Authors: Harlan Coben
Silence.
“Mr. Taylor?”
“Technology cannot help him. I thought you were one of us.” Still whispering but sad now.
“I am. Or at least I want to be—”
“I’m hanging up now.”
“No, wait—”
“Good-bye.”
“Dennis Lex,” Myron said.
Silence, except for the sound of breathing. Myron wasn’t sure if the sound was coming from him or the caller.
“Please,” Myron said. “I’ll do whatever you ask. But we have to meet.”
“Will you remember to sow the seeds?”
Small chunks of ice dropped down his back.
“Yes,” Myron said, “I’ll remember.”
“Good. Then you know what you must do.”
Myron gripped the receiver. “No,” he said. “What must I do?”
“The boy,” the voice whispered. “Say one last good-bye to the boy.”
S
ow the seeds?” Esperanza said. They were in Myron’s office. The morning sun striped the floor with Venetian slits, two cutting across Esperanza’s face. She didn’t seem to mind.
“Right,” Myron said. “And something about that phrase keeps gnawing at me.”
“It was a Tears for Fears song,” Esperanza said.
“ ‘Sowing the Seeds of Love.’ I remember.”
“Wasn’t that the name of the tour too? We saw them at the Meadowlands in, what, 1988?”
“Eighty-nine.”
“What happened to those guys?”
“They broke up,” Myron said.
“Why do they all do that?”
“Got me.”
“Supertramp, Steely Dan, the Doobie Brothers—”
“Not to mention Wham.”
“They break up and then they never make anything
decent on their own. They flounder around and end up a segment of VH-1’s
Where Are They Now
?”
“We’re getting off the subject.”
Esperanza handed him a slip of paper. “Here’s the office number for Susan Lex, Dennis’s older sister.”
Myron read the number like it was in code and might mean something. “I had another thought.”
“What’s that?”
“If Dennis Lex exists, then he had to have gone to school, right?”
“Maybe.”
“So let’s see if we can find out where the Children Lex schooled—public, private, whatever.”
Esperanza frowned. “You mean like college?”
“Start there, yes. Not that siblings go to the same school, but maybe they did. Or maybe they all went to Ivy League schools. Something like that. You might want to start with high school. It’s more likely that they all went to the same one.”
“And if I don’t find any record of him in high school?”
“Go back even further.”
She crossed her legs, folded her arms. “How far?”
“As far as you can.”
“And what good will this exercise in futility do us?”
“I want to know when Dennis Lex fell off the radar screen. Did people know him in high school? In college? In grad school?”
She did not look impressed. “And assuming I somehow manage to find, say, his elementary school, what exactly is that going to do for us?”
“Damn if I know. I’m grasping at straws here.”
“No, you’re asking
me
to grasp at straws.”
“Then don’t do it, Esperanza, okay? It was just a thought.”
“Nah,” she said with a wave of her hand. “You may be right.”
Myron put his palms on his desk, arched his back, looked left, looked right, looked up, looked down.
“What?” she said.
“You said I may be right. I’m waiting for the world as we know it to end.”
“Good one,” Esperanza said, standing. “I’ll see what I can dig up.”
She left the room. Myron picked up the telephone and dialed Susan Lex’s number. The receptionist transferred the call, and a woman identifying herself as Ms. Lex’s secretary picked it up. She had a voice like a steel-wool tire over gravel.
“Ms. Lex does not see people she doesn’t know.”
“It’s a matter of grave importance,” Myron said.
“Perhaps you did not hear me the first time.” Classic Battle-ax. “Ms. Lex does not see people she doesn’t know.”
“Tell her it’s about Dennis.”
“Excuse me?”
“Just tell her that.”
Battle-ax put Myron on hold without another word. Myron listened to a Muzak version of Al Stewart’s “Time Passages.” Myron had thought the original was Muzak-y enough, thank you very much.
The battle-ax came back with a snap. “Ms. Lex does not see people she doesn’t know.”
“I’ve been thinking about that, but it doesn’t really make sense.”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, at some time she must see people she doesn’t know—otherwise she’d never meet anybody new. And if we follow my logic, how did you ever get to see her for the first time? She was willing to see you before she knew you, right?”
“I’m hanging up now, Mr. Bolitar.”
“Tell her I know about Dennis.”
“I just—”
“Tell her if she doesn’t agree to see me, I’ll go to the press.”
