Three Women Disappear

by James Patterson

  “That’s it? You get to laugh at me?”

  She thought it over.

  “And I get a night’s free labor. You cover the dinner shift for nothin’. Sound fair?”

  “Plenty fair.”

  Come on now, Sarah, I told myself. You can do this.

  And I did. I held myself steady and squeezed that trigger. And Lord knows if I hit the target, because the recoil landed me flat on my ass. I looked up to see Doris holding her sides.

  “Hot damn,” she said. “I didn’t know it was possible to miss from this close. I mean, you must’ve hit something somewhere, but I’ve never seen those cans so still.”

  She reached out to take the gun back.

  “I was gonna let you have it for two hundred, but—”

  I held on to the barrel.

  “Let’s up the stakes,” I said. “One more shot. If I make it, you put me on as chef for a day. If I miss again, you get a free waitress for a full week.”

  She backed up a step.

  “Go for it,” she said. “But I can’t say I like your odds.”

  I took careful aim, concentrated with everything I had, promised myself the battle was already won…and then fell on my ass a second time. When I got back up, I saw the coffee cans hanging undisturbed.

  “Well,” Doris said, “you better nap some after your shower, ’cause Thursday’s a busy night at the Diner Things in Life.”

  Chapter 22

  Detective Sean Walsh

  I SAT parked outside Símon’s place until sunup. Serena didn’t show. She must have packed an overnight bag and headed to a local motel in case Símon got lucky. Chances were she’d be back by breakfast, but I couldn’t risk hanging around any longer—I had a 7:00 a.m. shift to make.

  I thought about calling in sick, but knowing Heidi, she’d have sent someone to check on me. Though she had yet to say it out loud, I was a top suspect in her high-profile case, and I couldn’t afford to draw attention to myself. I stopped home for a shave and a change of clothes, then gunned it for the station house.

  I had plenty of practice hiding sleepless nights from my superiors, and this particular sleepless night would be easier to hide than most. Heidi wanted me to chaperone a rookie assigned to his first homicide. Busywork, pure and simple. For once I didn’t mind.

  The kid’s name was Randolph. He was short and lean, almost frail-looking, and tried to hide his bad skin under a layer of cover-up that seemed likely to melt right off in the Florida sun. He’d been some kind of celebrity on the beat, risen through the ranks at lightning speed. At twenty-six years of age, he was biologically young enough to be my son. That wasn’t his fault, but there were other reasons not to like him. Randolph was a smug little company man, the type who’d rat you out for parking too far from the curb if he thought it might endear him to the brass. Any detective on the squad who had more than a year or two until retirement was sucking up to him already, thinking one day soon he’d be signing their OT slips.

  The case was a stone-cold whodunit: a homeless man found knifed to death under a pedestrian bridge near the Tampa Riverwalk. We rode over in a department-issue sedan, Randolph behind the wheel. I’d have been fine with quiet, but Randolph wanted to chat. He wanted to know all about the Costello case. Mostly he wanted to know about Sarah. What was it like having my wife in the box with my ex-partner? He didn’t know how I could concentrate. I must be worried sick. How was Sarah holding up? Had she ever run off before? Had she been acting differently in the days leading up to the murder?

  “You know, they say some women can sense a natural disaster before it happens. Earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes. Not that they know exactly what’s coming—only that it’s big. Maybe it’s the same with homicide?”

  The little bastard was fishing, looking for a tip he could pass on to Heidi, something to raise his profile and ruin my life.

  “Listen, Randy—”

  “It’s Randolph.”

  I smiled, knowing that from this moment forward his name would forever be Randy. I was about to tell him where to go with his thinly veiled interrogation when it dawned on me that two can play this game.

  “What’s the over-under in the office pool?” I asked.

  “What office pool?”

  “Don’t you mean which office pool? There has to be more than one. Does homicide detective Sean Walsh’s wife go to prison for murder? Does Detective Walsh keep his job? Hell, I bet there’s even one on whether or not I set the whole thing up. Everybody knows I had a relationship with Anthony Costello. Maybe I’m framing my own wife?”

