The Vanishing Season

by Joanna Schaffhausen

  “I’m sorry,” McGreevy told her. “I promise he’s no threat to you. This was just some desperate, ill-considered attempt to get the FBI’s attention—something he’s enjoyed precious little of in the past few years.”

  Ellie sat up and looked hard across the table. “With all due respect, Agent McGreevy, he addressed the letter to me, not the FBI.”

  “Coben’s been locked up fourteen years. He knew damn well that letter was never going to make it past inspection, let alone in the mail to you.”

  A humorless smile twitched at Reed’s lips. “And yet here it is in front of her, Puss, hand-delivered by the FBI itself.” Probably just like Coben anticipated when he scribbled the damn thing in the first place.

  McGreevy shifted uncomfortably at this idea. “Yes, well. There’s nothing in there he couldn’t have learned from the news reports, but obviously we are following up.”

  “Following up how?” Reed asked.

  “I’ve got a ticket booked for Indiana, leaving in two hours. We’re going to put Coben in a box and shake him to see what falls out.” He paused. “There’s a seat on that plane for you too if you want it.”

  Ellery looked quickly at Reed for his reaction, but he wasn’t sure how to feel. He’d expected McGreevy to show up here and hand him his ass for working while on stress leave—in a case that just blew up national news, no less—but instead he was offering Reed an official assignment and a return to grace. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I think it might be better if I stuck around here right now.”

  McGreevy hitched up his pants and rose from his seat. “You mind if I speak to you outside a moment?”

  Ellery scowled, suspicious again at the mention of another private conversation, but Reed raised his eyebrows at her. “My turn for the doghouse, it would seem,” he said lightly before he followed McGreevy out the door. His boss cornered Reed by the watercooler, blocking him in with one arm and leaning down into Reed’s personal space. “What are you doing here, Markham?”

  “My job, sir, amazingly enough.”

  McGreevy blew out a short breath in disbelief. “This isn’t a job. It’s a crusade.”

  “You don’t need me to handle Coben.”

  “If he’s going to talk to anyone, it would be you.”

  “Talk, yes, sure,” Reed agreed. “He’ll chat with me all day and jerk off to the memory at night, but he won’t tell me anything useful. Meanwhile, they could use me here to work the Coben angle—everyone local is involved in the search for Julia Parker.”

  McGreevy backed away, looking reproachful. “They could use you, or she could use you?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “She grew up real pretty, I’ll grant you that.”

  Reed cocked his head in deliberate fashion, holding a thin line on his temper. “It isn’t like that.”

  “Oh, no?” McGreevy’s eyebrows shot up. “I heard you’re sleeping at her place now.”

  “On the couch. Someone around here is maybe out to kill her, or haven’t you read that far in the reports just yet?”

  McGreevy shook his head. “Let them protect her, then. You’re too close to this investigation to do her any good anyway. You helped her the last time because you were following the leads, not your feelings. Look, Markham, I get that this case is personal to you—I do—but if you’re right that she’s in danger, about the worst thing for her is a federal agent with a bad case of Hero Syndrome. Believe it or not, I’m trying to help you.”

  “By getting me on a plane out of here.”

  “If that’s what it takes, then yes.”

  Reed thought of Ellery, pounding each of the nails back into her closet door. “She called me for help,” he said finally. “Not the FBI.”

  “And that’s exactly why you oughtn’t be here.” McGreevy paced a few steps away and then back again. He held out a finger at Reed. “I can order you off the case.”

  “I’m not officially on it.”

  “Dammit, Reed. I don’t want to have to make this leave permanent.”

  A fresh wave of exhaustion hit him, and Reed held up both hands in wordless surrender. “Do what you’ve got to do, Puss,” he said finally, “and I’ll do the same.”

  * * *

  In the car on the way back to her place, they idled alone at a pointless red light, as no traffic was visible for miles in either direction. Woodbury residents were too scared to leave their homes. Reed gave Ellie a sideways glance. She had said almost nothing to him since they had met with McGreevy and read the letter, and Reed worried it had rattled her. “You know,” he said softly, “Coben wrote that letter to try to make himself important again. That doesn’t mean you have to let him.”

