Harlan Coben - Gone for Good

I just looked at him some more.

"Yeah, okay, that's pretty begging," he agreed. "Let's forget that. Possibility two" Squares raised another finger, paused, looked up in the air "hell, I'm lost here."

"Right."

We ate. He mulled it over some more. "Okay, let's assume that Sheila knew exactly who you were from the beginning."

"Let's."

"I still don't get it, man. What are we left with here?"

"Styling," I replied.

The shower stopped. I picked up a poppy-seed bagel. The seeds stuck to my hand.

"I've been thinking about it all night," I said.

"And?"

"And I keep coming back to New Mexico."

"How so?"

"The FBI wanted to question Sheila about an unsolved double murder in Albuquerque."

"So?"

"Years earlier, Julie Miller was also murdered."

"Also unsolved," Squares said, "though they suspect your brother."

"Yes."

"You see a connection between the two," Squares said. "There has to be."

Squares nodded. "Okay, I see point A and I see point B. But I don't see how you get from one to the other."

"Neither,"Isaid, "doI."

We grew silent. Katy peeked her head through the doorway. Her face had that morning-after pallor. She groaned and said, "I just upchucked again."

"Appreciate the update," I said.

"Where's my clothes?"

"The bedroom closet," I said.

She gestured an in-pain thank-you and closed the door. I looked at the right side of the couch, the spot where Sheila liked to read. How could this be happening? The old adage "Better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all" came to me. I wondered about that. But more than that, I wondered what was worse to lose the love of a lifetime or to realize that maybe she never loved you at all.

Some choice.

The phone rang. This time I did not wait for the machine. I lifted the receiver and said hello.

"Will?"

"Yes?"

"It's Yvonne Sterno," she said. " Albuquerque 's answer to Jimmy Olsen."

"What have you got?"

"I've been up all night working on this."

"And?"

"And it keeps getting weirder."

"I'm listening."

"Okay, I got my contact to go through the deeds and tax records. Now understand that my contact is a government employee, and I got her to go in during her off hours. You usually have a better chance of turning water into wine or having my uncle pick up a check than getting a government employee to show up "

"Yvonne?" I interrupted.

"Yeah?"

"Assume that I'm already impressed by your resourcefulness. Tell me what you got."

"Yeah, okay, you're right," she said. I heard papers being shuffled. "The murder-scene house was leased by a corporation called Cripco."

"And they are?"

"Untraceable. It's a shell. They don't seem to do anything."

I thought about that.

"Owen Enfield also had a car. A gray Honda Accord. Also leased by the fine folks at Cripco."

"Maybe he worked for them."

"Maybe. I'm trying to check that now."

"Where's the car now?"

"That's another interesting thing," Yvonne said. "The police found it abandoned in a mall in Lacida. That's about two hundred miles east of here."

"So where is Owen Enfield?"

"My guess? He's dead. For all we know, he was one of the victims."

"And the woman and little girl? Where are they?"

"No clue. Hell, I don't even know who they are."

"Did you talk to the neighbors?"

"Yes. It's like I said before: No one knew much about them."

"How about a physical description?"

"Ah."

"Ah what?"

"That's what I wanted to talk to you about."

Squares kept eating, but I could tell he was listening. Katy was still in my room, either dressing or making another offering to the porcelain gods.

"The descriptions were pretty vague," Yvonne continued. "The woman was in her mid-thirties, attractive, and a brunette. That's about as much as any of the neighbors could tell me. No one knew the little girl's name. She was around eleven or twelve with sandy-brown hair. One neighbor described her as cute as a button, but what kid that age isn't? Mr. Enfield was described as six feet with a gray crew cut and goatee. Forty years old, more or less."

"Then he wasn't one of the victims," I said.

"How do you know?"

"I saw a photo of the crime scene."

"When?"

"When I was questioned by the FBI about my girlfriend's whereabouts."

"You could see the victims?"

"Not clearly, but enough to know that neither had a crew cut."

"Hmm. Then the whole family has up and vanished."

"Yes."

"There's one other thing, Will."

"What's that?"

"Stonepointe is a new community. Everything is fairly self-contained."

"Meaning?"

"Are you familiar with Quick Go the convenience store chain?"

"Sure," I said. "We have QuickGos out here too."

Squares took off his sunglasses and looked a question at me. I shrugged and he moved toward me.

"Well, there's a big Quick Go at the edge of the complex," Yvonne said. "Almost all the residents use it."

"So?"

"One of the neighbors swore she saw Owen Enfield there at three o'clock on the day of the murders."

"I'm not following you, Yvonne."

"Well," she said, "the thing is, all the QuickGos have security cameras." She paused. "You following me now?"

"Yeah, I think so."

"I already checked," she went on. "They keep them for a month before they tape over them."

"So if we can get that tape," I began, "we might be able to get a good view of Mr. Enfield."

"Big if, though. The store manager was firm. There was no way he was going to turn anything over to me."

"There has to be a way," I said.

"I'm open to ideas, Will."

Squares put his hand on my shoulder. "What?"

I covered the mouthpiece and filled him in. "You know anybody connected to Quick Go I said.

"Incredible as this might sound, the answer is nope."

Damn. We mulled it over for a bit. Yvonne started humming the Quick Go jingle, one of those torturous tunes that enters through the ear canal and proceeds to ricochet around the skull in search of an escape route it will never find. I remembered the new commercial campaign, the one where they updated the old jingle by adding an electric guitar and a synthesizer and bass, and fronting the band with a big-time pop star simply known as Sonay.

Hold the phone. Sonay. Squares looked at me. "What?"

"I think you may be able to help after all," I said.

Sheila and Julie had been members of Chi Gamma sorority. I still had the rent-a-car from my late-night sojourn to Livingston, so Katy and I decided to take the two-hour drive up to Haverton College in Connecticut and see what we could learn.

Earlier in the day, I called the Haverton registrar's office to do a little fact-checking. I'd learned that the sorority's housemother back then had been one Rose Baker. Ms. Baker had retired three years ago and moved into a campus house directly across the street. She was to be the main target of our pseudo-investigation.

We pulled in front of the Chi Gamma house. I remembered it from my too-infrequent visits during my Amherst College days. You could tell right off that it was a sorority house. It had that antebellum, faux Greco-Roman-columns-thing going on, all in white, and with soft ruffled edges that gave the whole edifice a feminine feel. Something about it reminded me of a wedding cake.

Rose Baker's residence was, to speak kindly, more modest. The house had started life as a small Cape Cod, but somewhere along the way the lines had been ironed flat. The one-time red color was now a dull clay. The window lace looked cat-shredded. Shingles had flaked off as if the house had an acute case of seborrhea.

Under normal circumstances, I would have made an appointment of some kind. On TV, they never do that. The detective shows up and the person is always home. I always found that both unrealistic and unwieldy, yet perhaps now I understood a little better. First off, the chatty lady in the registrar's office informed me that Rose Baker rarely left home, and when she did, she rarely strayed far. Second and I think, more important if I called Rose Baker and she asked me why I wanted to see her, what would I say? Hi, let's talk murder? No, better just to show up with Katy and see where that got us. If she was not in, we could always explore the archives in the library or visit the sorority house. I had no idea what good any of this would do, but hey, we were just flying blind here.