Harlan Coben - Caught

"I have no idea what you mean."

"Sure. You were just checking for a flat, right?"

Grayson took another deep drag. His face hadn't seen a razor, but that was true of more than half the men who'd gotten up here at such an early hour. His eyes were bloodshot. He looked a lot worse than the man who had just yesterday confidently explained to her his theories on vigilantism. She thought about that, about his visit to her house.

"Did you really think I'd help you kill him?" she asked.

"Truth?"

"That'd be nice, yeah."

"You might've agreed with what I said in theory. You maybe even started to waver a little when I raised Ariana Nasbro. But no, I never thought you'd help."

"So you were just giving it a shot?"

He didn't reply.

"Or was your visit all an excuse to put that GPS on my car?"

Ed Grayson slowly shook his head.

"What?" she asked.

"You don't have a clue, do you, Wendy?"

She stepped closer to the driver's door. "Why are you here, Ed?"

He looked off toward the woods. "I wanted to help with the search."

"They wouldn't let you?"

"What do you think?"

"Sounds like you feel guilty."

He took another drag. "Do me a favor, Wendy. Skip the analysis."

"So what do you want with me?"

"Your opinion."

"On?"

He pinched the cigarette between his fingertips and studied it as though it held an answer. "Do you think Dan killed her?"

She wondered how to answer that. "What did you do with his body?"

"You talk first. Did Dan kill Haley McWaid?"

"I don't know. Maybe he just locked her up, and right now, because of what you did, she's starving to death."

"Nice try." He scratched at his cheek. "But the cops laid that guilt trip on me already."

"Didn't work?"

"Nope."

"Are you going to tell me what you did with the body?"

"My. My." He spoke in pure monotone. "I. Have. No. Idea. What. You're. Talking. About."

This was getting her nowhere-and she had places to go. The niggling had something to do with her research on the Princeton group. Dan and Haley running away together-okay, maybe. But what about all those scandals involving his old roommates? Could be nothing. Probably was. But she was missing something huge here.

"So what do you want from me?" she asked.

"I'm trying to figure out whether Dan really kidnapped this girl."

"Why?"

"Trying to help the investigation, I guess."

"So you can sleep better at night?"

"Maybe."

"So what answer will make you sleep better?" she asked.

"I don't follow."

"Well, if Dan killed Haley, would you feel better about what you did? Like you said before, he was bound to do it again. You stopped him-albeit a little late. And if Dan did not kill her, well, you're still convinced he would have hurt someone else, right? So either way, killing him was the only way to stop him. Seems the only way you lose sleep is if Haley is alive somewhere and you put her in further danger."

Ed Grayson shook his head. "Just forget it." He started to walk away.

"Am I missing something?" she asked.

"Like I said before." Grayson tossed the cigarette and never broke stride. "You don't have a clue."

SO NOW WHAT?

Wendy could keep looking for clues that proved Dan and Haley were involved in some kind of consensual, albeit wrong, relationship, but what was the point? The police now had that theory. They would run with it. She needed to attack from another angle.

The five Princeton roommates.

Four out of five had been felled by scandals in the past year. The fifth, well, maybe he had too, but it just wasn't online. So she headed back to the Starbucks in Englewood to continue her investigation. When she entered, even before she spotted the Fathers Club, the sound of Ten-A-Fly's rapping blew forth from the overhead speakers.

Charisma Carpenter, I love you

You ain't no carpenter's dream, you ain't flat as board,

And you ain't easy to screw…

"Yo, hey."

It was Ten-A-Fly. She stopped. "Hi."

Ten-A-Fly was decked out in a Grass Roots zip-up blue hoodie. On his head he wore the hood over a red baseball cap with a brim so big a trucker in 1978 would have been embarrassed to wear it while on the CB. Behind him Wendy could see the guy with the tennis whites. He was typing madly on a laptop. The younger father with the baby sling was walking back and forth and making cooing noises.

Ten-A-Fly jiggled a bling bracelet that looked like a Halloween prop. "Saw you at my gig last night."

"Yep."

"You likey?"

Wendy nodded. "It was, uh, phat, dawg."

That pleased him. He held up his fist for a knuckle pound. She obliged. "You're a TV reporter, right?"

"Right."

"So are you here to do a story on me?"

Tennis Whites on the laptop added, "You should." He pointed to the screen. "We're getting a lot of action here."

Wendy circled around and looked at the laptop. "You're on eBay?"

"It's how I make a living now," Tennis Whites said. "Since I got laid off-"

"Doug here was at Lehman Brothers," Ten-A-Fly interrupted. "He saw the bad coming, but nobody would listen to him."

"Whatever," Doug said, waving a hand with modesty. "Anyway, I stay solvent with eBay. First, I sold pretty much everything I owned. Then I started going to garage sales, buying things, fixing them up, reselling them."

"And you can make a living at that?"

He shrugged. "No, not really. It's something to do."

"Like tennis?"

"Oh, I don't play."

She just looked at him.

"My wife does. Second wife actually. Some would call her a trophy wife. She kept whining about how she gave up this wonderful career to watch the kids, but really, she plays tennis all day. When I lost my job, I suggested that she go back to work. She told me that it was too late now. So she still plays tennis every day. And she hates me now. She can barely look at me. So I wear the tennis whites too."

"Because…?"

"I don't know. A protest, I guess. I dumped a good woman-hurt her horribly-for a hottie. Now the good woman has moved on and doesn't even have the good sense to be mad at me anymore. I guess I got what I deserved, right?"

Wendy had no interest in going there. She looked at the screen. "What are you selling now?"

"Ten-A-Fly souvenirs. I mean, we're selling his CD, of course."

There were copies on the table. Ten-A-Fly dressed like Snoop Dogg on a bender making gangsta hand signs that made one think not so much of intimidation as an unusual state of palsy. The CD was titled Unsprung in Suburbia.

"Unsprung?" Wendy asked.

"Ghetto slang," Doug of the Tennis Whites explained.

"For?"

"You don't want to know. Anyway, we're selling those CDs, T-shirts, caps, key chains, posters. But now I'm putting up one-of-a-kind items. Like, see here, that's the actual bandana Ten-A-Fly wore onstage last night."

Wendy looked and couldn't believe the bidding. "It's up to six hundred dollars?"

"Six-twenty now. Like I said, a lot of action. The panties a fan threw up onstage are also a hot item."

Wendy looked back at Fly. "Wasn't the fan your wife?"

"Your point?"

Good question. "Absolutely none. Is Phil here?"

As she asked the question, Wendy spotted him behind the counter talking to the barista. He was smiling when he turned and saw her. The smile anvil-dropped off his face. Phil hurried toward her. Wendy met him halfway.

"What are you doing here?"

"We need to talk."

"We already talked."

"We need to talk more."

"I don't know anything."

She took a step closer to him. "Do you not get that there is still a girl missing?"

Phil closed his eyes. "Yeah, I get it," he said. "It's just… I don't know anything."