Now You See Her

by James Patterson

  “Seventeen years ago, this person abducted my wife and killed her, and he doesn’t even have the semblance of humanity to tell me where he dumped her body so I can have a proper funeral,” Peter said calmly. “What do I do with that, Al? Forgive and forget? My pain and the pain of all of the victims’ families will never go away. Dante said that hell is the place where all forgotten things go. That’s exactly where I want to put Harris. I just want him to be forgotten by me, by the other families, and by every other human being on this planet.”

  “What are your plans now?” Al wanted to know.

  “I, and the other family members in our organization, have learned that death penalty opponents are scheduling protests, so we will be front-row center to make sure that our voice, and the voices of the people that Harris truly disenfranchised, are heard.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Fournier. I wish you well, sir,” Al said. “Up next is Meredith with some money-saving travel tips.”

  Chapter 63

  MY AIRPORT CAR let me out in front of Rockefeller Center on the corner of Fifth and 50th and kept going. I’d asked the driver to go ahead to my Lexington Avenue office building to pick up the Harris case file and wait for me there. After my aggravating meet and greet with Harris’s mom, I would hustle over to my office and, by some miracle, make my flight.

  I spotted Fouhy standing in the crowd in front of the 10 Rock Center window where they taped the Today show.

  Beside him, a large black woman wearing a YES WE DID ball cap was holding a large handwritten sign:

  FREE JUSTIN HARRIS!

  DON’T KILL MY SON!

  “Mrs. Harris. Hi, I’m Nina Bloom,” I said, coming through the crowd.

  Mrs. Harris almost knocked me down as she barreled into me, wrapping her arms around me in a full embrace. She pressed her smiling face against my cheek. She seemed enthusiastic, strangely upbeat despite her son’s predicament.

  “Oh, she’s a good one. I can feel it, Mr. Fouhy,” she said in a honey-smooth Southern accent, her soft brown eyes staring hard into mine. “You’re going to save my Justin.”

  “I’m going to, um, try,” I said, eyeing Fouhy for help.

  “Try won’t do, Ms. Bloom,” Mrs. Harris said, rapidly shaking her head at me. “Try won’t do. You are going to do it, and that’s an end to it. It’s going to end with you. There’s no other choice.”

  She released me and rummaged through the brimming Duane Reade bag beside her and showed me a picture. It was of a teenaged Justin in a drum major high school uniform. There was another one of him on a stage playing with the rest of an all-black marching band.

  “That was at Carnegie Hall for a Wynton Marsalis tribute.” She laughed as she stared at the photo. “All them lessons and practicin’. The neighbors used to call the police twice a month. That was the proudest moment of my life.”

  Then she placed something cold and metal into my hand. At first I thought it was a coin, but it was a military medal, a bronze octagon with a green, white, and blue ribbon.

  “Justin earned this medal when he responded to a helicopter accident during his Ranger training. Last time I checked, serial killers don’t go around pulling bodies from burning wreckage. You know, I used to believe in the system. That the truth would come out. But every day, it just got worse. I wish I knew the words to express how wrong this is, the legal terms and such. You’re going to have to do it for me, Ms. Bloom.”

  Mrs. Harris let out a breath, trying to keep herself composed.

  “That’s why I needed to meet you. To try to make you feel what I know. So you can know Justin like I know Justin. He didn’t do it. Justin isn’t a monster. It’s all lies. All of it. Justin was my best child, my nicest boy. His brother was the mean one. His brother would tussle with him. But Justin would never strike him back. He’s incapable of hurting anyone.”

  “Ms. Bloom is going to do everything she can, Mrs. Harris. Now she really has a plane to catch,” Carl Fouhy said gently.

  “Wait, please,” Mrs. Harris said, without taking her eyes off me. “Do you have a child, Ms. Bloom?”

  “A daughter,” I said.

  “What’s her name?” she said with a smile.

  “Emma,” I said, smiling back.

  “What would you do if people had Emma and were about to kill her?”

  “Everything I could,” I answered immediately.

