The Vanishing Season Read online

  “Agent Reed Markham?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have an officer on the line from … Woodbury, Massachusetts. She gives her name as Ellery Hathaway and she wants to speak to you. Says it’s urgent. Normally, I wouldn’t bother you with this, but she says she worked with you on one of your earlier cases. Would you like me to transfer the call?”

  Reed sat up against the headboard, still holding his head with one hand. The name didn’t mean a damn thing to him, but he was currently hungover and naked in a bed that wasn’t his. “Uh, sure, put her through.” He tried to not notice that his bed partner was watching him now with obvious curiosity.

  “Agent Markham?” A new female voice came on the line, this one less certain, less officious.

  “Yes, how can I help you?”

  There was a beat of strange silence, as though, Markham thought, she couldn’t figure out an answer, despite the fact that she had been the one to call him. As the seconds passed, he grew irritated, embarrassed to be put in this awkward situation. “You said we worked a case together?” he prompted when she did not say anything.

  “In a way. It was a long time ago. You knew me then as Abigail. Abby.” She took a long breath. “Abby Hathaway.”

  Holy shit. If the woman next to him was a blank, the one on the phone was a bomb. Just the sound of her name set off a hundred tiny fuses in his head. Adrenaline surged through him, tightening his chest and quickening his breathing. “I, uh…” He scrambled off the bed and away from the force of the memories, momentarily forgetting his nudity as he careened around the unfamiliar room looking for a door. He found the bathroom and shut himself inside it, not bothering to turn on the lights. “Abby,” he repeated in wonder, once he could talk again. “How are you?”

  “It’s Ellery now. My middle name.”

  In his book, he’d called her Patricia. Had she read his book? It spent thirty-six weeks on the bestseller list and was now in its third printing. It was a bit old for her, wasn’t it? No, wait, she isn’t fourteen anymore, he reminded himself. Maybe she was writing a book of her own and that was why she was calling. It would be a bestseller too, he knew it instantly. Oh, God, what if the cameras come around again looking for fresh quotes? Look what had become of him now.

  “Back then,” she said, penetrating his panic, “you said if I ever needed anything, I could call you.”

  No one asked Reed for help these days. Even his six-year-old daughter looked at him with sympathetic, doubtful eyes when he asked if she needed any assistance buckling herself into her booster seat in the car. No thanks, Daddy, I’ll do it myself. Now he was standing naked in the bathroom of a woman he couldn’t name, and Abby Hathaway was asking him to make good on a promise from fourteen years ago. “What is it?” he asked cautiously.

  “I’ve been working in Woodbury, Massachusetts, as a police officer for the past four years. Three years ago, we had a missing persons case—a nineteen-year-old college student who was home on break for the summer disappeared one Sunday night in June. She had a volatile relationship with her boyfriend, and they fought loudly the night Bea vanished. The State Police investigated, but without a body, no one could prove she was even dead, let alone that her boyfriend had killed her.”

  Reed leaned his head against the door. “That is a terrible story, but I don’t see—”

  Ellery cut him off, her voice hard but steady. “The next summer, almost a year later, Shannon Blessing disappeared. Shannon was an on-again, off-again alcoholic, and she lived alone, so it took us awhile to realize she was gone. Her apartment was a mess but there didn’t seem to be any signs of struggle. She had an ex-husband, but they weren’t in touch and anyway he lives in Tennessee now. Her car was gone too, and investigating officers decided she had either just driven off to find some other life or took a wrong turn and ended up at the bottom of a lake somewhere.”

  “Did you search all the nearby bodies of water?”

  “Shannon had no immediate family.” She paused, as if gathering herself. “There was no one in particular who cared to find her. Dragging the lake and river, that costs money. We have eight officers in our unit, Agent Markham. Just three patrol cars, and the chief does the repair work on them himself.”

  “I see.” Reed knew well the realities of small-town policing, how more than half the country’s local police agencies consisted of fewer than ten officers. Cop shows invited the American public to think they were protected by bustling, large-staffed precincts filled with technologically savvy officers like on The Shield or Law & Order, when for most of them, the truth was a lot closer to Mayberry RFD.

