Three Women Disappear

by James Patterson

  Little by little, then all at once, my memory came alive. I’d been to this house before. I’d been here every day for the last year. I was personal chef to a man named Anthony Costello and his wife, Anna. This was their house. This was where I made three meals a day for them, where I’d made breakfast for Anthony as recently as this morning.

  My legs wanted to buckle, but I kept moving forward, through the gate and up the steps to the wraparound porch. The sliding back door was open. I stepped inside.

  “Anna?” I called out. “Anthony?”

  Nothing. The silence scared me more than waking up on that rock. This time of day, the place was normally bustling. Serena, the maid, would be singing to herself as she polished the dining room table; Anna would be watching Good Morning Florida with the volume turned full blast; Anthony would be pacing the marble hallway, cursing into his phone.

  “Serena?” I tried.

  Still no answer. Something was seismically wrong. I crept like a cat burglar through the dining room, the laundry room, the family room, the living room, the parlor, Anthony’s office. Ten thousand square feet of real estate and not a whiff of life.

  “It’s Sarah,” I called upstairs. “Anyone home?”

  I’d climbed a handful of steps when the dizziness hit me hard.

  Water, I reminded myself. You need water.

  I made my way to the kitchen. And that was where I found him. Anthony, facedown on the floor, outlined by a pool of his own blood, a kitchen knife lying not three feet away.

  Chapter 2

  “DEAD?” HAAGEN asked.

  I shook my head.

  “No,” I said. “Not yet.”

  “And still you didn’t call 911?”

  “I did,” I said. “At least I tried. I was in shock.”

  “I don’t believe in shock.”

  “Denial, then.”

  “Why don’t you skip what you were feeling and tell me what you did?”

  I nodded, thinking to myself, You’ll get through this, Sarah.

  At first it didn’t occur to me that he might be alive. There was so much blood. So many holes. Gashes up and down his legs, his back. His clothes nearly shredded. I just stood there staring at him. I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t make myself move.

  And then he coughed.

  “Anthony!” I yelled. “Oh, my God, Anthony.”

  I ran across the kitchen, slipped on his blood, nearly toppled, then righted myself and knelt beside him.

  “Can you hear me, Anthony?” I said. “I’m calling 911. You’re going to be all right.”

  He made a raspy, muffled sound. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to speak. I couldn’t tell if he knew I was there.

  “Just hold on,” I said.

  I stood up, spotted my purse lying on the far counter. I riffled through it, turned it upside down, and shook out the contents. No phone. Maybe I’d left it at home. Maybe I’d dropped it in the woods.

  I returned to his side, leaned in close, touched his hand.

  “You’ll be okay, Anthony. I’m not leaving you. I’m just going to find the house phone, all right?”

  His eyelids were fluttering, but they wouldn’t open. I jumped up, ran to the console in the foyer, but the phone wasn’t in its cradle. I sprinted back through the house, thinking, Blood loss, coma, organ failure. Thinking every second mattered. No phone in the guest room, the game room, the sun room. I finally found it in the most obvious place: under a couch cushion. I picked it up, dialed. Nothing. The line was dead.

  I held the phone away from my ear and looked at it. The buttons were dark. I scanned the room. Everything was dark: the television, the DVR, the hi-fi. I went over to the light switch, flicked it up and down. Someone had cut the power.

  There was one hope left. I ran back into the kitchen, took a knee beside Anthony. His eyelids were still fluttering, and his right hand had started to twitch.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Just keep breathing.”

  I knew better than to move a person in his condition, hovering between shock and death, but I had to access his front pockets. I raised up into a crouch, placed my hands on his side, and pushed. My legs shot out from under me; I landed belly down in his blood. I tried slipping my hand under his waist but didn’t get very far. The man weighed three hundred pounds—even before I started cooking for him.

  I was at my wits’ end, biting back tears, fighting the urge to crumble completely. I wandered over to the kitchen window, stood staring out at the far-reaching wilds of Anthony Costello’s estate. And then it hit me: the reason I’d been out there in the first place.

  I’d been chasing him.

  Or her—I didn’t get a very good look. It was dawn. I’d just started the coffee brewing when I heard a door slam. I looked out, saw a figure I didn’t recognize struggling with the gate’s latch, then saw that same figure tear off across the lawn, headed for the woods.

  “And you ran after this phantom figure?” Haagen cut me off. “Like you were one of Charlie’s angels? Sorry, but I find that a little hard to believe.”

  “I must have,” I said. “I must have climbed up on that boulder to see if I could spot him.”

  “And then conveniently passed out?”

  “It didn’t seem convenient to me.”

  “Let’s get back to the part where you’re staring out the window while your employer lies dying at your feet.”

  “I was collecting myself,” I said. “Piecing things together. Coming up with a plan.”

  “And that plan was?”

  “To drive for help.”

  I’d decided to break my promise, leave Anthony behind while I sped to the nearest gas station and called 911. But when I turned around, he was moving, trying to drag himself forward across the floor. He crawled a few inches, collapsed, then lifted his head and pointed. I walked over to him, crouched down.

