by Harlan Coben
"First off, we deny that he had anything to do with the death of this felon--"
She put her hand up. "Save it."
"It doesn't matter," I said. "You can make all the threats you want. I don't know anything."
"Otto didn't believe that, did he?"
Bob's voice: "Where is she?"
Mulholland leaned close to me. "Are you dumb enough to think this is the end of it? You think they'll just forget about you now? They underestimated you the first time. They won't do that again."
"Who are 'they'?" I asked.
"Some seriously bad men," he said. "That's all you need to know."
"That makes no sense," Benedict said.
"Listen to me closely. They can find Natalie first," Mulholland said, "or we can. It's your choice."
Again I said, "I really don't know anything."
Which was true enough. But more than that, Mulholland had left off one last option, much as it might seem like a long shot.
I could find her.
Chapter 24
Benedict drove. "You want to fill me in?"
"It's a long story," I said.
"It's a long drive. Speaking of which, where am I going to drop you off?"
Good question. I couldn't go back to campus, not only because I was unwelcome, but as Detectives Mulholland and Telesco reminded me, some very bad people might be interested in finding me. I wondered whether Jed and Cookie were part of the same bad people as Bob and Otto or if I had two different groups of bad people after me. Doubtful. Bob and Otto were cool professionals. Grabbing me had been another day at the office. Jed and Cookie were bumbling amateurs--unsure, angry, scared. I wasn't sure what that meant, but I suspected that it was important.
"I'm not sure."
"I'll start back toward campus, okay? You fill me in on what's going on."
So I did. Benedict kept his eyes on the road, nodding every once in a while. His face remained set, his hands always at ten and two. When I finished he said nothing for several seconds. Then: "Jake?"
"Yes?"
"You need to stop this," Benedict said.
"I'm not sure I can."
"A lot of people want to kill you."
"I was never popular to begin with," I said.
"True enough, but you've stumbled into some serious doo-doo."
"You humanities professors and your big words."
"I'm not joking," he said.
I knew that.
"These people in Vermont," Benedict said. "Who were they?"
"Old friends, in a way. I mean, that's the weirdest part. Jed and Cookie were both there the first time I met Natalie."
"And now they want to kill you?"
"Jed thinks that I had something to do with Todd Sanderson's murder. But I can't figure out why he'd care or how he knew Todd. There has to be some connection between them."
"A connection between this Jed guy and Todd Sanderson?"
"Yes."
"The answer is obvious, isn't it?"
I nodded. "Natalie," I said.
"Yep."
I thought about that. "The first time I saw Natalie, she was sitting next to Jed. I even had a passing thought that maybe they were dating."
"Well then," Benedict said, "now it sounds like all three of you have something of a connection."
"Meaning?"
"Carnal knowledge of Natalie."
I didn't like that. "You don't know that for sure," I protested weakly.
"May I state the obvious?"
"If you must."
"I've known my share of women," Benedict said. "At the risk of bragging, some might even call me an expert on the subject."
I made a face. "Risk?"
"Some women are just trouble. You understand what I'm saying?"
"Trouble."
"Right."
"And I guess you're going to tell me Natalie is one of these women."
"You, Jed, Todd," Benedict said. "No offense, but there is only one explanation for all this."
"And that is?"
"Your Natalie is a big ol' can of crazy."
I frowned. We drove a little more.
"I have that guest cottage I use as an office," Benedict said. "You can stay there until this all cools down."
"Thank you."
We drove a little more.
"Jake?"
"Yeah?"
"We always fall harder for the crazy ones," Benedict said. "That's our problem as men. We all claim we hate the drama, but we don't."
"That's deep, Benedict."
"Can I ask you one more thing?"
"Sure."
I thought I saw his grip tighten on the wheel. "How did you happen to see Todd's obituary?"
I turned to face him. "What?"
"His obituary. How did you see it?"
I wondered if the confusion was showing on my face. "It was on the front page of the college website. What exactly are you trying to ask?"
"Nothing. I was just wondering, that's all."
