“We’re continuing to follow leads on the case. Julia’s a witness.”
“Bullshit.” He yanked the wheel so the car turned abruptly off the road. “Julia collected the mail from Mark and that’s it. She’s a witness to nothing.”
“Jimmy asked her only about Mark. He didn’t ask her about anything else she might have seen that day. Reed and I were just following up.”
“Listen up, because I am going to explain this one time: you are stay away from my wife, and stay away from my house.”
“Oh, but you can go creeping around in my backyard and that’s okay?”
“Dammit, Ellie!” He pounded the wheel with such force that she jumped. His breathing was ragged as he leaned over toward her. “You don’t get it. We’re all going to start getting attention now, some of it the kind we don’t want—are you following me?”
“No. Are you following me? Like, literally following me? Because that’s going to get you all kinds of attention, Sam. I made the bottle go away, and now Reed thinks I’m sandbagging him on the case. I protected you once, but I’m not going to do it again.”
“Believe me, you won’t have to. I get it. We’re done. I’m reading you loud and clear. The part where you moved a man into your house last night kind of made that obvious.”
Ellery resisted pointing out that he’d had a woman living in his house the whole damn time—a suspicious, angry woman, if their earlier conversation could be believed. “I’m not sleeping with him.” After the incident with the bottle, she’d be lucky if Reed was even speaking to her.
Sam gave a derisive snort. “Yeah, well, I’d keep my distance if I were you. The man who solved the Coben case shows up here, and all of a sudden you’ve got a severed hand on your doorstep. Seems like maybe he’s got some sort of sick fan club going on.”
“Bea was taken three years ago,” Ellie pointed out. “Long before Reed Markham was involved in the investigation.”
Sam shook his head like she just didn’t get it. “I didn’t tell everyone the full report on Bea’s hand. It was remarkably well preserved, considering the years. The ME can’t say when the hand was removed, but her best guess is that it’s been frozen all this time. So you see what I’m saying? Some sicko has been keeping Bea Nesbit on ice, just waiting for this opportunity to come along. Maybe tomorrow, he’ll mail us her liver. Or, God forbid, her head.”
Ellie’s own hand fluttered to her throat. With her thumb, she could just feel the scar by her clavicle. Coben always left his victim’s hands uninjured, but he had no compunction about slicing up the rest of the body, just for fun. By the time he got to her, he’d had lots of practice, so he knew where he could cut, how much and how deep, to keep her alive as long as he wanted. A thousand times she had prayed for death to release her, but she’d kept opening her eyes and finding herself awake again. It was a pattern she’d been repeating for fourteen years now, each morning when she blinked herself free from the past and found only her shadowed bedroom. Still breathing. Still here. It was one part miracle, one part waking nightmare. Ellie wasn’t suicidal; she’d fought hard for her life and won. But sometimes, especially during the longest nights, she did wonder if maybe the other girls had been luckier after all.
* * *
Back at the station, Sam holed up in his office to draft a statement for the press while Ellery met with State Investigators Matthew Tovar and Tracy Grigsby. She had spoken to them before during their earlier exploration of Bea’s disappearance, but they were quite a bit more interested in her theories this time. Tovar had a head of silver hair and a gut that hung over his belt and made her think of Santa Claus. Grigsby was younger, maybe midforties somewhere, with wide blue eyes that seemed to give her a perpetually surprised look. Or maybe it was just that she was having a hard time buying Ellery’s story.
“Why do you think the perpetrator left the hand on your porch?” she pressed for the third time. “Wrapped up like a present?”
Ellie kept her cool. “Well, I do have a birthday coming up.”
Tovar and Grigsby exchanged an annoyed glance. They didn’t understand how much truth she had just told them. “He or she picked you for a reason,” Tovar said. “It would help to know what it was.”
Ellie flicked away a bit of lint from her knee. If she’d stayed inside that night when she was a kid, maybe watched the late-late show or just sat out on the fire escape and watched the people go by, she would not have been on her bike near the park when Francis Coben stopped her to ask directions. Sometimes, she wanted to tell them, there isn’t a reason.