  “Last summer, Mark Roy went missing. He was depressed at the time over the recent death of his three year-old son due to drowning. Medical records showed Mark had been hospitalized for depression with suicidal ideation more than fifteen years ago, and he was taking antidepressants. After a brief investigation, it was concluded that Mark most likely went off somewhere and killed himself, but no body has ever been recovered.”

  Reed frowned. Suicide victims often did not leave neat explanations behind—only about half left some kind of note—but it was exceedingly rare for them to plan thoroughly enough that they could not be found. At most, they sought privacy just long enough to complete the act.

  “These are open missing persons investigations,” she continued, “but no one is actively investigating them. I think the cases are connected. I think it’s the work of one individual, someone who is abducting these people during the first two weeks of July.”

  “It’s July second now,” Reed observed absently.

  “Yes. That’s why I need you to come right away.”

  “Come? You mean come up there?”

  “No one here believes me,” she said, her voice taking on a note of desperation. “I’ve tried everything to get them to listen, but the chief is unconvinced that the cases are connected. I thought with your background, your expertise, maybe he’ll believe you.”

  Three potential victims, different ages, male and female. He wasn’t sure he believed the story himself. Not to mention the hell to pay if Assistant Director Russ McGreevy found out Reed was taking on cases without the FBI’s official sanction, especially not now. Not after what had happened last year. He swallowed and chose his words carefully. “Officer Hathaway, I’d like to help you, but I don’t know what you’ve been told. I’m not actually with—”

  “He sends me cards,” she cut in quickly.

  For a moment, there was only the sound of her heightened breathing on the other end. “Cards?” Reed finally asked.

  “Birthday cards, on my birthday. Each year, after another person goes missing, I get a card. They’re all the same. There’s a painted clown on the front holding some balloons and a hand-printed note inside that says, ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY ELLERY.’” She gave a significant pause. “I don’t talk about my birthday around here, Agent Markham. It’s not like it’s common knowledge.”

  Who would want to talk about it? Abby Hathaway had been abducted the night of her fourteenth birthday, an ironic twist that made it into every story written about Francis Michael Coben. She was a minor at the time so the press kept her name out of it, but this juicy detail was too good not to share. “And you think … what?” he asked her. “These missing persons are some sort of gift for you?”

  “I don’t know what to think. The cards have no signature, no return address, and no usable prints. But I traced them to a manufacturing company that went out of business ten years ago.” She hesitated, as if deciding how much to say. “They were based in Chicago.”

  The words dragged up a dozen different memories, all jumbled together: the oppressive heat bearing down on the city like a boot to the throat; photos of the mutilated young women, all missing their hands; Coben, smiling, giving a cheery wave, as he walked out of the Chicago precinct as the SAC muttered, “Not our guy.” Abby had been missing twenty-four hours by that point, and most of his team presumed she was already dead.

  He
turned on the light, leaned on the hard porcelain sink, and regarded the mirror in front of him, trying to recognize the face looking back at him in the unflattering gray light. You saved her, he told the face. You. But his haggard expression did not appear to be convinced. “Maybe … maybe I could come up for a day or two,” he found himself saying slowly into the phone. “Just to look around—off the record.” It wasn’t like he had much else to do.

  “Thank you,” she said with relief. “Thank you, that would be great.”

  “You realize,” he said before she could break the connection, “people are going to wonder how we know each other. There may be questions.” He had loved to talk about this case at one point, but he would bet that she did not especially welcome the memories.

  “I know. Tell them…” She sighed. “Tell them anything you want.”

  He wondered what she looked like now, how her story had turned out. He had left her fourteen years ago pale and bandaged and huddled in a hospital bed. All this time, he’d swelled with pride whenever someone asked him about the case. The last girl, the one who lived: Reed Markham had rescued her. Now he was going to get to see for himself whether she was truly saved.