"I told you about it in my office--and you encouraged me to go down to the funeral, remember?"
"I do," Benedict said. "And now I'm encouraging you to let this go."
I didn't reply. We drove for a while in silence. Benedict interrupted it.
"One other thing that's bothering me," he said.
"What's that?"
"How do you think the police found you at Natalie's sister's house?"
I had wondered the same thing, but now I realized the answer was obvious. "Shanta."
"She knew where you were?"
I explained about my calling her and my stupidity in keeping the disposable phone. If the police can track you by your phone, it stood to reason that if they knew the number (which would have popped up on Shanta's caller ID), they could track you by a disposable phone too. I still had it in my pocket and debated chucking it out the window. No need. The cops weren't the ones I was worried about anymore.
After President Tripp requested my departure, I had packed a suitcase and my laptop and stored them in my office at Clark House. I wondered whether someone might be, I don't know, staking out my campus house or that office. It seemed like overkill, but what the heck. Benedict had the idea of having us park far away. We looked to see if there was anything suspicious. There wasn't.
"We can send a student in to pick up your stuff," he said.
I shook my head. "I already got one student hurt in this."
"There's no risk here."
"Still."
Clark House was closed. I carefully entered via the back entrance. I grabbed my stuff and hurried back toward Benedict's car. No one shot me. Score one for the good guys. Benedict drove to the back of his property and dropped me off at the guest cottage.
"Thank you," I said.
"I got a bunch of papers to grade. You'll be all right?"
"Sure."
"You should see a doctor about your head."
I did have a residual headache. If it was from some kind of concussion, exhaustion, stress, or some combination of those, I had no idea. Either way I didn't think a doctor could help. I thanked Benedict again and settled into the room. I took out my laptop and set it up on the desk.
It was time, I thought, to do some cyber-sleuthing.
You may wonder what qualifies me to be a top-notch investigator or how I would know how to cyber-sleuth. I'm not and I don't. But I know how to type stuff in a Google search field. That was what I started to do now.
First, I searched for a date: May 24, six years ago.
That had been the date on the surveillance photograph the NYPD had shown me. It stood to reason that whatever had happened that day, well, it was probably a crime. It might have been reported in the news. Was that a long shot? I guess. But it could be a start.
When I hit the return button, a bunch of hits about a tornado in Kansas popped up first. I would need to narrow this down. I added "NYC" into the search field and hit the return button again. The first story told me that the New
York Rangers had lost to the Buffalo Sabres 2 to 1. Second link: the New York Mets beat the Arizona Diamondbacks 5 to 3. Man, we are a sports-obsessed society.
I finally located a site that ran daily New York newspapers and their archives. Over the past two weeks, the front pages of many newspapers were discussing the brazen string of bank robberies in New York City. They hit at night and left no clue and had earned the nickname "the Invisibles." Catchy. Then I hit the link for the archives for May 24 six years ago and started cyber-paging through the metro sections.
Top stories for that day: An armed man attacked the French consulate. Police took down a heroin ring operated by a Ukrainian gang. A cop named Jordan Smith accused of rape was having his day in court. A house fire in Staten Island had been deemed suspicious. A hedge fund manager from Solem Hamilton had been indicted in some kind of Ponzi scheme. A state comptroller was accused of ethics violations.
This didn't help. Or maybe it did. Maybe Natalie had been part of the Ukrainian gang. Maybe she knew the hedge fund manager--the surveillance photo looked like the lobby of an office building--or the state comptroller. Where was I on that day six years ago? May 24. School would have been coming to a close. In fact, classes would probably be over right around then.
Six years ago.
My life had been in turmoil, as Benedict had recently reminded me at the Library Bar. My father had died of a heart attack a month earlier. My thesis wasn't going well. May 24. That would have been right around the time Professor Trainor had thrown his graduation party with the underage drinking. I had wanted him seriously censured, putting a bit of tension between Professor Hume and myself.
But my life wasn't the point here. Natalie's was.
