Harlan Coben - Caught

"Five minutes. For Haley's sake."

Phil nodded. They moved over to a table in the corner. It was rectangular and had a handicap logo with the words "Please offer this table to our disabled customers."

"During your freshman year at Princeton," Wendy said, "who else did you and Dan room with in college?"

Phil frowned. "What could that possibly matter?"

"Just answer, okay?"

"There were five of us. Besides Dan and me, there was Farley Parks, Kelvin Tilfer, and Steve Miciano."

"Did you guys room together other years?"

"Are you serious?"

"Please."

"Yeah. Well, sophomore year-or maybe junior-Steve did a semester in Spain. Barcelona or Madrid. And junior year, I think, Farley lived in a frat house."

"You didn't join a fraternity?"

"No. Oh, and I was gone first semester senior year. Did a program in London. Happy?"

"Do you guys stay in touch?"

"Not really."

"How about Kelvin Tilfer?"

"I haven't heard from him since graduation."

"Do you know where he lives?"

Phil shook his head. A barista brought over a cup of coffee and placed it in front of Phil. Phil looked toward Wendy, seeing if she wanted one, but she shook him off. "Kelvin was from the Bronx. Maybe he's back there, I don't know."

"How about the others? You ever talk to them?"

"I hear from Farley, though it's been a while. Sherry and I held a fund-raiser for him last year. He was running for Congress, but it didn't work out."

"Well, Phil, that's the thing."

"What is?"

"It didn't work out for any of you."

He put his hand on the cup but didn't lift it. "I'm not following."

She took the printouts from a manila envelope and laid them on the desk.

"What's this?" he asked.

"Let's start with you."

"What about me?

"A year ago, you go down for embezzling over two million dollars."

His eyes widened. "How do you know that number?"

"I have my sources."

"The charges are total crap. I didn't do it."

"I'm not saying you did. Just bear with me, okay? First, you go down for embezzling." She opened another folder. "Two months later, Farley gets ruined by a political scandal involving a prostitute." The next file. "A month or so after that, Dan Mercer gets nailed on my TV show. And then, skip ahead another two months, Dr. Steve Miciano gets arrested for illegally possessing prescription drugs."

The files with various online printouts sat on the table. Phil stared at them, his hands down as though afraid to touch them.

"Don't you think it's a hell of a coincidence?" she asked.

"What about Kelvin?"

"I don't have anything on him yet."

"You found this all out in one day?"

"It didn't take much. I just did a simple Web search."

From behind her, Ten-A-Fly said, "May I see those?"

She turned. They were all there-the rest of the Fathers Club. "You were eavesdropping?"

"Don't take offense," Doug said. "People come in here and talk about the most personal things in the loudest of voices. It's like they think someone lowered a cone of silence around them. You just get used to listening in. Phil, this trumped-up embezzling charge-is that the reason they fired you?"

"No. That was the excuse. I was laid off like the rest of you."

Ten-A-Fly reached out and picked up the sheets. He slipped on a pair of reading glasses and started studying them.

Phil said, "I still can't see what any of this has to do with that missing girl."

"Maybe nothing," Wendy said. "But take it step by step. You get caught up in a scandal. You claim you're innocent."

"I am innocent. Why do you think I'm free right now? If my firm had any real proof, I'd be in jail. They know the charges were trumped-up."

"But don't you see? That kind of adds up. Take Dan. He ended up getting off. And to the best of my knowledge, neither Steve Miciano nor Farley Parks is in jail. None of the charges against you guys have been proven-yet the accusations alone were ruinous."

"So?"

Doug said, "Are you kidding, Phil?"

Wendy nodded. "Four guys, all in the same Princeton class, lived together in college, all involved in scandals within a year of each other."

Phil thought about it. "But not Kelvin."

"We don't know that yet," Wendy said. "We need to find him to know for sure."

Owen, still with baby in tow, said, "Maybe this Kelvin is the one who set this all up."

"Set what up?" Phil said. He looked at Wendy. "You're joking, right? Why would Kelvin want to hurt us?"

"Whoa," Doug said. "I saw a movie like this once. Like, Phil, were you guys in the Skull and Bones or some secret society?"

"What? No."

"Maybe you guys killed a girl and buried her body and now she's getting revenge on you. I think that's what happened in the movie."

"Stop it, Doug."

"But they have a point," Wendy said. "I mean, forgetting all the melodrama, could something have happened back at Princeton?"

"Like what?"

"Like something that would make someone come after you years later."

"No."

He said it too fast. Ten-A-Fly was looking down his half-moon reading glasses-a bizarre look on a rapper-still studying her printouts. "Owen," Fly said.

The guy with the baby sling came over. Fly ripped off a piece of paper. "This is a video blog. Look it up online, see what you can come up with."

Owen said, "Sure."

"What are you thinking?" Wendy asked him.

But Ten-A-Fly was still going through the pages. She looked back at Phil. His eyes were on the floor.

"Think, Phil."

"There was nothing."

"Did you guys have any enemies?"

Phil frowned. "We were just a bunch of college kids."

"Still. Maybe you guys got into a fight. Maybe one of you stole someone's girlfriend."

"No."

"You can't think of anything?"

"There isn't anything. I'm telling you. You're barking up the wrong tree."

"How about Kelvin Tilfer?"

"What about him?"

"Did he ever feel slighted by you guys?"

"No."

"He was the only black guy in the group."

"So?"

"I'm just taking stabs in the dark here," Wendy said. "Did something happen to him maybe?"

"At school? No. Kelvin was weird, a math genius, but we all liked him."

"What do you mean, weird?"

"Weird-different, funky, out there. He kept strange hours. He liked taking late-night walks. He talked out loud when he worked on math problems. Weird-mad genius weird. That plays well at Princeton."

"So you can't think of any incident at school?"

"That would make him do something like this? No, nothing."

"How about something more recent?"

"I haven't spoken to Kelvin since graduation. I told you."

"Why not?"

Phil answered the question by asking one of his own. "Where did you go to college, Wendy?"

"Tufts."

"Do you still talk to everyone you graduated with?"

"No."

"Neither do I. We were friends. We lost touch. Like ninety-nine percent of college friends."

"Did he ever come to reunions or homecoming or anything like that?"

"No."

Wendy mulled that one over. She would try to contact Princeton's alumni office. Maybe they'd have something.

Ten-A-Fly said, "I found something."

Wendy turned to him. Yes, the outfit was still ridiculous, what with the baggy jeans, the cap with the bill the size of a manhole cover, the Ed Hardy shirt, but it was amazing how much of a persona is indeed the attitude. Ten-A-Fly was gone now. Norm was back. "What?"

"Before I got laid off, I was a marketing guy for several start-ups. Our main task was to get our company noticed in a positive way. Create buzz, especially online. So we got heavily into viral marketing. Do you know anything about it?"

"No," she said.

"It is getting big to the point of irrelevancy-meaning everyone is doing it so no one will be heard over the din. But for now it still works. We even do some of it with my rap persona. Let's say a movie comes out. Right away, you'll see great reviews or positive comments posted on the YouTube trailers, bulletin boards, blogs about how great the movie is, all that. Most of the early comments aren't real. They are done by a marketing group hired by the movie studio."