Three Women Disappear

by James Patterson

  From the restaurant I followed him to a ritzy wine bar in Sunset Park. Lucky for me, the place had a glass storefront. I parked across the street, watched through binoculars from behind my Jeep’s tinted windows. Símon was halfway through a demicarafe of red when a woman in a sequin dress tapped his shoulder. He hopped up, smiled, gave her a very polite peck on the cheek. For a second I thought it was Serena. Right height and shape, wrong age: Símon’s date was robbing the cradle.

  They carried on what looked like a lively conversation for the better part of an hour, then made their way to the movie theater around the corner, an indie house showing two titles, one French and one German. Símon was eager to impress.

  I looked at my watch, figured I had a couple of hours to kill before they came back out. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I grabbed three slices at the pizza parlor across from the theater, then strolled over to Símon’s Honda Civic and opened the driver’s-side door with a slim jim.

  I was looking for any sign of Serena: a receipt from a store in Anthony Costello’s zip code, one of the ESL workbooks my wife was always giving her, a piece of Anna’s jewelry. But the interior was spotless. Of course it was: if Símon played his cards right, he’d have company on the ride home.

  I checked the glove compartment. Nothing but the vehicle’s registration and an illustrated primer on the flora and fauna of the Everglades. Nothing much in the trunk, either. Just a spare tire, a jack, and a stash of environmentally friendly grocery bags.

  Símon was starting to annoy me.

  I glanced at my watch. The movie was only a half hour in. Chances were they’d stop for another drink after, maybe even a late meal. Unless Símon’s sister planned on crashing date night, there was no point in my continuing to tag along. It occurred to me that I could break into his apartment just as easily as his car. If Serena was there, camped out on his couch, so much the better. If not, there might be something to indicate where she’d gone. I copied Símon’s current address off the registration, then locked up and walked back to my car.

  Símon lived in Ybor City in a funky but upscale building, a nineteenth-century boarding school that had been converted into condominiums in the nineties. I got past the lobby door with a bump key and some elbow grease, took the stairs two at a time up to his third-floor apartment. For a while, I just stood there listening, hoping to hear a television or radio, something to tell me Serena was home. But the only noise came from children fighting in a corner unit.

  I rang the bell just to be sure, then slipped on a pair of latex gloves and let myself in. The lights were off, the windows open. I heard sporadic traffic coming from the street below, but otherwise the place was silent. I switched my phone to Flashlight, passed its beam over the living room, then kept going through the rest of the apartment. No doubt about it: Símon had done well for himself. French doors led to a balcony with a wrought iron railing. The raised kitchen was loaded with stainless steel appliances. Art from multiple continents hung on the walls. The hardwood floors were gleaming. Not a speck of dust anywhere. Not in the bedroom, the bathroom, the study. Almost as if he had a full-time maid.

  Well, this was a bust, I thought.

  When Vincent called tomorrow for his daily update, I’d have nothing to give him. Unless…

  I was on my way out the door when it hit me: what if Símon killed Anthony? It was a theory with no supporting evidence, but still it felt plausible. When it came to women, Anthony was pure predator. His type always is. And Símon, from what I could gather, was pure gentleman. On a day picked at random, I’d seen him cry with an old woman over her dead cat, then greet his date with an innocent peck on the cheek. Símon, champion of the fair sex. He wouldn’t take kindly to someone pawing his kid sister.

  Maybe I’d laid it on a little thick with Heidi, but I’d meant what I said: it was borderline impossible to believe that a 120-pound woman could bring down a mammoth like Anthony. Símon, on the other hand, acting as Serena’s white knight—that was easy enough to picture. Maybe he’d gone there to beat some manners into Anthony. Maybe his rage had gotten the better of him.

  The idea struck me so hard that, without realizing it, I backed up and dropped onto the couch. But before I could think things through, I heard keys jangling outside, and then Símon’s front door swung open.

  Chapter 15

  Anna Costello

  October 14

  2:00 p.m.