  I’d raised my voice without meaning to. That’s what an absence of sleep will do for you: your ideas might be good, but the execution falls apart.

  “Nobody’s saying you framed Mrs. Walsh.”

  Mrs. Walsh? That small sign of respect told me I had him running scared. His biggest fear, I knew, was that I’d ask for names—a tally of who was for me and who was against me.

  “What are they saying?” I asked.

  “Not much,” he lied. “I mean—”

  “Nobody’s saying I was on the Costello payroll? Nobody’s saying I got in so deep there was only one way out?”

  He started hemming and hawing. I cut him short.

  “Because if they are, you can tell them this: I was working Anthony. That’s what the golf games were about. That’s why I put Sarah in his house. I wanted to be the one to read Vincent Costello his rights. Anthony always seemed weak to me. I figured sooner or later he’d let something slip. Something I could use. It was stupid—I see that now—but ambition got the better of me. That promotion should have been mine, not Heidi’s.”

  A motive I figured Randy of all people would understand. I just hoped he’d pass his new intel along.

  By the time we got to the crime scene, the unis had it roped off and locked down. There were enough squad cars along the perimeter to patrol a small town, all with their lights flashing and sirens muted. Lookie-loos were gathered on the bridge above, faces pressed against the chain-link fencing. I hoped a good Florida rain would come along and soak them to the bone.

  “You nervous?” I asked Randy.

  “Me? Why would I be?”

  “Let’s go find out.”

  We got out of the car and walked over to the police tape. The boy in blue who greeted us was almost literally a boy: wiry from the neck down but with the last of his baby fat clinging stubbornly to his cheeks. When he spoke, his voice wobbled like a kazoo. I looked from him to Randy and had a sad thought for the future of Tampa law enforcement.

  “What do we know?” I asked.

  Randy shot me an I’ll-ask-the-questions look.

  “Not much,” the infant cop said, pointing over his shoulder to a cadaver slumped against the underside of the bridge. “No ID, no witnesses that we can find. He must have been here all night. A jogger called it in.”

  “Cause of death?” Randy asked.

  “Well, it looks like someone—or someones—beat him real bad. Then, when he was down, they dropped a cinder block on his head.”

  Randy looked past the tape while he slipped on his latex gloves and scrub booties. I looked with him. It wasn’t a pretty sight. Not for Randy, anyway. Not if he was hoping to clear his first case. A brigade of Tampa’s homeless had decamped in a hurry. There were beer cans and cigarette butts and liquor bottles scattered everywhere. Overturned shopping carts stood among the ruins of a cardboard city. It would take CSI days to sort through it all, and chances were every print they pulled would come back a hit. Young Randy was turning a little green around the gills.

  “I’ve seen worse,” I told him.

  He looked at me as if this was the world’s cruelest practical joke and he knew damn well I was behind it.

  Chapter 23

  “SHOULD WE go take a look at the body?” I asked.

  Randy nodded, then shook himself all over like a diver about to plunge into icy water. But just as we started to duck under the tape, my phone rang. Some
how I knew before I checked: it was Vincent “Old School” Costello.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I have to take this.”

  If anything, Randy looked relieved: nobody wants a chaperone overseeing his first date. I walked back to the sedan, leaned up against the trunk, shoved my work phone into my front pocket, and pulled the burner from my back pocket.

  “I’ve located her,” I said.

  “Then why isn’t she sitting in front of me now?”

  “I know where she is,” I said. “I mean, I know where she’s staying. I’m just waiting for the right moment to pick her up.”

  “The right moment has passed, Detective. I understand why you didn’t bring Sarah to me. She’s your wife. There are demands even I can’t make. But the maid is different. I’ll give you until sundown, like in a western flick. If the girl isn’t in my possession by then, certain disquieting facts—facts that would put your fitness to serve in question—may become public knowledge.”

  Reminding him that I’d collected certain disquieting facts of my own would have won me a one-way trip to the Everglades.

  “I understand,” I said, but by then I was already talking to a dial tone.