  Mrs. Harris let out a loud breath. “Good,” she said. She nodded. “Justin is in good hands. My prayers have been answered. My baby is safe now.”

  I tried to hand back Justin’s medal. Mrs. Harris shook her head.

  “No. You hold on to that,” she said as a tear, a single tear, slid over the soft brown curve of her cheek. “Don’t lose it, now.”

  I stared at the medal, then at Fouhy. I could see why he’d wanted me to come. The son of a bitch wanted me motivated, emotionally involved, not just going through the motions. He wanted me to see that Mrs. Harris was flesh and blood, a good, warm person and a desperate, loving mother who would do anything not to lose her child.

  Mission accomplished, I thought, my own eyes wet as I walked away.

  Chapter 64

  IT WAS FIVE TO NINE when Peter Fournier walked out the tunnel-like NBC studio exit onto West 50th Street beside Rockefeller Center.

  “Baby, you did so good!” his wife, Vicki, cooed when he opened his ringing cell. “I still can’t believe it. It’s like I’m dreaming. You having a chat with Al Roker, like he’s your best buddy. I would have passed out. Let me put the boys on.”

  “Dad, you rocked!” Scott said.

  “Yes. That’s right. My dad is Mr. Cool!” Mike yelled in the background.

  “Thanks, guys. I love you, too. I’ll tell you all about it when I get back to the hotel,” Peter said.

  Peter smiled as he closed his cell. He had done well. He thought he might be nervous about going on live national TV, but once the red camera light came on, he’d felt perfectly fine, like himself, calm, in charge. He’d always suspected that he’d be good on TV. Now he knew. In another life, he could have been an actor, a talk show host. He had the looks, the charm.

  Was it narcissistic if you knew you actually were the biggest swinging dick in the room? he wondered. Any room? Every room?

  Flying under the radar was his usual game plan, but in this case he’d taken a calculated risk because there was business involved.

  One of the victims’ group members, Arty Tivolli, was an elderly multimillionaire hotel chain owner from Palm Beach. After befriending the silver-haired gent with bottomless pockets, Peter had persuaded him to take a serious look at bidding on Key West’s only run-down golf course and turning it into a massive luxury resort.

  For the last year, he’d been working with Arty’s company, the Tivolli Group, introducing them around to the “right” city council and zoning board members. If all went as planned, Peter’s slice of the proceedings would be massive, a seven-figure windfall. It would be the most money he’d ever made in his life. Well, at least legally.

  So in actuality, his Today show appearance had exactly squat to do with his desire to steal Matt Lauer’s job or to mourn his dearly departed other half, Jeanine. His victim group activism and nationally televised righteous indignation at Justin Harris were all for Arty, who had lost his only daughter to the Jump Killer in 1991.

  Peter, still jazzed, looked out at midtown Manhattan’s swirling chaos of delivery trucks backing up and double-parked taxis honking. It was morning rush now, and rock concert–sized crowds of businesspeople and hard hats hustled past him up and down the cavernous side street.

  What absolute suckers, he thought. Get to work, you ball-less serfs. Step to it!

  Though his cell phone camera stunk, he decided to take some pictures with it anyway to show the kids. He snapped a shot of the famous television studio’s door, a passing mounted cop, a bike messenger across the street smoking a cigarette.

  He was about to take a shot of a pigeon pecking at a doughnut in
the gutter when a blond woman flashed out from the east corner of the building by Rockefeller Center. There was something so New York about the tall head turner: her creamy thigh, her get-the-fuck-out-of-my-way pace, her just-so salon-colored platinum hair.

  Then she turned to her right to check the approaching traffic, and Peter’s serene smile faded as he lowered the phone.

  All he could do was watch in silence as his dead wife, Jeanine, stepped across the street.

  Chapter 65

  “DAMMIT,” I said, checking the time on my iPhone as I cornered onto Fifth Avenue. I needed to be on my way to the airport already. My driver, waiting at my office, was going to have to floor it and maybe eat some red lights on our way out to JFK if I was going to make my flight.

