Authors: Harlan Coben
“I need your help,” he said to her.
Susan Lex looked at him, head high, not backing off.
“I promise not to say anything,” he went on. “I have no interest in hurting you or your family. But you’re going to take me to see Dennis.”
“And if I say no?”
Myron just looked at her.
“You’d hurt me?” she said.
“I just beat up an innocent man,” Myron said.
“And you’d do the same to a woman?”
“I wouldn’t want to be accused of sexism.”
Her expression remained defiant, but unlike Chase Layton, she seemed to understand how the real world worked. “You know what sort of power I have.”
“I do.”
“Then you know what I’ll do to you when this is all over?”
“I don’t much care. A thirteen-year-old boy has been kidnapped.”
She almost smiled. “I thought you said he needed a bone marrow transplant.”
“I don’t have time to explain.”
“My brother isn’t involved in this.”
“I keep hearing that.”
“Because it’s true.”
“Then prove it to me.”
Something in her face shifted then, changing her features, relaxing them into something strangely approaching tranquility. “Come,” she said. “Let’s go.”
S
usan Lex directed him north on the FDR to the Harlem River Drive and then north again to 684. Once they were in Connecticut, the roads grew quieter. Woods thickened. Buildings grew scarce. Traffic was pretty much nonexistent.
“We’re almost there,” Susan Lex said. “I’d like the truth now.”
“I’m telling you the truth.”
“Fine,” she said. Then: “How do you plan on getting away with this?”
“With what?”
“Are you going to kill me when this is all over?”
“No.”
“Then I’ll come back after you. I’ll press charges, if nothing else.”
“I told you before. I don’t much care. But I’ve thought of something.”
“Oh?”
“Dennis will save me.”
“How?”
“If he is the Sow the Seeds kidnapper—”
“He’s not.”
“—or somehow involved with him, then what I’m doing here will be small potatoes by comparison.”
“And if he’s not?”
Myron shrugged. “Either way, I’m going to learn whatever it is you want to hide. We make a deal. I never tell what I saw. In exchange, you leave me alone.”
“Or I can simply kill you.”
“I don’t believe you’d do that.”
“No?”
“You’re not a killer. And even if you were, it would be too complicated. I’d leave evidence behind. I have Win covering my back. It would be too messy.”
“We’ll see,” she said, but there was no starch there. She pointed up ahead. “Turn off up here.”
She pointed to a dirt road that seemed to materialize from nowhere. There was a guardhouse fifty yards down and to the left. Myron pulled up. Susan Lex leaned over and smiled. The guard waved her through. There were no signs, no identification marks, nothing. The whole setup looked like some sort of militia compound.
After the gatehouse, the dirt road stopped and a paved one began. New pavement from the looks of it colored the dark black-gray of heavy rain. Trees crowded the sides like parade watchers. Up ahead, the road narrowed. The trees closed in too. Myron veered the car to the left and passed through wrought-iron gates guarded by two stone falcons.
“What is this?” Myron asked.
Susan Lex did not reply.
A mansion seemed to push out of the green, elbowing its way forward. The exterior was classic off-white Georgian but on an oversized scale. Palladian windows, pilasters, fancy pediments, curved balconies, brick cornering, and what looked like real stone masonry were all garnished with hints of green ivy. A set of oversized
double doors were dead center, the entire edifice perfectly symmetrical.
“Park in the lot over there,” Susan Lex said.
Myron followed her finger. There was indeed a paved lot. Myron figured it contained close to twenty cars. Various makes. A BMW, a couple of Honda Accords, three Mercedes of different lineage, Fords, SUVs, one station wagon. Your basic American melting pot. Myron glanced back at the oversized manor. He noticed ramps now. Lots of them. He checked the cars. Several had MD license plates.
“A hospital,” he said.
Susan Lex smiled. “Come along.”
They headed up the brick path. Gloved gardeners were on their knees, working on the flower beds. A woman walked by in the opposite direction. She smiled politely but said nothing. They passed through an arched entranceway and into a two-story foyer. A woman seated behind the desk stood, slightly startled.
“We weren’t expecting you, ma’am,” she said.
“That’s fine.”
“I don’t have security set up.”