  Interview Room A

  I NEEDED a place to hole up, gather myself. My first instinct was to book a room at the Four Seasons. Anthony and I spent our last anniversary there. We got into a blistering poolside fight, and then I didn’t see him again until two in the morning, when he stumbled in and passed out facedown on his side of the bed. Believe me, if I was going to kill him, I’d have done it then.

  The problem with the Four Seasons—and the Peninsula, the Ritz-Carlton, the Regency—was that I’d need a credit card, and even if I weaseled my way in without one, I’d run the risk of being flagged by the staff. The Costello payroll reached far and wide, and then there were the wannabe thugs looking to ingratiate themselves with Vincent. I wasn’t above slumming it at a Super 8, but even that would be risky: a Bentley, even a scratched one, wouldn’t exactly blend in with the Hyundais and tractor trailers.

  Meanwhile, I had to get off the street, at least for the six remaining hours of daylight. I pulled into a parking garage, drove up to the third level, and took a space between a minivan and a Ford F-150. No way to spot me unless you happened to turn your head as you were driving past. I figured I’d shut my eyes until dark, then drive straight out of Florida, put as many miles as I could manage between me and my dead husband’s family, then pawn the Bentley for a fraction of its worth and buy a one-way ticket to Buenos Aires. I’ve always wanted to learn the tango.

  I didn’t sleep. If I can’t fall asleep in my own bed without swallowing a bucket of pills every night, then how was I going to drift off in a parking garage in the middle of the day? Especially knowing I was Uncle Vincent’s new most wanted? Still, I tried. I draped a scarf over my eyes and angled my seat back as far as it would go.

  Which is why I didn’t notice Defoe walking up behind the Bentley with a crowbar. He’d smashed in my rear passenger’s side window and was fiddling with the lock by the time I had the key in the ignition.

  “Don’t you dare!” he shouted. “Get out of the car. Now.”

  I cranked the engine, shifted into reverse, stomped on the gas. Defoe leapt out of the way, but not before I clipped his leg. Johnny Broch materialized from between two SUVs, ran at the Bentley as if he might tackle it, then hurled himself onto the hood of a Fiat when I switched to Drive and laid on the gas again.

  “Stop!” Defoe yelled. “We just want to talk.”

  He was upright, hobbling at full speed toward his sedan. I might have asked him why he had his pistol out if he was only looking to chat. Broch, who was an easy six feet six inches and must have weighed three hundred pounds, half slid, half fell off the Fiat. He and Defoe made an unlikely pair: two thugs fat and fit, tall and short, young and old. I was running from Laurel and Hardy.

  It’s hard to burn rubber in a parking garage. I lost my side mirror turning onto level two, nearly massacred an octogenarian and his shopping cart as I blurred down level one. Then I did something I’ve only seen in movies: I took out the boom barrier at the attendant’s station. Plowed right through it and dragged the remains skidding and sparking into the street. Pedestrians screamed, scattered, then screamed again when Defoe’s sedan came barreling after me.

  The only direction I had in mind was away. I spun right at the first corner, then turned hard into an alley after I saw traffic backed up at the next light. I had the Bentley pushing seventy when a small slab of cement by the back door of a restaurant sent the car careening into a dumpster. The airbag nearly knocked me unconscious. By the time I’d scrambled out from under it, Defoe was limping toward me, his minion at his heels.

  “Enough,
Anna,” he said. “It’s time to come with us.”

  I’d forgotten just how heinous his skin was close up—taut and glistening, as if someone had taken a cockroach shell and spread it over a human face.

  “Can’t do it,” I said, leaning with one hand against the Bentley, waiting for my breath to come bounding back.

  “Come on now, Anna,” he said, patting his leg as if he was summoning a dog.

  Here’s a free survival tip: always do the opposite of whatever your would-be assassin commands.

  Which is to say I ran like hell. I was guessing they couldn’t kill me until Vincent got his alone time. More importantly, I was guessing I could outrun a fat man and a gimp. One perk to being the wife of mob royalty: you spend a lot of time at the gym. With the crumpled Bentley blocking the alley, the only way they could follow was on foot. I figured as long as I didn’t trip and face-plant, I’d live to see another day.

