Harlan Coben - Gone for Good

Claudia Fisher crinkled her nose at him, as if he were something she'd just scraped off her shoe.

"Joey Pistillo," Squares said. "I bet Joey would know."

Now it was Fisher and Wilcox's turn to rock back on their heels.

"You got a cell phone?" Squares asked. "We can ask him right now."

Fisher looked at Wilcox, then at Squares. "Are you telling us that you know Assistant Director in Charge Joseph Pistillo?" she asked.

"Call him," Squares said. Then: "Oh, wait, you probably don't know his private line." Squares stretched out his hand and wiggled his finger in a give-me gesture. "You mind?"

She handed him the phone. Squares pressed the number pad and put the phone to his ear. He leaned all the way back, his feet still on the desk; if he'd been wearing a cowboy hat, it'd be pulled down over his eyes for a little siesta.

"Joey? Hey, man, how are you?" Squares listened for a minute and then he burst out laughing. He schmoozed a bit and I watched Fisher and Wilcox turn white. Normally I'd enjoy this power play between his checkered past and current celebrity status, Squares was one degree of separation from almost everyone but my mind was reeling.

After a few minutes, Squares handed Agent Fisher the cell phone. "Joey wants to talk to you."

Fisher and Wilcox stepped out in the corridor and closed the door.

"Dude, the feds," Squares said, thumbs up again, still impressed.

"Yeah, I'm pretty thrilled," I said.

"That's something, huh. I mean, about Sheila having a record. Who'd have guessed?"

Not me.

When Fisher and Wilcox returned, the color had returned to their faces. Fisher handed the phone to Squares with too courteous a smile.

Squares put it to his ear and said, "What's up, Joey?" He listened for a while. Then he said, "Okay," and hung up.

"What? "I said.

"That was Joey Pistillo. Top gun for the FBI on the East Coast."

"And?"

"He wants to see you in person," Squares said. He looked off.

"What?"

"I don't think we're going to like what he has to say."

Assistant Director in Charge Joseph Pistillo not only wanted to see me in person, but alone.

"I understand your mother passed away," he said.

"How do you understand?"

"Pardon?"

"Did you read the obituary in the paper?" I asked. "Did a friend tell you? How did you come to understand that she passed away?"

We looked at each other. Pistillo was a burly man, bald except for a close-cropped fringe of gray, shoulders like bowling balls, gnarled hands folded on his desk.

"Or," I went on, feeling the old anger creep in, "did you have an agent watching us. Watching her. At the hospital. On her deathbed. At her funeral. Was one of your agents the new orderly the nurses whispered about? Was one of your agents the limousine driver who forgot the funeral director's name?"

Neither one of us broke eye contact.

"I'm sorry for your loss," Pistillo said.

"Thank you."

He leaned back. "Why won't you tell us where Sheila Rogers is?"

"Why won't you tell me why you're looking for her?"

"When did you see her last?"

"Are you married, Agent Pistillo?"

He didn't break stride. "Twenty-six years. We have three kids."

"You love your wife?"

"Yes."

"So if I came to you and made demands and threats involving her, what would you do?"

Pistillo nodded slowly. "If you worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, I'd tell her to cooperate."

"Just like that?"

"Well" he raised his index finger "with one caveat."

"What's that?"

"That she was innocent. If she's innocent, I'd have no fears."

"So you wouldn't wonder what it was all about?"

"Wonder? Sure. Demand to know…" He let his voice trail off. "Let me ask you a hypothetical now."

He paused. I sat up.

"I know that you think your brother is dead."

Another pause. I stayed quiet.

"But suppose you found out that he's alive and hiding and suppose on top of that, you found out he killed Julie Miller." He sat back. "Hypothetically, of course. This is all just a hypothetical."

"Go on," I said.

"Well, what would you do? Would you turn him in? Would you tell him he's on his own? Or would you help him?"

More silence.

I said, "You didn't bring me here to play hypotheti-cals."

"No," he said, "I didn't."

There was a computer monitor on the right side of his desk. He turned the screen so that I could see it. Then he pressed some buttons. A color image came up, and something inside me clenched.

An ordinary-looking room. Tall lamp in the corner overturned. Beige carpet. Coffee table on its side. A mess. Like a tornado aftermath or something. But in the center of the room, a man lay in a puddle of what I assumed was blood. The blood was dark, beyond crimson, beyond rust, almost black. The man lay faceup, his arms and legs splayed in such way that he looked like he'd been dropped from a great height.

As I looked at the image on the monitor, I could feel Pistillo's eyes on me, gauging my reaction. My eyes flicked to his and then back at the screen.

He pressed the keyboard. Another image replaced the blood-soaked one. The same room. The lamp was out of sight now. Blood still stained the carpet but there was another body now, this one curled up in the fetal position. The first man wore a black T-shirt and black pants. This one wore a flannel shirt and blue jeans.

Pistillo hit another key. Now the photograph was wide framed. Both bodies now. The first in the center of the room. The second, closer to the door. I could see only one face from this angle it was not a familiar one but the other was blocked from view.

Panic rose up in me. Ken, I thought. Could one of them be…?

But then I remembered their questions. This wasn't about Ken.

"These pictures were taken in Albuquerque, New Mexico, over the weekend," Pistillo said.

I frowned. "I don't understand."

"The crime scene was something of a mess, but we still found some hairs and fibers." He smiled at me. "I'm not great on the technical aspects of our work. They have tests nowadays that you simply can't believe. But sometimes it's still the classics that get you through the day."

"Am I supposed to know what you're talking about?"

"Someone had wiped the place pretty good, but the crime-scene people still lifted a set of fingerprints one clean set that didn't belong to either of the victims. We ran them through the computer and got a hit early this morning." He leaned forward and the smile was gone now. "You want to make a guess?"

I saw Sheila, my beautiful Sheila, staring out the window.

"I'm sorry, Will."

"They belong to your girlfriend, Mr. Klein. The same one with a criminal record. The same one we're suddenly having a lot of trouble finding."

Elizabeth, New Jersey

They were near the cemetery now.

Philip McGuane sat in the back of his handcrafted Mercedes limousine a stretch model equipped with armor-reinforced sides and bulletproof one-way windows at a cost of four hundred thou and stared out at the blur of fast-food restaurants, tacky stores, and aged strip malls. A scotch and soda, freshly mixed in the limo's wet bar, was cupped in his right hand. He looked down at the amber liquor. Steady. That surprised him.

"You okay, Mr. McGuane?"

McGuane turned to his companion. Fred Tanner was huge, the approximate size and consistency of a city brownstone. His hands were manhole covers with sausagelike fingers. His gaze was one of supreme confidence. Old school, Tanner was still with his shellac-shiny suit and the ostentatious pinky ring. Tanner always wore the ring, a garish, oversize gold thing, twisting and toying with it whenever he spoke.

"I'm fine," McGuane lied.