  I thought about calling and having him come back around onto Fifth to pick me up, but then I decided against it. Midtown morning rush hour was so insanely gridlocked and unpredictable, it was actually quicker for me to go to him on foot.

  I was picking up the pace, crossing to the east side of the street, when my iPhone jingled its incoming text alert.

  I glanced at the screen, fearing another delay, but then let out a breath when I saw that the message was from Em.

  Who else? I could almost see her there on her early free period in the Brearley library illegally texting. Her books open in front of her, her phone under the table.

  I thumbed the View button on the touchscreen.

  “Willlllsonnnnnn!!” her text read.

  Despite my full-blown hurry, I smiled. Then I laughed out loud. It was a reference to the stupidest and our hands-down-favorite part of the movie Cast Away, in which Tom Hanks, a plane crash survivor, nonsensically befriends a Wilson volleyball.

  It was also our way of saying hi. All day long, Emma and I texted each other silly inside jokes like that.

  There was another jingle as another text came in.

  “Worst 80s band?” Em wanted to know. “REO Speedwagon?”

  Since I’d actually been there, I had to disagree: “Close,” I texted back as I walked. It was a glacial process for someone over the age of sixteen. “Culture Club. Their hit song was ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.’ The answer was yes. Google ‘Boy George’ if you don’t believe me.”

  “Fine,” Em texted back in a finger snap. “Movie quote throwdown! Toy Story. ‘That’s not flying. That’s falling with style.’ ”

  “What does a space ranger actually do?” I texted her back pretty quickly this time. Em would be proud.

  Then I pocketed my phone as a sudden lump caught in my throat. After a moment, I started crying. As I walked, I started sobbing uncontrollably right there in front of Fifth Avenue’s tourist shops and luggage stores and overpriced pizzerias.

  Because I suddenly realized, Em actually wouldn’t be proud of me.

  What would Em think of me when everything came out? I wondered, snorting into the lapel of my faux Burberry coat. When she found out that I’d been lying to her ever since she could walk? That I was an impostor? That someone had died because of me?

  Who was I kidding here? The idea that I could exonerate Harris in a week while keeping the house of cards that was my life from quickly becoming a game of 52 pickup was a tall order even for someone with my extensive creative skills. I’d dodged a bullet at Rockefeller Center, but it was just the beginning, I knew. The deeper I went into this, the more I would be at risk. What the hell was I doing? I had one mother of a skeleton in my closet, and here I was about to put the key in the lock and turn.

  My phone text jingled again.

  “There’s a snake in my boots,” Em had typed.

  There’s a snake in your family, I thought, shaking my head at the phone.

  Chapter 66

  PETER MOVED SMOOTHLY with the morning rush hour crowd on Fifth Avenue, a half block behind Jeanine.

  He couldn’t decide what surprised him more. The fact that Jeanine was actually alive or how incredible she still looked. She was what now? Forty? Yet, look at her—stylish, confident, model thin, regal. Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

  Despite the fact that he’d only glanced at her, Peter knew it was her, didn’t have the slightest doubt. He knew now that he’d seen her at the Yankees game as well.

  The unlikeliness of coincidences didn’t matter to him. He paid close attention to things and made it a point to remember everything and everyone. Especially faces. The way he operated, you forgot a face at the peril of your life.

  He was fifty, yet his senses and instincts were as sharp as ever. Bravo, Jeanine, he thought, as he trailed her. Not too many people walking around on this earth could brag about putting one over on Peter Fournier.

  In fact, Jeanine, Peter reflected, besides you, there’s nobody at all.

  He ran to catch up as she turned the next left around a corner. Dead-ending the shadowed side street two blocks to the east was a massive, dirty old building: Grand Central Terminal. He and his family had visited it on their first day up here.

  Tunnels, he thought. Darkness, speeding trains, crowds. A place where accidents happened. Or random acts of violence.

