Jeffrey Deaver - Triangle

Copyright © 2001 by Jeffery Deaver All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

“M aybe I’ll go to Baltimore.”

“You mean…” She looked at him. “To see…”

“Doug,” he answered.

“Really?” Mo Anderson asked and looked carefully at her fingernails, which she was painting bright red. He didn’t like the color but he didn’t say anything about it. She wouldn’t listen to him anyway.

“I think it’d be fun,” he continued.

“Oh, it would be,” she said quickly. “Doug’s a fun guy.”

“Sure is,” Pete Anderson said. He sat across from Mo on the front porch of their split- level house in suburban Westchester County. The month was June and the air was thick with the smell of the jasmine that Mo had planted earlier in the spring. Pete used to like that smell. Now, though, it made him sick to his stomach.

Mo inspected her nails for streaks and pretended to be sort of bored with the idea of him going to see her friend Doug. But she was a lousy actor; Pete could tell she was really excited by the idea and he knew why. But he just watched the lightning bugs and kept quiet. Unlike Mo, he could act.

“When would you go?” she asked.

“This weekend, I guess. Saturday.”

They were silent and sipped their drinks, the ice clunking dully on the plastic glasses. It was the first day of summer and the sky wasn’t completely dark yet even though it was nearly nine o’clock in the evening. There must’ve been a thousand lightning bugs in their front yard.

“I know I kinda said I’d help you clean up the garage,” he said, wincing a little, looking guilty.

“No, I think you should go. I think it’d be a good idea,” she said.

I know you think it’d be a good idea, Pete thought. But he didn’t say this to her. Lately he ’d been thinking a lot of things and not saying them.

Pete was sweating-more from the excitement than from the heat-and he wiped the sweat off his face and his round buzz-cut blond hair with his napkin.

The phone rang and Mo went to answer it.

She came back and said, “It’s your father, ” in that sour voice of hers that Pete hated. She sat back down and didn’t say anything else, just picked up her drink and examined her nails again.

Pete got up and went into the kitchen. His father lived in Wisconsin, not far from Lake Michigan. He loved the man and wished they lived closer together. Mo, though, didn’t like him one bit and always raised a stink when Pete wanted to go visit. She never went with him. Pete was never exactly sure what the problem was between Mo and his dad. But it made him mad that she treated the man so badly and would never talk to Pete about it.

And he was mad too that Mo seemed to put him in the middle of things. Sometimes Pete even felt guilty he had a father.

He had a nice talk but hung up after only ten minutes because he felt Mo didn’t want him to be on the phone.

Pete walked back out onto the porch.

“Saturday,” Mo said. “I think Saturday’d be fine.”

Fine…

Then she looked at her watch and said, “It’s getting late. Time for bed.”

And when Mo said it was time for bed, it was definitely time for bed.

Later that night, when Mo was asleep, Pete walked downstairs into the office. He reached behind a row of books resting on the built-in bookshelves and pulled out a large, sealed envelope.

He carried it down to his workshop in the basement. He opened the envelope and took out a book. It was called Triangle and Pete had found it in the true-crime section of a local used-book shop after flipping through nearly twenty books about real-life murders.

Pete had never before ripped off anything, but that day he ’d looked around the store and slipped the book inside his windbreaker, then strolled casually out the door. He’d had to steal it; he was afraid that-if everything went as he’d planned-the clerk might remember him buying the book and the police would use it as evidence.

Triangle was the story of a couple in Colorado Springs. The wife was married to a man named Roy. But she was also seeing another man-Hank-a local carpenter. Roy found out and waited until Hank was out hiking on a mountain path, then he snuck up beside him and pushed him over the cliff. Hank grabbed onto a tree root but lost his grip-or Roy smashed his hands, it wasn’t clear-and Hank fell a hundred feet to his death on the rocks in the valley. Roy went back home and had a drink with his wife just to watch her reaction when the call came that Hank was dead.

Pete didn’t know squat about crimes. All he knew was what he ’ d seen on TV and in the movies. None of the criminals in those shows seemed very smart and they were always getting caught by the good guys, even though they didn ’ t really seem much smarter than the bad guys. But that crime in Colorado was a smart crime. Because there were no murder weapons and very few clues. The only reason Roy got caught was that he ’ d forgotten to look for witnesses.

If the killer had only taken the time to look around him, he would have seen the witnesses: A couple of campers had a perfect view of Hank Gibson plummeting to his bloody death, screaming as he fell, and of Roy standing on the cliff, watching him…

Triangle became Pete’s bible. He read it from cover to cover-to see how Roy had planned the crime and to find out how the police had investigated it.

Tonight, with Mo asleep and his electronic airline ticket to Baltimore bought and paid for, Pete read Triangle once again, paying particular attention to the parts he’d underlined. Then he walked back upstairs, packed the book in the bottom of his knapsack, and lay on the couch in the office, looking out the window at the hazy summer stars and thinking about his trip from every angle.

Because he wanted to make sure he got away with the crime. He didn’t want to go to jail for life-like Roy.

Oh, sure, there were risks. Pete knew that. But nothing was going to stop him.

Doug had to die.

Pete realized he’d been thinking about the idea, in the back of his mind, for months, not long after Mo met Doug.

She worked part-time for a drug company in Westchester-the same company Doug was a salesman for, assigned to the Baltimore office. They met when he came to the headquarters for a sales conference. Mo had told Pete that she was having dinner with “somebody” from the company, but she didn’t say who. Pete didn’t think anything of it until he overheard her telling one of her girlfriends on the phone about this interesting guy she’d met. But then she realized Pete was standing near enough to hear and she changed the subject.

Over the next few months Pete realized that Mo was getting more and more distracted, paying less and less attention to him. And he heard her mention Doug more and more.

One night Pete asked her about him.

“Oh, Doug?” she said, sounding irritated. “Why, he’s just a friend, that’s all. Can’t I have friends? Aren’t I allowed?”

Pete noticed that Mo was starting to spend a lot of time on the phone and on-line. He tried to check the phone bills to see if she was calling Baltimore but she hid them or threw them out. He also tried to read her e-mails but found she ’ d changed her password. Pete was an expert with computers and easily broke into her account. But when he went to read her e-mails he found she ’ d deleted them all.

He was so furious he nearly smashed the computer.