  I kept the phone pressed to my ear, sat on the trunk of the sedan with my feet on the bumper, pretending the conversation was still in full swing. I needed a moment to let the sweat dry. Sunset was a tight deadline, especially with a John Doe threatening forced overtime. And Vincent wasn’t the type to make idle promises. Whatever file he had on me would be in the hands of every local newscaster come morning. Vincent wouldn’t worry about my stink blowing back on him. He thought he was invincible. Maybe he was right: forty years is a long reign for a mob boss.

  What I needed now was a reason to slip away, to leave Randy on his own for however long it took me to find Serena. But bringing Serena to Vincent wasn’t an option. As far as I knew, Sarah was Serena’s only friend in the US. I needed a Sarah ally in the box with Heidi, someone who’d swear up and down that Sarah and Anthony were on the best of terms. The only way I could square that with Vincent would be to hand him Anthony’s killer, or someone who could pass for Anthony’s killer—namely, Símon. Then Sarah would be off the hook all the way around, and I could go back to being a cop and nothing but a cop. There were a lot of moving parts, and all of them had to click into place before nightfall.

  Impossible, I told myself. Ditch Randy now, and Heidi would sic Internal Affairs on me with an order to kill.

  And then I finally caught a break. It came in the unlikely form of Marty the Mute, a vagabond I’d busted for drunken loitering almost weekly when I worked Vice. He was tugging on the hem of my blazer. I looked down at him. His beard had gone gray in the last decade, and his wino nose had turned a deeper shade of red, but the waiflike frame remained the same. Even wearing what must have been all the clothes he owned, he couldn’t have weighed more than a buck twenty. I mouthed a fake good-bye into the phone, then hopped down off the sedan.

  “Marty,” I said. “It’s been a minute.”

  He held out his wrists as if to say “Cuff me.” Marty was always the type who preferred prison to the street.

  “Wish I could, buddy, but I’m working a murder.”

  He nodded vigorously, pounded his chest with a tight fist.

  “What, you?” I asked.

  More nodding. Marty’s life hadn’t exactly panned out, but he’d always seemed harmless, even gentle. His rap sheet was a laundry list of petty offenses, and no way could I see him hoisting a cinder block high enough to cave in a man’s skull. I figured he viewed this as his chance to go inside for good.

  “I tell you what,” I said. “Flip your hands over. Let me see your palms.”

  He obliged. Sure enough, the skin was scraped to the bone. I decided to test him.

  “We going to find your prints on that two-by-four?” I asked.

  He looked confused, started drawing a rectangle in the air with his fingers, then mimed lifting something really heavy. There were tears in his eyes. They seemed legit.

  Hot damn, I thought. You really never know.

  “Do yourself a solid,” I told him. “Hold back on the remorse. You’ll get a longer sentence.”

  I cuffed him, read him his rights, put him in the back of the nearest squad car, and signaled for one of the uniforms to go fetch Randy. A few minutes later, my junior colleague came stomping up to me, looking as if his little world was about to implode.

  “I thought you were my partner for the day,” he said. “So far all you’ve done is take a phone call and drag me away from the scene.”

  I got the feeling he was rehearsing his report to Heidi.

  “Sorry, but I was busy solving your case for you,” I said.

  “What?”

  I jerked a thumb toward the squad car. Marty looked to be singing silently to himself in the back seat.

  “He confessed?”

  “Not in so many words.”

  I laid it out for him, told him about my history with Marty, said he’d find corroborating fingerprints all over the cinder block. Then I asked for my reward.

  “The collar’s all yours,” I said. “But I need a favor.”

  Randy left me the sedan, drove back in the squad car with Marty and the uni who’d greeted us at the scene. I stuck a siren on the hood, made it crosstown in record time. I was sweating as though it was mid-August, and my head was spinning from the all-nighter, but at least I had the presence of mind to dial the animal hospital and make sure Símon’s hangover hadn’t turned into a sick day. It hadn’t. If Serena was at the apartment, then she didn’t have her big brother around to protect her.

  An elderly woman pushing a grocery cart let me into the building without asking any questions. I hightailed it up two flights, rang Símon’s bell to the tune of “Pop Goes the Weasel,” hoping to sound playful and innocent. Serena didn’t answer, so for the second time in as many days I broke my way into Símon’s condo. The glasses from last night’s tryst were sitting in the sink alongside the morning’s breakfast dishes. Otherwise, the place looked just as tidy and unlived-in. I started for the back rooms.