  * * *

  His cell phone rang again that afternoon as he was driving his rental car toward Woodbury. He knew it was definitely not the woman from last night, whose name turned out to be Lauren, he’d discovered, much to his chagrin, by pawing through the prescription bottles in her medicine cabinet after he had hung up with Abby. When he’d finally emerged from the bathroom with a towel around his waist, Lauren had been curled on her bed wearing a robe and a suspicious expression. “You were in there a very long time. At least tell me it wasn’t your wife on the phone.”

  No, it wasn’t his wife, although he had one of those too, if only in the most technical sense since she had asked him to move out last year. So it was not surprising that this time when his phone rang it was her on the other end. “You’re not here,” she said flatly by way of greeting, and Reed cringed as he realized he’d forgotten his agreement to take their daughter, Tula, for dinner and a rare sleepover that night.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He said that a lot these days.

  “This is twice now, Reed. You’re familiar with the three-strikes laws, yes?”

  “Sorry,” he repeated, this time with feeling. “I should have called you. Something came up—an emergency.”

  Sarit snorted on the other end. “What’s her name this time?”

  He hesitated just a second. “Abby Hathaway.”

  There was a stunned silence, and he felt a moment of triumph that he’d managed, this once, to surprise her. “What?” she breathed finally. “The Abby Hathaway?” Sarit Ranupam was one of a handful of people who knew the girl’s real name, and that was because she was the one who convinced Reed to write the book in the first place, back when they had first met at the mayor’s gala event to combat domestic violence. Sarit had been a young reporter on the rise at the Washington Post, and Reed was two years removed from the Coben case, but it was all over the news at the time because Coben was finally on trial. Reed had no talent for writing; he relied on Sarit’s clear prose and sense of story to guide him, and together, they had crafted Little Girl Lost, a tale that had riveted the nation.

  “Yeah,” he told her with a trace of amazement, scarcely able to believe it himself. “She called me this morning about a string of missing persons cases in Massachusetts. She’s a junior deputy or something now.”

  “How did she seem? Does she have a family? Is she thinking of coming forward with her story?”

  Reed almost smiled at this connection to his old Sarit, the journalist who smelled a lede, the storyteller who always wanted to know the ending. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her yet. She’s pretty shaken up by these disappearances and she wants my advice.”

  “And this couldn’t have waited another twenty-four hours?”

  “She said it was urgent.”

  Sarit made a tsking noise, one he had heard often over the past few years. “This isn’t your job anymore, Reed. You don’t go hopping a plane the minute someone turns up missing or dead halfway across the country. When we go see the judge next month, he’s going to ask what efforts you’ve made to keep in touch with Tula. What are you going to say then?”

  He thought of the day his daughter was born, unusually calm and serious for a new person who had just been through the trauma of birth, how she had laid still in his arms and gazed up at him with wide, trusting eyes. Every monster he’d hunted down since then was for her. “Tell Tula I am so sorry, and I love her. I should be back tomorrow, Monday at the latest. I will call her and we’ll plan a My Little Pony sleepover. I’ll even be Princess Chrysanthemum.”

  “Princess Celestia,” Sarit corrected absently. She made a small humming noise that Reed knew meant she was still thinking. “Reed … I don’t understand it. Why you? Why now?”

  “I told you. She wants my professional opinion.” Sarit had the grace not to point out that apparently Abby Hathaway was the only one who did. What Reed didn’t say was the odd, niggling feeling he’d had in the back of his brain ever since his call from Abby. The birthday cards from Chicago meant someone else had figured out her secret, someone who, even if he wasn’t a murderer, was getting a sick thrill out of subtly menacing her. Whoever that was had to know the Coben history inside and out, which meant he—or she—would no doubt recognize Reed as well.

  * * *

  When at last he took the exit for Woodbury, it was as if the forest rose up around the road, trees thick as a bear’s fur, the sun rendered as a distant, filtered light. Reed followed the rolling hills into town, where the woods had been cleared away to form a small outpost of civilization. There was a gas station, a post office, a pharmacy, a white-steepled church that was cut straight from New England lore, a handful of other storefronts, and at least one restaurant/bar. It took Reed less than five minutes to get through the whole downtown. He spotted a squat brick building with a white painted sign in front, whose fancy script lettering proclaimed WOODBURY POLICE DEPARTMENT, SINCE 1903. As advertised, there was only one patrol car parked on the street outside.

