Harlan Coben - Long Lost

“Of?”

“The blond girl.”

“Why?”

He didn’t reply. It took another five minutes. I peppered him with questions. He ignored me. Finally his e-mail dinged and a very short video from the parking lot arrived. He clicked the Play button and sat back.

We could see the blond girl clearer now. She was indeed a teenager-maybe sixteen, seventeen years old. She had long blond hair. The vantage point was still from too great a distance to see the features up close, but there was something familiar about her, about the way she held her head up, the way her shoulders stayed back, the perfect posture. .

“We ran a preliminary DNA test on that blood sample and the blond hair,” Berleand said.

The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. I wrested my eyes away from the screen and looked at him.

“It isn’t just his daughter,” Berleand said, gesturing toward the blonde on the screen. “It’s also Terese Collins’s.”

It took me a while to find my voice.

“You said preliminary.”

Berleand nodded. “The final DNA test will take a few more hours.”

“So it could be wrong.”

“Unlikely.”

“But there have been cases?”

“Yes. I had one case where we grabbed a man based on a preliminary like this. It turns out it was his brother. I also know about a paternity case where a woman sued her boyfriend for child custody. He claimed that the baby wasn’t his. The preliminary DNA test was a dead match-but when the lab looked closer, it turned out that it was the boyfriend’s father.”

I thought about it.

“Does Terese Collins have any sisters?” Berleand asked.

“I don’t know.”

Berleand made a face.

“What?” I said.

“You two really have a special relationship, don’t you?”

I ignored the jab. “So what’s next?”

“We need you to call Terese Collins,” Berleand said. “So we can question her some more.”

“Why don’t you call her yourself?”

“We did. She won’t pick up.”

He handed me back my cell phone. I turned it on. One missed call. I didn’t click to see who it was from just yet. There was what appeared to be junk mail, the subject reading: When Peggy Lee sang, “Is that all there is?” was she talking about your trouser snake? Your Small Pee-Pee Needs Viagra at 86BR22.com.

Berleand read it over my shoulder. “What does that mean?”

“One of my old girlfriends has been talking out of school.”

“Your self-deprecation,” Berleand said. “It’s very charming.”

I hit Terese’s number. It rang for a while and then the voice mail picked up. I left her a message and hung up.

“Now what?”

“Do you know anything about tracing cell phone locations?” Berleand asked.

“Yes.”

“And you probably know that as long as the phone is on, even if no call is being made, we can triangulate coordinates and know where she is.”

“Yes.”

“So we weren’t worried about following Ms. Collins. We have that technology. But about an hour ago, she turned her phone off.”

“Maybe she ran out of battery,” I said.

Berleand frowned at me.

“Or maybe she just needed downtime. You know how hard it must have been to tell me about her car accident.”

“So she-what? — turned her phone off to get away from it all?”

“Sure.”

“Instead of just silencing the ringer or whatever,” he went on, “Ms. Collins turned the phone all the way off?”

“You don’t buy it?”

“Please. We can still run her call logs-see who called her or whom she called. About an hour ago, Ms. Collins received her only call of the day.”

“From?”

“Don’t know. The number bounced to some phone in Hungary and then a Web site and then we lost it. The call lasted two minutes. After that, she turned off her phone. At the time she was at the Rodin Museum. Now we have no idea where she is.”

I said nothing.

“Do you have any thoughts?”

“About Rodin? I love The Thinker .”

“You’re killing me, Myron. Really.”

“Are you going to hold me?”

“I have your passport. You can go, but please stay in your hotel.”

“Where you can listen in,” I said.

“Think of it this way,” Berleand said. “If you finally get lucky, maybe I can pick up a few pointers.”

The processing to release me took about twenty minutes. I started back down the Quai des Orfevres toward the Pont Neuf. I wondered how long it would take. There was a chance, of course, that Berleand already had me under surveillance, but I considered it unlikely.

Up ahead was a car with the license plate 97 CS 33.

The code, of course, couldn’t have been simpler. The junk e-mail read 86 BR 22. Just add one to each one. Eight becomes a nine. B becomes a C. As I approached the car a piece of paper dropped out of the driver’s-side window. The piece of paper was attached to a coin so it wouldn’t blow away.

I sighed. First the overly simple code, now this. Would James Bond go so low tech?

I picked up the note.

1 RUE DU PONT NEUF, FIFTH FLOOR. TOSS PHONE IN CAR BACK WINDOW.

I did. The car took off, phone on and in tow. Let them track that. I turned right. It was the Louis Vuitton Building, the one with the glass dome on the top. The Kenzo department store was on the bottom floor, and I felt hopelessly unhip just opening the door. I stepped into the glass elevator and saw that the fifth floor was a restaurant called Kong.

When the elevator stopped, a hostess in black greeted me. She was over six feet tall, dressed in tourniquet-tight black and looked about as fat as your average lamp cord. “Mr. Bolitar?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Right this way.”

She led me up a staircase that glowed fluorescent green and into the glass dome. I would call Kong “ultra-hip” but it was almost beyond that-like postmodern ultra-hip. The decor was futuristic geisha. There were plasma TVs with sleek Asian women winking as you passed. The chairs were acrylic and see-through except for the printed faces of beautiful women with strange hairstyles. The faces actually glowed, as though there were a light in each one. The effect was kind of eerie.

Above my head was a giant tapestry of a geisha. The patrons were dressed like, well, the hostess-trendy and black. What made the place work though, what threw it all together, was the killer view of the Seine, almost as great as the one at police headquarters-and there, at the front table with the absolute best view, was Win.

“I ordered you foie gras,” he said.

“Someone’s going to catch on to our old trick one of these days.”

“They haven’t yet.”

I sat across from him. “This place looks familiar.”

“It was featured in a French film with Francois Cluzet and Kristin Scott Thomas,” Win said. “They sat at this very table.”

“Kristin Scott Thomas in a French film?”

“She’s lived here for years and speaks fluent French.”

Win knows stuff like this, I don’t know how.

“Anyway,” Win continued, “perhaps that’s why the restaurant is causing-to remain in our French environs-deja vu.”

I shook my head. “I don’t watch French films.”

“Or,” Win said with a deep sigh, “perhaps you recall Sarah Jessica Parker eating here in the series finale of Sex and the City .”

“Bingo,” I said.

The foie gras-goose liver for the uninitiated-arrived. I was indeed starving and dug in. I know the animal-rights people would crucify me, but I can’t help it. I love foie gras. Win had red wine already poured. I took a sip. I’m no expert, but it tasted like a deity had personally squeezed the grapes.