Harlan Coben - Fool Me Once

“You are a suspect here.”

“For what exactly?”

“What do you think? Murder.”

“Based on?”

“How did you end up here tonight?”

“I told you already.”

“You’d learned that the victim was missing from his wife, correct?”

“Correct.”

“Then you got a tip from a mystery source to check this storage shed.”

“Right.”

“Who was the mystery source?”

“It was anonymous.”

“By phone?” Curly asked.

“Yes.”

“Home phone or mobile?”

“Home.”

“We’re going to check your call records.”

“You do that. But for now, it’s late.” She started to stand. “So if that’s all for tonight—”

“Hold up.”

Maya recognized the voice and cursed under her breath.

NYPD detective Roger Kierce walked toward them with his caveman swagger, his arms jutting out from his squat body.

“Who are you?” Curly asked.

Kierce flashed his badge and gave his name. “I’m investigating the shooting death of Joe Burkett, Ms. Stern’s husband. Do you guys have a cause of death here?”

Curly looked warily at Maya for a moment. “Maybe we should talk alone?”

“Looked like a slit throat,” Maya said. They both looked at her. “Hey, I really have to go. I’m trying to save us all time.”

Kierce made a face and looked back toward Curly.

“There is what appears to be a knife wound at the throat,” Curly said, “but we don’t know more than that yet. The county medical examiner will give us her findings in the morning.”

Kierce pulled up the chair next to Maya, twirled it so the back was in the front, and then made a big production of sitting/straddling it. Maya watched him, wondering about what Caroline had said about Kierce taking payoffs from the Burketts. Was it true? She doubted it, but true or false, raising it at this juncture seemed an unwise move.

“I could call my attorney right now,” Maya said. “We both know you guys don’t have enough to hold me.”

“We appreciate your cooperation in this matter,” Kierce said without an iota of sincerity, “but before you go... Well, I think we’ve been looking at this all wrong.”

He was waiting for her to bite.

“What have we ” — she emphasized the word — “been looking at wrong, Detective?”

Kierce put his hands on the top of the chair back. “You keep stumbling over dead bodies, don’t you?”

Eddie’s words: “Death follows you, Maya...”

“First your husband. Now this private investigator.”

He gave her a smile.

“Are you trying to make a point, Detective Kierce?”

“I’m just saying. First, you’re with your husband in the park. He ends up dead. Then you come searching for God knows what. Tom Douglass ends up dead. What’s the common denominator in all this?”

“Let me guess,” Maya said. “Me?”

Kierce shrugged. “You can’t help but notice that.”

“No, you can’t. So what’s your theory, Detective? Did I kill them both?”

Kierce shrugged again. “You tell me.”

Maya put up her hands in mock surrender. “Yeah, you got me. I guess I, what, killed Tom Douglass weeks ago judging by the condition of the body. Then I jammed his corpse into that storage bin, got clean away with it apparently, still went to his wife looking for him for some odd reason, and then — help me here, Kierce — I came back to reveal the body and implicate myself?”

He just sat there.

“And yes, I see the obvious connection between this and my husband. I guess I’m stupid enough to stick around murder scenes because that’s a great way to get away with it, right? Oh, and in the case of Joe, I even — wow, I’m good — somehow tracked down the gun someone used to kill my sister, even though I wasn’t even in the country when she was murdered, and used it on him. That about right, Detective Kierce? Did I leave anything out?”

Kierce said nothing.

“And while you’re trying to prove I committed two... Or, wait, did I kill my sister too? No, you told me already I couldn’t have done that one because you know I was serving our country overseas... But while you’re proving all of this, maybe we could also take a look at your relationship to the Burkett family.”

That got Kierce’s attention. “What are you talking about?”

“Never mind.” Maya rose and started toward the exit. “Look, you guys waste time any way you want. I’m going to pick up my daughter.”

They’d impounded her car.

“You got a warrant already?” Maya asked.

Curly handed it to her.

“Fast,” she said.

Curly shrugged.

Kierce said, “I’ll give you a ride.”

“No, thanks.”

Maya paged a taxi from her smartphone. It arrived in ten minutes. When she got back to her house, she grabbed the other car — Joe’s car — and headed to Claire and Eddie’s house.

Eddie was at the front door before she reached it. “So?”

She stayed in the doorway and told him about the night. Behind Eddie, she could see Alexa playing with Lily. She thought about Alexa and Daniel. Such good kids. Maya was result-oriented. You have good kids, you were probably good parents. Did Claire deserve all the credit for that? Who, in the end, would Maya trust most to raise her daughter?

“Eddie?”

“What?”

“I kept something from you.”

He looked at her.

“Philadelphia did mean something to me. It was where Andrew Burkett went to school.” She filled Eddie in on that connection as well. She debated taking it one more step and telling him about seeing Joe on that nanny cam, but right now she simply couldn’t see what that would add.

“So,” Eddie said, when she finished, “we have three murders.” He meant Claire, Joe, and newly discovered Tom Douglass. “And the only connection, as far as I can see, is Andrew Burkett.”

“Yes,” Maya said.

“It’s obvious, isn’t it, Maya? Something happened on that boat. Something so bad that, all these years later, it’s still killing people.”

Maya nodded.

“So who else was there that night?” Eddie asked. “Who else was on that boat?”

She thought about her email to Christopher Swain. So far, no answer. “Just some family and friends.”

“Which Burketts were on board?” Eddie asked.

“Andrew, Joe, and Caroline.”

Eddie rubbed his chin. “Two of them are dead.”

“Yes.”

“So that leaves...?”

“Caroline was only a kid. What could she have done?” Maya peered behind him. Lily looked sleepy. “It’s getting late, Eddie.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“And I need to put you on the pickup list at Lily’s school,” Maya said. “They won’t let you take her out again unless we do that in person.”

“Yeah, that Miss Kitty told me. We have to go in together and take an ID picture and all that.”

“Maybe we could do that tomorrow, if you’re free.”

Eddie looked at Lily sleepily playing some sort of patty-cake game with Alexa. “That should work.”

“Thank you, Eddie.”

All three of them — Eddie, Alexa, and now Daniel — walked Maya and Lily out to the car. Lily again tried to protest their departure, but she was too tired to do it with any sort of two-year-old-tantrum effectiveness. Her eyes were closed by the time Maya snapped the car seat buckle into place.

On the ride home, Maya tried to shake off the dead but of course that was easier said than done. Eddie was right. Whatever was happening now had a direct link to whatever happened on that yacht seventeen years ago. It made no sense, of course, but there it was. She longed for the simplicity of Occam’s razor again, but perhaps the more apropos philosophy once again came from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle via his creation Sherlock Holmes: “When you eliminate the impossible what remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”