Harlan Coben - Fool Me Once

Maya did not move. “But they aren’t.”

“I know it sounds crazy—”

“It is crazy.”

“You had a fight with Isabella, right? She told us. She said you were screaming about seeing Joe. Why did you do that? What did you mean?”

“Caroline, listen to me. Joe is dead.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I was there.”

“But you didn’t see him die, right? It was dark. You were running away by the third shot.”

“Listen to me, Caroline. The police came. They’ve been investigating. He didn’t get up from the two shots I saw and walk away. The cops even arrested two suspects. How do you explain all that?”

Caroline shook her head.

“What?”

“You won’t believe me.”

“Try me.”

“The officer leading the investigation,” Caroline said. “His name is Roger Kierce.”

“That’s right.”

Silence.

“Caroline, what is it?”

“I know this is going to sound crazy...”

Maya wanted to shake the information out of her.

“We have this private bank account. I won’t go into details on it. They aren’t important. But let’s just say you’d never trace it back to the source. Do you know what I mean?”

“I think so. Wait. Is it called WTC?”

“No.”

“It’s not out of Houston?”

“No, it’s offshore. Why were you asking me about Houston?”

“It doesn’t matter. Go on. You have a private overseas account.”

Caroline stared at her a beat too long. “So I started going through some recent online transactions.”

Maya nodded, tried to look encouraging.

“Most of the transfers went to numbered accounts or offshore holdings, stuff that bounces to various places so it can’t be traced back. Again there is no reason to go into details. But there was a name in there too. Several payments made to a Roger Kierce.”

Maya took the blow without so much as blinking. “Are you sure?”

“That’s what I saw.”

“Show me.”

“What?”

“You have online access to the account,” Maya said. “So show it to me.”

Caroline tapped in the password. The same message — “ERROR: UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS” — popped across the screen for the third time.

“I don’t understand,” Caroline said. She sat in front of the computer in the library. “Maya?”

Maya stood behind her and stared at the screen. Don’t rush, she told herself. Think it through. But this part didn’t take much thought. She quickly whittled down the possibilities and realized that one of two things was happening here: Either Caroline was playing her or someone had changed passwords so Caroline could no longer access the online financial records.

“What exactly did you see?” Maya asked.

“I told you. Money transfers to Roger Kierce.”

“How many?”

“I don’t know. Three maybe?”

“How much were they?”

“Nine thousand dollars each.”

Nine thousand. That made sense. Anything below ten grand could go unreported.

“What else?” Maya asked.

“What do you mean?”

“When was the first payment made?”

“I don’t know.”

“Before or after Joe was murdered?”

Caroline put her finger to her lip and thought about it. “I don’t know for absolute sure, but...”

Maya waited.

“But I’m almost positive the first one was before.”

Two ways for Maya to play it.

One was the obvious. Confront Judith. Confront Neil. Confront them immediately and demand answers. But there were problems with the direct approach. Logistically speaking, neither one of them was home right now, but more than that, what did she hope to find? If they were hiding something, would they admit it? Even if she somehow forced them to log into that account, wouldn’t they have gotten rid of the evidence or covered it up somehow by now?

And cover up what?

What did Maya think was happening here? Why would the Burkett family pay off the homicide cop who was investigating Joe’s death? Did that make any sense at all? Let’s assume that Caroline was on the up-and-up. If the payoffs had started before the murder, well, again, how could they possibly know he’d be the detective who’d catch the case? No, that made no sense. Caroline hadn’t been sure about the date of the first payment anyway. It would make more sense — “more sense” was in this case just a hair above “absolutely no sense at all” — if the payments started after the murder.

But to what end?

See several moves ahead. That was the key. And when Maya looked several moves ahead of directly confronting either Neil or Judith, assuming they were the ones behind the alleged payments, she saw nothing substantially beneficial. She’d be revealing herself to them without getting any valuable information in return.

Be patient. Learn what you can first. Then, if need be, confront. They say an attorney should never ask a question unless she already knows the answer. In a similar vein, a good soldier doesn’t attack unless she’s already calculated and can counter the most likely outcomes.

She’d had a plan before all this: Get hold of Isabella and make her talk. Figure out why Claire was secretly calling Leather and Lace.

Stick to the plan. Start with Isabella’s house.

Hector answered the door.

“Isabella is not here.”

“Mrs. Burkett thinks she and I should talk.”

“She’s out of the country,” Hector said.

Bullshit. “Until when?”

“She’ll call you. Please don’t come back.”

He shut the door. Maya had expected this. As she headed back toward her car, she circled around Hector’s truck and, without breaking stride, slapped a magnetic real-time GPS tracker under his bumper.

Out of the country, my ass.

The tracker was simple: You download the app, you bring up the map, you can see exactly where the vehicle is now and where it has gone. They weren’t hard to get. Two stores at the mall sold them. Maya didn’t believe for a second that Isabella had left the country.

But Hector, she bet, would eventually lead Maya to his sister.

Some might figure that Leather and Lace would be closed until the nighttime. They’d be wrong. Located in the shadow of MetLife Stadium, home to both the New York Giants and Jets, Leather and Lace opened at 11:00 a.m. and offered a “deluxe sumptuous lunch buffet.” Maya had been to strip clubs before, mostly during leaves. The guys blew off steam there. She’d gone once or twice. They obviously weren’t for her, but you’d never guess that from the star treatment female clients received. Every pole dancer hit on her like mad. Maya had theories — less to do with the dancers being gay than being anti-male — but she kept them to herself.

Leather and Lace had the prerequisite meathead at the door. Six four, probably three hundred pounds, no neck, buzz cut, black shirt so tight it worked like a tourniquet on his biceps.

“Well, hello,” he said, like someone had offered him a free appetizer. “What can I do for you, little lady?”

Oh boy. “I need to talk to your manager.”

He narrowed his eyes and looked her up and down — beef inspection — and nodded. “You got references?”

“I would like to speak to your manager.”

Meathead gave her the once-over for at least the third time. “You’re a little old for this line of work,” he said. Then he nodded again and awarded her with his best smile. “But me, I think you’re smoking hot.”

“That means a lot,” Maya said, “coming from you.”

“I’m dead serious. You are hot. Great tight bod.”

“It’s all I can do not to swoon. Your manager?”

A few minutes later, Maya passed the surprisingly extensive buffet. The crowd was still light. The men kept their heads down. Two women danced onstage with the enthusiasm of middle schoolers waking up for a math test. They couldn’t have looked more bored without prescribed sedation. Forget your morals, this was Maya’s real problem with clubs like this. They had all the eroticism of a stool sample.