One False Move

by Harlan Coben

"What?"

  "I know you think protecting me is sweet and noble. But it's not. It's annoying and insulting. So stop it. Now. If your mother ran away when you were five, wouldn't you want to know what happened?"

  Myron thought about it, nodded. "Point taken. I won't do it again."

  "Fine. So what did Mabel say?"

  He recounted his conversation with her aunt. Brenda stayed still. She reacted only when he mentioned the phone calls Mabel and perhaps her father had received from her mother.

  "They never told me," she said. "I suspected as much, but"--she looked at Myron--"looks like you weren't the only one who thought I couldn't handle the truth."

  They fell into silence and continued the drive. Before making the left off Northfield Avenue, Myron noticed a gray Honda Accord in the rearview mirror. At least it looked like a Honda Accord. All cars pretty much looked the same to Myron, and there was no vehicle more unassuming than a gray Honda Accord. No way to tell for sure, but Myron thought that maybe they were being followed. He slowed down, memorized the license plate. New Jersey plate. 890UB3. When he entered the St. Barnabas Medical Center lot, the car drove on. Didn't mean anything. If the guy doing the tailing was good, he'd never pull in behind him.

  St. Barnabas was bigger than when he was a kid, but what hospital wasn't? His dad had taken Myron here several times when he was a kid, for sprains and stitches and X rays and even one ten-day stint for rheumatic fever when he was twelve.

  "Let me talk to this guy alone," Myron said.

  "Why?"

  "You're the daughter. He may speak more freely without you there."

  "Yeah, okay. I have some patients I'm following on the fourth floor anyway. I'll meet you back down in the lobby."

  Calvin Campbell was in full uniform when Myron found him in the security office. He sat behind a high counter with several dozen TV monitors running. The pictures were in black and white and, from what Myron could see, completely uneventful. Campbell's feet were up. He was downing a submarine sandwich slightly longer than a baseball bat. He took off his policelike cap to reveal tightly curled white hair.

  Myron asked him about Horace Slaughter.

  "He didn't show for three straight days," Calvin said. "No call, no nothing. So I fired his ass."

  "How?" Myron asked.

  "What?"

  "How did you fire him? In person? On the phone?"

  "Well, I tried to call him. But nobody answered. So I wrote a letter."

  "Return receipt?"

  "Yes."

  "Did he sign it?"

  He shrugged. "Haven't gotten it back yet, if that's what you mean."

  "Was Horace a good worker?"

  Calvin's eyes narrowed. "You a private eye?"

  "Something like that."

  "And you're working for the daughter?"

  "Yes."

  "She got juice."

  "Huh?"

  "Juice," Calvin repeated. "I mean, I never wanted to hire the man in the first place."

  "So why did you?"

  He scowled. "Don't you listen? His daughter got juice. She's tight with some of the bigwigs here. Everybody likes her. So you start hearing things. Rumors, you know. So I figured, what the hell. Being a security guard ain't brain surgery. I hired him."

  "What kind of rumors?"

  "Hey, don't get me in the middle here." He held his palms as though pushing trouble back. "People talk, is all I'm saying. I've been here eighteen years. I ain't one to make waves. But when a guy don't show for work, well, I have to draw the line."

  "Anything else you can tell me?"

  "Nope. He came. He did his job okay, I guess. Then he didn't show and I fired him. End of story."

  Myron nodded. "Thank you for your time."

  "Hey, man, can you do me a favor?"

  "What?" Myron asked.

  "See if his daughter can clear out his locker. I got a new man coming on board, and I could use the space."

  Myron took the elevator up to the pediatric floor. He circled the nurses' station and spotted Brenda through a big window. She was sitting on the bed of a little girl who could not have been more than seven. Myron stopped and watched for a moment. Brenda had put on a white coat, a stethoscope draped around her neck. The little girl said something. Brenda smiled and put the stethoscope on the little girl's ears. They both laughed. Brenda beckoned behind her, and the girl's parents joined them on the bed. The parents had gaunt faces--the sunken cheeks, hollow eyes of the terminally harrowed. Brenda said something to them. More laughter. Myron continued to watch, mesmerized.

  When she finally came out, Brenda walked straight to him. "How long have you been standing here?"