  She gave an ironic smile but didn’t look at him. “You’re not going to feed me some bullshit about how I’m in charge, and I decide what kind of power he has over me, are you?”

  Reed winced inwardly. Jeez, when she put it like that … He ducked his head, glad for the cover of darkness. “Uh, no?”

  “Good,” she said with a nod as she drove forward again. “I had a shrink try that line on me after it happened. She worked for the school, and looking back on it, I should probably feel sorry for her. She was totally out of her depth with me. She was there to help kids whose parents were getting divorced or maybe to counsel some pipsqueak who was getting bullied on the playground. Francis Coben was way out of her league.” She paused, considering. “You know what’s funny? She wanted me to write a letter to him, to Coben. Not to send it or anything. Just ‘to get your feelings out,’ she told me. ‘Write them down and make them go away.’”

  “Did you do it?”

  “Ha, as if. Instead I wrote two thousand words on why forced interaction with school-based social workers was a violation of human rights.” She shook her head, bemused. “I didn’t have to go see her again after that.”

  He gave a wry grin. “No, I would expect not.”

  Ellery was quiet for a moment, her eyes on the shadowed roads. “Coben’s in my head for good. I accepted that a long time ago because I don’t see any way I could really change it. There isn’t a way to remove him without a lobotomy or some soap-opera kind of amnesia. I could write him a thousand letters and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. The funny thing is, though, I didn’t realize until I saw his letter that it goes both ways. I’m in his head forever too. He’s rotting away inside those concrete walls and what’s he got to think about? Me, and how I helped put him there. A bunch of letters aren’t going to change that fact either, so let him write as many as he wants.”

  Reed felt the truth of this immediately, down to his very bones. Coben and Ellie lived within him too. She had changed and shaped him in a way that was both ineffable and unalterable. They were linked together for always. Reed looked at her profile and swallowed back a surge of emotion, of tenderness and pride and a flicker of something baser, a sudden heat at his center that tinged his thoughts with shame. He’d rescued her as a girl when he’d known nothing more about her than the statistics listed on the missing persons poster. Now she was a grown woman, insightful and infuriating, with just a bunch of nails keeping the worst of her past at bay, and suddenly he was fiercely grateful for her. He wished she could see how remarkable she really was. “There’s something maybe you don’t know,” he said, wondering even as he said it whether his two cents would be helpful or not. After all, she had deliberately avoided knowing the details for years.

  “Don’t know about what?”

  He hesitated again. “The other young women Coben abducted … evidence suggests they probably didn’t live longer than a day or so afterward. Two at most.” Ellie had survived three days in the closet, almost four. They had theorized at the time that Coben was losing focus and becoming more disorganized as the investigation closed in on him. Reed wasn’t a big believer in destiny, but he wondered now if the man had simply met his match.

  Ellie absorbed this news in silence for a moment but ultimately sho
ok her head. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t try to tell me I’m special or that this happened for a reason, because I don’t believe that either. I’m not a hero. I lived just long enough for it to be over.”

  She stopped talking to him after that, and Reed turned without argument to look out at the passing trees. He only wants you because I had you first, Coben had written, and Reed feared this was the truth. So it wasn’t quite over. Maybe what Ellie was trying to tell him was that it never really would be.

  * * *

  Reed startled awake in the middle of the night to the sound of nearby footsteps. He jerked upright on the couch and squinted at the shadowy figure in the doorway. “It’s just me,” she said in the darkness. She switched on a flashlight, and he flinched as the beam caught him across the eyes. “Bump has to go out.”

  Okay, yes, he heard it now that he was more awake: the faint sound of panting and toenails scratching on the wooden floor. He groped for his trousers and tugged them on. At the front door, Ellie paused in a pool of silver moonlight. “You don’t have to come. We’ll just be in the yard for a few minutes.”

  “I’m coming,” he said, taking his gun and smothering a yawn on his forearm. Outside, the storm had cleared away the heat and the night was almost chilly. The crickets’ song had gone silent and the only noise was Bump’s dog tags and the whispering of the trees. Reed and Ellie stood in their shirtsleeves on the dewy grass while Bump hurled himself enthusiastically at the bushes. “This isn’t going to a take long, is it?” he asked her.

