The Vanishing Season Read online

  “So, Mr. Markham,” the chief said, leaning back in his chair. “What brings you to the Woodbury Police Department today?”

  “Agent Markham,” Ellery corrected, and Reed felt a flicker of guilt go through him. He hoped no one called up the FBI to check his references. “He’s graciously offered his help with the missing persons cases.”

  Parker’s bushy eyebrows knit together and his mouth turned downward. “FBI,” he said, eyeing Reed with new suspicion.

  “I’m with the Behavioral Sciences Unit,” Reed supplied. Technically, it wasn’t untrue, but you could hide a whole mess of stories behind the word “technically.”

  “A profiler,” Parker translated.

  “Of sorts.”

  The chief turned his gaze to Ellery and narrowed his eyes a bit. “I didn’t realize you were so cozy with the Feds, Ellie.”

  Color heightened her cheeks, but Ellery stood her ground. “You’ve always told us to be inventive with our limited resources, sir. I simply made a phone call. As long as he’s here, what’s the harm in Agent Markham taking a look at the files? Like you’ve said yourself a hundred times—the cases are at a dead end. Maybe he can see something we’ve missed.”

  “We’re a long way from Quantico up here. You in the habit of checking into missing persons cases on the basis of one phone call from a patrol officer, Agent Markham?”

  Reed felt Ellery freeze at the question; he’d wanted to let her be the one to explain their connection however she preferred to define it, but she had no words, and now the lack of response fell heavy over them. The seconds ticked by in the tense, silent room. “I’m an old family friend,” Reed said at last, and he felt her unclench at his side. “I’m here as a favor, that’s all.”

  “I see.” Parker looked from one to the other, and Reed could tell he wasn’t quite buying the story. “Well, I appreciate that you came all this way to offer your services, but I’m not in the habit of handing out our files to anyone just on the basis of a favor. That’s not how we conduct business around here.”

  “You promised.” Ellery sat forward, her outrage on the loose now. “You promised me that if I found a new angle that we could revisit these investigations. Well, I have. Agent Markham is one of the top behavioral experts in the country, and he’s generously agreed to give us his opinion on the cases. Do you really want me to have to tell Annie and Dave Nesbit that we turned him away just because of some ridiculous adherence to office protocol?”

  Anger flashed across Parker’s features, but he reined it back in fast. “Don’t you go bothering the Nesbits about this,” he warned her. “They’ve had enough from you, stirring them up with your stories every summer.”

  “They deserve answers.”

  “Real answers, yes. Not some cracked-up story about a serial murderer.” They glowered at each other for a long moment, and then Parker heaved a long, worn-out sigh. “Give me a day to think about it,” he said. “I’ll talk to Jimmy about our files, see what might be relevant.”

  “A day! We don’t have time to wait an extra day.”

  “That seems more than fair,” Reed interjected smoothly, cutting short Ellery’s tirade, and she turned in her seat to glare at him. “I was planning to stay in town anyway. Is there a nearby motel you could direct me to?”

  A strange look passed between Ellery and the chief, as though for some reason this was yet another question nobody wanted to answer. “There’s a place down the road toward Pittsfield,” Parker answered gruffly after a moment. “Ellie can give you directions if you need. Officer Hathaway, why don’t you see our guest out, and then come back in here so we can discuss this further.”

  Her answer was a tight, “Yes, sir,” and Reed followed her back out to the main bullpen, where the other officers were watching with naked curiosity. He noted the careful way that Ellie pretended not to see them as she crossed to her desk, pulled out a piece of scrap paper, and wrote out the address of the motel. Reed glanced at it briefly before tucking it in the pocket of his jeans. “Walk me out?” he offered.

  Ellie trailed him into the warm summer afternoon, where the sun was only beginning to dip in the sky. Reed kept glancing back at her because it was a marvel just to see her walking around. He remembered the awful stench and total silence he’d found when he pried open the closet door and seen the full horror of Coben’s work. He’d thought he was too late, that she was dead. Now here she was standing whole and healthy right in front of him—and furious enough to spit nails. “He swore we could reinvestigate the cases,” she told him as they lingered by Reed’s car. “But now it’s just more of the same old bullshit. Wait and see.”