“Obviously, I don’t know what would motivate someone to leave a human body part on my porch,” she said. “But I am the one who has been asking questions about the case over the past few years. Maybe he figured I’d be a good person to deliver the message.”
“What message?” Tovar asked sharply.
“I’m here. I’m for real. Take me seriously.” All the things she’d been saying to Sam for the last three years.
Grigsby nodded at Ellie’s wrist. “Out of curiosity, where did you get those scars?”
“Bike accident,” Ellie replied smoothly, because when you got right down to it, that’s all it was, really—an accident.
Grigsby’s wide eyes narrowed ever so slightly. “Must have been one hell of an accident.”
Eventually, Tovar and Grigsby tired of her, and Ellie was able to sneak down to the basement, where the holding cells were, and dial Reed from her cell phone. It rang through to his voice mail, so she left him a brief message and asked him to call her back. If he’d been in touch with Danielle about the bottle, maybe he had received the news about the birthday cards too. She also wanted to know what he’d found out about Coben’s cousin.
She tapped the phone in her hand a few times as she tried to figure out her next move. It was late, way past dinner. She felt emotionally exhausted but also jittery, like she’d had too much caffeine. In truth, she hadn’t eaten a thing in hours, and neither had Bump. She hit the button for Brady’s number, and a few moments later, his familiar voice came on the line. “Hey,” she said. “It’s been a day.”
“I saw the news,” he said. “You kind of couldn’t miss it.”
“Do you want to meet me and Bump at Armstead Park for sandwiches?”
“Yeah, okay. That sounds good.” He gave a sigh. “It’s been a day here too. See you in half an hour?”
“We’ll be there.” A better friend would have asked Brady what happened to him that day to make him sound worn down and spent, but she had no energy to take on someone else’s problems at that moment. Outside, she had little trouble dodging the press; the pack had thinned because they were all working on their nightly stories. It was dark but still very warm, with sticky air that bore the faint scent of salt in it, as though it had traveled all the way from the sea. Ellie went home to retrieve Bump, who greeted her with an enthusiastic slobber. She tried Reed’s cell number one last time before leaving, but he still wasn’t picking up. Maybe he’d said the hell with her and flown back to Virginia.
Brady beat her to the park because she’d stopped at Branson’s Deli to pick up two ice-cold Cokes and classic submarine sandwiches. He stood up from their usual bench by the streetlamp when he saw her juggling the bag, the Coke bottles, and Bump’s leash. “Here, let me give you a hand.” He froze the instant the words left his mouth, horror plain on his face.
Ellie gasped in shock but then in laughter as her internal pressure gauge finally snapped. It wasn’t funny so much as ridiculous, but she was helpless in the thrall of giggles. “Too late,” she said as her eyes teared up. “Someone beat you to it.”
“Tell me,” he offered as he took the bag and one of the Cokes.
She let Bump free so he could sniff about the premises, and he scampered into the dark as soon as he was loose. “I can’t really talk about it,” Ellie told Brady with a sigh as they took their usual positions on the bench. “But the news reports are probably pretty accurate at this stage.�
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“They said it was Bea Nesbit.”
She nodded as she unwrapped her sandwich. The smell of salami and mustard rose up from her lap, and she realized suddenly that she was ravenous. “We had to tell her parents. It was awful.”
“God. That had to be rough. I’m so sorry.”
They ate without speaking for a few moments, the only sounds coming from Bump’s distant jingling collar, the occasional rustle of the deli paper, and the ever-present electric hum of the bugs in the trees. Eventually, she remembered he’d indicated that his day had been less than stellar as well. “What about you?” she asked. “What happened to you today?”
He waved her off. “Forget it,” he said as he uncapped the soda and took a long drink. “It’s nothing compared to what you’ve been through.”
She saw then he had a bandage on his forearm. “No, what? You got hurt?”
