Harlan Coben - Fool Me Once

Maya shook her head. “We never got confirmation.”

Shane stopped and looked at her.

“I turned your signal off.”

“What... what are you...?”

“JOC radioed back for us to hold off.”

He shook his head. “What are you talking about?”

“They didn’t give us the go-ahead. They believed that at least one of the people in the SUV was a civilian, possibly underage. They radioed that it was only about fifty-fifty that the people in the SUV were the enemy.”

Shane’s breathing had grown ragtag. “But I heard—”

“No, you didn’t, Shane. I relayed it to you, remember?”

He just stood there.

“You think what’s on the audiotape would be bad for us because we sounded celebratory after we destroyed the target. But that wasn’t what Corey had on me. He had the radio call telling me that there could be civilians in that SUV.”

“And you shot anyway,” Shane said.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t care about the civilians,” Maya said. “I cared about our boys.”

“Jesus, Maya.”

“I made a choice. I wasn’t going to lose another one of ours. Not on my watch. Not if I could help it. And if civilians died, if there was collateral damage, so be it. I didn’t care anymore. That’s the truth. You think I have these horrible flashbacks because I feel guilty about those dead civilians. It’s just the opposite, Shane. I have them because I don’t feel guilty. Those deaths don’t haunt me. What haunts me, Shane, what lingers inside me, is the knowledge that if I was up there again, I would do the exact same thing.”

Now Shane had tears in his eyes.

“So you don’t have to be a shrink to figure it out. I’m forced to relive what happened every night — but I can never change the outcome. That’s why those flashbacks won’t ever leave me, Shane. Every night, I’m back on that chopper. Every night, I try to find a way to save those soldiers.”

“And every night, you kill those civilians again,” Shane said. “Oh Christ...”

He stepped toward her, arms open, but she shook him off. There was no way she could handle that. She quickly turned around and looked behind her. Isabella and Hector still hadn’t moved.

It was time to get going.

“What did Kierce tell you, Shane?”

“Joe and Claire were killed by the same gun,” Shane said. “You knew that already, right? Kierce told you.”

Maya nodded.

“But you didn’t tell me, Maya.”

She didn’t bother replying.

“You told me everything except the results of that ballistics test.”

“Shane...”

“I figured that you were working on your own to find Claire’s killer. The cops were useless. I figured that you came up with something.”

Maya kept her eyes on the pickup truck. It wasn’t so she could keep an eye on Hector and Isabella so much as that she couldn’t face Shane.

“You gave me that bullet before Joe was shot,” Shane said. “You asked me to see if it came from the same weapon that murdered Claire. It matched. You wouldn’t tell me how you got it. And now I know the same weapon killed Joe too. How can that be?”

“Only one way,” Maya said.

Shane shook his head, but he already knew. She met his eye and held it.

“I killed him,” Maya said. “I killed Joe.”

Maya wore the baseball cap and drove Hector’s pickup truck. She headed to Farnwood via the back gate and made her way to the main house. Darkness had fallen. Security was still around, but it was pretty lax. No one questioned or bothered to stop the familiar Dodge Ram.

Shane was holding Hector and Isabella to make sure that they didn’t warn anyone of her arrival at the mansion. Using the throwaway cell phone, Maya called Leather and Lace and asked for Lulu.

“I can’t help you anymore,” Lulu said.

“I think you can.”

After she hung up, Maya parked to the side of the main house. The grounds were dark. She crept to the back and tried the kitchen door. It was unlocked. The house was empty and still. No lights had been kept on. Maya moved toward the fireplace and paused. Then she sat alone in the front parlor and waited. Time passed. Her eyes adjusted to the dark.

She saw the past all in snap flashes, but it was the first one, the opening of the gun safe, that changed everything. She had been overseas and home for the first time since Claire’s death. She visited the gravesite. Joe had driven her. He had been acting odd, but that really hadn’t set her off much. She was starting to wonder about him though, about how little time they had actually spent together, what with the whirlwind romance, her service, his work, but again that wouldn’t have meant anything to her.

Was she thinking that she really didn’t know the man very well? No. She only thought that now, in hindsight.

It was opening the gun safe that changed everything.

Maya was meticulous when it came to her guns. She kept them sparkling clean, and so the moment she took out her Smith and Wesson 686s, she knew something for certain.

One of them — the one she kept in the hidden compartment — had been used.

Joe had reiterated when she’d come home how he hated guns, that he had no interest in going with her to the range, that he really wished that she didn’t keep them in the house.

In short, he doth protest too much.

It was odd, looking back on it, why a man who had no interest in guns would still want to have his fingerprint in the safe database. “Just in case,” Joe had said. “You never know.”

There are moments in life when everything changes. It was again like one of those optical illusions. You see only one thing, and then you shift something just a little, and everything changes. That was how she felt, holding this gun that someone who clearly didn’t know what they were doing had tried to clean.

It was a gut punch. It was a betrayal of the worst kind. Sleeping with the enemy — she felt a fool and worse. And yet it also made terrible, horrible sense somehow.

She knew.

Even as she went into denial, she knew that this gun, her own gun, had killed her sister. She knew it even before she went to the range and shot it and brought the bullet to Shane. She knew even before she talked Shane into secretly testing it against the.38 found in Claire’s skull.

Joe had killed Claire.

Still there was a chance she was wrong. There was a chance a clever hit man had broken into the safe, used her gun, put it back. There was a chance it wasn’t Joe at all. That was why she switched the two Smith and Wesson 686s, putting the one Joe had taken from the safe’s hidden compartment for out-of-state purchases and switching it with the one registered in New Jersey that she kept in plain view. She made sure none of her other guns were loaded or had ammunition...

Only the Smith and Wesson in the hidden compartment.

She started digging through Joe’s stuff and intentionally left clues that she had done so. Maya wanted him to know that she was onto him. To see if he would react. To get enough information to make him tell her why he had killed Claire.

Yes, Kierce was right. It was Maya who called Joe that night, not the other way around.

“I know what you did,” she had said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I have proof.”

She told Joe to meet her in that spot in Central Park. She arrived early and cased the area. She spotted two street punks — she would later learn their names were Emilio Rodrigo and Fred Katen — walking past Bethesda Fountain. She could see from the way Rodrigo moved that he was carrying a weapon.

Perfect. Fall guys who could never be convicted.