Silence. “Hold.” A click and then the Muzak came back on. Time passed. So, mercifully, did “Time Passages,” replaced by the Alan Parsons Project’s “Time.” Myron nearly slipped into a coma.
Battle-ax returned. “Mr. Bolitar?”
“Yes?”
“Ms. Lex will give you five minutes of her time. I have an opening on the fifteenth of next month.”
“No good,” Myron said. “It has to be today.”
“Ms. Lex is a very busy woman.”
“Today,” Myron said.
“That simply will not be possible.”
“At eleven. If I’m not let in, I go immediately to the press.”
“You’re being terribly rude, Mr. Bolitar.”
“To the press,” Myron repeated. “Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Will you be there?”
“What possible difference could that make?”
“All this sexual tension is driving me batty. Maybe afterward we could get together for a nice cool latte.”
He heard the phone go click and smiled. The charm, he thought. It’s baaaaack.
Esperanza buzzed in. “Topless tennis, anyone?”
“What?”
“I got Suzze T on line one.”
He hit a button. “Hey, Suzze.”
“Hey, Myron, what’s shaking?”
“I got an offer for you to refuse.”
“You mean you’re going to hit on me?”
The charm suffers a setback. “Where are you going to be this afternoon?”
“Same place as now,” she said. “The Morning Mosh. You know it?”
“No.”
She gave him the address, and Myron agreed to meet her there in a few hours. He hung up the phone and leaned back.
“ ‘Sow the seeds,’” he said out loud.
He stared at the wall. An hour to kill before he headed over to the Lex Building on Fifth Avenue. He could sit here and think about life and maybe contemplate his navel. No, too much of that already. He swiveled his seat to the computer, double-clicked the proper icon, connected to the Net. He tried Yahoo first and typed
sow the seeds
into the search field. Only one hit: a Web site for the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners. They went by the acronym SLUG. Tough guys probably. A gang. Probably wore green bandannas and engaged in drive-by waterings.
He tried Alta Vista’s search engine next, but they listed 2,501 Web pages. It was kinda like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Yahoo’s search was toooo small. Alta Vista’s was toooo big. They didn’t have LEXIS-NEXIS at the office, but Myron tried a less powerful media engine. He typed in the same three words and pressed the return key, and bammo.
http://vwvw.nyherald.com/archives/9800322
Myron hit the link and the article came up:
New York Herald
by Stan Gibbs
Whoa, hold the phone. Myron knew the name. Stan Gibbs had been a big-time newspaper columnist, the kind of guy who regularly pontificated (read: pimped) on the cable news talk shows, though he’d been less annoying than most, which is like saying syphilis is less annoying than gonorrhea. But that had all been before
the scandal gutted him like Ted Nugent over a fallen moose. Myron read:
The phone call comes out of the blue.
“What is your darkest fear?” the voice whispers. “Close your eyes now and picture it. Can you see it? Do you have it yet? The very worst agony you can imagine?”
After a long pause, I say, “Yes.”
“Good. Now imagine something worse, something far, far worse …”
Myron took a deep breath. He remembered the series of articles. Stan Gibbs had broken a story about a bizarre kidnapper. He’d told the heart-wrenching tale of three abductions that the police had supposedly wanted to keep quiet, out of, Stan Gibbs claimed, embarrassment. No names were mentioned. He had spoken with the families under the condition of anonymity. And, the coup de grâce, the kidnapper had granted Gibbs access:
I ask the kidnapper why he does it. Is it for the ransom?
“I never pick up the ransom money,” he says. “I usually leave explosives at the spot and burn it. But sometimes money helps me sow the seeds. That is what I’m trying to do. Sow the seeds.”
Myron felt his blood stop.
“You all think you’re safe,” he continues, “in your technological cocoon. But you’re not. Technology has made us expect easy answers and happy endings. But with me, there is no answer and there is no end.”
He has kidnapped at least four people: the father of two young children, age 41; a female college student, age 20; and a young couple, newlyweds ages 28 and 27. All were abducted while in the New York City area.
“The idea,” he says, “is to keep the terror going. Let it grow, not with gore or obvious bloodletting, but with your
own imagination. Technology is trying to destroy our ability to imagine. But when someone you love is taken away, your mind can conjure up horrors darker than any machine—than anything even I can do. Some minds won’t go that far. Some minds stop and put up a barrier. My job is to push them through that barrier.”
