initial card from the envelope. Just the stamp on the front had been a shock. You don’t get first-class mail when you’re living a third-rate life. She had seen the message and felt the wind go out of her, the past rising up like an icy wave to steal her very breath. Someone knew. Knew enough to find her birthday, and the rest would come tumbling after. She’d escaped from the paper-thin edge, run off the page of her own story only to discover she’d failed to shut the book. She had slammed the card in a drawer, locked all her doors and drawn the curtains, and waited for the phone or bell to ring. But they had stayed silent. Days passed and nothing more came of it.
The Vanishing Season Page 10