The surveillance photograph had been taken May 24. I thought about that for a moment. Suppose there had been some kind of crime or incident on May 24. Okay, right, that was certainly the possibility I had been going on, but now I was following through on the thought. If the incident took place on May 24, when would the papers report it?
May 25, not May 24.
This was not a brilliant insight, but it did make some sense. I found the papers for May 25 and again searched the metro sections. Top stories: Local philanthropist Archer Minor was gunned down. A fire in Chelsea kills two. An unarmed teen was shot by police. Man kills his ex-wife. High school principal arrested for embezzling school funds.
This was a waste of time.
I closed my eyes and rubbed them. Giving up sounded really good right now. I could lie down and close my eyes. I could keep my promise and honor the wishes, it seemed, of the woman I thought was my true love. Of course, as Benedict had pointed out, maybe Todd and Jed thought that Natalie was their true love. A flush of something primordial--let's call it jealousy--whooshed through me.
Sorry, I didn't buy it.
Jed wasn't attacking me as a jealous lover. Todd . . . I didn't know what the hell was going on there, but it didn't matter. I couldn't back away. I wasn't built that way--who is, really? How could any reasonable person live with so many questions left unanswered?
A small voice in my head replied: Well, at least you'd live.
Didn't matter. Couldn't be done. I had been attacked, threatened, assaulted, arrested, and I had even killed a man . . .
Whoa, hold the phone. I had killed a man--and now I knew his name.
I leaned forward and googled a name: Otto Devereaux.
I expected to find an obituary on top. I didn't. The first hit was a forum for "gangster enthusiasts." Yes, for real. I clicked into the discussion boards, but you had to create a profile. I quickly did.
There was a topic called "RIP, OTTO." I hit the link: Holy crap! Otto Devereaux, one of the toughest mob hit men and extortionists, got his neck snapped! His body was dumped on the side of Saw Mill Parkway like some piece of garbage. Respekt, Otto. You knew how to kill, bro.
I shook my head. What next--a fan site for convicted pedophiles?
There were about a dozen comments from people remembering some of Otto's most horrible deeds and, yes, praising his work. They say that you can find any sort of depravity on the Internet. I had stumbled across a site devoted to admirers of violent gangsters. Some world.
On the fourteenth comment, I hit pay dirt:
Otto is being laid to rest at the Franklin Funeral Home in Queens this Saturday. The funeral is private, so you can't go to pay your respects, but admirers can still send flowers. Here's the address.
The post listed an address in Flushing, Queens.
There was a sketchpad on the desk. I grabbed a pencil and leaned back with it. I wrote down Natalie's name on the left. I wrote down Todd's beneath it. I jotted down other names--mine, Jed, Cookie, Bob, Otto--any name I could come up with at all. Delia Sanderson; Eban Trainor; Natalie's father, Aaron Kleiner, and mother, Sylvia Avery; Julie Pottham; Malcolm Hume even. All of them. Then on the right side of the page, I drew a timeline from top to bottom.
Go back as far as I could. Where did this first start?
I didn't know.
So back to the beginning.
Twenty-five years ago, Natalie's father, who taught here at Lanford, had run off with a student. According to Julie Pottham, dear old Dad had relocated and remarried. The only problem was, there was no sign of him anywhere. How had Shanta put it? Like father, like daughter. Both Natalie and her father had seemingly vanished into thin air. Both were completely off the grid.
I drew a line connecting Natalie and her father.
How could I learn more about this connection? I thought about what Julie had said. Her information about her father's remarriage came from her mother. Maybe Mom knew more than she was saying. Maybe she had an address for Dad. Either way, I needed to talk to her. But how? She was in a home. That was what Julie had said. I didn't know which home and somehow I doubted that Julie would be forthcoming. Still, it couldn't be too difficult to track Mrs. Avery down.
I circled Sylvia Avery, Natalie's mother.
Back to the timeline. I moved up through the years until I reached twenty years ago when Todd Sanderson was a student. He had nearly been expelled after his father's suicide. I thought back to his student file and his obituary. Both had mentioned that Todd had made amends by launching a charity.
