Харлан Кобен - The Boy from the Woods

“Even now,” Saul added, “you standing there holding a gun on us. Gavin and I are willing to pay the price for what we did. We felt we had no choice. But we’ve now saved Raymond—”

“Righting a tremendous wrong,” Gavin added. “Nothing hypothetical about that.”

“—and on a much larger scale, we maybe saved this country. That tape we just sent out could change the course of history.”

The two men waited now for Wilde to say something.

After a few moments passed, Gavin put his hand on Saul Strauss’s arm. “Oh man.”

“What?” Saul said.

“Wilde gets it.”

Strauss frowned. “What do you mean?”

Gavin met Wilde’s eye. “I mean Wilde has been hiding in this garage since before you arrived.”

“So?”

“So he waited , Saul. He waited for you to get here. He waited until we sent out the tape.”

Silence.

Strauss saw it now. He turned to face Wilde too. “You could have stopped us. You could have popped out with that gun two minutes earlier.”

“And the tape would never have seen the light of day,” Gavin added.

“But you didn’t do that, Wilde.” Both men were nodding along now. “You came out with us on that slippery slope.”

Wilde said nothing.

“In the end,” Gavin said, “we’re just three soldiers.”

“One last mission. You let us complete it.”

“In my case,” Gavin said, taking a step in front of Saul, “a suicide mission.”

Wilde finally spoke. “Wait, what?”

“I’ll be okay in prison,” Saul said. “I’ll still be able to speak out. I can still be a voice.”

“But I’m an old man and I don’t want to face that,” Gavin said. He stood and reached out his hand. “Let me have my gun back, Wilde. Warrior to warrior. Let me end this on my terms.”

Suicide.

“No,” Wilde said.

“Then I’ll run at you. I’ll force you to shoot me.”

“That’s not what’s going to happen either,” Wilde said. “Listen closely. You had your mission, I had mine. Mine was to find two missing kids. I rescued one. I then stayed behind to search these premises for the other. That’s what I’ll tell Rola. Naomi isn’t here, is she?”

“No,” Saul said, confused. “We don’t know anything about that.”

“Then my mission here is complete.”

“I don’t understand,” Saul said.

“Yeah,” Wilde said, “I think you do.”

Wilde didn’t say another word. He just lowered the gun and walked away.

Hester was finishing up a meeting with Simon Greene, the rich financial advisor who was captured on a viral video punching what looked like a vagrant in Central Park. She liked Greene, felt that he was getting a bad rap, but more important, the call from the Manhattan DA indicated that they wouldn’t be pressing charges, in part because no one could locate the supposed victim.

Hester walked Greene to her office door.

Simon Greene thanked her. Hester gave him a buss on the cheek. That was when she saw her seated in the waiting room. Hester stormed over to her executive assistant Sarah McLynn and said, “Why is Delia Maynard here?”

“She asked for fifteen minutes. She said it was important.”

“You should tell me these things.”

“I did.”

“When?”

“Did you check your texts?”

“A text isn’t telling me.”

“How many times have we gone over this? You told me not to interrupt you and to inform you of schedule changes via text.”

“I did?”

“You did. Now you have fifteen minutes before your next client gets here. It’s a billable fifteen minutes, and Delia Maynard is a client. Should I tell her to go home or—”

“Stop already. You’re a bigger nag than I am. Send her in.”

Hester had not seen Delia Maynard since that awful day at the manor three weeks ago — right before the finger was found. Sarah showed Delia into the office and closed the door behind her. The two women stood and stared at one another for a long moment.

“How is your son?” Hester asked.

“Better,” Delia said. “They were able to attach the finger.”

“Oh, good.”

“Physically, he’s doing fine.”

“And mentally?”

“There are nightmares. It seems the kidnappers, whoever they were, treated him well, but...”

“I understand. And you’ve decided not to involve the police?”

“That’s right.”

“No one asked you how his finger got severed?”

“The doctor did, of course. We said it was a fishing incident. I don’t think she bought it, especially since it was hours between the time the finger arrived at the hospital and the time Crash got there, but there’s nothing that can be proved.”

“So no one else knows about the kidnapping.”

“No one.”

Delia had no idea Gavin Chambers and Saul Strauss had kidnapped her son. Hester knew, of course. Three weeks ago, Wilde had confided in her and her only. She didn’t like what Wilde had done in the end. You don’t work outside of the system. The system may be flawed, but you don’t cut off children’s fingers, even to save a wrongly convicted man or even to save — ugh, such dramatics — the world.

She hadn’t seen Wilde in three weeks either.

“So why are you here, Delia?”

“To say goodbye.”

“Oh?”

“We are taking the family and moving overseas for a while.”

“I see.”

“Since that tape became public, you can’t imagine what it’s been like.”

“I think I can.”

“There are constant death threats coming from Rusty supporters. They think Dash made it up or doctored it to destroy their hero.”

“Fake news,” Hester said.

“Yes. As our attorney, you know that Dash can’t comment or authenticate it.”

Hester swallowed hard. “Right. It would be self-incrimination.”

Dash Maynard had committed felonies that night by moving the dead body. Hester had wanted to work Raymond Stark’s case pro bono, but unfortunately, she couldn’t because of the conflict of interest in her representing the Maynards. Her hands were also tied. She wanted Dash more than anything to come forward, but as his attorney, she had to advise him against it.

The system was flawed, but it was still the system.

She didn’t think Dash would come forward anyway. She also didn’t think it would help. That was the worst part of it all. At first, the release of the tape seemed to destroy Rusty Eggers once and for all.

At first.

But mythical beasts don’t die, do they? When you try to kill them, they come back stronger. So: The tape was a fake. If it wasn’t an outright fake, it was doctored. If it wasn’t doctored, it all happened thirty years ago, so it didn’t matter. If it mattered, Rusty Eggers said on the tape that he killed the man in self-defense and that’s not a crime. If it’s a crime, it was thirty years ago, when Rusty Eggers was just a young student, and well, someone tried to kill him so he had no choice but to defend himself. And if the death was later blamed on an innocent black man, that was the police’s fault, not Rusty Eggers’s. Blame that crooked cop Kindler. Blame the racist system. And if it’s not racism, Raymond Stark had a criminal record, even as a seventeen-year-old, so he probably would have ended up in prison on another charge. Maybe Stark did other crimes that night, who knows? Maybe Raymond Stark was involved in Christopher Anson’s killing anyway. If it was self-defense, maybe Raymond Stark joined forces with Christopher Anson to attack Rusty Eggers. Maybe Raymond Stark and Christopher Anson together tried to rob Rusty Eggers and Raymond Stark ran off with the knife. Maybe that was why the knife was on him.