Harlan Coben - Caught

Unfair doesn't begin to get it.

Kasey was sixteen when they made the diagnosis of Ewing's sarcoma. Bone cancer. The tumors started in her pelvis and began to gnaw away. His little girl died in pain. Frank watched it. He sat there, at her bedside, dry-eyed, holding on tightly to both her frail hand and his sanity. He saw the scars from invasive surgeries and the sunken eyes of the slowly dying. He felt her body warmth spike when she had a fever. He remembered that Kasey had a lot of bad dreams as a young child, that she'd often crawl into their bed quaking, slipping between him and Maria, that she talked in her sleep, tossed and turned, but once she was diagnosed, all that stopped. Maybe her night terror fled in the face of her day terror. Either way, Kasey's sleep became quiet, a night calm, almost as though she was rehearsing for death.

He had prayed, but that was worthless. That was just how he felt. God knows what He's going to do. He's got a plan, right? If you truly want to believe that He is all-knowing and all-powerful, do you really think you and your pitiful begging are going to sway His grand plan? Tremont knew it didn't work that way. He met another family praying for their son in the hospital. Same disease. He still died. Then their other son went to Iraq and died there. How anyone could hear that and believe prayer worked was beyond him.

Meanwhile the streets out here are littered with the useless. They live-Kasey dies. So, yeah, girls with families, girls like Haley McWaid and Kasey Tremont, girls who had people who loved them and had lives in front of them, real lives, lives that would amount to more than waste, they mattered more. That was the truth. No one wanted to say it. The spineless phonies would tell you that the dead hooker being zipped up in that Hefty bag deserved the exact same consideration as a Haley McWaid or a Kasey Tremont. Except we all know that's crap. We peddle it. But we all know the truth. We tell the lie. But we know.

So let's stop pretending. The dead hooker would maybe get two paragraphs on page twelve of The Star-Ledger , strictly as a story for the readers to tsk-tsk over. Haley McWaid got hours on national TV. So we all know, don't we? Why can't we just say it?

The Haley McWaids of the world mattered more.

Nothing wrong with that. It's the truth, right? Didn't mean the dead hooker didn't matter. But Haley mattered more. And it wasn't a question of race or any of those other tags people tried to stick on him. Label a guy a bigot-that's the easy way out. But it's crap. White, black, Asian, Latino, whatever-lesser is lesser. Everyone gets it, even if they're afraid to say it.

Frank's mind traveled, as it often did these days, to Haley McWaid's mother, Marcia, and the shattered father, Ted. This hooker being whisked away was gone now. Maybe someone will care, but nine times out of ten, that's not the case. Her parents, if she knew who they were, had given up on her long ago. Marcia and Ted were still waiting and scared and hoping. And yeah, that mattered. Maybe that was the difference between the Dead Hookers of the world and the Haley McWaids. Not skin color or finances or picket fences, but people who cared about you, family who'd be left devastated, fathers and mothers who would never ever be whole again.

So Frank would not quit until he found out what happened to Haley McWaid.

He thought about Kasey again, tried to conjure up the happy little girl, the one who liked aquariums more than zoos and blue more than pink. But those images had faded, were harder now to evoke, outrageous as that was, and instead, Frank remembered the way Kasey grew smaller in that hospital bed, the way she ran her hand through her hair and it came out in clumps, the way she looked down at the hair in her hand and cried while her father sat by her side, helpless, powerless.

The ME finished with the dead hooker. Two men lifted the corpse and plopped it on a gurney, as though it were a bag of peat moss.

"Easy," Frank said.

One of the guys turned to him. "Ain't going to hurt her."

"Just go easy."

As they wheeled the body away, Frank Tremont felt his mobile phone vibrate.

He blinked back the moistness and hit the answer button. "Tremont here."

"Frank?"

It was Mickey Walker, sheriff of nearby Sussex County. Big black guy, used to work in Newark with Frank. Solid dude, good investigator. One of Frank's favorites. Walker's office had landed the baby-raper murder case-apparently a parent had taken care of the pedophilia problem with his own gun. Seemed to Frank a damned fine example of good riddance, though he knew Walker would work it for all it had.

"Yeah, I'm here, Mickey."

"You know Freddy's Deluxe Luxury Suites?"

"The hot sheets on Williams Street?"

"That's the one. I need you to get over here right away."

Tremont felt a tick in his blood. He switched hands. "Why, what's up?"

"I found something in Mercer's room," Walker said in a voice as gray as a tombstone. "I think it belongs to Haley McWaid."

POPS WAS IN THE KITCHEN scrambling up some eggs when Wendy got home.

"Where's Charlie?"

"Still in bed."

"It's one in the afternoon."

Pops looked at the clock. "Yep. Hungry?"

"No. Where did you guys go last night?"

Pops, working the frying pan like a short-order lifer, arched an eyebrow.

"Sworn to secrecy?"

"Something like that," Pops said. "So where you been?"

"I spent a little time with the Fathers Club this morning."

"Care to elaborate?"

She did.

"Sad," he said.

"And maybe a little self-indulgent."

Pops shrugged. "A man stops being able to earn for his family- you might as well cut off his balls. Makes him feel like less of a man. That's sad. Losing your job is an earthquake for Working Joes and Yuppie Scum alike. Maybe more so for the Yuppie Scum. Society has taught them to define themselves by their job."

"And now that's gone?"

"Yep."

"Maybe the answer isn't in another job," Wendy said. "Maybe the answer is in finding new ways to define manhood."

Pops nodded. "Deep."

"And sanctimonious?"

"Right on," Pops said, sprinkling grated cheese into the pan. "But if you can't be sanctimonious with me, well, who else is there?"

Wendy smiled. "No one, Pops."

He turned off the burner. "Sure you don't want some huevos de Pops? It's my forte. And I already made enough for two."

"Yeah, okay."

They sat and ate. She told him more about Phil Turnball and the Fathers Club and her sense that Phil was holding something back. As they were finishing, a sleepy Charlie appeared in ripped boxers, a huge white T-shirt, and a major case of bed head. Wendy was just thinking how much he looked like a man when Charlie started plucking at his eyes and flicking his fingers.

"You okay?" she asked.

"Sleep buggers," Charlie explained.

Wendy rolled her eyes and headed for the upstairs computer. She Googled Phil Turnball. Got very little. A political donation. There was a hit on an image search, a group shot with Phil and his wife, Sherry, a pretty petite blonde, at a charity wine tasting two years ago. Phil Turnball was listed as working for a securities firm called Barry Brothers Trust. Hoping that they hadn't already changed her password, Wendy signed on to the media database her station used. Yes, everything is supposed to be available on free search engines nowadays, but it wasn't. You still had to pay to get the goods.

She did a news search on Turnball. Still nothing. But Barry Brothers came back with more than a few unflattering articles. For one thing the company was moving out of its long-term home on Park Avenue at Forty-sixth Street. Wendy recognized the address. The Lock-Horne Building. She smiled, took out her cell phone. Yep, after two years, the number was still there. She made sure the door was closed and pressed send.