“That’s fine too.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Susan Lex barely broke stride. She took the sweeping staircase on her left, staying in the middle, not touching a handrail. Myron followed.
“What did she mean about security?” Myron asked.
“When I visit, they make sure the hallways are kept clear and that no one else is present.”
“To keep your secret?”
“Yes,” she said. She did not stop moving. “Perhaps you noticed that she called me ‘ma’am.’ That’s part of the discretion here. They never use names.”
When they reached the top level, Susan turned to the left. The corridor had raised wallpaper in a classic floral design and nothing else. No small tables, no chairs, no pictures in frames, no Oriental runners. They passed by
maybe a dozen rooms, only two with doors open. Myron noticed that the doors were extra wide and he remembered his visit to Babies and Children’s Hospital. Extra wide doors there too. For wheelchairs and stretchers and the like.
When they reached the end of the corridor, Susan stopped, took a deep breath, looked back at Myron. “Are you ready?”
He nodded.
She opened the door and stepped inside. Myron followed. A four-poster antique bed, like something you’d see on a tour of Jefferson’s Monticello, overwhelmed the room. The walls were warm green with woodwork trim. There was a small crystal chandelier, a burgundy Victorian couch, a Persian rug with deep scarlets. A Mozart violin concerto was playing a bit too loudly on the stereo. A woman sat in the corner reading a book. She too started upright when she saw who it was.
“It’s okay,” Susan Lex said. “Would you mind leaving us for a few moments?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the woman said. “If you need anything—”
“I’ll ring, thank you.”
The woman did a semi-curtsy/semi-bow and hurried out. Myron looked at the man in the bed. The resemblance to the computer rendering was uncanny, almost perfect. Even, strangely enough, the dead eyes. Myron moved closer. Dennis Lex followed him with the dead eyes, unfocused, empty, like windows over a vacant lot.
“Mr. Lex?”
Dennis Lex just stared at him.
“He can’t talk,” she said.
Myron turned to her. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“You were right before. It’s a hospital. Of sorts. In another era, I suppose one would have called it a private sanitarium.”
“How long has your brother been here?”
“Thirty years,” she said. She moved toward the bed,
and for the first time, she looked down at her brother. “You see, Mr. Bolitar, this is where the wealthy store unpleasantness.” She reached down and stroked her brother’s cheek. Dennis Lex did not respond. “We’re too cultured not to give our loved ones the best. All very humane and practical, don’t you know.”
Myron waited for her to say more. She kept stroking her brother’s cheek. He tried to see her face, but she kept it lowered and away from him.
“Why is he here?” Myron asked.
“I shot him,” she said.
Myron opened his mouth, closed it, did the math. “But you were only a child when he disappeared.”
“Fourteen years old,” she said. “Bronwyn was six.” She stopped stroking the cheek. “It’s an old story, Mr. Bolitar. You’ve probably heard it a thousand times. We were playing with a loaded gun. Bronwyn wanted to hold it, I said no, he reached for it, it went off.” She said it all in one breath, staring down at her brother, still stroking the cheek. “This is the end result.”
Myron looked at the still eyes in the bed. “He’s been here since?”
She nodded. “For a while I kept waiting for him to die. So I could officially be a murderer.”
“You were a child,” Myron said. “It was an accident.”
She looked at him and smiled. “My, that means so much coming from you, thank you.”
Myron said nothing.
“No matter,” she said. “Daddy took care of it. He arranged for my brother to have the best care. He was a very private person, my father. It was his gun. He’d left it where his children could play with it. His business and reputation were both growing. He had political aspirations at the time. He just wanted it all to go away.”
“And it did.”
She tilted her head back and forth. “Yes.”
“What about your mother?”
“What about her?”
“What did she say?”
“My mother hated unpleasantness, Mr. Bolitar. After the incident, she never saw her son again.”
Dennis Lex made a sound, a guttural scrape, nothing remotely human. Susan gently shushed him.
“Did you and Bronwyn ever get help?” Myron asked.
She cocked an eyebrow. “Help?”
“Counseling. To help you through it.”
She made a face. “Oh please,” she said.
Myron stood there, his mind circling nowhere over nothing.
“So now you know the truth, Mr. Bolitar.”
“I guess,” he said.
“Meaning?”