  "Just a minute or two," he said. Then he added, "You like it here."

  She nodded. "It's even better than being on the court."

  Enough said.

  "So what's up?" she asked.

  "Your father has a locker here."

  They took the elevator to the basement. Calvin Campbell was waiting for them. "Do you know the combination?" he asked.

  Brenda said no.

  "No problem." Calvin had a lead pipe in his hand. With practiced precision he belted the combination lock. It shattered like glass. "You can use that empty carton in the corner," he said. Then he sauntered out.

  Brenda looked at Myron. He nodded. She reached out and opened the locker. An odor like oft-soiled socks popped out. Myron made a face and looked in. Using his index finger and thumb like a pair of tweezers, he lifted a shirt into view. The shirt looked like the before picture in a Tide commercial.

  "Dad wasn't great with laundry," Brenda said.

  Or with throwing away garbage, from the looks of things. The entire locker resembled a condensed frat house. There were dirty clothes and empty cans of beer and old newspapers and even a pizza box. Brenda brought over the carton, and they began to load stuff in. Myron started with a pair of uniform pants. He wondered if Horace owned them or if they belonged to the hospital, and then he wondered why he was wondering about something so irrelevant. He searched through the pockets and pulled out a crumpled ball of paper.

  Myron smoothed it out. An envelope. He plucked out a sheet of paper and began to read.

  "What is it?" Brenda asked.

  "A letter from an attorney," Myron said.

  He handed it to her:

  Dear Mr. Slaughter:

  We are in receipt of your letters and are aware of your constant communications with this office. As explained to you in person, the matter you are asking about is confidential. We ask you to kindly stop contacting us. Your behavior is fast approaching harassment.

  Sincerely,

  Thomas Kincaid

  "Do you know what he's talking about?" Myron asked.

  She hesitated. "No," she said slowly. "But that name--Thomas Kincaid--it rings a bell. I just can't place it."

  "Maybe he did work for your dad before."

  Brenda shook her head. "I don't think so. I can't remember my father ever hiring a lawyer. And if he had, I doubt he would have gone to Morristown."

  Myron took out his cellular phone and dialed the office. Big Cyndi answered and transferred the call to Esperanza.

  "What?" Esperanza said. Always with the pleasantries.

  "Did Lisa fax over Horace Slaughter's phone bill?"

  "It's right in front of me," Esperanza said. "I was just working on it."

  Scary as it might sound, getting a list of someone's long-distance calls had always been fairly easy. Almost every private investigator has a source at the phone company. All it takes is a little grease.

  Myron signaled that he wanted the letter back. Brenda handed it to him. Then she knelt and extracted a plastic bag from the back of the locker. Myron looked at the phone number for Kincaid's office on the letter.

  "Is five-five-five-one-nine-zero-eight on there?" he asked.

  "Yeah. Eight times. All less than five minutes."

  "Anything else?"

  "I'm still tracking down all the numb
ers."

  "Anything stick out?"

  "Maybe," Esperanza said. "For some reason he called Arthur Bradford's gubernatorial headquarters a couple of times."

  Myron felt a familiar, not unpleasant jolt. The Bradford name rears its ugly head yet again. Arthur Bradford, one of two prodigal sons, was running for governor in November. "Okay, good. Anything else?"

  "Not yet. And I found nothing--I mean, nada--on Anita Slaughter."

  No surprise there. "Okay, thanks."

  He hung up.

  "What?" Brenda asked.

  "Your father has been calling this Kincaid guy a lot. He's also called Arthur Bradford's campaign headquarters."

  She looked confused. "So what does that mean?"

  "I don't know. Was your dad political at all?"

  "No."

  "Did he know Arthur Bradford or anybody connected with the campaign?"

  "Not that I'm aware of." Brenda opened the garbage bag and peered inside. Her face went slack. "Oh Christ."

  Myron dropped down next to her. Brenda spread open the top of the bag so he could see the contents. A referee's shirt, black and white striped. On the right breast pocket was a patch reading "New Jersey Basketball Referee Association." On the left breast was a big crimson stain.

  A bloodstain.

  "We should call the police," Myron said.

  "And tell them what?"

