Harlan Coben: Don’t Let Go

Reynolds asks, “How will you get back here?”

“Because we ain’t Uber,” Bates adds.

“Yeah, return transportation,” I say. “That’s what we should all be concentrating on.”

They frown some more, but this is done now. Reynolds gets in on the driver’s side, Bates the passenger.

“No one is going to open a door for me?” I say.

Needless needling, but what the hell. Before I get in, I take out my phone and go to my Favorites. From the driver’s seat, Reynolds gives me a WTF look. I hold up a finger to tell her this will only take a moment.

Ellie answers, “Hey.”

“I have to cancel tonight.”

Every Sunday night I volunteer at Ellie’s shelter for battered women.

“What’s up?” she asks.

“Do you remember Rex Canton?”

“From high school? Sure.”

Ellie is happily married with two girls. I’m godfather to both, which is odd, but it works. Ellie is the best person I know.

“He was a cop in Pennsylvania,” I say.

“I think I heard something about that.”

“You never mentioned it to me.”

“Why would I?”

“Good point.”

“So what about him?”

“Rex was killed on the job. Someone shot him during a traffic stop.”

“Oh, that’s awful. I’m sorry to hear that.”

With some people, it’s just words. With Ellie, you could feel the empathy.

“What’s that have to do with you?” she asks.

“I’ll let you know later.”

Ellie didn’t waste time with asking why or for more details. She got that if I wanted to say more, I would have.

“Okay, call me if you need anything.”

“Take care of Brenda for me,” I say.

There is a brief pause here. Brenda is a mother of two and one of the battered women at the shelter. Her life has been made a living nightmare by a violent douchenozzle. Two weeks ago, Brenda fled to Ellie’s shelter in the thick of night with a concussion, broken ribs, and nothing else. Since then, Brenda has been too frightened to go outside, not even to get some air in the shelter’s isolated courtyard. She left everything other than her children behind. She shakes a lot. She constantly winces and cringes as if awaiting a blow.

I want to tell Ellie that Brenda could go home tonight and finally pack her belongings, that her abuser — a cretin dubbed Trey — wouldn’t be home for a few days, but there is a certain discretion even between Ellie and me here.

They’d figure it out. They always do.

“Tell Brenda I’ll be back,” I say.

“I will,” Ellie says, and then she hangs up.

I sit alone in the back of the squad car. It smells like squad car, which is to say of perspiration and desperation and fear. Reynolds and Bates are up front, like they’re my parents. They don’t start asking me questions right away. They are completely silent. I roll my eyes. Really? Did they forget I’m a cop too? They are trying to get me to talk, to reveal something, wait me out. This is the vehicular equivalent to sweating a perp in the interrogation room, intentionally making him wait.

I’m not playing. I close my eyes and try to sleep.

Reynolds wakes me up. “Is your first name really Napoleon?”

“It is,” I say.

My French father hated the name, but my mother, the American in Paris, insisted.

“Napoleon Dumas?”

“Everyone calls me Nap.”

“Queer-ass name,” Bates says.

“Bates,” I say. “Instead of Mister, do they call you Master?”

“Huh?”

Reynolds holds back a chuckle. I can’t believe Bates has never heard this one before. He actually tries it out, saying softly to himself, “Master Bates,” before he figures it out.

“You’re an asshole, Dumas.”

He pronounces my last name correctly this time.

“So you want to get to it, Nap?” Reynolds says.

“Ask away.”

“You’re the one who put Maura Wells into the AFIS, correct?”

AFIS. Automated Fingerprint Identification System.

“Let’s pretend the answer is yes.”

“When?”

They know this already. “Ten years ago.”

“Why?”

“She vanished.”

“We checked,” Bates says. “Her family never reported that she was missing.”

I don’t reply. We let the silence linger a bit. Reynolds breaks it.

“Nap?”

It won’t look good. I know that, but it can’t be helped. “Maura Wells was my girlfriend in high school. When we were seniors, she broke up with me via a text. Cut off all contact. Moved away. I looked for her, but I could never find her.”

Reynolds and Bates exchange a glance.

“You talked to her parents?” Reynolds asks.

“Her mom, yeah.”

“And?”

“And she said Maura’s whereabouts were none of my business and I should move on with my life.”

“Good advice,” Bates says.

I don’t take the bait.

Reynolds asks, “So how old were you?”

“Eighteen.”

“So you looked for Maura, you didn’t find her...”

“Right.”

“So then what did you do?”

I don’t want to say it, but Rex is dead and Maura may be back and you have to give a little to get a little. “When I joined the force I put her prints into the AFIS. Filed a report saying she was missing.”

“You really didn’t have any standing to do that,” Bates says.

“Debatable,” I say, “but are you here to bust me over a protocol issue?”

“No,” Reynolds says. “We are not.”

“I don’t know,” Bates says, feigning dubious. “A girl dumps you. Five years later, you break procedure by putting her in the system, so you can, what, try to hook up with her again?” He shrugs. “Sounds stalkerish.”

“Pretty creepy behavior, Nap,” Reynolds adds.

They know some of my past, I bet. They don’t know enough.

“I assume you looked for Maura Wells on your own?” Reynolds asks.

“Some.”

“And I assume you didn’t find her.”

“Correct.”

“Any thoughts on where Maura’s been the past fifteen years?”

We are on the highway now, heading west. I am still trying to put this together. I try to place my memories of Maura in terms of Rex. I think about you now, Leo. You were friends with them both. Does that mean anything? Maybe, maybe not. We were all in the same graduating class, so we all knew one another. But how close was Maura to Rex? Had Rex perhaps recognized her by chance? And if so, does that mean she killed him?

“No,” I say. “No thoughts.”

“It’s odd,” Reynolds says. “There has been no recent activity for Maura Wells. No credit cards, no bank accounts, no IRS filings. We’re still checking the paper trail—”

“You won’t find anything,” I say.

“You’ve been checking.”

It’s not a question.

“When did Maura Wells fall off the radar?” she asks me.

“Far as I can tell,” I say, “fifteen years ago.”

The murder scene is a small stretch of the kind of quiet back road you might find near an airport or train depot. No residences. An industrial park that has seen better days. A sprinkling of what were either abandoned warehouses or ones on the way out.

We step out of the squad car. A few makeshift wooden horses block off the murder scene, but a vehicle could drive around them. So far I have seen none do so. I keep that in mind — the lack of traffic. The blood hasn’t been cleaned up yet. Someone did a chalk outline of where Rex fell. I can’t remember the last time I saw one of those — an actual chalk outline.

“Walk me through it,” I say.

“You aren’t here as an investigator,” Bates snaps.

“You want to have a pissing contest,” I ask, “or you want to catch a cop killer?”