  “Depends. He can be … particular.”

  “Remind him I’m armed and dangerous,” Reed groused. “He could lose a tail.”

  “No one holds a gun to your head when you’re in the bathroom.”

  “I don’t wake the entire household just to take a piss at two o’clock in the morning.”

  The jingle of Bump’s collar grew fainter as he moved deeper into the woods. “Bump, no!” Ellie called, starting across the lawn after him. “Come back here!” But instead of complying, the collar picked up speed, running away from them into the trees.

  “Aw, hell,” Reed muttered as he jogged after them.

  “Bump? Bump, stop it. Come back here now!”

  Reed held up one arm to protect his face from the slapping branches as he followed the sound of Ellie’s voice and Bump’s dog tags. “Where the hell is he going?” he called out.

  “Looks like the Ingram house,” she yelled back. “They have a poodle.”

  “Great,” Reed said under his breath. “I’m going to get my eye poked out because some grungy mutt thinks he’s got a starring role in Lady and the Tramp.” He forged onward, unable to see much until a clearing appeared ahead. Ellie was still in hot pursuit of the dog.

  “They’re not even home, you silly animal,” she called out to Bump.

  Reed caught up with her where the woods thinned out into someone else’s backyard. There was a rickety old swing set and an empty patio. Bump was snuffling around eagerly, his outline just visible in the silver moonlight. Ellie hugged herself as if to warm up. “You see? They’re not here. They went to the Cape for the Fourth of July, same as always.”

  Not surprisingly, the dog ignored this bit of information and continued his in-depth exploration of the yard. It was when he stopped suddenly that Reed got curious. “What’s he got there?” he said, fearing some dead rodent.

  “I don’t know.” Ellie walked closer and trained the flashlight down to where Bump was snuffling. “Oh, my God!”

  The alarm in her voice made Reed race across the lawn so he could see too. There, on the patio, were two hands raised beseechingly to the sky, as though their owner was standing underground. The spotlight on them shook as Ellie’s own hand trembled, and Reed gently took the flashlight from her for a closer observation. The severed hands looked to be real and human, belonging to a middle-aged female with a neat French manicure. They had been stuck to the spot with some sort of putty. “That’s Julia Parker,” Ellie said, covering her mouth. “Those are her hands.”

  From his crouch, Reed turned to look up at her. “You’re sure?”

  Ellie nodded, her eyes so wide he could see the whites even in the low light. “She’s still wearing her wedding band.”

  * * *

  Pandemonium reigned for the next few hours. They couldn’t very well report the discovery to Sam Parker, so Ellie called Jimmy Tipton instead—at home, using his private line so as not to alert the whole department. “Jesus, Mary, Mother of God,” he said when he heard. “This is going to kill him.” Tipton knew his role was just to babysit the scene until State Investigators Matthew Tovar and Tracy Grigsby arrived, but with the press tracking Woodbury PD’s every move, there was no hope of keeping the discovery entirely quiet. By the time Sam Parker showed up at the house, the news vans had their lights and cameras rolling.

  Reed hung back out of the way with Ellery, as Tipton intercepted his boss. “Chief, you can’t go back there.”

  Parker shoved Tipton out of the way. “The hell I can’t. This is my town and I’m in charge here.”

  “Not this time,” Tipton said firmly, stepping in front of him again. Sam grabbed him by the shirt front and the two started to struggle. They grappled for a minute and Tipton tried to plead his case again. “Chief, listen—you don’t want to see, okay? You don’t want to.”

  “Don’t tell me what I want!” Parker seemed to have the strength of ten men as he threw his deputy to the ground. He went storming around the back of the house, and there was a terrible moment of silence followed by his howl, a guttural wounded sound that made even the veteran reporters turn away. Ellie covered her face with her hands, and Reed recalled Parker’s words: I keep wondering: what’s he doing to her? Everyone would know the truth now. Reed scanned the line of cameras and their unblinking eyes that were taking in every moment so later they could beam it back out into the world for popular consumption, horror-cum-cinéma vérité.