  “Go on, go on!” Defoe shouted. “Stop her before she makes the street.”

  Then I heard tires screeching, and I knew Defoe was planning to hightail it around the block and cut me off on the other side. Unfortunately for me, this alley was the length of an airport runway, and I hadn’t cleared a third of it before I crashed.

  A quick glance over my shoulder told me I had nothing to fear from Broch, who was too top-heavy to keep pace. Now all I needed was for downtown traffic to keep Defoe at a crawl. I dug deep for an extra gear, gasped my way through the homestretch.

  And then I saw my escape route: a city bus. It was pulling past the alley and up to the curb as I hit the street. I ran after it, leapt aboard just before the driver shut the doors, then started for the back.

  “Hey, miss,” the driver called after me. “Forget something?”

  I hadn’t taken a city bus since college. I searched my pockets, threw change down the chute until the light turned green.

  The smart play would have been to duck out of sight, but I had to know. I walked past rows of empty seats, crouched down, peered out the back window.

  Defoe and the man-child were standing beside their double-parked sedan, craning their necks in every direction but mine.

  I was safe. For now.

  Chapter 16

  BUT PROBABLY not for much longer. Not unless I found a way to get Vincent Costello off my back.

  I exited three stops later, in front of a strip mall lined with the kind of stores my brain is programmed to ignore: a comic book shop I’d bet my life sold weed out of the back, one of those cook-your-own-food Mongolian barbecues (Anthony always thought they looked like fun; my argument was, what’s the point if you have to do all the work?), an antiques store with busted GI Joes and ancient lunch boxes in the window. Crap, crap, and more crap. And crappiest of all: a women’s discount apparel store with half a roll of duct tape holding the front window in place.

  Like it or not, this was a new day for me, and new days require new outfits. I held my breath, stepped inside. It was suddenly clear to me what people meant by off-the-rack: half the merchandise was lying trampled on the floor. The place itself looked trampled. The drop ceiling was buckled from water damage, the blue synthetic carpet was worn through to the concrete foundation, and the long, dark cracks in the drywall reminded me of my grandmother’s spider veins. Even the security cameras hadn’t been updated since the seventies.

  In other words, the place was perfect. I didn’t have to search hard to find the kind of outfit Anna Costello would never be caught dead in: acid jeans, a pink sweatshirt with GLAMOUR GIRL scrawled across the chest in purple glitter, a pair of those rubber clogs patterned with geometric cutouts, plastic sunglasses sporting neon-green frames, and a handful of sparkly rainbow hair clips that I planned to stick at random intervals all around my head. I could sit on Vincent Costello’s lap and he still wouldn’t recognize me.

  I took my haul up to the counter and paid—this was one place I could use my credit cards without fear of a Costello hearing about it seconds later—then carried the drawstring plastic bag back to the only dressing room and swapped my new clothes for the old ones. I looked like a cross between a high school cheerleader and the last woman standing at the local casino’s boilermaker Thursdays. It would work just fine. Where I was going, I’d fit right in.

  La Torre Bar (formerly La Torre Bar and Grille, but the latter part of the name was dropped when not even the most hardened wino would eat there) was five miles to the north, in a neighborhood I’d heard about but never visited. I decided to hoof it in my new clogs. I had time to kill: Victoria wouldn’t be there before happy hour, anyway.

  Victoria Maria Elena Costello. Anthony’s first wife. In his more affectionate moments, Anthony called me “the upgrade.” Victoria kept the Costello name in part to piss off Anthony and in part because it came with major benefits. No one fires a Costello. No one assaults or insults a Costello. And men don’t hit on a Costello uninvited. Not even drunk men.

  All that came in handy for Vicki given that she poured the drinks at La Torre. By the time I arrived, my new sweatshirt was a darker shade of pink, and my feet felt as though they’d been rubbed raw. The bar sat between a bodega and an abandoned storefront. A gaggle of aging men hung outside the bodega playing cards and smoking cigars. I cocked my head and winked at them: a new personality to go with my new wardrobe. Then I gave myself a silent pep talk and pushed through the bar’s saloon-style doors.

