Harlan Coben - Hold Tight

Pietra looked out the side window.

“Eventually the police will get an ID on Marianne,” he said. “Or someone will realize that she’s missing. The police will look into it. They’ll talk to her friends. Reba would have told them then for certain.”

“You are sacrificing many lives.”

“Two so far.”

“And the survivors. Their lives are altered.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

“Are you going to claim Marianne started it?”

“Started is not the right word. She changed the dynamics.”

“So she dies?”

“She made a decision that altered and could potentially destroy lives.”

“So she dies?” Pietra repeated.

“All our decisions carry weight, Pietra. We all play God every day. When a woman buys a new pair of expensive shoes, she could have spent that same money feeding someone who was starving. In a sense, those shoes mean more to her than a life. We all kill to make our lives more comfortable. We don’t put it in those terms. But we do.”

She didn’t argue.

“What’s going on, Pietra?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

“I promised Cassandra.”

“Yes. So you said.”

“We need to keep this contained, Pietra.”

“Do you think we can?”

“I do.”

“So how many more will we kill?”

He was puzzled by the question. “Do you really care? Have you had enough?”

“I’m just asking about now. Today. With this. How many more will we kill?”

Nash thought about it. He realized now that perhaps Marianne had told him the truth in the beginning. In that case, he needed to go back to square one and snuff out the problem at its source.

“With a little luck,” he said, “only one.”

“ WOW,” Loren Muse said. “Could this woman be more boring?”

Clarence smiled. They were going through the credit card receipts for Reba Cordova. There were absolutely no surprises. She bought groceries and school supplies and kid clothes. She bought a vacuum at Sears and returned it. She bought a microwave at P.C. Richard. Her credit card was on file at a Chinese restaurant called Baumgarts, where she ordered takeout every Tuesday night.

Her e-mails were equally dull. She wrote to other parents about playdates. She kept in touch with one daughter’s dance instructor and the other’s soccer coach. She received the Willard School e-mail. She kept up with her tennis group about scheduling and filling in when one of them couldn’t make it. She was on the Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn and PetSmart newsletter lists. She wrote to her sister asking her for the name of a reading specialist because one of her daughters, Sarah, was having trouble.

“I didn’t know people like this really existed,” Muse said.

But she did. She saw them at Starbucks, the harried, doe-eyed women who thought a coffee shop was the perfect place for Mommy and Me hour, what with Brittany and Madison and Kyle in tow, all running around while the mommies-college graduates, former intellectuals-gabbed incessantly about their offspring as if no other child had ever existed. They gabbed about their poopies-yes, for real, their bowel movements!-and their first word and their social skills and their Montessori schools and their gymnastics and their Baby Einstein DVDs and they all had this brain-gone smile, like some alien had sucked their head dry, and Muse despised them on one level, pitied them on another and tried so damn hard not to be envious.

Loren Muse swore, of course, that she would never be like those mommies if she ever did have children. But who knew? Blanket declarations like that reminded her of the people who said that when they were old they’d rather be dead than end up in a nursing home or be a burden to their grown children-and now almost everyone she knew had parents who were either in a nursing home or a burden and none of those old people wanted to die.

If you look at anything from the outside, it is easy to make sweeping ungenerous judgments.

“How is the husband’s alibi?” she asked.

“The Livingston police questioned Cordova. It seems pretty solid.”

Muse motioned at the paperwork with her jaw. “And is the husband as boring as the wife?”

“I’m still going through all his e-mails, phone records, and credit card stuff, but yeah, so far.”

“What else?”

“Well, assuming that the same killer or killers took Reba Cordova and Jane Doe, we have patrolmen checking the spots known for prostitution, seeing if another body gets dumped.”

Loren Muse didn’t think that was going to happen but it was worth looking into. One of the possible scenarios here was that some serial killer, with the willing or unwilling help of a female accomplice, grabbed suburban women, killed them, and wanted them to appear to be prostitutes. They were going through the computers now, seeing if any other victims in nearby cities fit that description. So far, goose egg.

Muse didn’t buy this particular theory anyway. Psychologists and profilers would have a quasi-orgasm at the idea of a serial killer working suburban moms and making them up to be prostitutes. They would pontificate on the obvious mom-whore linkage, but Muse didn’t really buy it. There was one question that didn’t fit with this scenario, a question that had been bugging her from the moment she’d realized that Jane Doe was not a street hooker: Why hadn’t anyone reported Jane Doe missing?

There were two possible reasons she could see. One, nobody knew that she was missing. Jane Doe was on vacation or supposed to be on a business trip or something like that. Or two, someone who knew her had killed her. And that someone didn’t want to report her missing.

“Where is the husband now?”

“Cordova? He’s still with the Livingston cops. They’re going to canvass the neighborhood and see if anyone saw a white van, you know, the usual.”

Muse picked up a pencil. She put the eraser end in her mouth and chewed.

There was a knock on her door. She looked up and saw the soon-to-be-retired Frank Tremont filling her doorway.

Third day in a row with the same brown suit, Muse thought. Impressive.

He looked at her and waited. She didn’t have time for this, but it was probably better to get it over with.

“Clarence, you mind leaving us alone?”

“Yeah, Chief, sure thing.”

Clarence gave Frank Tremont a little nod as he left. Tremont did not return it. When Clarence was out of sight, he shook his head and said, “Did he call you chief?”

“I’m kind of pressed for time, Frank.”

“You got my letter?”

His resignation letter. “I did.”

Silence.

“I have something for you,” Tremont said.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m not out until the end of next month,” he said. “So I still need to do work, right?”

“Right.”

“So I got something.”

She leaned back, hoping he would make it a quick.

“I start looking into that white van. The one at both scenes.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t think it was stolen, unless it was out of the area. There is really nothing reported that matches it. So I started searching rent-a-car companies, seeing if anyone rented a van like the one we described.”

“And?”

“There are some, but most I was able to trace down fast and find out they’re legit.”

“So it’s a dead end.”

Frank Tremont smiled. “Mind if I sit down a second?”

She waved at the chair.

“I tried one more thing,” he said. “See, this guy has been pretty clever. Like you said. Setting up the first to look like a hooker. Parking the second vic’s car in a hotel lot. Changing the license plates and all. He doesn’t do it in the typical way. So I started wondering. What would be better and less traceable than stealing or renting a car?”