I wrote down Fresh Start on my pad.
One, Fresh Start had been birthed on this very campus in the wake of Todd's personal turmoil. Two, six years ago, Natalie told her sister that she and Todd were going to travel around the world doing good works for Fresh Start. Three, Delia Sanderson, Todd's real wife, told me that Fresh Start had been her husband's passion. Four, Professor Hume, my very own beloved mentor, had been the faculty adviser during Fresh Start's creation.
I started tapping the paper with my pencil. Fresh Start was all over this. Whatever "this" was.
I needed to look into that charity. If Natalie had indeed traveled for Fresh Start, someone there might at the very least have a lead on where she was. Again I started doing web searches. Fresh Start helped people get new starts, though the work seemed a bit unfocused. They worked with kids who needed cleft palates repaired, for example. They helped with political dissidents who needed asylum. They helped people with bankruptcy issues. They helped you find new employment, no matter what issues you've had in the past.
In short, as the mantra on the bottom of the home page said, "We help anyone who truly, desperately needs a fresh start."
I frowned. Could that be more vague?
There was a link to donate. Fresh Start was a 501(c)(3) charity, so all contributions were tax deductible. No officers were listed--no mention of Todd Sanderson or Malcolm Hume or anyone. There was no office address. The phone number had an 843 area code--South Carolina. I dialed the number. An answering machine picked up. I didn't leave a message.
I found a company online that investigates various charities "so that you may give with confidence." For a small fee, they would send you a complete report on any charity, including an IRS Form 990 (whatever that was) and
a "comprehensive analysis with full financial data, mission-driven decisions, officers' biographies, charity holdings, money spent on fund-raising and all other activities." I paid the small fee. An e-mail came to me saying that the report would be in my e-mail the following day.
I could wait that long. My head throbbed like a stubbed toe. My craving for sleep was overwhelming, emanating from the marrow of my bones. Tomorrow morning I would head to Otto Devereaux's funeral, but for now, the body needed rest and nourishment. I took a shower, grabbed a bite to eat, and slept the sleep of the dead, which, based on what was going on around me, seemed apropos.
Chapter 25
Benedict leaned into the car window of his own car. "I don't like this."
I didn't bother responding. We had been through this a dozen times already. "Thanks for letting me borrow your car."
I had left my car with its altered license plate on the street in Greenfield. At some point I would have to figure out a way to retrieve it, but it could wait.
"I can go with you," Benedict said.
"You have a class."
Benedict didn't argue. We never miss class. I had hurt enough students, in ways small and big, by taking up this bizarre quest. I wouldn't allow more to pay even a minor price.
"So your plan is to show up at this gangster's funeral?"
"More or less."
"Sounds like less to me."
Hard to argue. I planned on staking out Otto Devereaux's funeral. My hope was that I could somehow learn why he attacked me, who he worked for, why they were searching for Natalie. I wasn't big on the details--like how I'd accomplish this--but I had no job right now and sitting around idly waiting to be found by Bob or Jed didn't seem like a terrific alternative either.
Better to be proactive. That was what I would tell my students.
Route 95 in Connecticut and New York is basically a series of construction areas masquerading as an interstate highway. Still I made decent time. The Franklin Funeral Home was located on Northern Boulevard in the Flushing section of Queens. For some odd reason, the picture on their website was of Central Park's beloved Bow Bridge, a place you've seen lovers get married in pretty much every romantic comedy that takes place in Manhattan. I had no idea why they had that, as opposed to the photographs of their actual funeral home, until I pulled up to it.
Some final resting spot.
The Franklin Funeral Home looked as though it'd been built to house two dentists' offices with maybe room for a proctologist, circa 1978. The facade was the yellowing stucco of a smoker's teeth. Weddings, parties, celebrations often reflect the celebrants. Funerals rarely do. Death is truly the great equalizer, so much so that all funeral services, except the ones in movies, end up being the same. They are always colorless and rote and offer not so much solace and comfort as formula and ritual.