“I wonder why you told me all this. You could have just shown Dennis to me.”
“Because you won’t talk.”
“How can you be so sure?”
She smiled. “After you shoot your own brother, shooting strangers becomes so easy.”
“You don’t really believe that.”
“No, I suppose not.” Susan Lex turned and faced him. “The fact is, you really don’t have much to tell. As you said earlier, we both have reasons to keep our mouths shut. You’ll be arrested for kidnapping and Lord knows what. The evidence of my crime—if indeed it was a crime—is nonexistent. You’d be worse off than I.”
Myron nodded, but his mind still whirred. Her story might be true or just something she told him to gain sympathy, to contain the damage. Still, there was the ring of truth in her words. Maybe her reason for talking was simpler. Maybe, after all this time, she just needed someone who’d listen to her confession. Didn’t matter. None of it mattered. There was nothing here. Dennis Lex was truly a dead end.
Myron looked out the window. The sun was starting
to dip away. He checked his watch. Jeremy had been missing five hours now—five hours alone with a madman—and Myron’s best lead, his
only
lead, was lying brain-damaged in a hospital room.
The sun was still strong, bathing the expansive garden in white. Myron saw what looked like a maze made of shrubbery. He spotted several patients in wheelchairs, legs covered with blankets, sitting by a fountain. Serene. The rays reflected off a pool of water and a statue in the middle of—
He stopped. The statue.
Myron felt the blood in his veins turn to crystal. He shaded his eyes with his hand and squinted again.
“Oh Christ,” he said.
Then he sprinted toward the stairs.
S
usan Lex’s helicopter was starting to descend toward the sanitarium’s landing pad when Kimberly Green called him on the cell phone.
“We’ve caught Stan Gibbs,” she said. “But the boy wasn’t with him.”
“That’s because he isn’t the kidnapper.”
“You know something I don’t?”
Myron ignored the question. “Has Stan told you anything?”
“Nope. He lawyered up already. Says he won’t talk to anyone but you. You, Myron. Why don’t I find that particularly surprising?”
Had Myron responded, the helicopter’s propeller would have drowned it out. He backed off a few steps. The copter touched down. The pilot stuck his head out and waved to him.
“I’m on my way,” Myron shouted into the phone. He switched it off and turned to Susan Lex. “Thank you.”
She nodded.
He ducked and ran toward the helicopter. As they
rose, Myron looked back down. Susan Lex’s chin was tilted up, her eyes still on him. He waved. And she waved back.
Stan was not in a holding cell because they had nothing to hold him on. He sat in a waiting room with his eyes on the table and let his attorney, Clara Steinberg, do the talking. Myron had known Clara—he called her Aunt Clara though there was no familial relationship—since he was too young to remember. Aunt Clara and Uncle Sidney were Mom and Dad’s closest friends. Dad had gone to elementary school with Clara. Mom had roomed with her in law school. Aunt Clara, in fact, had set up Mom and Dad on their first date. She liked to remind Myron with a wink that “you wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for your aunt Clara.” Then she’d wink again. Subtle, that Clara. During the holidays, she always pinched Myron’s cheeks in admiration of his
punim.
“Let me set up the ground rules,
bubbe
,” she said to him. Clara had gray hair and a pair of oversized glasses that magnified her eyes to Ant-Man size. She looked up at him and the giant eyes seemed to reel in everything all at once. She wore a white blouse with a gray vest, matching skirt, a kerchief around her neck, and teardrop pearl earrings. Think Shtetl Barbara Bush.
“One,” she said, “I am Mr. Gibbs’s attorney of record. I have requested that this conversation not be overheard. I have changed rooms four times to make sure the authorities don’t listen in. But I don’t trust them. They think your aunt Clara is an old dodo bird. They think we’re going to chat right here.”
“We’re not?” Myron said.
“We’re not,” she repeated. There was little hint of the cheek pincher here; if she were an athlete, you’d say that she’d strapped on her game face. “What we’re going to do first is stand up. Got me?”
“Stand up,” Myron repeated.
“Right. Then I’m going to lead you and Stan outside, across the street. I’m going to remain on the other side of the street with all those friendly agents. We do this right now, quickly, so they won’t have a chance to set up surveillance. Understood?”