Harlan Coben: Don’t Let Go

“She goes right over to him.” Hal says this wide-eyed, as though he’s describing a UFO landing. “Starts hitting on the guy.”

“Any chance they knew each other before?”

“Don’t think so. Not the vibe I got.”

“What vibe did you get?”

Hal shrugs. “Figured that she was a pro. That was my take, you want to know the truth.”

“You get a lot of pros in here?” I ask.

Hal gets wary. Reynolds says, “We don’t give a shit about solicitation, Hal. This is a cop killing.”

“Sometimes, yeah. I mean, there are two strip clubs within a mile. Sometimes the girls from there want to do a little business off-site.”

I look at Reynolds, but she’s already nodding in my direction. “I got Bates working that angle.”

“You ever see her in here before?” I ask.

“Twice.”

“You remember?”

Hal spreads his hands. “How many times I gotta tell you?”

“Hot,” I say for him. I am good at denial. This “hot” might not be Maura, though, uh, the description, vague as it is, does indeed fit.

“Those other two times,” I continue, “she leave with guys?”

“Yep.”

I picture it. Three times at this dump. Three times leaving with guys. Maura. I swallow back the ache.

Hal rubs his chin. “Come to think of it, she might not be a pro.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Not the type.”

“What’s the type?”

“It’s like that judge said about porn: You know it when you see it. I mean, she could be. Probably is. But it could be something else. She could just be a freak, you know? We get these MILFs that come in sometimes, happily married, three kids at home. They come in here and they bed guys and, I don’t know. Freaks. Maybe she’s one of those.”

How reassuring.

Reynolds taps her foot. She brought me here for a specific reason, and it isn’t to follow this line of questioning.

Enough putting it off. I nod at her. It’s time.

“Okay,” Reynolds says to Hal. “Show him the videotape.”

The TV is an old console. Hal has it propped up on the bar. There are two customers at the bar now, but both seem enamored of the glasses in front of them and nothing else. Hal hits the switch. The screen comes alive, first as a blue dot and then, thirty seconds later, as angry static.

Hal checks the back of the TV. “Cord’s loose,” he says. He jams it back in. The other end of the fraying cord is plugged into a Zenith VCR player. The door is broken, so I can look into the slot and see the old cassette.

The play button descends with an audible click. The video quality sucks — yellow, filmy, unfocused. The camera is set up high above the parking lot so as to cover everything, and yet because of that, it pretty much covers nothing. I can make out car types maybe and some colors, but there’s no way to read license plates.

“Boss just tapes over and over until the tape rips,” Hal explains.

I know the deal. Insurance company probably requires a CCTV presence, so the boss complies in the cheapest way possible. The tape trudges forward. Reynolds points to a car on the upper right. “We think that’s the rental.”

I nod. “Can we hit the fast-forward?”

Hal does so. It speeds up old-school, so you can see everything happening faster. He releases the button when two people exit. Their backs are toward us. They are at a distance, shot from behind, blurry with the camera set too far away.

But then I see the woman walk.

Time stops. There is a slow, steady tick-tick-ticking in my chest. Then I can feel the ka-boom right as my heart explodes into a million pieces.

I remember the first time I saw that walk. There was a song Dad loved by Alejandro Escovedo called “Castanets.” Do you remember it, Leo? Of course you do. There’s that line where he sings about this impossibly sexy woman: “I like her better when she walks away.” I never concurred — I preferred when Maura walked right toward me, shoulders back, eyes boring into me — but boy, did I get it.

Senior year, the Dumas twins both fell in love. I introduced you to Diana Styles, Augie and Audrey’s daughter, and a week later, you hooked me up with Maura Wells. Even in this — dating, girls, falling in love — we had to be in sync, right, Leo? Maura was the beautiful outsider who hung with your geek squad. Diana was the good-girl cheerleader and student council vice president. Her father, Augie, was captain of the police and my football coach. I remember him making a joke at practice about his daughter dating the “better Dumas.”

At least, I think it was a joke.

Dumb, I know, but I still wonder about the what-ifs. We never talked specifics about life after high school, did we? Would you and I have gone to the same college? Would I have stayed with Maura? Would you and Diana...?

Dumb.

Reynolds says, “Well?”

“That’s Maura,” I say.

“You sure?”

I don’t bother replying. I’m still watching the tape. The gray-haired guy opens the car door, and Maura slips into the passenger seat. I watch him circle back around and get into the driver’s seat. The car reverses out of the spot and starts cruising toward the exit. I watch carefully until the car is gone from view.

“How much did they drink?” I ask Hal.

Hal is wary again.

Reynolds reminds him of the severity in the same way: “We don’t give a crap about overserving, Hal. This is a cop killing.”

“Yeah, they were drinking pretty good.”

I think about it, try to get it to make sense.

“Oh, one other thing,” Hal says. “Her name wasn’t Maura. I mean, that’s not the name she used.”

“What name did she use?” Reynolds asks.

“Daisy.”

Reynolds looks at me with a concern I find oddly touching. “You okay?”

I know what she’s thinking. My great love, whom I’ve spent the past fifteen years obsessing over, was hanging out in this toilet, using a fake name, leaving with strange men. The stench of this place is starting to get to me. I stand, thank Hal, and hurry to the front door. I open it and step into the same lot I just saw on the video. I gulp some fresh air. But that’s not why I’m here.

I look toward where the rental car had been parked.

Reynolds comes up behind me. “Thoughts?”

“The guy opened the car door for her.”

“So?”

“He didn’t stagger. Didn’t fumble with his keys. Didn’t forget his manners.”

“And again I say: So?”

“Did you watch him drive out of here?”

“I did.”

“No swerving, no quick stops or starts.”

“Meaningless.”

I start walking down the road.

“Where are you going?” she asks.

I keep walking. Reynolds follows. “How far is the turn?”

She hesitates because I think she now sees where I’m going with this. “Second right.”

That’s about what I’d figured. The entire walk from the bar to the murder scene takes us less than five minutes. When I get to it, I look back at the bar and then down to the spot where Rex fell.

It isn’t making sense. Not yet. But I’m getting closer.

“Rex pulled them over awfully fast,” I say.

“He was probably staking out the bar.”

“I bet if we watch that video we’ll see a lot of drunker guys stumbling out,” I say. “So why them?”

Reynolds shrugs. “Maybe the rest were local. This guy had a rental plate.”

“Nail the out-of-towner?”

“Sure.”

“Who happens to be driving in a car with a girl Rex knew in high school?”

The wind has picked up. A few strands of hair get in Reynolds’s face. She pushes them away. “I’ve seen bigger coincidences.”

“So have I,” I say.

But this isn’t one of them. I try to picture it. I start with what I know — Maura and the old man in the bar, coming out, he holds the door for her, they drive off, Rex pulls them over.