  Tipton and another deputy escorted the chief back around to the front of the house, and he put up no resistance this time. He was a shell of the person he was only minutes before, smaller somehow, and broken in a way that could never be made whole. The camera shutters click-clicked away, but the reporters said nothing, standing in a hush as Parker walked on past them like they were not even there.

  “Sam!” Ellery called, a desperate edge in her voice. Parker didn’t seem to hear.

  When she started after him, Reed grabbed her elbow lightly to pull her back. “Let him go.”

  “I should tell him.”

  “Tell him what?” Reed asked gently.

  She faltered, opening and closing her mouth several times. There would come a day when perhaps she could tell Sam lots of things, stories and difficult truths that few others could share, like how to walk around with this kind of crime inside you, but the chief would never be able to hear her now. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

  “I know. But you did not do this. You are not responsible.”

  “I didn’t do this,” she agreed, squinting at the crime tape circling the yard. “But I didn’t stop it either.”

  “It’s not up to you to stop it, not by yourself. You’re just one person, Ellie.”

  She shuddered and wrapped her arms around herself. “Yeah, but I’m the one he wants.”

  * * *

  Dawn arrived in a scant few hours, streaking watercolor pink across the empty sky. Reed and Ellery dropped Bump off with Brady before heading into town. They had to use a circuitous alternate way to the shelter because the press was even stalking the dog now that he had discovered Julia Parker’s remains. Brady looked tired and wan himself as he accepted the leash. “No problem, he can hang out here as long as he wants. We’ll just tell them ‘no comment,’ right, Bump? If they won’t take the hint, I’ll send him to pee on their legs.”

  “Thanks,” Ellie said with obvious relief. “I’ll text you when things calm down.”

  The Woodbury station had undergone a
personality transplant, seized as it was by outside law enforcement and missing its usual leader. Parker’s office sat in shadow with the door closed; the investigating officers used the interrogation room to conduct their interviews. Tovar and Grigsby were back again, this time with more bite to their questions. They grilled Ellery for at least an hour, and when it was Reed’s turn, they marched him perfunctorily through the facts of the case before getting down to their real questions. “We know you have a background in behavioral analysis,” Matthew Tovar said as he leaned across the table.

  “And you caught Francis Coben,” Tracy Grigsby added.

  Reed sat back wearily, anticipating the request to perform another miracle. Surely by now everyone could see how limited his powers were.

  “We need to know what we’re dealing with,” Tovar said. “Who we should be looking for.”

  “Is this a straight-up Coben copycat we’re looking at?” Grigsby added, leaning in.

  “No,” Reed replied, glancing at the door. He hoped Ellie was on the other side of it, safe inside the station. “Coben kept his victims’ hands, while this offender uses them for displays. Coben avoided the authorities and did not otherwise engage with the investigation. This offender wants attention.”

  “He wants us to catch him.”

  Reed looked at Tovar sharply. “Oh, no. He wants us to admire him. Ellery in particular. He’s obviously taken great pains to get her to notice him.”

  At the mention of Ellie’s name, Tracy Grigsby frowned. “Officer Hathaway didn’t provide much insight into why someone might be abducting people and chopping off their hands simply to gain her attention.”

  “And I can’t tell you that either,” Reed said flatly.

  “So what can you tell us?” Tovar was irritated now too.

  Reed had revised some of his earlier profile based on the latest developments. A killer this practiced would have to be older, more experienced. “He’s most likely a white male who lives in Woodbury or the surrounding area. He’s on the older end of the spectrum, maybe forty to forty-five—still physically strong but developed enough in his technique that he can abduct healthy adults in the middle of the day. He belongs here. He fits in. There are probably witnesses who have seen him just before or after his crimes who have no idea what they’re looking at because he seems so ordinary. That’s part of the excitement for him, that he knows something about himself that they don’t know. He likes secrets—you can tell this from the way he’s taunted Ellery about her past. Knowledge, as they say, is power, and this guy gets off on power. He probably has a job that permits him to wield that power in other ways, which is one reason he can be so disciplined in his crimes.”