  “Easy now, Anthony,” I said. “Just relax.”

  He made no effort to speak—just kept pointing. I lowered myself onto the floor, searched for whatever it was he wanted me to see.

  “Oh, thank God,” I said.

  His phone, lying far back under the industrial-size refrigerator. I ran to the hall closet, fetched a broom, used the handle to bat the phone out. Not a speck of dust came with it: Serena’s a maniac for detail.

  Cavalry had arrived in the form of a cellular device. My heart was beating hard, my hands shaking. I lit up Anthony’s home screen, found a string of missed-call alerts: five in a span of ten minutes, all from “UV,” the most recent stamped forty-five minutes ago. “UV” stood for Uncle Vincent, head of the Costello family. Vincent Costello only used the phone for holiday greetings and dire emergencies.

  “Oh, no,” I said out loud. “Oh, my God, no.”

  A quick scan of outgoing calls confirmed my suspicion: Anthony had reached out to Vincent just minutes before the missed calls started. His attacker had left him for dead, and instead of dialing 911, Anthony had gone straight to the person who’d always made things right: his uncle, don of Central Florida, the Mafia boss who’d lived to a ripe old age without spending so much as an hour behind bars. Anthony, stuck and bleeding, must have managed a few words, then dropped the phone. A frantic Vincent had tried desperately to get his nephew back on the line.

  “All right,” I told myself. “Don’t panic. Just go ahead and call the paramedics.”

  I had my thumb on the 9 key when I looked over at Anthony and saw it was too late. His eyes were open and still, and his back had quit rising and falling with every labored breath. I went over and checked his pulse just to be sure. Then I stood and dropped the phone. I may have screamed—I can’t remember. Vincent lived in a gated mansion on the outskirts of Tampa, maybe an hour away. He would have sent help of his own. Mobsters who’d be pulling up the drive any minute. And they’d find me, the wife of a cop, alone in the house, dripping with Anthony’s blood. Anthony, who’d been killed with a kitchen knife. Me, his personal chef.

  Chapter 3<
br />
  “SO YOU ran?” Haagen said. “All the way to Texas?”

  I nodded.

  “Texas is just where I wound up,” I said. “The running was the important part.”

  Haagen sat back in her chair.

  “Let me ask you something,” she said. “Just how much of this do you expect me to believe?”

  “All of it.”

  “Every word?” she asked.

  Breathing the air in that room was like chewing on thirty-year-old cigarette smoke. I felt tired, cold, anxious, sweaty, frightened, lonely, and above all eager to win Haagen over.

  “Every word,” I told her.

  She folded her hands behind her head and grinned, as if she knew something I didn’t.

  “Why do you hyphenate your last name?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Roberts-Walsh. You hyphenate your last name. Why?”

  Changing topic midstream was Heidi’s way of keeping a suspect off-balance. It worked. You could never tell what was coming next.

  “Sorry,” I said, “but how is that relevant?”

  “Would you say that you have marital issues, Ms. Roberts-Walsh?”

  “Issues is a bit vague.”

  “Problems, then.”

  “No more so than any other couple.”

  “So everything’s fine at home?”

  “Have you ever been married, Detective Haagen?”

  She let the question pass.

  “What’s interesting is that you’re very similar to your husband.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You’re both guarded. You both give the impression that you’re holding back. You both pretend to be cooperating when really you’re running your own game.”

  “Maybe you’re projecting because you know my husband. I’ve told you everything I can remember.”

  She shrugged, seemed almost amused. I took a long look at the mirror I’d been avoiding.

  “Maybe,” she said. “It’s true I know him very well. We were partners for a decade. You know what they say about partners? They’re closer than man and wife.”

  A new way to rattle me: jealousy. I wasn’t going to bite.

  “Is he on the other side?” I asked. “Is he watching us?”

  “Your husband, you mean?” She shifted forward in her seat. “Let me ask you something, Ms. Roberts-hyphen-Walsh. Suppose he is there, monitoring, listening, standing idle as you dig yourself deeper and deeper. Why wouldn’t he intervene? Barge in here, slam his fist on the table, and order me to stop tormenting his beloved wife? Wouldn’t he at least bang on the glass? This isn’t going very well for you, you know.”

  She’d confirmed it: my husband was there, watching. She was talking to him now, not me.

  “Could it be because he knows you’re guilty?” she asked. “Did the two of you have a heart-to-heart on the drive back from Texas?”

  She tapped the manila folder on the table in front of her.

  “Or maybe it’s the other way around,” she said. “Maybe you’re protecting him. I mean, however you look at it, it was Sean who set this whole thing in motion.”

  “You’ve lost it,” I said. “You’re off your rocker.”

  I didn’t care anymore about winning her over. If I’d been someone else—someone like Anna, or even Serena—I would have lunged.

  “Am I?” she asked. “Tell me, how does a cop’s wife end up working for Florida’s top crime family? Are you really going to tell me that Sean didn’t get you the job? Maybe he wanted you in Costello’s house for a reason. Maybe that reason expired. Or maybe you just couldn’t take it anymore.”