I ask him how he does that.
“Sow the seeds,” he repeats. “You sow the seeds over time.”
He explains that sowing the seeds means giving hope and taking it away over a sustained period of time. His first call to the victim’s family is naturally devastating, but merely the beginning of a long and torturous ordeal.
He begins the call, he claims, with a normal hello and asks the family member to please hold. After a pause, the family member hears their loved one give a blood-curdling shriek. “Just one,” he says, “and it’s very short. I cut them off in mid-scream.
“This is the last they’ll ever hear from their loved one,” he continues. “Imagine how that scream echoes.”
But for the victim’s family, it does not end there. He demands a ransom that he has no intention of claiming. He calls after midnight and asks the family to imagine their darkest fear. He convinces them that this time, he will really let their loved one go, but he is only extending hope to those who no longer have it, rekindling their agony.
“Time and hope,” he says, “sow the seeds of despair.”
The father of two has been missing for three years. The young premed college student has been missing for twenty-seven months. The newlyweds were married almost two years ago this weekend. To date, not a trace of any of them has been found. Rarely does a week pass when the families don’t get a call from their tormentor.
When I ask him if his victims are alive or dead, he is coy. “Death is closure,” he explains, “and closure stops the sowing.”
He wants to talk about society, how computers and
technology are doing our thinking for us, how what he does lets us see the power of the human brain.
“That is where God exists,” he says. “That is where all things valuable exist. True bliss can only be found inside of you. The meaning of life is not in your new home entertainment system or sports car. People must see their limitless potential. How do you make them see? Right now imagine what these families are going through.”
His voice soft, he invites me to try.
“Technology could never conjure up the horrors you are now imagining. Sow the seeds. Sowing the seeds shows us the potential.”
Myron’s heart pounded in big thuds. He sat back, shook his head, started reading again. The crazed kidnapper ranted on, his theories feverishly demented, sort of Symbionese Liberation Army by way of Ted Kaczynski. Stan Gibbs’s column continued into the next day’s paper. Myron hit the link and read on. During the second day, Gibbs opened with some heartbreaking quotes from the family of the victims. Then he questioned the kidnapper some more:
I ask him how he has managed to keep these kidnappings out of the media.
“By sowing the seeds,” he repeats yet again.
I ask for an example.
“I tell his wife to go to the garage and open the red Stanley toolbox on the third shelf. I tell her to pick out the black pliers with the bubble grip. Then I send her to the basement. I tell her to stand in front of the Mission chair they bought the previous summer at that tag sale on the Cape. Imagine, I say, your husband tied naked to that chair. Imagine those pliers in my hand. And finally, imagine what I’ll do if I see anything about him in the newspaper.”
But he does not stop there.
“I ask her about the children. I mention their names. I
mention their schools and their teachers and their favorite breakfast cereal.”
I ask him how he knows these things.
His answer is simple. “Daddy tells me.”
Myron fell back. “Jesus,” he uttered.
Deep breaths, he told himself again. In and out. That’s it. Think it through. Slowly now. Carefully. Okay, first off: Horrible as this is, what does it have to do with Davis Taylor né Dennis Lex? Probably nothing. The worst sort of long shot. And again, horrible as this is, Myron knew that there was more to the story. More—and in a sense, less.
The Gibbs columns drew weeks’ worth of nationwide attention and criticism—until, Myron remembered, it all blew up in the most public way possible. What had happened exactly? Myron hit some keys and clicked the mouse. He started a search of articles where Stan Gibbs was the subject. They came up in date order:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which in recent weeks has been denying the allegations listed in Stan Gibbs’s columns, took a new tack today. They demanded his notes and information.
Dan Conway, a spokesman for the FBI, began by saying, “We know nothing about these crimes,” then added, “But if Mr. Gibbs is being truthful, he has important information on a possible serial kidnapper and killer, perhaps even harboring or aiding him. We have a right to that information.”
Stan Gibbs, a popular columnist and television journalist, has refused to reveal his sources. “I’m not protecting a killer here,” Mr. Gibbs said. “The families of the victims as well as the perpetrator of the crimes spoke to me under the strict condition of confidentiality. It’s a cry as old as our country: I will not reveal my sources.”
The
New York Herald
and American Civil Liberties Union have already denounced the FBI and plan on backing Mr. Gibbs. The judge has ordered the case sealed from the public.