Harlan Coben - Live Wire

“Go on.”

“Well, if you want to kill her, why not just kill her? Why call nine-one-one and take the chance that she’d be alive when they got here? For that matter, with the amount of drugs she took, why not lead her under that arch and get her to fall off? Either way, what you do not do is call the paramedics or leave with the door open for a janitor or whatever. Do you see what I mean?”

“I do,” Myron said.

“Am I making sense?”

“You are.”

“Do you have anything that disputes what I said?”

“Not a thing,” Myron said, trying to sort it through in his head. “So if you’re right, she probably contacted her dealer yesterday. Any clues on who it was?”

“Not yet, no. We know that she took a drive yesterday. There was an E-ZPass hit on the Garden State Parkway near Route Two-eighty. She could have headed to Newark.”

Myron considered that. “Did you check her car?”

“Her car? No. Why?”

“Do you mind if I check it?”

“Do you have keys?”

“I do.”

She shook her head. “Agents. Go ahead. I have to get back to work.”

“One more question, Muse.”

Muse just waited.

“Why are you showing me all this after I pulled the attorneyclient card last night?”

“Because right now I have no case anyway,” she said. “And because if somehow I’m missing something-if somehow this was a murder-it doesn’t matter who you’re supposed to defend. You cared about Suzze. You wouldn’t just let her killer walk.”

They headed down the elevator in silence. Muse got off at ground level. Myron went down to the garage. He hit the remote control and listened for the beep. Suzze drove a Mercedes S63 AMG. He opened it and slipped into the driver’s seat. He got a whiff of some wildflower perfume and it made him think of Suzze. He opened the glove compartment and found the registration, insurance card, and the car manual. He searched under the seats for-he wasn’t sure what, really. Clues. All he found was loose change and two pens. Sherlock Holmes probably could have used them to figure out exactly where Suzze had gone, but Myron couldn’t.

He turned the car on, started up the dashboard GPS. He hit “previous destinations” and saw a list of spots Suzze had plugged in for directions. Sherlock Holmes, eat your heart out. The most recent destination was in Kasselton, New Jersey. Hmm. In order to get there, you’d have to take the Garden State Parkway past Exit 146 per the E-ZPass records.

The second-to-last input was an intersection in Edison, New Jersey. Myron pulled out his BlackBerry and started typing in the addresses listed. When he finished he e-mailed them to Esperanza. She could look them up online, figure out whether any of them were important. There were no dates next to inputs, so for all Myron knew, Suzze had visited these places months ago and rarely used the GPS.

Still all signs pointed to the fact that Suzze visited Kasselton recently, maybe even the day of her death. It might be worth a quick visit.

The address in Kasselton was a four-store strip mall anchored by a Kings Supermarket. The other three storefronts housed a Renato’s Pizzeria, a make-your-own ice cream parlor called SnowCap, and an old-school barbershop dubbed “Sal and Shorty Joe’s Hair-Clipping,” complete with the classic red-and-white pole out front.

So why had Suzze come out here?

There were, of course, supermarkets and ice cream parlors and pizzerias far closer to her home and somehow Myron doubted that either Sal or Shorty Joe did Suzze’s hair. So why drive out this way? Myron stood there and waited for the answer to come to him. Two minutes passed. The answer did not arrive, so Myron decided to give it a nudge.

He started with the Kings Supermarket. Not sure what else to do, he flashed a picture of Suzze T around and asked whether anyone had seen her. Working old-school. Like Sal and Shorty Joe. A few people recognized Suzze from her tennis days. A few had seen her on the news last night and assumed Myron was a cop, an assumption he did little to correct. In the end though, no one had seen her in the supermarket.

Strike one.

Myron headed back outside. He looked out at the parking lot. Best odds? Suzze had driven here for a drug buy. Drug dealers, especially in suburbia, used public lots all the time. You park your cars side by side, open front windows, someone tosses money from one car to another, someone tosses drugs back.

He tried to picture it. Suzze, the woman who had told him the night before about secrets and worried about being too competitive, all eight months pregnant of her, the woman who walked into his office two days earlier saying, “I’m so damn happy”-that Suzze had driven out to this strip mall to buy enough heroin to kill herself?

Sorry, no, Myron wasn’t buying it.

Maybe she was meeting someone else, not a drug dealer, in this lot. Maybe, maybe not. Great detective work so far. Okay, there was still work to be done. Renato’s Pizzeria was closed. The barbershop, however, was doing business. Through the storefront window, Myron could see the older men jabbering away, arguing in that good-natured ways guys do, looking remarkably content. He turned to SnowCap ice cream parlor. Someone was hanging up a sign: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LAUREN! Girls, probably around the age of eight, maybe nine, were heading inside toting birthday presents. Their mothers held their hands, exhausted, harried, happy.

Suzze’s voice: “I’m so damned happy.”

This, he thought, looking at the mothers, should have been Suzze’s life. It would have been. It was what Suzze wanted. People do dumb things. They throw away happiness as though it were a soiled napkin. That could have been what happened here-Suzze, so close to true joy, messed it up as was her wont.

He looked through the parlor’s front window and watched the little girls pull away from their mothers and greet one another with squeals and hugs. The parlor was a swirl of colors and movement. The mothers moved to the corner with the coffee urn. Myron again tried to picture Suzze here, where she belonged, when he noticed a man standing behind the counter, staring at him. The man was older, midsixties, with the middle-management belly spread and citation-worthy comb-over. He stared at Myron through glasses that were a touch too fashionable, like something a hip urban architect might sport, and he kept pushing them back up his nose.

The manager, Myron figured. Probably always looking out the window like this, guarding the grounds, a busybody. Perfect. Myron approached the door with Suzze T’s picture at the ready. By the time he got to the door, the man was already there, holding it open.

“Can I help you?” the man asked.

Myron held up the picture. The man looked at the photograph and his eyes closed.

“Have you seen this woman?” Myron asked.

His voice seemed very far away. “I spoke to her yesterday.”

This guy did not look like a drug dealer. “What about?”

The man swallowed, started to turn away. “My daughter,” he said. “She wanted to know about my daughter.”

“Follow me,” the man said.

They walked past the ice cream counter. The woman working behind it was in a wheelchair. She had a great big smile and was telling a customer about the oddly named ice cream flavors and all the possible ingredients you could mix into them. Myron glanced to his left. The party was in full swing. The girls were taking turns mixing and mashing ice cream in order to create their own flavors. Two high school-age girls helped with the heavy scooping while another mixed in Reese’s Pieces, cookie dough, Oreos, sprinkles, Gummi Bears, nuts, chocolate chips, even granola.