  The interior was all felt pennants slung crooked against wood paneling. The sawdust on the floor was probably the same sawdust they’d laid out when the place opened three decades ago. At a little after five, only the hard-core regulars were in attendance—drunks of both genders with sunken mouths, busted capillaries, clothes that would fall apart if they were ever washed. Of course, the population would look much the same at 8:00 p.m., 10:00 p.m., midnight.

  She was standing behind the bar, chopping up lemons, with a black rag slung over one shoulder. She hadn’t changed much since the last time I saw her. Fake hair, fake eyelashes, fake nails, fake tits, and none of it particularly well maintained.

  “Hiya, Vicki,” I said.

  She hated it when anyone shortened her name. Victoria sounded to her like royalty, and falling from Anthony’s castle to this hole-in-the-wall had done nothing to slow her ego.

  “I know you?” she asked.

  I took off the Cracker Jack–prize sunglasses.

  “Know me?” I said. “You hate my guts.”

  She glared across the bar, her jaw working double time. Vicki’s one of those people who can make the act of chewing gum look and sound like a war crime.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “You’re the lying, thieving, flat-chested whore. Anthony find a newer model yet?”

  I grinned. I felt oddly pleased with myself. Her insults held no sway anymore. Nothing she said could faze me. I needed information from her, and that was it.

  Namely, I needed to know who might want Anthony dead. Because while I believed either Sarah or Serena was involved, or maybe both of them, I didn’t believe they’d acted alone. I didn’t believe they’d done the stabbing. Combined they added up to about half Anthony’s weight. Maybe Serena turned off the alarm, let the killer in. Maybe Sarah sprinkled my husband’s eggs with powdered Valium. But the move against him had been sanctioned by a higher power. Maybe Vincent’s men weren’t coming after me to avenge Anthony. Maybe they were just finishing the job.

  If anyone could cut through the maybes, it was Victoria. She’d been hands-on with his business interests—especially his extracurricular interests, the side deals he didn’t want Vincent to know about. She was the one who convinced him he wasn’t getting his due. It took a while, but her relationship with Anthony went south because she pushed too hard, wanted his fingers in more and more pies. That’s part of why I played deaf and dumb in my marriage. The other part was that I really didn’t want to know.

  “I’m trying to imagine what brings an Italian American princess like you to this shithole on a weekday afternoon,” sh
e said. “I’m not coming up with anything that makes my life better.”

  “I’ve got questions,” I said. “Questions I’m pretty sure only you can answer.”

  “Anthony did something to you, didn’t he?”

  She was gloating. The poor thing really had no clue, and I wasn’t about to break the news until she told me what I wanted to know.

  “In a way,” I said. “I’m not involved in his business dealings like you were. I was wondering who…”

  “He’s in bed with?”

  I nodded.

  “You looking to hurt him? ’Cause if that could be done, believe me I’d have done it. Anthony’s protected from every angle. As bad as I wanted to see his little empire collapse—an empire I more or less built for him—I wasn’t going to get myself killed trying.”

  “It isn’t that,” I said. “I just want to be prepared.”

  An elderly patron at the end of the bar called out for a fresh pint. Vicki told him to keep his pants on.

  “I don’t believe you,” she said. “But if you want to make a play against Tony, it won’t be me who stops you. Nothing would make me happier than to see you both go down in flames.”

  “That’s sweet, Vic,” I said. “So tell me: where is he vulnerable? Most likely to get in trouble?”

  “You asking who would come after him?”

  I gave another nod, felt the hair clips knocking against my skull.

  “Granted, my information’s dated, but I’d look to the boys in blue.”

  “The cops?”

  “That’s right, hon: the cops. Tony blackmails them. Gets them to do his bidding. His, not Vincent’s. You starting to see the picture?”

  It was a much bigger and uglier picture than I’d imagined. I leaned hard against a stool. Vicki smiled, enjoying herself.

  “Could be one of the cops is after him. Could be Vincent himself. But the question you need to ask yourself is, how does Tony know which cops are dirty? Who’s feeding him the intel? ’Cause that person has a hell of a lot to lose. Could be he wants out.”