Harlan Coben - Fool Me Once

“What the hell are you talking about?”

She filled him in on what she had learned and what she had already known via Joe about Andrew’s death being a suicide. Corey kept nodding, a little too hyped up, and she started to wonder when the mellow would kick in.

“So let’s put this together,” Corey said, still pacing. “Your sister starts investigating. She stumbles across these Burkett payments to Tom Douglass. Boom, she’s tortured and killed. Boom, your husband’s killed. Boom, Tom Douglass goes missing. That about right?”

His timeline was slightly off. It wasn’t Claire, Joe, Tom. It was Claire, Tom, Joe. But she didn’t bother to correct him.

“But there’s something else to consider,” Maya said.

“How’s that?”

“You don’t murder someone to hide a son’s suicide. You might pay them off. But you don’t kill them.”

Corey nodded. “And assuming it was the Burketts who were making the payments,” he added, still nodding with too much vigor, “you certainly don’t kill your own son.”

His eyes were red, she could see now. From cannabis or tears, she didn’t know which.

“Corey?”

“Yeah.”

“You guys have sources. Good sources. I need you to hack into Tom Douglass’s life.”

“Did that already.”

“You did it weeks ago looking for clues on his work. But we need everything now. His credit card statements, ATM payments, when he last made a transaction, what his habits are, where he could go. We need to find him. Can you do that?”

“Yeah,” Corey said. “We can do that.”

He started pacing again.

“What else is wrong?” Maya asked.

“I think I have to disappear again. Maybe for a very long time.”

“Why?”

Corey lowered his voice to a near whisper. “Something you said last time you were here.”

“About?”

He looked left, then right. “I got ways out of here,” he said. “Secret ways.”

Maya wasn’t sure what to make of that. “Okay.”

“There’s even a hidden door in that wall over there. I can hide, or there’s a tunnel to the river. If the cops ever try to surround this place, even quietly or whatever, I can get out. You wouldn’t believe the measures I have in place here.”

“I can see that. But I don’t see why that means you have to disappear.”

“A leak!” Corey shouted, spitting out the word as if it truly disgusted him, which, she assumed, it did. “You were the one to first raise that, right? You said one possibility was that someone inside my organization leaked Claire’s name. I’ve been thinking hard about it. Suppose my operation... I mean, suppose we’re not as airtight as I thought. Do you realize how many people could be exposed? Do you know how many of them would suffer huge, possibly even fatal, consequences?”

Whoa, Maya needed to calm him down. “I don’t think it was a leak, Corey.”

“Why not?”

“Because of Joe.”

“I’m not following.”

“Claire was killed. Joe was killed. You said that before — that Joe may have been helping her. So there’s your leak. Claire told Joe. She may have also told someone else, or Joe might have, or they might have just screwed up when they were investigating.”

She didn’t care if it was true or not. She just needed him not to disappear on her.

“I don’t know,” Corey said. “I don’t feel safe.”

She stood and put her hands on his shoulders. “I need your help, Corey.”

He wouldn’t meet her eye. “Maybe you were right. Maybe we should go to the police. Like you said. I give them all the information I have. Anonymously. Let them do the rest.”

“No,” Maya said.

“I thought that’s what you wanted.”

“Not anymore.”

“Why not?”

“There’s no way to do that without exposing yourself and your organization.”

He frowned and turned back toward her. “You care about my organization?”

“Not even a little bit,” Maya said. “But you’ll blow our chances if you do that. You’ll run. I need you, Corey. We can do this better than the cops.”

She stopped.

“There’s something else,” he said. “What is it?”

“I don’t trust them.”

“The cops?”

She nodded.

“But you trust me?”

“My sister did.”

“And it got her killed,” Corey said.

“Yeah, it did. But you can’t keep going back like that. If you don’t get her to become a whistle-blower, yep, she’s probably still alive. But if I don’t kill civilians on that copter, then you don’t release that tape, and Claire never even meets you. For that matter, if I chose another career, Claire is probably at home right now, playing with her two kids instead of rotting in the ground. Lots of sliding doors, Corey. Waste of time to play it that way.”

Corey stepped back and took another deep toke. When he could speak again, he said, “I don’t know what to do.”

“Stay. Look into Tom Douglass. Help me finish this.”

“And I guess I should just trust you.”

“You don’t have to just trust me,” she said. “Remember?”

He saw it now. “Because I still have something on you.”

Maya didn’t bother replying. Corey looked at her. She knew that he wanted to ask her about the audio portion of that tape. But she wanted to ask him something about it too.

“Why didn’t you release the audio?” she asked.

“I told you.”

“You said my sister talked you out of it.”

“That’s right.”

“But I’m not completely buying that. It took time for her message to reach you. The story made a splash, but it was starting to die down by then. You’d have been back in the headlines.”

“You think that’s all I care about?”

Again Maya didn’t bother replying.

“Without headlines, the truth never gets out. Without headlines, we can’t recruit more truth tellers.”

She didn’t need the speech again. “All the more reason to release the audio, Corey. So why didn’t you?”

He moved toward the couch and sat down. “Because I’m also a human being.”

Maya sat down.

Corey lowered his head into his hands for a moment and took a few deep breaths. When he looked up, he was more clear-eyed, calmer, less panicked. “Because I figured that you’d have to live with yourself, Maya. With what you’d done. And sometimes that’s punishment enough.”

She said nothing.

“So how do you live with it, Maya?”

If Corey expected a truthful answer to that question, he would have to get in a very long line.

For a few moments, they just sat there in silence, the din of the club seemingly miles away. Nothing more to learn here, Maya thought. It was time to go to Judith’s office anyway.

Maya rose and headed for the door. “See what you can find on Tom Douglass.”

Judith’s office was located on the ground floor of an apartment building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, one block from Central Park. Maya had no idea what sort of patients Judith saw nowadays. She was a Stanford University — trained MD and now a clinical professor on staff at Weill Cornell Medicine, though she didn’t teach any classes. That someone who worked part-time could hold these positions was only a surprise to those who didn’t recognize the power of the Burkett name and big donations.

Shock alert: Money means power and gets you stuff.

Judith went professionally by her maiden name, Velle. If this was to semihide the conflict of the Burkett name or because that was what many women did was anyone’s guess. Maya headed past the doorman and found Judith’s office door. Judith shared her space with two other part-time physicians. All three names — Judith Velle, Angela Warner, and Mary McLeod — were on the door with a long list of letters after them.