Harlan Coben: Deal Breaker

“I’ll see what I can come up with.”

Win resteepled his hands, bouncing the fingertips gently against one another. “You do realize,” he began, “that this photograph probably means nothing. Chances are there is a very simple explanation for all this.”

“Maybe,” Myron agreed, rising from his chair. He had been telling himself the same thing for the past two hours. He no longer believed it.

“Myron?”

“What?”

“You don’t think it was a coincidence-Jessica being in the bar downstairs, I mean.”

“No,” Myron said. “I guess I don’t.”

Win nodded. “Be careful,” he said. “A word to the wise.”

Damn him.

Jessica Culver sat in her family’s kitchen, in the very seat she had sat in innumerable times as a child.

She should have known better. She should have thought it through, should have come prepared for any occurrence. But what had she done instead? She had gotten nervous. She had hesitated. She had stopped for a drink in the bar below his office.

Stupid, stupid.

But that wasn’t all. He had surprised her, and she had panicked.

Why?

She should have told Myron the truth. She should have told him in a plain unemotional voice the real reason she was there. But she hadn’t. She had been drinking unaware, and suddenly he had appeared, looking so handsome and yet so hurt and-

Oh shit, Jessie, you are one fucked-up chick .

She nodded to herself. Yup. Fucked-up. Self-destructive. And a few other hyphenated words she couldn’t come up with right now. Her publisher and agent did not see it that way, of course. They loved her “foibles” (their term-Jessie preferred “fuck-ups”), even encouraged them. They were what made Jessica Culver such an exceptional writer. They were what gave Jessica Culver’s writing that certain “edge” (again, their term).

Perhaps that was so. Jessie really couldn’t say. But one thing was certain: These foibling fuck-ups had turned her life to shit.

Oh, pity the suffering artist! Thy heart bleeds for such torment!

She dismissed the mocking tone with a shake of her head. She was unusually introspective today, but that was understandable. She had seen Myron, and that had led to a lot of “what if-ing”-a verifiable avalanche of useless “what if-ing” from every conceivable height and angle.

What if. She pondered it yet again.

In her typically self-centered way, she had seen the “what if-ing” only in terms of herself, not Myron. Now she wondered about him, about what his life had really been like since the world crumbled down upon him-not all at once-but in small, decaying bits. Four years. She had not seen him in four years. She had shoved Myron into some back closet in her mind and locked the door. She’d thought (hoped?) that would be the end of it, that the door could stand up to a little pressure without opening. But seeing him today, seeing the kind, handsome face high above those broad shoulders, seeing the still why-me stare in his eyes-the door had blown off its hinges like something in a gas explosion.

Jessica had been overwhelmed by her feelings. She wanted to be with him so badly that she knew she had to get out right away.

Makes sense , she thought, if you’re a total fuck-up .

Jessica glanced out the window. She was waiting for Paul’s arrival. Bergen County police Lieutenant Paul Duncan-Uncle Paul to her, since infancy-was two years away from retirement. He had been her father’s closest friend, the executor of Adam Culver’s will. They had both worked in law enforcement-Paul as a cop, Adam as the county medical examiner-for more than twenty-five years.

Paul was coming to finalize the details for her father’s memorial service. No funeral for Adam Culver. He wouldn’t hear of it. But Jessica wanted to talk to Paul about another matter. Alone. She did not like what was going on.

“Hi, honey.”

She turned to the voice. “Hi, Mom.”

Her mother came up through the basement. She was wearing an apron, her fingers fiddling with the large wooden cross around her neck. “I put his chair in storage,” she explained in a forced matter-of-fact tone. “Just cluttering space up here.”

For the first time Jessica realized that her father’s chair-the one her mother must have been referring to-was gone from the kitchen table. The simple unpadded four-legged chair her father had sat in for as long as Jessica could remember, the one closest to the refrigerator, so close that her father could turn around, open the door, and stretch for the milk on the top shelf without getting up, had been taken away, stored in some cob-webbed corner of the basement.

But not so Kathy’s.

Jessie’s gaze touched down on the chair to her immediate right. Kathy’s chair. It was still here. Her mother had not touched it. Her father, well, he was dead. But Kathy-who knew? Kathy could, in theory, walk through the back door right this very minute, banging it against the wall as she always did, smile brightly, and join them for dinner. The dead were dead. When you lived with a medical examiner, you understood just how useless the dead were. Dead and buried. The soul, well, that was another matter. Jessie’s mom was a devout Catholic, attending mass every morning, and during crises like these her religious tenacity paid off-like someone who spent time in a gym finally finding a use for their new muscles. She could believe without question in a divine and joyous afterlife. Such a comfort. Jessica wished she could do the same, but over the years her religious fervor had become a strict couch potato.

Except, of course, Kathy might not be dead. Ergo the chair-Mom’s lantern kept lit to guide her youngest back home.

Jessica awoke most mornings bolting upright in her bed, thinking about-no, inventing new possibilities for-her younger sister. Was Kathy lying dead in a pit somewhere? Buried under brush in the woods? A skeleton gnawed on by animals and inhabited by maggots? Was Kathy’s corpse stuck in some cement foundation? Was it weighed down in the bottom of some river like the little undersea man in the living-room aquarium? Had she died painlessly? Had she been tortured? Had her body been chopped into small bits, burned, broken down with acid…

Or was she still alive?

That eternal spring.

Had Kathy possibly been kidnapped? Was she living in white slavery under the thumb of some Middle East sheikh? Or was she living chained to a radiator on a farm in Wisconsin like something on Geraldo ? Could she have banged her head, forgotten who she was, and was now living as a street person with amnesia? Or had she simply run away to a different world?

The possibilities were endless. Even those lacking creativity can come up with a million different horrors when their loved one suddenly vanishes-or more painfully, a million different hopes.

Jessica’s thoughts were chased away by the tired chugging of a car engine. A familiar Chevy Caprice blanketed with tiny dents pulled up. It looked like a retrieval car at a driving range. She stood and hurried out the front door.

Paul Duncan was a stocky man, compact, with salt-and-pepper hair now turning defiantly toward salt. He walked purposely, the way cops do. He greeted her on the front stoop with a big smile and kiss on the cheek. “Hey, beautiful! How are you?”

She hugged him. “I’m okay, Uncle Paul,” she said.

“You look great.”

“Thanks.”

Paul shaded his eyes from the sun. “Come on, let’s go inside. It’s hot as hell out here.”

“In a minute,” she said, putting a hand on his forearm. “I want to talk to you first.”

“What about?”

“My father’s case.”

“I’m not handling that, honey. I don’t do homicides anymore, you know that. Besides, it would be a conflict of interest-me being Adam’s friend and all.”