  “Serena,” I called. “Siesta’s over. Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

  No response. No stirring that I could hear.

  “Polícia,” I tried. “We need to talk.”

  I counted to ten, then started opening doors. Spare room empty, bathroom empty, bedroom half ransacked but also empty. I made a beeline for the balcony. There was a newspaper and a half drunk cup of coffee on the table where I’d found English on Your Lunch Break the night before. The small, tan duffel bag brimming with Serena’s things was gone, too.

  My gut started churning. I dropped onto one of the wrought iron chairs, held my breath until the nausea passed. I’d missed her. She’d been here, and I’d missed her, and the only place I knew she might be headed now was roughly a thousand miles away, a country where even the Costellos had no pull.

  Chapter 24

  Sarah Roberts-Walsh

  October 15

  3:00 p.m.

  Interview Room C

  THE BEST shower in the world is the one that’s long overdue. I watched the blood and dirt, and whatever else had clung to me since I woke up on that boulder, swirl around the drain of Doris’s claw-foot tub and vanish. Then I stood under the spray awhile longer because that warm, pounding water felt so damn good.

  Afterward, I changed into a DINER THINGS IN LIFE T-shirt and a pair of jeans Doris said she never wore because the fit was too snug. Downstairs, in her sprawling farmhouse living room, my hostess greeted me with a cold beer.

  “Let’s take a load off,” she said, pointing to a pair of overstuffed recliners. “The dinner rush won’t start for an hour or so. I’ll go fetch us some snacks.”

  I sunk deep into my chair, sat looking the room over. It reminded me of an enormous booth at a high-end flea market. Besides an abundance of antique furniture, there was a faded Navajo rug spread across the center of the f
loor, a wagon wheel chandelier hanging from the ceiling, a bookcase crammed with hardback encyclopedias and well-worn dime novels. Collections of cacti occupied every windowsill; randomly placed figurines and kachina dolls seemed to be crawling all over one another atop the fireplace mantel. Above the mantel was a very formal portrait of a man with a thick red mustache sporting a flannel hunting jacket. I wondered who he was. I wondered how long Doris had lived here.

  She came back carrying a bowl of pitted olives and a glass canister filled with pretzel rods, set them on a TV-tray-style table between the recliners, and took her seat.

  “Now, I’m not one to pry,” she said, “but since you’re a guest in my home, I need at least some of your story. Starting with who or what you’re running from.”

  It was a fair request. I started out slow and guarded, but before long I forgot who I was talking to; it was as if I was recapping it all for myself, trying to make sense of how I wound up in a place I’d never heard of, running from a crime I didn’t commit. Which isn’t to say I laid out every detail, but I did give her more than the broad strokes, more than I should have considering that we’d only just met. Once I caught myself, I changed the subject. I pointed to the almost life-size portrait above the fireplace.

  “Your husband?” I asked.

  “Was,” she said. “I’ve been widowed five years.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why? You didn’t kill him. Since we’re sharing, I’ll tell you who did. Turns out we have a common enemy. It was the cops murdered my Jeffrey.”

  “The cops?”

  “Right on this highway, about three exits east of here. They tried to make it look like he’d done it himself, but I’m no fool.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I just waited.

  “Jeffrey ran a shipping company. Six drivers, six trucks. Cops around here are as crooked as the letter s. They want a piece of everything, and God help you if you won’t pay. Well, Jeffrey wouldn’t pay. So one morning I got a call. Jeffrey had one belt too many and drove his semi into a gantry pole. Jeffrey was a drunk, so that sounded about right. But then I went down to the scene. In addition to being a drunk—or maybe because he was a drunk—Jeffrey had a gut I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Acid reflux, hiatal hernia, something called a Schatzki’s ring—there wasn’t anything right with that man’s stomach. Only liquor he drank was tequila. Agave tequila, ’cause he couldn’t tolerate wheat or barley or rye or any of it.