Harlan Coben - Fool Me Once

“I know what you mean,” she snapped. Then: “No.”

He was about to ask a follow-up, but Maya stopped him with “We’re here.”

When she made the left turn onto a dirt road, her eyes started scanning the area for surveillance cameras. None present. She pulled the car to a stop a block away from JR’s Body Shop.

Corey handed her the ski mask. She shook her head. “We’ll be less obvious without them. It’s dark. We are a couple looking for our car after hours or something.”

“I need to be extra careful,” he said.

“I know.”

“I can’t be spotted.”

“You got the facial growth, you got the baseball cap. You’ll be fine. Grab the chain cutter and keep your head down.”

He looked doubtful.

“Or wait here and I’ll do it.”

She opened the car door and got out. Corey didn’t like it, but he grabbed the chain cutter and followed. They walked in silence. It was dark now, but Maya didn’t turn on the flashlight. She kept scanning her surroundings. No cameras. No security. No houses.

“Interesting,” Maya said.

“What?”

“Tom Douglass chose here to rent a storage unit.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a CubeSmart storage right down the street. A Public Storage too. They have security cameras and easy access and all that. But Tom Douglass didn’t choose there.”

“Because he’s old-school.”

“Could be,” Maya said. “Or it could be that he really didn’t want anyone to know about this. Think about it. You hacked into his credit cards. If he was paying by check or credit card at a normal storage facility center, you’d probably have found some record of it. He clearly didn’t want that.”

JR’s Body Shop was made of concrete painted the yellow of a Ticonderoga pencil. The two garage bay doors were shut. Maya could see the padlocks, even at a distance. The grass hadn’t been mowed in a long while, if ever. There were rusted car parts scattered across the property. Maya and Corey circled toward the back. A vehicle graveyard blocked their path. Maya spotted a beaten-down once-white Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera from the midnineties, the same car her dad had once owned, and for a moment, she flashed back to that day: Dad turning the corner, all of them waiting, Dad honking his horn, that crooked smile on this face, Mom hopping in the front, Claire and Maya sliding into the back. It wasn’t a flashy car, far from it, but Dad loved it, and Maya couldn’t help, stupid as it felt, looking at this Oldsmobile and wondering whether it was the exact one that had made her dad so happy on that day, how every vehicle in this pile of junk had one day been driven off the lot new and shiny, with excitement and hope and expectation, and now they lay in tatters, dying piece by piece in the back lot of an old body shop off Route 10.

“You okay?” Corey asked.

She moved ahead without replying. She flicked on her flashlight. The yard had to be two, maybe three acres, and in the back right-hand corner, almost hidden from view by an old Chevy van, Maya spotted two outdoor sheds, the kind people buy at Home Depot or Lowe’s to store their shovels and rakes and gardening stuff.

She pointed at them with the flashlight beam. Corey squinted and then nodded. They started to move closer in silence, high-stepping it over the hubcaps and engine parts and car doors that littered their path.

The sheds were small, maybe four feet high and four feet wide. Maya guessed that they were made from resin or some other sort of heavy-duty, all-weather plastic. These were the kind of units you assembled yourself in about an hour. Both units were padlocked closed.

They kept moving, but when they were about ten yards away, both Maya and Corey pulled up from the smell at the exact same moment.

With mounting horror on his face, Corey looked at Maya. Maya just nodded.

“Oh no,” Corey said.

Corey wanted to turn and run right then and there.

“Don’t,” Maya said.

Corey stopped.

“It’ll be worse if we run,” she said.

“We don’t even know what that smell is. It could be an animal.”

“Could be.”

“So we just leave now.”

“You leave, Corey.”

“What?”

“I’m staying. I’m opening it. I can handle the blowback. You can’t. I get that. You’re already a wanted man. So go. I won’t tell anyone you’ve been here.”

“What will you tell them?”

“Don’t worry about it. Go.”

“I’ll want to know what you found.”

Maya had had enough with the indecision. “Then hang around another minute.”

The chain cutter sliced through the padlock like a hot knife through butter. When the door flew open, a human arm popped out.

“Oh God,” Corey said.

The smell made him gag, step back, and start to dry heave. Maya stayed where she was.

The rest of the body started to slip out. Maya could see that the corpse was in pretty bad shape. The face was starting to rot, but based on the pictures she’d seen, plus the size and gray hair, it was Tom Douglass. She stepped toward the body.

“What are you doing?”

She didn’t bother answering. It wasn’t that dead bodies had stopped bothering her after she’d seen too many. It was just that they didn’t shock her anymore. She peered into the shed behind the body. Empty.

Corey started dry heaving again.

“Go,” she said.

“What?”

“If you throw up here, the cops will see it. Get out of here. Now. Get back to the highway and find a food place. Call Lulu or someone to pick you up.”

“I don’t feel comfortable leaving you here alone.”

“I’m not in danger. You are.”

He looked left. He looked right. “Are you sure?”

“Go.”

She moved to the other shed, snipped the lock, looked inside.

Also empty.

When she glanced behind her, Corey was in the distance, staggering past the car parts toward the exit. She waited until he was out of sight. Maya checked her watch. She wiped her prints off the chain cutters and hid them inside the Oldsmobile. Even if found, they’d prove nothing. She waited another twenty minutes to be on the safe side.

Then she called 9-1-1.

Maya had a story and she stuck to it:

“I got a tip to come here. When I arrived, the lock was broken. An arm was sticking out. So I opened the door some more. And that’s when I called nine-one-one.”

The police asked what kind of “tip.” She said it was anonymous. They asked what her interest was in this. She went for the truth here because they would learn it from Tom Douglass’s widow anyway: Her sister, Claire, who had been murdered, had conversed with Tom Douglass not long before her death, and Maya wanted to know why.

The questions kept coming in various forms. She said that she needed to arrange pickup for her daughter at day care. The cops let her do so. She called Eddie and quickly explained the situation.

“You okay?” Eddie asked.

“Fine.”

“This has to be connected to Claire’s murder, right?”

“No doubt.”

“I’ll get Lily now.”

Maya reached the Growin’ Up Day Care via Skype and, surrounded by police presence, explained that Lily’s uncle Eddie would be picking her up today. Miss Kitty did not readily accept that. She made Maya jump through all the hoops and then insisted on phone-call backups to make sure it was all on the up-and-up. Maya welcomed the security overkill.

Hours later, Maya finally had had enough. “Are you arresting me?”

The lead cop, an Essex County detective with the most glorious helmet of curly hair and bold eyelashes, hemmed and hawed. “We can arrest you for trespassing.”

“Then do that,” she said, putting her hands out, wrists together. “I really need to go home to my daughter.”