by Harlan Coben
Stan closed his eyes. “No more.”
Myron switched tracks. “How did the Sow the Seeds kidnapper get in touch with you?”
“I never reveal sources.”
“Come on, Stan.”
“No,” he said firmly. “I may have lost a lot. But not that part of me. You know I can’t say anything about my sources.”
“You know who it is, don’t you?”
“Take me home, Myron.”
“Is it Dennis Lex—or did the same kidnapper take Dennis Lex?”
Stan crossed his arms. “Home,” he said.
His face closed down. Myron saw it. There would be no more give tonight. He took a right and started heading back. Neither man spoke again until Myron stopped the car in the front of the condominium.
“Are you telling the truth, Myron? About the bone marrow donor?”
“Yes.”
“This boy is someone close to you?”
Myron kept both hands on the wheel. “Yes.”
“So there’s no way you’ll walk away from this?”
“None.”
Stan nodded, mostly to himself. “I’ll do what I can. But you have to trust me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Give me a few days.”
“To do what?”
“You won’t hear from me for a little while. Don’t let that shake your faith.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You do what you have to,” he said. “I’ll do the same.”
Stan Gibbs stepped out of the car and disappeared into the night.
27
Greg Downing woke Myron early the next morning with a phone call. “Nathan Mostoni left town,” he said. “So I came back to New York. I get to pick up my son this afternoon.”
Goody-goody for you, Myron thought. But he kept his tongue still.
“I’m going to the Ninety-second Street Y to shoot around,” Greg said. “You want to come?”
“No,” Myron said.
“Come anyway. Ten o’clock.”
“I’ll be late.” Myron hung up and rolled out of bed. He checked his e-mail and found a JPEG image from Esperanza’s contact at AgeComp. He clicked the file and an image slowly appeared on the screen. The possible face of Dennis Lex as a man in his mid to late thirties. Weird. Myron looked at the picture. Not familiar. Not familiar at all. Remarkable work, these age-enhanced images. So lifelike. Except in the eyes. The eyes always looked like the eyes of the dead.
He clicked on the print icon and heard his Hewlett-Packard go to work. Myron checked the clock on the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. Still early in the morning, but he didn’t want to wait. He called Melina Garston’s father.
George Garston agreed to meet Myron at his penthouse at Fifth Avenue and Seventy-eighth Street, overlooking Central Park. A dark-haired woman answered the door. She introduced herself as Sandra and led him silently down the corridor. Myron looked out a window. He could see the Gothic outline of the Dakota all the way across the park. He remembered reading somewhere how Woody and Mia would wave towels from their respective apartments on either side of Central Park. Happier days, no doubt.
“I don’t understand what you have to do with my daughter,” George Garston said to him. Garston wore a collared blue shirt nicely offset by a shock of white neck-to-chest hairs sprouting out like a troll doll’s. His bald head was an almost perfect sphere jammed between two boulder-excuses for shoulders. He had the proud, burly build of a successful immigrant, but you could see that he’d taken a hit. There was a slump there now, the stoop of the eternally grieving. Myron had seen it before. Grief like his breaks your back. You go on, but you always stoop. You smile, but it never really reaches the eyes.
“Probably nothing,” Myron said. “I’m trying to find someone. He may be connected to your daughter’s murder. I don’t know.”
The study was too-dark cherry-wood with drawn curtains and one lamp giving off a faint yellow glow. George Garston turned to the side, staring at the rich paisley wallpaper, showing Myron his profile. “We’ve worked together once,” he said. “Not us personally. Our companies. Did you know that?”
“Yes,” Myron said.
George Garston had made his fortune with a chain of Greek quasi-restaurants, the kind that work best as mall stands in crowded food courts. The chain was called Achilles Meals. For real. Myron had a Greek hockey player who endorsed the chain regionally, in the upper Midwest.
“So a sports agent is interested in my daughter’s murder,” Garston said.
“It’s a long story.”
“The police aren’t talking. But they think it’s her boyfriend. This reporter. Do you agree?”
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
He made a scoffing noise. Myron could barely see his face anymore. “What do I think?” he said. “You sound like one of those grief counselors.”
“Didn’t mean to.”
“Spewing all that sensitivity garbage. They’re just trying to distract you from reality. They say they want you to face it. But really, it’s the opposite. They want you to dig so far into yourself you won’t be able to see how terrible your life is now.” He grunted and shifted in his chair. “I don’t have an opinion on Stan Gibbs. I never met him.”
“Did you know he and your daughter were dating?”
In the dark, Myron saw the big head silently go back and forth. “She told me she had a boyfriend,” he said. “She didn’t tell me his name. Or that he was married.”
“You wouldn’t have approved?”
“Of course I wouldn’t have approved,” he said, trying to sound snappish, but he was beyond petty indignation. “Would you approve if it was your daughter?”
“I guess not. So you knew nothing about her relationship with Stan Gibbs?”
“Nothing.”
“I understand that you spoke to her not long before she died.”
“Four days before.”
“Can you tell me about the conversation?”