  “Twenty-four hours isn’t too much to ask,” Reed told her. “If we went through official channels, it would take much longer.” He didn’t add the part about how Parker could relatively easily determine that Reed had no official channels at all at the moment. Stress leave, they called it when it was suggested to him, but to Reed, it had sounded like: Leave, and don’t come back.

  “Yeah, well, I have some unofficial copies I can give you now,” she said, leading him around back to a tiny parking lot. He was amused when she led him to a beat-up green truck and unlocked it to reveal a small stack of folders sitting on the passenger seat.

  “You travel around with these? You’re hardcore, Officer Hathaway.”

  “I figured we’d be meeting up later today,” she replied defensively. “Anyway, it’s not nearly everything. Only the stuff I could gain access to.”

  “It’s a good start, thank you.” He tucked the folders under his arm. “What about the birthday cards you received? Do you have those too?”

  She flushed and hesitated a moment, but then reached back in to retrieve a plain brown bag from the glove compartment. “They’re in here,” she murmured as she handed them over.

  He slid them out to see that they were exactly as she described. Envelopes filmy with fingerprint dust, the cards themselves picturing a somewhat garish clown holding balloons. Inside was even black printing: HAPPY BIRTHDAY ELLERY. “Do you mind if I keep these awhile?” he asked.

  She frowned, clearly not expecting this. “What for?”

  “Just to look them over in detail in the context of the other files.”

  “Oh. I, uh, sure … I guess that’s fine.”

  “We could arrange a meeting later this evening to discuss the cases if you like—maybe at your place?”

  “No,” she replied too quickly, and then stammered to cover it. “I mean, my place is a wreck. You must be hungry. Why don’t we get together over dinner, say in two hours? There’s a decent place for burgers and beer down by the motel where you’ll be staying. It’s called the Dive Bar because they open a pool out back during the summer.”

  Reed’s throat went dry at the mention of a bar. He hadn’t had a drink all day, opting instead for soda on the plane. For years he had avoided anything harder than an occasional beer, unsure of what addiction legacy might be lurking in his inscrutable family tree, even as he’d watched some of his colleagues pickle themselves silly in between cases. Now he understood the attractiveness of alcohol: it coursed through your insides like a river over a rock, smoothing you out so you didn’t feel so damn much.

  He cleared his throat, aware Ellie was staring at him. “The Dive Bar. Sure, I can find it.”

  Reed took her files to his rental car as Ellery went inside to receive her tongue-lashing from Chief Parker. Maybe raking her over the coals for insubordination would get the irritation out of Parker’s system and he’d be cooperative in the morning. Reed set Ellery’s files next to him and dug out the name of the motel she’d suggested: the Shady Inn.

  It was hot in the car, baking as it had been in the summer sun, but Reed suddenly broke out in a cold sweat. He pawed through the files to find the bag with the birthday cards. The plain black printing on the cards was eerily similar to the scrap paper he held in his hand. No, you’re imagining things, he told himself as he looked at the cards and back again.
It’s just printing. All plain printing looks alike.

  But in his head, he remembered Sarit’s parting words on the phone: That poor girl, she’d said of Abby. I think if it had happened to me, I’d have gone crazy.

  3

  It wasn’t his fault that his face appeared in her nightmares. She knew which team Reed Markham played for and remembered her rescue, but when her brain opened the closet door, only two faces waited on the other side, and one of them was his. She wondered if his brain opened the door and saw a fourteen-year-old girl. Maybe that was why she kept her uniform on when she went to meet him at the bar.

