Harlan Coben - Tell No One

The room chilled a few degrees. I tried not to move, to quiet my breath, anything so as not to disturb him.

"I'll start with the night at the lake," he said. "When they grabbed her."

"Who grabbed her?"

He stared down into his glass. "Don't interrupt," he said. "Just listen."

I nodded, but he didn't see. He was still staring down at his drink, literally looking for answers in the bottom of a glass.

"You know who grabbed her," he said, "or you should by now. The two men they found buried up there." His gaze suddenly swept the room. He snatched up his weapon and stood, checking the window again. I wanted to ask what he expected to see out there, but I didn't want to throw off his rhythm.

"My brother and I got to the lake late. Almost too late. We set up to stop them midway down the dirt road. You know where those two boulders are?"

He glanced toward the window, then back at me. I knew the two boulders. They sat about half a mile down the dirt road from Lake Charmaine. Both huge, both round, both almost the exact same size, both perfectly placed on either side of the road. There were all kinds of legends about how they got there.

"We hid behind them, Ken and me. When they came close, I shot out a tire. They stopped to check it. When they got out of the car, I shot them both in the head."

With one more look out the window, Hoyt moved back to his chair. He put down the weapon and stared at his drink some more. I held my tongue and waited.

"Griffin Scope hired those two men," he said. "They were supposed to interrogate Elizabeth and then kill her. Ken and I got wind of the plan and headed up to the lake to stop them." He put up his hand as if to silence a question, though I hadn't dared open my mouth. "The hows and whys aren't important. Griffin Scope wanted Elizabeth dead. That's all you need to know. And he wouldn't stop because a couple of his boys got killed. Plenty more where they came from. He's like one of those mythical beasts where you cut off the head and it grows two more." He looked at me. "You can't fight that kind of power, Beck."

He took a deep sip. I kept still.

"I want you to go back to that night and put yourself in our position," he continued, moving closer, trying to engage me. "Two men are lying dead on that dirt road. One of the most powerful men in the world sent them to kill you. He has no qualms about taking out the innocent to get to you. What can you do? Suppose we decided to go to the police. What would we tell them? A man like Scope doesn't leave any evidence behind – and even if he did, he has more cops and judges in his pocket than I have hairs on my head. We'd be dead. So I ask you, Beck. You're there. You have two men dead on the ground. You know it won't end there. What do you do?"

I took the question as rhetorical.

"So I presented these facts to Elizabeth, just like I'm presenting them to you now. I told her that Scope would wipe us out to get to her. If she ran away – if she went into hiding, for example – he'd just torture us until we gave her up. Or he'd go after my wife. Or your sister. He'd do whatever it took to make sure Elizabeth was found and killed."

He leaned closer to me. "Do you see now? Do you see the only answer?"

I nodded because it was all suddenly transparent. "You had to make them think she was dead."

He smiled, and new goose bumps surfaced all over me. "I had some money saved up. My brother Ken had more. We also had the contacts. Elizabeth went underground. We got her out of the country. She cut her hair, learned to wear disguises, but that was probably overkill. No one was really looking for her. For the past eight years she's been bouncing around third world countries, working for the Red Cross or UNICEF or whatever organization she could hook up with."

I waited. There was so much he hadn't yet told me, but I sat still. I let the implications seep in and shake me at the core. Elizabeth. She was alive. She had been alive for the past eight years. She had been breathing and living and working… It was too much to compute, one of those incomprehensible math problems that make the computer shut down.

"You're probably wondering about the body in the morgue."

I allowed myself a nod.

"It was pretty simple really. We get Jane Does in all the time. They get stored in pathology until somebody gets bored with them. Then we stick them in a potter's field out on Roosevelt Island. I just waited for the next Caucasian Jane Doe who'd be a near enough match to pop up. It took longer than I expected. The girl was probably a runaway stabbed by her pimp, but, of course, we'll never know for sure. We also couldn't leave Elizabeth's murder open. You need a fall guy, Beck. For closure. We chose KillRoy It was common knowledge that KillRoy branded the faces with the letter K. So we did that to the corpse. That only left the problem of identification. We toyed around with the idea of burning her beyond recognition, but that would have meant dental records and all that. So we took a chance. The hair matched. The skin tone and age were about right. We dumped her body in a town with a small coroner's office. We made the anonymous call to the police ourselves. We made sure we arrived at the medical examiner's office at the same time as the body. Then all I had to do was make a tearful ID. That's how the large majority of murder victims are identified. A family member IDs them. So I did, and Ken backed me up. Who would question that? Why on earth would a father and uncle lie?"

"You took a hell of a risk," I said.

"But what choice did we have?"

"There had to be other ways."

He leaned closer. I smelled his breath. The loose folds of skin by his eyes drooped low. "Again, Beck, you're on that dirt road with those two bodies – hell, you're sitting here right now with the benefit of hindsight. So tell me: What should we have done?"

I didn't have an answer.

"There were other problems too," Hoyt added, sitting back a bit. "We were never totally sure that Scope's people would buy the whole setup. Luckily for us, the two lowlifes were supposed to leave the country after the murder. We found plane tickets to Buenos Aires on them. They were both drifters, unreliable types. That all helped. Scope's people bought it, but they kept tabs on us – not so much because they thought she was still alive, but they worried that maybe she had given one of us some incriminating material."

"What incriminating material?"

He ignored the question. "Your house, your phone, probably your office. They've been bugged for the past eight years. Mine too."

That explained the careful emails. I let my eyes wander around the room.

"I swept for them yesterday," he said. "The house is clean."

When he was silent for a few moments, I risked a question. "Why did Elizabeth choose to come back now?"

"Because she's foolish," he said, and for the first time, I heard anger in his voice. I gave him some time. He calmed, the red swells in his face ebbing away. "The two bodies we buried," he said quietly.

"What about them?"

"Elizabeth followed the news on the Internet. When she read that they'd been discovered, she figured, same as me, that the Scopes might realize the truth."

"That she was still alive?"

"Yes."

"But if she were overseas, it would still take a hell of a lot to find her."

"That's what I told her. But she said that wouldn't stop them. They'd come after me. Or her mother. Or you. But" – again he stopped, dropped his head – "I don't know how important all that was."

"What do you mean?"

"Sometimes I think she wanted it to happen." He fiddled with the drink, jiggled the ice. "She wanted to come back to you, David. I think the bodies were just an excuse."

I waited again. He drank some more. He took another peek out the window.