“Melina had been drinking,” he said in that pure monotone you get when the words have been ricocheting around your brain too long. “A lot. She drank too much, my daughter. Got that from her papa—who got it from his papa. The Garston family legacy.” He made a chuckling sound that sounded far closer to a sob than anything in the neighborhood of a laugh.
“Melina talked to you about her testimony?”
“Yes.”
“Could you tell me what she said exactly?”
“ ‘I made a mistake, Papa.’ That’s what she said. She said that she lied.”
“What did you say?”
“I didn’t even know what she was talking about. It’s as I told you before—I didn’t know about this boyfriend.”
“Did you ask her to explain?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And she didn’t. She said to forget about it. She said she’d take care of it. Then she told me she loved me and hung up.”
Silence.
“I had two children, Mr. Bolitar. Did you know that?”
Myron shook his head.
“A plane crash killed my Michael three years ago. Now an animal has tortured and killed my girl. My wife, her name was Melina too, passed away fifteen years ago. There is no one. Forty-eight years ago, I thought I came to this country with nothing. I made a lot of money. And now I truly have nothing. You understand?”
“Yes,” Myron said.
“Is that all, then?”
“Your daughter had an apartment on Broadway.”
“Yes.”
“Are her personal belongings still there?”
“Sandra—that’s my daughter-in-law—she’s been packing her things. But it’s all still there. Why?”
“I’d like to go through them, if it’s okay with you.”
“The police already did that.”
“I know.”
“You think you might find something they didn’t?”
“
I’m almost positive I won’t.”
“But?”
“But I’m attacking this thing from a different perspective. It gives me a fresh set of eyes.”
George Garston flicked on his desk lamp. The yellow from the bulb painted his face a dark jaundice. Myron could see that his eyes were too dry, brittle like fallen acorns in the sun. “If you find whoever killed my Melina, you will tell me first.”
“No,” Myron said.
“Do you know what he did to her?”
“Yes. And I know what you want to do. But it won’t make you feel any better.”
“You say this like you know it for a fact.”
Myron kept silent.
George Garston flicked off the light and turned away. “Sandra will take you over now.”
“He sits in that study all day,” Sandra Garston told him, pressing the elevator button. “He won’t go out anymore.”
“It’s still new,” Myron said.
She shook her head. Her blue-black hair fell in big, loose curls, like thermal fax paper fresh out of the machine. But despite the hair color, her overall effect was almost Icelandic, the face and build of a world-class speed skater. Her features were sharp and ended rather abruptly. Her skin had the red of raw cold.
“He thinks he has no one,” she said.
“He has you.”
“I’m a daughter-in-law. He sees me and it’s like a tether to Michael. I don’t have the heart to tell him I finally started dating.”
When they reached the street, Myron asked, “Were you and Melina close?”
“I think so, yes.”
“Did you know about her relationship with Stan Gibbs?”
“Yes.”
“But she never told her father.”
“Oh, she would never. Papa didn’t approve of most men. A married one would have sent him off the ledge.”
They crossed the street and into the mid-city wonder known as Central Park. The park was packed on this rather spectacular day. Asian sketch artists hustled business. Men jogged by in those shorts that look suspiciously like diapers. Sunbathers lazed around on the grass, crowded together yet totally alone. New York City is like that. E. B. White once said that New York bestows the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. Damn straight. It was like everyone was plugged into their own internal Walkman, each playing a different tune, bopping obliviously to his or her own beat.
A yah-dude with a bandanna around his head tossed a Frisbee and yelled “Fetch,” but he had no dog. Hard-bodied women skated by in black jogging bras. Lots of men with various builds had their shirts off. Examples: A guy thick with flab that looked like wet Play-Doh jiggled past him. Behind him, a well-built guy skidded to a stop and arrogantly flexed a bicep. Actually flexed. In public. Myron frowned. He didn’t know which was worse: guys who shouldn’t take their shirts off and do, or guys who should take their shirts off and do.
When they reached Central Park West, Myron asked, “Did you have a problem with her dating a married man?”
Sandra shrugged. “I worried, of course. But he told Melina he would leave his wife.”
“Don’t they all?”
“Melina believed it. She seemed happy.”
“Did you ever meet Stan Gibbs?”
“No. Their relationship was supposed to be a secret.”
“Did she ever tell you about lying in court?”
“No,” she said. “Never.”
Sandra used her key and swung the door open. Myron stepped inside. Colors. Lots of them. Happy colors. The apartment looked like the Magical Mystery Tour meets the Teletubbies, all bright hues, especially greens, with hazy psychedelic splashes. The walls were covered with vivid watercolors of distant lands and ocean voyages. Some surreal stuff too. The effect was like an Enya video.
“I started throwing her stuff in boxes,” Sandra said. “But it’s hard to pack up a life.”
Myron nodded. He started walking around the small apartment, hoping for a psychic revelation or something. None came. He ran his eyes over the artwork.
“She was supposed to have her first show in the Village next month,” Sandra said.
Myron studied a painting with white domes and crystal blue water. He recognized the spot in Mykonos. It was wonderfully done. Myron could almost smell the salt of the Mediterranean, taste the grilled fish along the beach, feel the night sand clinging to a lover’s skin. No clue here, but he stared another minute or two before turning away.
