Harlan Coben - The Innocent

People often erased their surfing history or their mailbox, but the cookies were something different. If Olivia had wiped out the cookies, Matt would automatically know something had gone awry. His Yahoo! home page wouldn't automatically come up, for instance. Amazon wouldn't know who he was. A person trying to cover their tracks would not want that.

Clearing out the cookies would be too noticeable.

He went through Explorer and found the folder that held the Web's cookies. There were tons of them. He clicked the date button, thereby putting them in date order, the most recent at the top. His eyes ran down them. Most of them he recognized- Google, OfficeMax, Shutterfly- but there were two unfamiliar domains. He wrote them down, minimized the Explorer window, went back to the Web.

He typed in the first address and hit return. It was for the Nevada Sun News - a newspaper that required you to sign up in order to access the archives. The paper's home office was in Las Vegas. He checked the "personal profile." Olivia had signed up using a fake name and e-mail address. No surprise there. They both did that, to prevent spam and protect privacy.

But what had she been looking up?

There was no way to tell.

Strange, maybe, but the second Web address was far more so.

It took a while for the Web to recognize what he'd typed in. The address bounced from one spot to another before finally landing on something called:

Stripper-Fandom.com.

Matt frowned. There was a warning on the home page that nobody under the age of eighteen should continue. That didn't bode well. He clicked the enter icon. The pictures that appeared were, as one might expect, provocative. Stripper-Fandom was an "appreciation" site for…

… for female strippers?

Matt shook his head. There were countless thumbnails of topless women. He clicked one. There were biographies listed for each girl:

Bunny's career as an exotic dancer started in Atlantic City, but with her impressive dance moves and slinky costumes, she quickly rose to stardom and moved to Vegas. "I love it out here! And I love rich men!" Bunny's specialty is wearing bunny ears and doing a hop-dance using the pole…

Matt clicked the link. An e-mail address came up, in case you wanted to write Bunny and request rates for a "private audience." It actually said that- private audience. Like Bunny was the pope.

What the hell was going on here?

Matt searched through the stripper fan site until he could take no more. Nothing jumped out at him. Nothing fell into place. He just felt more confused. Maybe the site meant nothing at all. Most of the strippers were from the Vegas area. Maybe Olivia had gotten there by clicking an advertising link at that Nevada newspaper. Maybe the link wasn't even marked as a stripper site and just led there.

But why was she on a Nevada newspaper site in the first place? Why had she erased all her e-mails?

No answer.

Matt thought about Charles Talley. He Googled the name. Nothing interesting came up. He shut down the browser and moved back downstairs, that whisper from the phone call still echoing in his head, shredding all reason:

"Hey, guess what I'm doing to your wife right now?"

Time to get some air. Air and something more potent.

He headed outside and started for South Orange Avenue. From the Garden State Parkway, you couldn't miss the giant brown beer bottle rising up and dominating the skyline. But when you traveled this section of the GSP, the other thing you noticed- maybe even more than the old water tank- was the sprawling cemetery on both sides of the road. The parkway cut smack through the middle of a burial ground. You were encased left and right by unending rows of weather-beaten gravestones. But the effect of driving through was not so much splitting a cemetery in half as much as zipping it together, of making something whole. And there, in the not-so-far distance, this strange giant beer bottle stood, high in the air, a silent sentinel guarding or maybe mocking the buried inhabitants.

The damage to the brewery was somewhat mystifying. Every window was only partially broken, not fully smashed, as if someone had taken the time to throw one rock and only one rock at every single window in the twelve-story structure. Shards lay everywhere. Every opening was a yawning, jangled threat. The combination of erosion and pride, the strong skeleton against the missing-teeth shattered-eye look from the broken glass, gave the place a strange downtrodden-warrior bearing.

Soon they would tear the old factory down and build an upscale mall. Just what Jersey needed, he thought- another mall.

Matt turned down the alley and headed for the faded red door. The tavern did not have a name on it. There was one window with a Pabst Blue Ribbon neon sign in it. Like the brewery- like this city?- the sign no longer lit up.

Matt opened the door, forcing sunlight into a place bathed in darkness. The men- there was only one woman here right now and she'd hit you if you called her a lady- blinked like bats who'd had a flashlight shined on them. There was no jukebox playing, no music at all. The conversations were kept as low as the lights.

Mel was still behind the bar. Matt hadn't been here in, what, two, three years at least, but Mel still knew him by name. The tavern was a classic dive. You see them everywhere across the United States. Men- mostly, anyway- finishing up whatever job they grinded out were now looking to get a buzz on. If that included some boasting or banter, so be it, but places like this were much more about inebriation than consolation or conversation.

Before his stint in prison Matt would have never gone into a dump like Mel's. He now liked rougher spots. He was not sure why. The men in here were big with undefined muscle. They wore flannel shirts in the fall and winter, and bowling-gut-emphasizing T-shirts in the spring and summer. They wore jeans year-round. There weren't many fights in here, but you didn't walk in a place like this unless you knew how to use your fists.

Matt took a seat on a stool. Mel nodded at him. "Beer?"

"Vodka."

Mel poured him one. Matt held the glass, looked at it, shook his head. Drinking away his problems. Could he be a bigger cliché? He threw back the vodka and let the warmth coast through him. He nodded for another, but Mel was already on the case. Matt threw that one back too.

He started to feel better. Or to say the same thing in another way: He started to feel less. His eyes slowly swerved from side to side. He felt, as he did in most places, slightly out of place- a spy in enemy territory. He was not really comfortable anywhere anymore- his old softer world or his new hardened one. So he straddled both. Truth was, he was only comfortable- pitiful as it sounded- when he was with Olivia.

Damn her.

Third shot down the hatch. The buzzing started in the base of his skull.

Yo, check out the big man throwing back the booze.

He already felt a bit wobbly. He wanted that. Just make it go away, he thought. Not forever. He wasn't drinking away the blues. He was postponing them, for just one more night, just until Olivia came home and explained to him why she was in a motel room with another man, why she lied about it, why the guy knew that he had told her about the pictures.

Like that. The little things.

He pointed for another. Mel, rarely one to converse or hand out advice, poured.

"You're a beautiful man, Mel."

"Hey, thanks, Matt. I get that a lot, but it still means something, you know?"

Matt smiled and looked at the glass. Just for a night. Just let it go.

A big moose came back from the can, accidentally bumping into Matt as he walked past. Matt startled to, gave the moose the eye. "Watch it," Matt said.

The moose grunted an apology, diffusing the moment. Matt was almost disappointed. One would think he'd be smarter- that Matt, better than anyone, knew the danger in fisticuffs of any sort- but not tonight. Nope, tonight fisticuffs would be most welcome, yes indeed.