  Myron was not sure. The bloody shirt didn't have a hole in it--there were no rips or tears visible--and the stain was a concentrated fan shape over the left breast. How had it gotten there? Good question. Not wanting to contaminate any possible clues, Myron gave the shirt a quick, gentle once-over. The stain was thick and looked a bit sticky, if not wet. Since the shirt had been wrapped in a plastic bag, it was hard to say how long the blood had been there. Probably not long, though.

  Okay, good. Now what?

  The position of the stain itself was puzzling. If Horace had been wearing the shirt, how could the blood have ended up on just that one spot? If, for example, he had a bloody nose, the stain would be more widespread. If he had been shot, well, there'd be a hole in the shirt. If he had hit somebody else, again the stain would probably be more like a spray or at least more dispersed than this.

  Why was the stain so concentrated in that one spot?

  Myron studied the shirt again. Only one scenario fit: Horace had not been wearing the shirt when the injury occurred. Strange but probably true. The shirt had been used to stave off blood flow, like a bandage. That would explain both the placement and concentration. The fan shape indicated it had probably been pressed against a bleeding nose.

  Okey-dokey, we're on a roll. It didn't help him in any way, shape, or form. But rolling was good. Myron liked to roll.

  Brenda interrupted his thoughts. "What are we going to tell the police?" she asked again.

  "I don't know."

  "You think he's on the run, right?"

  "Yes."

  "Then maybe he doesn't want to be found."

  "Almost definitely."

  "And we know he ran away by his own volition. So what are we going to tell them? That we found some blood on a shirt in his locker? You think the police are going to give a rat's ass?"

  "Not even one cheek," Myron agreed.

  They finished clearing out the locker. Then Myron drove her to the late practice. He kept his eye on the rearview mirror, looking for the gray Honda Accord. There were many, of course, but none with the same license plate.

  He dropped her off at the gym, and then he took Palisades Avenue toward the Englewood Public Library. He had a couple of hours to kill, and he wanted to do some research on the Bradford family.

  The Englewood Library sat on Grand Avenue off Palisades Avenue like a clunky spaceship. When it was erected in 1968, the building had probably been praised for its sleek, futuristic design; now it looked like a rejected movie prop for Logan's Run.

  Myron quickly found a reference librarian who was straight from central casting: gray bun, glasses, pearls, boxy build. The nameplate on her desk read "Mrs. Kay." He approached her with his boyish grin, the one that usually made such ladies pinch his cheek and offer him hot cider.

  "I hope you can help me," he said.

  Mrs. Kay looked at him in that way librarians often do, wary and tired, like cops who know you're going to lie about how fast you were driving.

  "I need to look up articles from the Jersey Ledger from twenty years ago."

  "Microfiche," Mrs. Kay said. She rose with a great sigh and led him to a machine. "You're in luck."

  "Why's that?"

  "They just computerized an index. Before that you were on your own."

  Mrs. Kay taught him how to use the microfilm machine and the computer indexing service. It looked pretty standard. When she left him alone, Myron first typed in the name Anita Slaughter. No hits. Not a surprise, but hey, you never know. Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you plug in the name, and an article comes up and says, "I ran away to Florence, Italy. You can find me at the Plaza Lucchesi hotel on the Arno River, room 218." Well, not often. But sometimes.

  Typing in the Bradford name would produce ten zillion hits. Myron was not sure what he was looking for exactly. He knew who the Bradfords were, of course. They were New Jersey aristocracy, the closest thing the Garden State had to the Kennedys. Old Man Bradford had been the governor in the late sixties, and his older son, Arthur Bradford, was the current front-runner for the same office. Arthur's younger brother, Chance--Myron would have made fun of the name, but when your name is Myron, well, glass houses and big stones and all that--was his campaign manager and--to keep within the Kennedy metaphor--played Robert to Arthur's Jack.

  The Bradfords had started modestly enough. Old Man Bradford had come from farm stock. He had owned half the town of Livingston, considered the boonies in the sixties, and sold it in small pieces over the years to developers, who built split-levels and colonials for baby boomers escaping Newark and Brooklyn and the like. Myron in fact had grown up in a split-level that had been built on what had formerly been Bradford farmland.

