Harlan Coben - Stay close

And what?

Where the hell was he? And how did this connect to Carlton Flynn and the others?

Cassie rose. His eyes followed her. “Why?” Broome asked.

“Why what?”

“You could have stayed hidden, kept your new life safe.” He glanced at Harry Sutton and then back to her. “Why come back?”

“You’re Javert, remember?” she said. “You’d hunt me across the years. Eventually Javert and Valjean have to meet up.”

“So you decided to control the time and place?”

“Better than you just showing up on my doorstep, right?”

Broome shook his head. “I don’t buy it.”

She shrugged. “I’m not trying that hard to sell it.”

“So is that it, Cassie? You’re done here?”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

Oh, but she did. He could see it in her eyes.

“Do you just go back to your regularly scheduled life now?” Broome asked. “Has this been cleansing for you? Did it give you everything you need?”

“I think it has,” she said. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

Trying to turn the tables, Broome thought. Defensive. The question was, why? He gestured for her to go ahead.

“What do you do with this information?” she asked.

“I add it to the other evidence I have and try to draw conclusions.”

“Did you ever tell Stewart Green’s wife the truth about him?”

“Depends on whose truth.”

“You’re playing semantics with me, Detective.”

“Fair enough. Before now, I only heard rumors about Stewart Green. I really didn’t know for sure.”

“Will you tell his wife now that you know?”

Broome took his time with that one. “If I think it will help find what happened to him, yeah, I’ll say something to her. But I’m not a private eye hired to dig up dirt on the man.”

“It may make it easier for her to move on.”

“Or it may make it harder,” he said. “My concern is solving crimes. Period.”

“Makes sense,” she said with a nod, reaching for the doorknob. “Good luck with the case.”

“Uh, before you go…”

She stopped.

“There’s one big thing we’ve been dancing around, what with all our clever Victor Hugo references.”

“What’s that?”

Broome smiled. “The timing of this little meeting.”

“What about it?”

“Why now? Why, after seventeen years, did you choose to return now?”

“You know why.”

He shook his head. “I don’t, no.”

She looked toward Harry for guidance. He shrugged his shoulders. “I know about the other man vanishing.”

“I see. How did you learn about him?”

“I saw it on the news,” she said.

Another lie.

“And, what, you see a connection between what happened to Stewart Green and what happened to Carlton Flynn?”

“Other than the obvious?” she said. “Not really, no.”

“So hearing about it sort of reminded you of the past? Brought it back to you somehow?”

“It’s not that simple.” She looked down at her hands again. Broome could see it now. There had been a ring on her wedding finger. He could see the tan line. She had taken it off, probably for this meeting, and didn’t feel comfortable without that. That explained all the hand wringing. “What happened that night… it never really left me. I ran away. I changed my name. I built a new life. But that night followed me everywhere. It still does. I guess I thought that maybe it was time to stop running. I thought that maybe it was time to confront it once and for all.”

Everyone called them Ken and Barbie.

So, to be safe-and because secret identities were awfully cool-they started calling themselves that too.

Tawny’s broken finger had made this particular assignment ridiculously easy and unchallenging. Barbie had been a little disappointed by that. She was so good at extracting information. Creative. She had a new soldering iron with a finer tip, one that reached heat in excess of one thousand degrees Fahrenheit, and she really wanted to try it out.

But creativity meant improvising. Ken had seen right away that Tawny had a broken finger that was causing her great distress. Why not use it?

After Ken punched Tawny in the face, Barbie had locked the door. Tawny lay on her back, holding her nose. Ken put one of his Keds on her chest, in the spot between her huge fake breasts, pinning her hard to the floor. He lifted her right hand toward the ceiling. Tawny bucked in pain.

“It’s okay,” he said soothingly.

Using his foot as leverage, Ken pulled Tawny’s arm straight and then wrapped her in an elbow lock. She couldn’t move. The hand with the broken finger was exposed and completely vulnerable. He nodded at Barbie.

Barbie smiled and retied her ponytail. Ken loved to watch her, the way she took her own hair in her hand, the way she pulled it back, the way it exposed the softness of her neck. Barbie approached the finger and studied it for a moment.

First, Barbie flicked the broken digit with her own middle finger. Not hard. Just a routine twang. But her eyes lit up when Tawny cried out in pain. Barbie slowly wrapped her four fingers around the broken finger, making her hand into a fist. Tawny moaned. Barbie paused, a small smile on her face. The dog, Ralphie, maybe sensing what was about to happen, scampered to the far corner and whimpered. Barbie looked over at Ken. Ken smiled too. She nodded at him.

“Please,” Tawny said through her tears. “Please tell me what you want.”

Barbie smiled down at her. Then, without any warning, Barbie pulled the broken finger back so far that the finger hit the back of Tawny’s wrist. Ken was ready. He moved his foot from Tawny’s chest to her mouth, stifling the long, dark scream. Barbie regripped the finger. She started pulling it back and forth as though it were a joystick on one of those horrible video game systems or maybe something stuck in the mud she was trying to break free.

Eventually, the jagged edge of the bone broke through, shredding the skin and bandaging.

Then-and only then-did they ask Tawny where Carlton Flynn was.

But now, forty minutes later, reviving her twice from blacking out, they knew for sure that Tawny did not know. In truth they knew it earlier but Ken and Barbie did not get where they were today by not being thorough.

They had, however, gathered some potentially useful information. After the pain became too much-after her sanity had temporarily fled-Tawny just started talking in a delirious flow. She ranted about her childhood; her sister, Beth; her thinking that they, Ken and Barbie, were angels sent to help her. She told them about a cop named Broome and her boss, Rudy, and other people at the club. She told them about Carlton Flynn, about how he had been the one to break her finger, about how he hadn’t showed up on that last night.

But, sadly, Tawny didn’t know where Carlton Flynn was now.

Tawny lay on the floor like a broken rag doll. She was mumbling incoherently to herself. Barbie was petting Ralphie, the dog, trying to comfort him. She smiled up at Ken, and he felt his entire being go warm.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked her.

“The playlist.”

He wasn’t surprised. Barbie was such a perfectionist. “What about it?”

“Please be open-minded,” she said.

“I will.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

Barbie sighed, and again she retied the ponytail. “I think we should open the show with ‘Let the River Flow’ and then move into ‘What Color Is God’s Skin?’”

Ken thought about it. “When do we go into ‘Freedom Isn’t Free’?”

“Right before the closer.”

“That’s awfully late.”

“I think it will work.”