  Reed performed a U-turn so he could pull up behind the vehicle, his thoughts on Abby and what it would be like to see her again. When writing the book, he had made a perfunctory check-in with her mother to see how the girl was doing two years later so they would have some good news to put in the afterword. “Oh, Abby’s doing just fine,” her mother had said at the time, “Top marks. She’s the star shooter on her high school basketball team. You can hardly even see the scars on her now. She’s applying to colleges and she can go anywhere she wants now thanks to all the money people sent after she was rescued—places we never could’ve afforded before—so in a way, what happened turned out to be a blessing.” Reed had dutifully relayed the inspiring epilogue to the public, with Abby’s name still protected, of course, but he realized now that he had never verified any of the details with Abby herself. He hadn’t wanted to be the one to call up bad memories.

  The heavy wooden door stuck in the humidity, forcing Reed to lean into it so that he stumbled more than walked into the Woodbury station house. No one was the in the entryway to witness his embarrassment. Instead, he found sterile white-and-gray linoleum, a short row of plastic chairs, and a narrow Formica counter with a sliding glass window behind it. There was a bell to ring for service. Reed tapped it once, and the glass slid open a moment later to reveal a bland-faced officer with a dark buzz cut. “Can I help you?” he asked.

  “My name is Reed Markham. I’m here to see Ellery Hathaway.” Reed congratulated himself on his use of the correct name.

  The man turned and hollered over his shoulder. “Hathaway! You’ve got company.”

  She materialized almost immediately from the other side of the metal door, and Reed blinked in surprise a few times. He had been mentally casting her as a slightly larger version of the girl he had known—thin and gang
ly, with dirty blond hair, pale eyes that would not look directly at anyone—but the woman in front of him had dark hair, pulled back neatly at her nape, a toned, athletic frame, and a cool, assessing gaze. Only her eyes were the same, like cracked marbles the color of sagebrush. If he ever saw the eyes, Francis Coben would’ve been able to pick her out of any lineup, no question: That’s her. That’s the one I took.

  “I didn’t expect you to just show up here,” she said, and Reed didn’t know whether she meant the station house or Woodbury altogether.

  “You said it was urgent,” he replied, and a faint smile appeared on her lips.

  “Yeah, well, I’m not used to people believing me. Come on back.”

  She led him into the inner sanctum, where six desks sat mashed up together. The three other officers in the room all turned to stare, and Reed realized with dismay that they would have exactly zero privacy here. A man who Reed presumed was the chief stepped out from the partitioned office at the far end of the room. He had a sheaf of papers in his hand and he pulled down his reading glasses for a better look at Reed.

  “That’s Chief Parker,” Ellery muttered to him. “I don’t exactly have his blessing on all this, as you’re about to find out. I hope that’s not a problem.”

  Reed didn’t have the FBI’s blessing either. “No problem,” he said, straightening up as the chief approached.

  The chief stuck out his hand toward Reed. “Chief Sam Parker,” he said with a welcoming but curious tone. “Is there something I can help you with?”

  “Reed Markham. I’m here to see Officer Hathaway.”

  “Oh?” Parker looked him over from head to toe, slowly taking in the Ralph Lauren polo shirt, the dark, designer-wash jeans, and the leather loafers. Reed wondered if he should have stopped to put on a suit.

  “Can we talk in your office?” Ellery asked.

  Parker stretched out a magnanimous arm. “By all means.”

  Parker’s office was barely big enough to hold his desk and chair, a file cabinet, and two other chairs. They crowded in and sat down. Ellery was picking nervously at the blue piping on the edge of her uniform, and beneath the cuff at her wrist, Reed thought he could just make out the faint line of a white scar. Of course, he knew exactly where to look.