  Reed was already there, also dressed in the same clothes as earlier in the afternoon, but now he sported wire-rimmed glasses that made him look like a cross between a J.Crew model and an algebra teacher. He was nursing a Sam Adams and picking at a bowl of stale popcorn when she slid into the booth across from him. Outside, through the open patio doors, she could hear the sounds of laughter and splashing from the pool. “Are you still on the clock?” he asked, taking in her dark button-down shirt.

  “Came straight from work,” she said, although this was a lie. She’d been home for at least a half an hour to feed and walk Bump, but the less said about her house, the better. She had already deflected him once when he tried to invite himself over, and she wasn’t looking forward to a situation where she had to explain that Bump was the only male who was allowed through her front door.

  “I read your files,” he said, taking a swill from the beer as he nodded to the stack of folders on the table to his left. “They’re clear, detailed, and well organized. I’m impressed.”

  She felt her face go hot. “Yeah? Did you like my typing too?”

  He set down the beer and tilted his head at her. “You think I’m bullshitting you? I’ve combed through a lot of case files in my day, and half of them looked like they were thrown together like a fifth-grade book report. Yours are careful and insightful—like the part where you noted that Mark Roy ordered a new work uniform three days before he disappeared.”

  “That’s always bothered me. Why would he spend that money if he was planning on killing himself?”

  “It’s a good question. In fact, you’ve got lots of good questions in here. I’d say Woodbury is lucky to have you on the job.”

  Ellie ducked her head. “No one back home really figured I’d enjoy law enforcement. My mother once suggested I should be a toll-booth operator if I wanted to wear a uniform.”

  Reed grinned. “You’re kidding.”

  “No. She said it must give a person plenty of time to think.”

  The waitress showed up, a college-age girl who smelled faintly of chlorine. “You know what you want?”

  “I’ll have the cheeseburger and a Sam Adams,” Ellie said.

  “Cheeseburger for me too,” Reed added.

  Ellie nodded at the bottle in his hand. “You want another one of those? It’s on me—least I can do after you came all this way.”

  He took an oddly long time with his answer, as though he had to run a personal inventory first. “Uh, no, thank you. I’d better stick with one.” He cradled it closer, holding it almost protectively.

  “Let me know if you change your mind,” the waitress said, and Ellie watched Reed’s gaze follow the girl’s bouncy ponytail all the way back to the bar. She was still regarding him curiously when he swung his attention back around to her.

  “How’s your mother faring these days?” he asked as he reached for a handful of popcorn.

  “She’s fine. Still in Chicago, still in the same apartment. She calls on Sundays to update me on the neighborhood in excruciating detail.”

  “And your brother?”

  Ellie looked away at the question, into the faceless crowd. No one had asked her about Daniel in many years now; he became one of the people she’d had to leave behind. “He died,” she said at last, remembering his pale face and sunken eyes the last time she had seen him. “About a half a year after. After I came back.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  She gave a half shrug and contracted in on herself. “He’d been sick for so long by then, it wasn’t really a surprise.” Coben had yanked her off the street in an instant, but leukemia took her brother slowly, draining the life from him over four years in a kind of torture that only Mother Nature could design. Ellie wondered sometimes, especially on the hot summer nights, whether Daniel might have lived if she had died, as if somehow the universe had said, Pick one.

  Reed was watching her with unblinking eyes. “Your mother didn’t mention his passing when I spoke to her.” Off her questioning look, he explained, “I talked to her briefly a couple of years later, just to see how you were doing. She said you were thriving in school, but she didn’t mention Daniel.”

  “I’m not surprised. Losing him was the worst thing that’s ever happened to her.”

  Reed didn’t get to reply to this because their waitress returned with the cheeseburgers. They were thick and juicy, requiring both hands, and as Reed reached for his, Ellie noted he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but there was a slightly paler band of skin there, as if he’d taken a ring off quite recently. He wolfed down a bite or two and then paused to wipe the juice from his fingers. “So why Woodbury?” he asked her.

  “I wanted to get out of the city. This is where the job was.”

  “The city,” he repeated. “Meaning Chicago?”

  “Boston,” she corrected as she picked up a wedge-cut fry. “Where I got my training.”