He touched the bandage almost self-consciously. “You remember Tristan, the Rottie we got a couple of weeks ago?”
She did. The dog had been found wandering by the highway, half starved and with a deep cut on his hind leg. He had other lacerations that indicated he’d been in recent fights with other animals. The staff at the animal shelter named him Tristan and found him to be very friendly around people, but he displayed dangerous levels of aggression toward other animals. They were trying to determine if Tristan could be retrained. “What about him?” Ellie asked.
“He got out today. I’m not sure how. I think maybe his cage didn’t latch properly the last time he was put back inside it. Anyway, I was in the other room, exercising the kittens, when Tristan came charging in with his eighty-seven thousand teeth.”
“Oh, no,” Ellie said, wincing as she pictured the scene.
“Yeah.” Brady’s voice was grim. “He killed three of them before we could stop him. Sheila said that was it for Tristan—we had to put him down too.”
“That’s terrible. I’m sorry.”
Brady raised his Coke bottle in the lamplight and flashed her a humorless grin. “Some fun couple we are tonight, huh?”
“We would kill at parties,” she agreed.
“Let’s talk about something else. Something stupid. Oh, I know—I hear that Journey is thinking of going on tour again. Maybe they’ll play downtown here on Schearer Stage.”
The stage was a rickety collection of plank wood that was used to show off local music acts and drama groups during the summer. Families would picnic on the green and listen to a bunch of middle-aged guys who had real jobs at medical offices and auto dealerships fake their way through a cover of “Satisfaction.” “Ha ha, I see what you did there,” she groused. “You think ‘stupid,’ and Journey immediately comes to mind. They’re one of the bestselling bands of all time, you know. Five billion people can’t be wrong.”
“Oh, yeah? Well, the Snuggie moved more than four million units of inventory last year. I think I rest my case.”
“Let’s talk about your favorite, then: The Cars. Or shall we discuss their ill-advised reinvention as The New Cars? I think that sold as well as New Coke.” She waggled her bottle at him for emphasis.
“Mock me if you like. Ric Ocasek was a visionary. He’s helped develop a dozen different bands since then.”
“Yeah, and one of them is Weezer,” she retorted, and he smacked her playfully on the arm. At that moment, her cell phone rang, and the mood broke apart. She stuffed the uneaten sandwich back in the bag and pulled out her phone. The caller ID glowed with Reed Markham’s number. At least he wasn’t going to leave without saying good-bye.
“This is Ellie,” she said.
“It’s Reed. How did the notification go?”
Ellie scanned the horizon for Bump, relaxing as she spotted him forty yards away, snuffling in some bushes. “About like you’d expect. What did you find in Coben’s mail?”
She heard some paper shuffling on the other end. “The usual brand of misguided, lonely folks looking for a connection to a famous person, and religious fanatics who want to save Coben’s soul. Plenty of women who think he was wrongly convicted and would like to be his pen-pal girlfriend.”
Ellie shuddered. “Really?”
“Oh, yeah, a bunch of these guys wind up marrying women while on death row. They claim they’ve found God, but they’re really out for more earthy pursuits, if you catch my meaning.”
“Is that even possible?” She couldn’t imagine a system that granted death row prisoners the rights to conjugal visits.
“Legally? No. But it’s not without precedent. Ted Bundy conceived a child while awaiting his death sentence—a girl, I believe.”
Ellie wondered what it would be like to have your father be Ted Bundy and your mother be someone who had sex with Ted Bundy while he was on death row for murdering dozens of other women. “What about Coben?” she asked. “Is he, uh, seeing anyone?”
“No one special that I can discern.” There was a long pause. “You’ve never written to him, have you?”
Ellie fumbled the phone, such was her surprise. “What?” she said when she’d recovered. “God, no. Why the hell would I do that?”
“I don’t know,” Reed said, sounding speculative. “But it happens.”
“Not to me,” Ellie said firmly. She couldn’t imagine what she would have to say to him. A page full of expletives probably wouldn’t make it past the warden’s inspection.
