Harlan Coben - Don’t Let Go

“Yes.”

“I’d love to hear your thoughts.”

Augie gives a heavy sigh. “A bunch of teenagers defied government no-trespassing warnings and filmed a helicopter landing at a government site.”

“That’s it?”

“Did I miss something?”

“Could you make out who was talking on the tape?” I asked.

He considered that. “The only voice I recognized for sure was your brother’s.”

“How about Diana?”

Augie shakes his head. “Diana wasn’t on the tape.”

“You seem pretty certain.”

Augie raises the glass to his lips, stops, thinks better of it, places it back down. He stares off now, beyond me and into the past. “The weekend before she died, Diana was in Philadelphia doing college tours. All three of us — Diana, Audrey, and me — were there. We visited Villanova, Swarthmore, and Haverford. We liked them all, though Diana thought Haverford might be too small and Villanova might be too big. When we got home on Sunday, she was deciding between two colleges for early decision — Swarthmore and Amherst, which we’d visited over the summer.” He still looks off, his voice devoid of any emotion. “If Diana made that decision, she never got the chance to tell me. Both applications were on her desk on the night she died.”

Now he takes a deep pull from his drink. I give it a moment.

“Augie, they were covering something up at the base.”

I expect a denial, but he nods. “Seems so.”

“You’re not surprised?”

“That a remote government agency protected by barbed-wire fencing was a cover? No, Nap, I’m not surprised.”

“I assume Andy Reeves asked you about the tape,” I say.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“He said I should make sure you don’t release it. He said that it would be tantamount to treason, that it was a matter of national security.”

“It has to be connected to Leo and Diana.”

He closes his eyes and shakes his head.

“Come on, Augie. They discover this secret, and a week later, they end up dead.”

“No,” Augie says. “It’s not connected. At least not like you say.”

“Are you for real? You think this is all a giant coincidence?”

Augie looks down into his drink as though there really is an answer at the bottom of it. “You’re a great investigator, Nap. And I don’t say that just because I trained you. Your mind... you’re brilliant in many ways. You see things others can’t. But sometimes you need to go back to the basics, to what you definitely know. Stop taking leaps. Look at the facts. Look at what we know for certain.”

I wait.

“Number one, Leo and Diana were found dead by railroad tracks miles away from the military base.”

“I can explain that.”

He raises a hand to stop me. “I’m sure you can. I’m sure you’ll tell me that they could have been moved or whatever. But right now, let me just state the facts. No maybes.” He raises a finger. “Fact One: Their bodies were found miles from the military base. Fact Two” — a second finger — “the medical examiner concluded that blunt trauma from a moving train caused their deaths, nothing else. Before I continue, are we clear on all this?”

I nod, not because I completely agree — a train strike is devastating and might disguise earlier trauma — but because I want to hear what else he has to say.

“Now let’s examine this tape you found. Assuming it is authentic — and I see no reason to think it’s not — one week before these deaths, one of the deceased, Leo, saw a helicopter over the base. Your theory, I assume, is that this led to his death. Keep in mind that Diana wasn’t with them when they made this video.”

“Leo would have told her,” I counter.

“No,” he said.

“No?”

“Again, stick with the evidence, Nap. If you stick with the evidence, you’ll conclude, as I have, that Diana never knew.”

“I’m not following,” I say.

“It’s simple.” He meets my eyes. “Did Leo tell you about the helicopter?”

I open my mouth and stop. I see where he is going with this. I slowly shake my head.

“How about your girlfriend, Maura? She was on the tape, am I correct?”

“Yes.”

“Did Maura tell you?”

“No,” I say.

Augie lets that sink in before continuing. “And then we have the toxicology report.”

I know what the report said — hallucinogenics, alcohol, and pot in their systems. “What about it?” I ask.

Augie is trying to sound analytical, trying to be “just the facts, ma’am,” but his voice is coarse from the pain. “You knew my daughter for a long time.”

“Yes.”

“You could even say you were friends.”

“Yes.”

“In fact” — now he sounds a bit like an attorney during a cross-examination — “you set Diana and Leo up.”

That’s not exactly accurate. I brought them together — I didn’t actively set them up — but this hardly seems the time to argue semantics. “What’s your point, Augie?”

“All fathers are naïve when it comes to their little girls. I was no different, I guess. I thought the sun rose and set on that girl. Diana played soccer in the fall. She was a cheerleader in the winter. She was an active leader in a dozen extracurricular activities.” He leans forward, into the light. “I’m a cop, not a fool. I know none of that means your kid won’t do drugs or get into any trouble, but would you say Diana was a big partier?”

I don’t really have to think about the answer. “No.”

“No,” he repeats. “And ask Ellie. Ask her how often Diana did drugs or drank before...” He stops himself. His eyes close. “And yet that night, when Leo comes to pick her up, I’m there. I answer the door for him. I shake his hand, and I can see it.”

“See what?”

“He’s stoned. Not for the first time. I want to say something. I want to stop her from going out the door. But Diana just gives me this pleading look. You know the one — like, ‘Don’t make a scene, Dad.’ So I don’t. I let her go.”

He’s there, as he says this. Shaking hands with you, looking at his daughter, seeing the expression on her face. That what-if, that regret, never leaves him.

“So now that we got the facts out, Nap, you tell me: What’s more likely? A big conspiracy involving CIA agents that, I don’t know, kidnapped two kids because one of them had filmed a helicopter the week before — if the CIA knew about that, why did they wait a week before they killed him? — dragged them both across town to railroad tracks, and, I guess, pushed them in front of a speeding train? Or is the more likely scenario that a girl went out with a boy who liked to get high and stoned. They partied too hard. They remembered the legend of Jimmy Riccio and together, flying high, tried to jump the track and just fell a little short?”

He looks at me and waits.

“You’re leaving a whole lot of stuff out,” I say.

“No, Nap, you’re putting a whole lot of stuff in.”

“We have Rex. We have Hank—”

“Fifteen years later.”

“—and you know Maura hid that night. Ellie told you about it. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“When should I have told you? You were an eighteen-year-old kid. Should I have told you when you were nineteen? When you graduated from the academy? When you got promoted to county? When should I have told you something as irrelevant as ‘your old girlfriend didn’t want to go home so she stayed with Ellie’?”

Is he for real? “Maura was scared and hiding,” I say, trying not to shout, “from something that happened on the night Leo and Diana were killed.”

He shakes his head. “You need to leave this alone. For everyone’s sake.”

“Yeah, I keep hearing that.”