  When she did not elaborate, he tried another tack. “And you’ve been living out here four years?”

  “Four this fall, yes.”

  “Made a lot of friends?”

  She frowned at him, burger in hand. “I thought we were here to discuss the cases, not my social life.”

  “Right, the cases,” he said, as if reluctant to change the subject. “I see they were all investigated initially by James Tipton.”

  “He’s our detective. Worked out of Philly until a few years ago, when his wife wanted to move somewhere closer to her family—out in Worcester, I think. Sam was looking to bring in someone with experience, so I guess the timing worked out for both of them.”

  Reed made a thoughtful noise. “What do you think of him?”

  “Tipton? He’s all right, I guess,” she replied as she paused to consider. Jimmy Tipton laughed too loud at his own jokes and had a creepy sixth sense for when she was changing in the narrow locker room, but he never overtly hit on her or derided her, even as she was openly investigating his cases in her spare time. Mostly if she brought him a new theory, he would just mutter, “Yeah, I looked into that already,” and go back to playing solitaire on his computer.

  “All right? You’ve been checking the man’s homework for three years now, and that’s all you’ve got to say about him?”

  She sat back in the booth, trying to decide if he was genuinely interested or just messing with her. “Fine,” she said at length. “Here’s what I think: Woodbury is largely a low-crime area. The cases we get, even the ones where Jimmy’s called in, they don’t take a Sherlock Holmes kind of intellect to figure out, if you know what I’m saying. A lady calls up and says her ex-husband broke into her place and stole her stereo system—well, you know, nine times out of ten, she’s not wrong. Jimmy’s a good enough cop, but he’s used to being right because it’s easy to be right around here. That goes on long enough and maybe a person starts mistaking his opinions for facts.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Hmm? What does that mean?”

  Reed took a sip of beer. “Mind you, I haven’t met the man, but I have a feeling he might say the same thing about you.”

  “And you? You’ve read the files now. What do you think?”

  “I can see why you haven’t made any headway with your theory. You’ve got three missing persons of different race and age, two of whom might have had good reason to disappear on their own, with no link among them or any concrete evidence of murder
. The coincidental timing could be just that, a coincidence, and there’s nothing on the birthday cards to suggest they are connected to the disappearance of these three people.”

  Ellie fought a rising tide of frustration at having the same conversation yet again. “So you’re just like the rest of them, then. You think I’m a conspiracy theory nutcase.”

  “What I’m saying is, individually, each case might not add up to much. Collectively, I agree with you: they are unusual in a way that raises concern. Woodbury and its environs can’t contain more than fifteen thousand people. Perhaps one person decides to run off to a new life without leaving any kind of word behind, but three people in three years…” He broke off and shook his head. “Something isn’t right.” He pushed aside his half-eaten burger and shifted the files to sit in front of him. “This first one, Bea Nesbit, has the most complete information.”

  Ellie leaned over her plate, her own food forgotten now. “Her parents made a lot of fuss, said there was no way Bea would just have run off. The State Police took over pretty early in, although they kept Jimmy in the loop because he worked the local angles. Everyone decided that if Bea was killed, her boyfriend, Derek Chin, must’ve been the one who did it. He has two priors, one for possession, one for assault—a bar fight that witnesses say Chin provoked—and, interestingly, one arrest for assault on a previous girlfriend. She claimed he choked her, and she had the bruises on her neck to prove it.” Ellie fingered her throat to illustrate the pattern. “But she dropped the charges the next day and insisted the whole thing was a big misunderstanding.”

  “Isn’t it always,” Reed murmured as his eyes scanned through the file. “Bea’s mother said she’d seen similar bruising on her daughter?”

  “Once. About two months before Bea disappeared, she and her parents had lunch together for Mother’s Day, and Annie Nesbit noticed a discoloration on her daughter’s neck that she thought looked like fingerprints. Bea brushed it off when Annie mentioned it. If you’ve read the file, you’ll know why.”