Харлан Кобен - The Boy from the Woods

It was Hester: “Are you with Laila?”

“No.”

“Where are you then?”

“Casing Naomi’s house.”

“You have a plan?”

“I do.”

“Tell me.”

“You don’t want to know,” he said.

Wilde hung up and moved closer to the house. Loads of homes now had motion detector lights that snap on when you approach. If that were to be the case, Wilde would simply sprint back into the woods. No harm, no foul. But no lights came on. Good. He kept close to the house. The closer to the wall, the less chance of being seen.

He checked the kitchen window. Bernard Pine, Naomi’s father, sat at the table and played with his phone. He looked nervous. Wilde circled the perimeter and peered in through the first-floor windows. No one else present, no other movement.

Wilde bent down and checked the basement windows. The shades were drawn all the way — blackout shades — but Wilde still spotted the small sliver of light.

Someone down there maybe?

He had little trouble climbing onto the second-floor overhang. He worried about the structure, if it could hold his weight, but he decided to risk it. There was a light in a corridor that shone through what appeared to be the father’s bedroom. He climbed toward the corner back window, cupped his hands against the glass, and looked into the room.

A computer monitor displaying a dancing-lines screen saver provided the only illumination. The walls were blank. There were no posters of teen heartthrobs or favorite rock groups or any of the expected teenage girl clichés, except, perhaps, the bed, which was low to the floor and blanketed with stuffed animals — dozens of them, maybe hundreds, in various sizes and colors, mostly bears but there were giraffes and monkeys and penguins and elephants. It was hard to see how Naomi could fit in the bed with all of them. She must have just jumped in, like she was living inside one of those claw-crane arcade games.

Naomi was an only child, so Wilde was pretty sure that this was her bedroom.

The window was locked with a vinyl lever sash lock with keeper. Routine security for a second-floor room. Most burglars don’t scale walls to reach second floors. Wilde was, of course, different. He reached into his wallet and plucked out a loid — short for “celluloid” — card. Better than a credit card. More flexible. He slid the loid between the two sash frames and moved the lever into the unlocked position. It was that simple. Five seconds later, he was inside the room.

So now what?

Quick check of the closet revealed the following: a pink Fjällräven Kånken backpack on the top shelf, clothes neatly hung, no bare hangers. Meaning? He wasn’t sure. The backpack was empty. If she’d run away, wouldn’t she have packed it? Wouldn’t there be some signs of missing clothes?

Nothing conclusive, but interesting.

There was a time, Wilde imagined, where it would pay to check the desk drawers or perhaps look under the pillow or mattress for a diary, but nowadays most teens keep their secrets in their tech devices. The phone would be better to search, of course, the place we store our lives, and no, that wasn’t a comment on today’s youth. Adults too. Mankind has surrendered any pretense of privacy to those devices for the sake of... hard to say what. Convenience, he guessed. Artificial connections maybe, which might be better than no connection at all.

But it was not for him. Then again, real connections didn’t seem to be his bag either.

Had the police tried to ping Naomi’s location via her phone?

Maybe. Probably. Either way, he texted Hester to give it a try.

Naomi’s desktop computer had been left running. He moved the mouse, afraid that there might be a password blocking access. There wasn’t. He brought up her web browser. Naomi’s email information — name and password — had been saved for easy access. She was NaomiFlavuh, which seemed sweet and a little sad. He clicked and got in right away. He almost rubbed his hands together, hoping that he had hit the mother lode. He hadn’t. The emails couldn’t have been more innocuous — class assignments, college recruitment spams, coupons and offers from the Gap and Target and retailers unknown to Wilde with names like Forever 21 and PacSun. Kids today, he knew from his interactions with Matthew, text or use some sort of parent-proof app. They don’t email.

He stopped for a moment and listened. Nothing. No one coming up the stairs. He moved the mouse’s cursor up to the top and hit the history button. He hoped that Naomi hadn’t cleared her cache recently.

She hadn’t.

There were searches on eBay for stuffed animals. There were links to forums and Reddits that talked about collecting stuffed animals. Wilde glanced behind him at the bed. The stuffed animals had been laid out with some care. Several animals stared back at him. He thought about that for a second, about this girl who had been bullied all her life, how she must have rushed home after school, fleeing the taunts and abuse, maybe leaping high onto her bed, escaping into this lonely, self-created menagerie.

The thought flooded him with a surprising rage.

People had bullied this girl her whole life. If someone did more to her, if someone went the extra mile or forced her to do something desperate...

He bottled it and turned back to the task at hand. He still had the mask on his face. If by some chance Bernard Pine were to come upstairs or spot him — unlikely, really — Wilde would blow past him and run away. There would be nothing to identify him. His height and build — six feet, one eighty-five — would give them nothing.

Whoa. Pay dirt.

Naomi had been researching her classmates. There were six, maybe seven of them, but two names stuck out right away. One was Matthew’s. The other was Crash Maynard’s. The searches on Matthew — as well as his other classmates — were surface and quick. Did this mean anything? Or did teens Google each other all the time? You meet someone, you search online about them. Of course, Naomi had known these kids forever. She had grown up with them, gone to school with them, been a victim of their taunts and blows.

So why now?

He skimmed down through the rest of her Google searches. Nothing much stood out, except for an odd two-word search followed by an odd three-word search:

challenge game

challenge game missing

He focused on the added word: Missing.

He clicked through the links. As he started reading, his heart sank. He was midway through the pages when he heard a noise that startled him.

Footsteps.

Not close. Not coming up toward him. That was what was odd. There was only one person in the house. The father. Bernard Pine. He was in the kitchen. But these steps weren’t coming from the kitchen. In fact, now that he thought about it, he had not heard a sound coming from downstairs the entire time he had been up here.

The footsteps were faint. They were coming from inside the house, but...

Wilde closed down the browser and slipped across the room and into the corridor. He looked down the stairs. The footsteps were louder. Wilde could hear a voice now. Sounded like Bernard Pine. Who was he talking to? Wilde couldn’t make out the words. He crept closer to the top of the stairs so he could hear better.

The door beneath the stairs flew open.

The basement door.

Wilde jumped back. The voice was clear now, easy to understand.

“It was on the goddamn news! That woman was here too. What do you mean, who? That lawyer from TV, the one who did the report.”

Bernard Pine closed the basement door behind him.

“The cops just came. Yes, the chief, Carmichael, he knocked on the door. They’re probably still...” Wilde had his back pressed against the wall, but he risked a look. Bernard Pine had his mobile phone in one hand. With the other, he pushed aside a curtain and looked out into his front yard.