Harlan Coben: Don’t Let Go

I keep going. I can see my words are landing on my old mentor like body blows. I want to pause, give him time to breathe and recover, but I know that it will only make it worse and that it would not be what he wants. So I just keep the onslaught going.

I tell Augie about the scream Maura heard.

I tell Augie about the gunfire and then the silence.

Augie sits back when I’m done. He looks out the window and blinks twice.

“So now we know,” he says.

I don’t say anything. We both sit there. Now that we know the truth, we are waiting for something to feel different. But that guy is still eating his enormous slice of pizza. Cars are still cruising down Broad Street. People are still going to work. Nothing has changed.

You and Diana are both still dead.

“Is it over?” Augie asks.

“Is what over?”

He spreads his arms wide as if to indicate everything.

“It doesn’t feel over,” I say.

“Meaning?”

“There has to be justice for Leo and Diana.”

“I thought you said he was dead.”

He. Augie doesn’t use Andy Reeves’s name. Just in case.

“There were other people at the base that night.”

“And you want to catch them all.”

“Don’t you?”

Augie turns away.

“Someone pulled the trigger,” I say. “Probably not Reeves. Someone picked them up and put them in, I don’t know, a car or a truck. Someone pulled the bullets out of their bodies. Someone tossed your daughter’s body onto a railroad track and...”

Augie is wincing, his eyes closed.

“You were indeed a great mentor, Augie. Which is why I can’t move on. You were the one who railed against injustice. You, more than anyone I ever knew, insisted on making sure the bad guys paid a price for what they did. You taught me that if we don’t get justice — if no one is punished — we never have balance.”

“You punished Andy Reeves,” he says.

“That’s not enough.”

I lean forward now. I had seen Augie knock heads too many times to count. He was the one who helped me take care of my first “Trey,” a subhuman slither of scrotum whom I had arrested for sexually assaulting a six-year-old girl, his girlfriend’s daughter. It got kicked on a technicality, and he was heading back home — back to that little girl. So Augie and I, we stopped him.

“What aren’t you telling me, Augie?”

He drops his head into both hands.

“Augie?”

He rubs his face. When he faces me again, his eyes are red. “You said Maura blames herself for running toward that fence.”

“In part, yes.”

“She even said maybe it was her fault.”

“But it’s not.”

“But she feels that way, right? Because maybe if she didn’t get stoned and run like that... that’s what she said, right?”

“What’s your point?” I ask.

“Do you want to punish Maura?”

I meet his eyes. “What the hell is going on, Augie?”

“Do you?”

“Of course not.”

“Even though she might in part be responsible?”

“She isn’t.”

He leans back. “Maura told you about the big bright lights. All that noise. Made you wonder why no one called it in, right?”

“Right.”

“I mean, you know that area. The Meyers lived close by that base. On that cul-de-sac. So did the Carlinos and the Brannums.”

“Wait.” I see it now. “You guys got a call?”

He looks off. “Dodi Meyer. She said there was something going on at the base. She told us about the lights. She thought... she thought maybe some kids broke in and turned on the floodlights and set off firecrackers.”

I feel a small stone form in my chest. “So what did you do, Augie?”

“I was in my office. The dispatcher asked me if I wanted to take the call. It was late. The other patrol car was handling a domestic disturbance. So I said yes.”

“What happened?”

“The lights were out by the time I got there. I noticed... I noticed a pickup truck by the gate. It was ready to pull out. There was a tarp over the back. I rang the bell at the fence. Andy Reeves came out. It was late at night, but I didn’t question why so many people were still at a Department of Agriculture compound. What you said about a black site, that doesn’t surprise me. I didn’t know exactly what was going on, but I still foolishly trusted my government back then to be doing the right thing. So Andy Reeves comes to the gate. I tell him about us getting a disturbance call.”

“What does he say?”

“That a deer jumped into the fence. That’s what set off the alarms and lights. He said one of his guards panicked and started shooting. That was the gunfire. He said the guard killed the deer. He pointed to that tarp in the back of the pickup.”

“Did you buy that?”

“I don’t know. Not really. But the place was classified government stuff. So I let it go.”

“What did you do next?”

His voice is coming from a million miles away now. “I went home. My shift was over. I got into bed, and a few hours later...” He shrugs away the rest of the thought, but I’m not ready to let it go.

“You got the call about Diana and Leo.”

Augie nods. His eyes are wet now.

“And you didn’t see a connection?”

He thinks about that. “Maybe I didn’t want to see one. That way, like I asked you with Maura, it wasn’t my fault. Maybe I was just trying to justify my own mistake, but I never saw much of a link.”

My phone goes off. I see the time is 9:10 A.M., even before I read Muse’s text:

Where the F are you??!!

I text back: There in a minute.

I rise. His eyes are on the floor.

“You’re late for your meeting,” he says without looking up. “Go.”

I hesitate. In a way, all this explains so much — Augie’s reticence over the years, his insistence that it was just two stoned kids doing something stupid, his disconnect. His mind wouldn’t let him link the murder of his own daughter to his visit that night to the base because then he’d have to live with the additional guilt of maybe not doing anything about it. As I turn and head for the exit, I wonder about that now. I wonder about dropping this all on him, shattering him anew, whether every night from now on, as he closes his eyes, he’s going to see that tarp over the back of a pickup truck and wonder what was underneath it. Or has he already been doing that in some subconscious way? Is the reason he so easily accepted the more obvious explanation for his daughter’s death because he couldn’t face his own small role in what happened?

My phone rings. It’s Muse. “I’m almost there,” I tell her.

“What the hell have you done?”

“Why, what’s up?”

“Just hurry up.”

The Essex County Prosecutor’s Office is located on Market Street in the simply dubbed Veterans Courthouse. I work here, so I know the building well. This place is always humming — more than a third of the entire state’s criminal cases are tried here. As I head inside, I hear an unfamiliar ding coming from my phone and I realize it’s that new app Maura installed. I read the message from her:

Drove by again. Cops found yellow Mustang.

This isn’t good, of course, but it would still be a while before the course of events I laid out earlier would lead them to me. I have time. Probably. I type back:

Okay. Heading into meeting now.

Loren Muse is waiting for me at the door, staring daggers. She is a short woman, and she is flanked on both sides by tall men in suits. The younger of the two is thin and wiry, with hard eyes. The older guy sports a halo of too-long hair circling his bald dome. His protruding gut is giving his shirt buttons a hell of a battle. When we step into the outer office, the older guy says, “I’m Special Agent Rockdale. This is Special Agent Krueger.”