He started going through the boxes. He found a high school yearbook, class of 1986, and flipped through it until he found Melina’s picture. She’d like to paint, it said. He glanced again at the walls. So bright and optimistic, her work. Death, Myron knew, was always ironic. Young death most ironic of all.
He turned his attention back to her photograph. Melina was looking off to the side with the hesitant, unsure smile of high school. Myron knew it well. Don’t we all. He closed the book and headed to her closets. Her clothes were neatly arranged, lots of sweaters folded on the top shelf, shoes lined up like tiny soldiers. He moved back to the boxes and found her photographs in a shoebox. A shoebox of all things. Myron shook his head and started going through them. Sandra sat on the floor next to him. “That’s her mother,” she said.
Myron looked at the photograph of two women, clearly mother and daughter, embracing. There was no sign of the unsure smile this time. This smile—the smile in her mother’s arms—soared like an angel’s song. Myron stared at the angel-song smile and imagined that celestial mouth crying out in hopeless agony. He thought about George Garston alone in that jaundice-lit study. And he understood.
Myron checked his watch. Time to pick up the pace. He thumbed through pictures of her father, her brother, Sandra, family outings, the norm. No pictures of Stan Gibbs. Nothing helpful.
He found makeup and perfume in another box. In another, he stumbled across a diary, but Melina hadn’t written anything in it for two years. He paged through it, but it felt like too much of an unnecessary violation. He found a love letter from an old boyfriend. He found some receipts.
He found copies of Stan’s columns.
Hmm.
In her address book. All the columns. There were no markings on them. Just the clippings themselves, held together by a paper clip. So what did that mean? He checked them again. Just clippings. He put them aside and did some more flipping. Something fell out near the back. Myron picked up a piece of cream-colored or aged-white paper torn along the left edge, more a card really, folded in half. The outside was totally blank. He opened it. On the upper half, the words With Love, Dad had been written in script. Myron thought again about George Garston sitting alone in that room and felt a deep burn flush his skin.
He sat on the couch now and tried again to conjure up something. That might sound weird—sitting in this too empty room, the sweet smell of a dead woman still hovering, feeling not unlike that tiny old lady in the Poltergeist movies—but you never knew. The victims didn’t speak to him or anything like that. But sometimes he could imagine what they’d been thinking and feeling and some spark would hit the edges and start to flame. So he tried it again.
Nothing.
He let his eyes wander across the canvases and the burn under his skin started up again. He scanned the bright colors, let them assault him. The brightness should have protected her. Nonsense, but there you have it. She’d had a life. Melina worked and she painted and she loved bright colors and had too many sweaters and stored her precious memories in a shoebox and someone had snuffed that life away because none of that meant anything to him. None of that was important. It made Myron mad.
He closed his eyes and tried to turn the anger down a notch. Anger wasn’t good. It clouded reason. He’d let that side of him out before—his Batman complex, as Esperanza had called it—but being a hero seeking justice or vengeance (if they weren’t the same thing) was unwise, unhealthy. Eventually you saw things you didn’t want to. You learned truths you never should have. It stings and t
hen it deadens. Better to stay away.
But the heat in his blood would not leave him. So he stopped fighting it, let the heat soothe him, relax his muscles, settle gently over him. Maybe the heat wasn’t such a bad thing. Maybe the horrors he’d seen and the truths he’d learned hadn’t changed him, hadn’t deadened him, after all.
Myron closed the boxes, took one last, lingering look at the sunkissed isle of Mykonos, and made a silent vow.
28
Greg and Myron met up on the court. Myron strapped on his knee brace. Greg averted his eyes. The two men shot for half an hour, barely speaking, lost in the pure strokes. People ducked in and pointed at Greg. Several kids came up to him and asked him for autographs. Greg acquiesced, glancing at Myron as he took pen in hand, clearly uncomfortable getting all this attention in front of the man whose career he had ended.
Myron stared back at him, offering no solace.
After some time, Myron said, “There a reason you wanted me here, Greg?”
Greg kept shooting.
“Because I have to get back to the office,” Myron said.
Greg grabbed the ball, dribbled twice, took a turnaround jumper. “I saw you and Emily that night. You know that?”
“I know that,” Myron said.
Greg grabbed the rebound, took a lazy hook, let the ball hit the floor, and slowly bounce toward Myron. “We were getting married the next day. You know that?”
“Know that too.”
“And there you were,” Greg said, “her old boyfriend, screwing her brains out.”
Myron picked up the ball.
“I’m trying to explain here,” Greg said.
“I slept with Emily,” Myron said. “You saw us. You wanted revenge. You told Big Burt Wesson to hurt me during a preseason game. He did. End of story.”
“I wanted him to hurt you, yes. I didn’t mean for him to end your career.”
“You say tomato, I say tomahto.”
“It wasn’t intentional.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Myron said in a voice that sounded awfully calm in his own ears, “but I don’t give two shits about your intentions. You fired a weapon at me. You might have aimed for a flesh wound, but that didn’t happen. You think that makes you blameless?”
