Harlan Coben - Stay close

No, he was not about to leave this to the cops alone.

Del knew that earlier in the day Ken and Barbie had traced down a stripper Carlton had been banging. Her name was Tonya or Tawny or something like that. Earlier, the police had questioned the girl, but she gave them almost nothing. Ken and Barbie had been able to extract more information.

“Are you familiar with a town called Kasselton?” Ken asked.

Del thought about that. “It’s up north, right?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever been there.”

“How about anybody with the last name Pierce? David or Megan Pierce?”

“No. Do they have something to do with my son?”

Ken and Barbie updated Del on their day. They didn’t go into details about how they went about gathering information, and Del didn’t ask. He just listened, feeling his heart break and harden at the same time.

Mostly harden.

“Do you think there’ll be some blowback?” Del asked.

Ken looked at Barbie, then to Del. “From Tawny? No. From Harry Sutton? Yes. But they won’t be able to trace it back to us.”

“Or you,” Barbie added.

Again Del didn’t ask for details. “So now what?”

“We normally follow the evidence,” Barbie said, in a voice that sounded almost rehearsed, as if she were suddenly playing someone much older. “In this case, that would mean questioning Mr. and Mrs. Pierce.”

Del said nothing.

“And,” Ken said, “that would mean leaving Atlantic City for Kasselton, thereby widening the circle.”

“And adding to the collateral damage,” Barbie added.

Del kept his eyes on the window. “So you’re here to get my approval?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think the Pierces know something?”

“I think the wife does, yes,” Ken said. “We know that Detective Broome met with her today. She chose to have a lawyer with her-that lawyer being Harry Sutton.”

“That means she had something to hide,” Barbie added.

Del thought about that, about his visit to the precinct. “Whatever this Megan Pierce told him-Broome acted on it. He had the crime techs at a park tonight. They found blood.”

Silence.

“Do the Pierces have children?” Del asked.

“Two.”

“Try to keep them out of it.”

It was, Del knew from personal experience, the most merciful thing he could do.

Megan ’s drive home took two hours.

Dave had recently put satellite radio in the car, so she tried to listen to Howard Stern for a while. One time, when she and Dave were alone in the car and listening, Howard had chatted up a stripper named Triple Es, and Megan nearly jumped out of her skin because she immediately recognized the voice as belonging to Susan Schwartz, a girl who worked La Creme back in the day. They had even been roommates for a time.

Oddly enough, Megan found Howard Stern to be his least interesting when the show was its most provocative. While far from a prude, Megan had found the more graphic bits-the dirty sex, the bodily functions, the freaks-tame but got totally immersed when Howard conducted celebrity interviews or commented on the news with Robin. Megan was always surprised at how often she agreed with him, how much sense he made-Howard could be a wonderful distraction/companion on long, lonely car rides-but tonight, after a few futile minutes, she flicked off the radio and let herself be alone with her thoughts.

What now?

It was nearly one A.M. when she reached her driveway. The house was entirely dark, except for the lamp on a timer in the living room. She hadn’t called Dave to say she was coming home. She wasn’t sure why. She just didn’t know what to say to him, how she would answer his obvious questions. She had hoped the two hours in the car would clarify that for her. But it hadn’t. She had considered everything from a total fabrication (“A friend-I can’t tell you who-had a personal problem”) to total truth (“You better sit down for this one”) to something in the middle (“I went to Atlantic City, but it’s no big deal”).

So as Megan parked in her driveway, as she dropped her keys in her purse and opened the car door and closed it quietly, because it was so late and she didn’t want to wake anyone, she still had no idea what she would say to the man she’d been married to for the past sixteen years.

The house was quiet-almost too quiet, as they say-as if the shiny new brick and stonework were somehow holding its collective breath. The stillness surprised her. Despite the late hour Megan figured that Dave would be up, waiting for her to return, maybe sitting in the dark, maybe pacing. But there was no sign of any life at all. She tiptoed up the stairs and turned right. Jordan’s door was open. She could hear him breathing. Like most eleven-year-olds, when Jordan finally fell asleep, he fell hard and deep and it would take an act of God to wake him up.

Jordan always kept his door open and still, at the age of eleven, used a night-light. Megan could see the mounted shark above his head. For some strange reason, Jordan loved fishing more than anything. Neither she nor Dave had ever fished-or remotely enjoyed fishing-but Dave’s brother-in-law had taken Jordan when he was four, and the kid just got the bug. For a little while, that brother-in-law took Dave on his local fishing excursions, but when he divorced Dave’s sister, that ended. So now at least twice a year, Dave arranged a boys’ fishing weekend (some might coin this “sexist,” since the females weren’t invited, but Megan and Kaylie preferred the word “grateful”), everything from fly-fishing in Wyoming to bass fishing in Alabama and last year, shark fishing off the coast of northern Georgia. That was where Jordon got that particular trophy mount.

As always, Kaylie’s bedroom door was shut. She had no fear of the dark, only invasion of privacy. Kaylie had recently been campaigning-there was no other word for it-to turn the finished basement into her new bedroom, ergo, placing her person as far away from the rest of the family as possible, and while Megan was holding firm on the no, Dave was caving. His usual justification for giving in sounded like a plea: “She’s going to be leaving us soon… we need to let go of the little things… with such little time left, do we really want so much strife?”

Megan risked turning her daughter’s knob and opened the door. Kaylie was in her usual sleep position, on her side with her stuffed penguin, cleverly named “Penguin,” snuggled in close. Kaylie had slept with Penguin since she was eight. It always made Megan smile. Teens may look like adults, may crave adult independence from Mom and Dad, but good ol’ Penguin was a constant reminder that there was plenty of parental work yet to be done.

It felt good to be home.

In the end, Megan had done nothing wrong. She gave Broome the important information he needed and returned to where she belonged, unscathed. As she padded through her home, Atlantic City was getting smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror. The only thing that had thrown her slightly off her game was seeing Ray, with Lucy looming behind them. She had felt the ache all the way back-the same one she’d always had with Ray-but there were things you can do and things you can’t. The idea of “having it all” is indeed nonsense. Still, that desire, that electricity as though your whole being were suddenly revved up to the tenth power, that feeling that she wanted to be close to Ray and then even closer and then that’s not close enough… it, of course, still haunted her. Sure, she could try to deny it. She had and would again. But if you have that feeling, what do you do about it? It is there. Do you lie to yourself? Do you control it and forget it and move on? And was it a betrayal to admit that she didn’t feel that way with Dave-or was that normal with a man you’ve known so well? To be expected, perhaps even good?