Harlan Coben - Just One Look

“I guess. If that’s what you want.”

“That’s what I want,” Emma said firmly.

Grace took them to the bus stop. This time she did not follow the bus to school. She stayed in place and bit down on her lower lip. The calm façade was slipping off again. Now that Emma and Max were gone, that would be okay.

When she got back to the house, Cora was awake and at the computer and groaning.

“Can I get you something?” Grace asked.

“An anesthesiologist,” Cora said. “Straight preferred but not required.”

“I was thinking more like coffee.”

“Even better.” Cora’s fingers danced across the keyboard. Her eyes narrowed. She frowned. “Something’s wrong here.”

“You mean with the e-mails off our spam, right?”

“We’re not getting any replies.”

“I noticed that too.”

Cora sat back. Grace moved next to her and started biting a cuticle. After a few seconds, Cora leaned forward. “Let me try something.” She brought up an e-mail, typed something in, sent it.

“What was that all about?”

“I just sent an e-mail to our spam address. I want to see if it arrives.”

They waited. No e-mail appeared.

“Hmm.” Cora leaned back. “So either something is wrong with the mail system…”

“Or?”

“Or Gus is still ticked about that small wee-wee line.”

“How do we find out which?”

Cora kept staring at the computer. “Who were you on the phone with before?”

“Bob Dodd’s nursing home. I’m going to pay him a visit this morning.”

“Good.” Cora’s eyes stayed on the screen.

“What is it?’

“I want to check something out,” she said.

“What?”

“Nothing probably, just something with the phone bills.” Cora started typing again. “I’ll call you if I learn anything.”

Perlmutter left Charlaine Swain with the Bergen County sketch artist. He had forced the truth out of her, thereby unearthing a tawdry secret that would have been better left deep in the ground. Charlaine Swain had been right to keep it from him. It offered no help. The revelation was, at best, a sleazy and embarrassing distraction.

He sat with a doodle pad, wrote the word “Windstar” and spent the next fifteen minutes circling it.

A Ford Windstar.

Kasselton was not a sleepy small town. They had thirty-eight cops on the payroll. They worked robberies. They checked on suspicious cars. They kept the school drug problems-suburban white-kid drugs-under control. They worked vandalism cases. They dealt with congestion in town, illegal parking, car accidents. They did their best to keep the urban decay of Paterson, a scant three miles from the border of Kasselton, at a safe distance. They answered too many false alarms emanating from the technological mating call of too many overpriced motion detectors.

Perlmutter had never fired his service revolver, except on a range. He had, in fact, never drawn his weapon in the line of duty. There had only been three deaths in the last three decades that fell under the possible heading of “suspicious” and all three perpetrators were caught within hours. One was an ex-husband who got drunk and decided to profess his undying love by planning to kill the woman he purportedly adored before turning the shotgun on himself. Said ex-husband managed to get the first part right-two shotgun blasts to the ex’s head-but like everything else in his pathetic life, he messed up the second part. He had only brought two shells. An hour later he was in custody. Suspicious Death Two was a teenage bully stabbed by a skinny, tormented elementary-school victim. The skinny kid served three years in juvie, where he learned the real meaning of being bullied and tormented. The final case was of a man dying of cancer who begged his wife of forty-eight years to end his suffering. She did. She got parole and Perlmutter suspected that it was worth it to her.

As for gunshots, well, there had been plenty in Kasselton but almost all were self-inflicted. Perlmutter wasn’t much on politics. He wasn’t sure of the relative merits of gun control, but he knew from personal experience that a gun bought for home protection was more likely-much, much, much more likely-to be used by the owner to commit suicide than to ward off a home invasion. In fact, in all his years in law enforcement, Perlmutter had never seen a case where the home gun had been used to shoot, stop, or scare away an intruder. Suicides by handguns, well, they were more plentiful than anyone wanted to let on.

Ford Windstar. He circled it again.

Now, after all these years, Perlmutter had a case involving attempted murder, bizarre abduction, unusually brutal assault-and, he suspected, much more. He started doodling again. He wrote the name Jack Lawson in the top left-hand corner. He wrote the name Rocky Conwell in the top right-hand corner. Both men, possibly missing, had crossed a toll plaza in a neighboring state at the same time. He drew a line from one name to the other.

Connection One.

Perlmutter wrote out Freddy Sykes’s name, bottom left. The victim of a grievous assault. He wrote Mike Swain on the bottom right. Shot, attempted murder. The connection between these two men, Connection Two, was obvious. Swain’s wife had seen the perpetrator of both acts, a stout Chinese guy she made sound like the Son of Odd Job from the old James Bond film.

But nothing really connected the four cases. Nothing connected the two disappearing men to the work of Odd Job’s offspring. Except perhaps for one thing:

The Ford Windstar.

Jack Lawson had been driving a blue Ford Windstar when he disappeared. Mini Odd Job had been driving a blue Ford Windstar when he left the Sykes residence and shot Swain.

Granted this was a tenuous connection at best. Saying “Ford Windstar” in this suburb was like saying “implant” at a strip club. It wasn’t much to go on, but when you add in the history of this town, the fact that stable fathers do not really just go missing, that this much activity never happens in a town like Kasselton… no, it wasn’t a strong tie, but it wasn’t far off for Perlmutter to draw a conclusion:

All of this was related.

Perlmutter had no idea how this was all related, and he really didn’t want to think about it too much quite yet. Let the techies and lab guys do their jobs first. Let them scour the Sykes residence for fingerprints and hairs. Let the artist finish the sketch. Let Veronique Baltrus, their resident computer weenie and an honest-to-God knockout, sift through the Sykes computer. It was simply too early to make a guess.

“Captain?”

It was Daley.

“What’s up?”

“We found Rocky Conwell’s car.”

“Where?”

“You know the Park-n-Ride on Route 17?”

Perlmutter took off his reading glasses. “The one down the street?”

Daley nodded. “I know. It doesn’t make sense. We know he left the state, right?”

“Who found it?”

“Pepe and Pashaian.”

“Tell them to secure the area,” he said, rising. “We’ll check the vehicle out ourselves.”

Grace threw on a Coldplay CD for the ride, hoping it’d distract her. It did and it didn’t. On one level she understood exactly what was happening to her with no need for interpretation. But the truth, in a sense, was too stark. To face it straight on would paralyze. That was where the surrealism probably derived from-self-preservation, the need to protect and even filter what one saw. Surrealism gave her the strength to go on, to pursue the truth, to find her husband, as opposed to the eye of reality, stark and naked and alone, which made her want to crouch into a small ball or maybe scream until they took her away.