Reed sighed. “Coben’s cousin looks to me like a dead end. His name is Andrew MacKenzie, age thirty-eight, and he’s currently locked up on an attempted homicide charge in Pennsylvania. He’s been in since 2011 and won’t be eligible for parole for another six months. He’s not our guy. Maybe your friend Jackie-Mac told someone else about your background.”
“Maybe. But we can’t ask her—she’s dead.” There was another strange silence on the other end. She would have thought Reed had hung up except for the fact that she could still hear him breathing. “Reed?”
“Where are you right now?”
“I’m with Brady at the park, getting Bump some exercise. Why?”
“Okay, that’s fine. I guess we’ll talk tomorrow.”
“If you want to get together, I can meet you—”
“No,” he cut her off quickly. “Tomorrow. We’ll talk then.”
He hung up, and she looked down at her phone, perplexed. He’d been acting strangely ever since he’d discovered she asked Danielle Wertz to can the analysis on the bottle. Maybe she shouldn’t have gone around him like that, since Danielle was his friend and doing him the favor, but it wasn’t Reed’s case, not officially. His aggrieved tone seemed a bit over the top to her. The Feds, she thought as she stuffed the phone back into her jeans, they can be such divas.
“More trouble?” Brady asked her.
“No, just more of the same.”
“You mentioned Coben. His name came up in the news reports too.”
Ellie kicked her leg at the dirt and tried to sound cool. “Yeah, when you’ve got a severed human hand, pretty much everyone’s mind goes to the same place. It was his signature move.”
“You thinking he might have a copycat?”
She shook her head. “It’s not that simple. Plus, like I said, I can’t really talk about it.”
He held up his palms in surrender. “Say no more. I was just interested when I heard you saying you were looking into his mail.”
She gave him a sideways glance. “Yeah? You ever drop him a line?”
He got a strange look on his face, and for a second, she thought he might say yes. “No, no. Nothing like that. My aunt Ginny had a prison pen pal, though. A guy in Texas who was locked up for murdering his wife. She wrote him every Sunday like clockwork for years, urging him to repent and find God. He said he would pray real hard, but could she also send along a few dollars for the commissary because he needed new slippers. Always slippers or soap—not cigarettes or candy or whatever else he was really using it for. Anyway, she wrote him right up until the time he was released. I think maybe
she even offered to have him come visit.”
“Did he?”
Brady squinted at the trees and gave a quick shake of his head. “Naw. He got out and immediately beat some hooker within an inch of her life.” He turned to look at her again, his eyes gone black in the low light. “Guess you probably know by now—there’s just no saving some people.”
* * *
Ellery collected Bump from his adventures, dusting bits of grass from his ears before she let him back into her truck. The night was mild, so she left the windows down as they drove through the deserted streets of Woodbury. Bump rode with his head out the window, ears to the wind, a giant doggy grin on his long face. Ellie made the turn into her driveway at half speed, lumbering the truck toward the trees. She drove like she felt: exhausted and spent.
As the woods parted to reveal her house in the distance, she hit the brakes with a sudden jolt. Light glowed in one of the upstairs windows—her bedroom. Her heart started pounding and she was wide awake now. She cut the engine and watched the window for a few moments. Maybe she had left the light on that morning. Or perhaps the State Police had been inside her home when they searched the premises earlier. Then a shadow crossed in the window and Ellie had to admit it: someone was inside.
“You stay here,” she ordered Bump as she retrieved her weapon and slid out of the truck.
She walked up to the house on the grass, careful to avoid the gravel so her footsteps wouldn’t give her away. Her heartbeat pulsed in her ears, creating an ache that made her feel dizzy, and the gun felt slippery in her hands. She licked her dry lips and slowly, carefully opened the locks at her front door. As she eased open the door, she could hear the sounds in the house definitively now; someone was moving around upstairs in her bedroom. Creak. Thunk. Then she heard the tinkle of metal rolling on the floor. Ellie couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, because she knew this sound too well.
The Vanishing Season Page 15