  He had his small police backup Glock in his ankle holster, but since the station was crawling with antiterror cops, there was no way he could use it. That left the illegal spring-loaded blackjack he kept snug in the small of his back, ever since his days on the Boston PD, or his belt buckle knife. The knife, then. He could have it out and in and back as quick as a coin trick. Open the femoral in her leg and keep going. He began to visualize it. Don’t even make eye contact. Flank her, stab, and saw.

  He relished what he had to do now about as much as a carpenter relished using a hammer to hit a nail. There was no glee. There was just brutal necessity, covering his margins, business. He was no animal. He was just one of the rare breed of men who were born unafraid to wield violence as the efficient tool that it was.

  A soft, aching warmth filled his chest as he remembered the outrageous romantic times he had shared with Jeanine. The way she looked coming out of the Gulf with the water sluicing off her tan, incredible body. The bullhorn outside the bathroom was a classic. The cut-your-throat creases she used to iron into his uniform shirts.

  No question, of all his dead wives, she was by far his favorite.

  Heading down the slightly sloping street toward Grand Central, Peter shook his head sadly at his runaway wife.

  “Oh, Mermaid, we had ourselves some times, didn’t we?” he whispered, keeping his eyes centered on the back of her fancy ivory spring coat.

  What a shame.

  Chapter 67

  I WAS ONLY MILDLY MELTING DOWN by the time I came off Vanderbilt into Grand Central. I’d managed to stop crying at least by the time I hit the west marble staircase above the main concourse.

  It never failed to amaze. Cream-colored marble everywhere, the famous tsunami-sized windows, the constellation mural on the massive green ceiling.

  Walking through its old-world elegance in my business clothes, I always felt instantly classy, a true New Yorker. I’d often pretend I was in an old movie, Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest.

  Thirty seconds later, I was across the massive cathedral-like space in the long corridor that led toward Lexington Avenue. The mall was lined with businesses. I passed a jewelry store, a boutique, a shoeshine stand, a Starbucks.

  I dodged all the way to the left as a fresh batch of people started spilling into the corridor and up the stairway that connected to the Lexington Avenue subway lines.

  But not far enough, apparently. I winced in pain as some Wall Street jackass in a pinstriped suit rushing past stepped on my right foot.

  My toes felt severed. I stopped against the wall in the crowded passageway and slipped off my open-toe pump to count my toenails.

  “Excuse you,” I yelled, pissed and in pain.

  But I suddenly wasn’t angry anymore. The pain in my foot faded, instantly forgotten.

  At the mouth of the swirling corridor was a tall man. He
was handsome and had short salt-and-pepper hair and blue eyes. He stood like a rock in the stream of the crowd, and he was staring at me.

  I ripped my eyes away and stuffed my foot back into my shoe. Hobbled and blind with fear, I pointed myself forward toward the exit and broke into a full-out finish-line sprint.

  It couldn’t be. It shouldn’t be.

  But it was.

  Peter had found me at last.

  Chapter 68

  SHIT, PETER THOUGHT, flattening himself against the wall next to a pay phone. He’d been following too close. Jeanine had stopped. She’d looked back. Had she seen him? It was hard to tell with the trillion-people march going on in the passageway between them. It was a definite possibility.

  He could have whipped himself. The last thing Jeanine would have been expecting after all this time was a visit from him. The element of surprise was critical. But he’d crowded her and blown the whole thing.

  What the hell had gotten into him? What happened to that cold patience and reserve he was so proud of?

  Too late to cry about it. He needed to move.

  He counted to three and then chanced a look back up the wide concourse. He thought she might have headed down the subway entrance on the right, but then he thought he caught a flash of ivory going out through the distant exit door.

  What the…? She was leaving? he thought, as he started to run. She’d only cut through the station? So she wasn’t getting on a train?

  “Yo, slow down!” someone scolded him.

  Peter turned. In the doorway of a camera store was an NYPD cop decked out in full antiterrorist gear, bomb vest, M16. There was a no-nonsense expression on his face as he looked Peter over. He didn’t need that kind of scrutiny. Not now. Instead of giving the cop the finger like he wanted, Peter slowed immediately, nodding to his fellow peace officer with an apologetic wave.