  But Old Man Bradford had been smarter than most. For one thing, he reinvested his money in strong local businesses, mostly malls, but more important, he sold his land slowly, over time, not immediately cashing in. By holding on a bit longer, he became a true baron as the price for land increased at an alarming rate. He married a blue blood aristocrat from Connecticut. She redid the old farmhouse and made it something of a monument to excess. They stayed in Livingston, in the original spot of the old farmhouse, fencing off an enormous chunk of real estate. They were the mansion on the hill, surrounded by hundreds of middle-class cookie-cut houses: feudal lords overlooking the serfdom. Nobody in town really knew the Bradfords. When Myron was a kid, he and his friends just referred to them as the millionaires. They were the stuff of legends. Supposedly, if you climbed their fence, armed guards shot at you. Two sixth graders gave a wide-eyed Myron this stern warning when he was seven years old. He of course believed it absolutely. Outside of the Bat Lady, who lived in a shack near the Little League field and kidnapped and then ate little boys, no one was more feared than the Bradfords.

  Myron tried limiting the search on the Bradfords to 1978, the year Anita Slaughter disappeared, but there were still a ton of hits. Most, he noticed, were from March, while Anita had run off in November. A vague memory prodded him, but he couldn't conjure up more than a glimpse. He'd been just starting high school then, but there had been something in the news about the Bradfords. A scandal of some sort. He threaded microfilm into the machine. He was a tad spastic with anything mechanical--something he blamed on his ancestry--so it took him longer than it should have. After a few screeching false starts, Myron managed to look up a couple of articles. In fairly short order he stumbled across the obituary. "Elizabeth Bradford. Age thirty. Daughter of Richard and Miriam Worth. Wife of Arthur Bradford. Mother of Stephen Bradford ..."

  No cause of death given. But now Myron remembered the sto
ry. It had, in fact, been rehashed a bit recently, what with the press on the gubernatorial race. Arthur Bradford was now a fifty-two-year-old widower who, if the accounts were to be believed, still pined for his dead love. He dated, sure, but the spin was that he had never gotten over the devastating heartbreak of losing his young bride; it made for a nice, too-neat contrast with his thrice-married gubernatorial opponent, Jim Davison. Myron wondered if there was any truth in the spin. Arthur Bradford was perceived as a little too mean, a little Bob Dole. Sick as it sounded, what better way to offset that image than resurrecting a dead wife?

  But who knew for sure? Politics and the press: two cherished institutions that spoke with tongues so forked they could double for fine dinnerware. Arthur Bradford refused to talk about his wife, and that could reflect either genuine pain or clever media manipulation. Cynical, but there you have it.

  Myron continued to review the old articles. The story had made the front page on three consecutive dates in March 1978. Arthur and Elizabeth Bradford had been college sweethearts and married six years. Everyone described them as a "loving couple," one of those media buzz phrases that meant as much as calling a dead youth an honor student. Mrs. Bradford had fallen off a third-level balcony at the Bradford mansion. The surface below was brick, and Elizabeth Bradford had landed on her head. There was not much in the way of details. A police investigation stated unequivocally that the death had been a tragic accident. The balcony was tiled and slippery. It had been raining and dark. A wall was being replaced and thus not secure in certain spots.

  Awfully clean.

  The press played very fair with the Bradfords. Myron now recalled the obvious rumors that had gone around the schoolyard. What the heck was she doing out on her balcony in March? Was she drunk? Probably. How else do you fall off your own balcony? Naturally some of the guys speculated that she'd been pushed. It made for interesting high school cafeteria fodder for at least, oh, two days. But this was high school. Hormones inevitably recaptured the flag, and everybody returned to panicking about the opposite sex. Ah, the sweet bird of youth.

  Myron leaned back and stared at the screen. He thought again about Arthur Bradford's refusal to comment. Maybe it had nothing to do with genuine grief or media manipulation; maybe Bradford refused to talk because he didn't want something brought to light after twenty years.

  Hmm. Right, Myron, sure. And maybe he had kidnapped the Lindbergh baby. Stick to the facts. One, Elizabeth Bradford had been dead for twenty years. Two, there was not a scintilla of evidence that her death was anything but an accident. Three--and most important to Myron--this had all happened a full nine months before Anita Slaughter ran away.