  I cocked my head and furrowed my brow like a puppy confused by her master’s command.

  “Don’t you know?” I asked.

  “Know what?”

  “I was working for you.”

  “For me?”

  “For Tampa PD. I filled out the informant paperwork and everything. I gave weekly reports.”

  “And you were paid for this?”

  “Once a month like clockwork.”

  “How were you paid?”

  “In cash. Sean said that was standard procedure. He said banks left a paper trail that someone like Anthony could easily check on.”

  “And Sean made these payments himself?”

  I nodded.

  “And you reported directly to him?”

  I nodded again.

  She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to—her smirk said it all.

  Haagen came back after a long coffee break during which I’d been left alone to stew.

  “Time to switch gears,” she said.

  She opened the folder, flipped through the top pages.

  “Your medical records,” she said. “Type 2 diabetes is no joke. That’s what bothers me most about your story.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “You say you woke up thinking you’d passed out due to either a missed dose of insulin or dehydration, but we both know you weren’t dehydrated: the morning wasn’t particularly hot, and you’d only wandered off for a few hours. If you blacked out, it had to be something like insulin shock. Yet you slid down off that rock and were suddenly fine. Nowhere in your testimony do you mention searching for your insulin bag once you got back to the house. Shouldn’t that have been your first priority? You know, the way you’re supposed to secure your own oxygen mask before you start helping your kids?”

  “I was disoriented. And then there was the shock of seeing Anthony like that. I couldn’t think straight.”

  “Shock—there’s that word again. You know, I did some research.”

  She held up a sheet of paper and waved it around.

  “Diabetics don’t usually black out because they missed a dose. In fact, blackouts are very, very rare. No, I think you invented your little bout of amnesia because the one detail you can’t explain to us is the knife wound in your calf.”

  “It wasn’t a knife wound,” I said. “It must have been a rock. Maybe a beer bottle. Anthony liked to host cookouts.”

  “I asked CSI to look into that. They had an entire class of cadets from the academy search the area. No rocks sharp or jagged enough to have made such a clean incision. No discarded bottles. Not even a pointy stick.”

  “I told you: I don’t remember how it happened.”

  “That’s okay,” Haagen said. “I have a pretty good idea.”

  She let me chew that over for a long, hostile beat.

  “One more thing,” she said. “You were alone when you left the house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which means you were alone when you got into your car?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t take anything with you? Anything that didn’t belong to you?”

  I hung my head.

  “You know what I took,” I said.

  Chapter 4

  Detective Sean Walsh

  WHILE HEIDI was busy grilling my wife, I decided to conduct a little business of my own.

  Destroying police evidence is never easy, especially when you’re dealing with computer files. Evidence logged through our municipal network is cloned onto two servers downtown. The trick isn’t to remove it. The trick is to drown it.

  I sat at my desk, picked up the phone, dialed, and waited.

  “Hi, this is Detective Sean Walsh with Homicide,” I said. “I’m calling to see if you’ve processed the files for the Danza case, reference number 00527 dash 57. I was looking for them this morning, but couldn’t find them in the system.”

  I told the clerk I’d be happy to hold. I was nothing if not polite. I even hummed along to the tinny Muzak while I sifted through the drawers of my desk, sliding papers I didn’t want discovered into an old issue of Men’s Health magazine. Later that night I’d burn the magazine on a barbecue grill.

  “Can I get the last three digits again?” the clerk asked.

  Once an admin logged on through his own computer, he’d be the only registered user until he
logged off again. It didn’t matter if every detective in Florida was searching the database: the network would only recognize the admin. It was a handy flaw in our archaic, underfunded municipal system—one that would allow me to revise the files on Sarah without leaving any record of having done so. Of course, if I somehow got caught…

  “Last three digits are 7 dash 57,” I said.

  Heidi had enlisted a rookie from Vice to gather a phone book’s worth of background info on my wife: Wikipedia-style bios of everyone she’d ever dated, her parents’ criminal histories (a half dozen parking tickets between them), her transcripts from grade school through culinary school, a facsimile of her medical ID bracelet, copies of her emails, records of every call she placed or received reaching back five years. You name it, it was there.

  Before Sarah resurfaced, I’d begun collating data of my own. It was meant to protect her, to bolster the notion that sweet little diabetic Sarah would never hurt a fly. But I saw pretty early on that the puzzle pieces were forming the wrong picture. Not only did Sarah have a motive to kill Anthony but she had twenty-four-hour access to his home.

  But then so did Anthony’s wife, Anna.

  And so did Anthony’s maid, Serena.

  I looked over my shoulder, pretending to scratch my elbow. My coworkers showed no interest in my computer screen.

  “Okay, Detective Walsh,” the clerk said. “I’m in the system now, and I see that your request is being processed as we speak. Should be there by the end of the day.”

  I logged on, found Sarah’s case file, saw that I was too late: the content had already been reviewed by the new investigation team. By Heidi. This morning. Just out of curiosity, I clicked on the icon beside Sarah’s name. Nothing happened. I clicked on it again. And again. And again.

  I’d been blocked.

  “Christ,” I whispered.