The Vanishing Season Read online

  “Sex games.” Reed cleared his throat. “BDSM.”

  “Derek is into some pretty kinky stuff. When the State Police searched his apartment, they found all kinds of … apparatus. Also pictures of him and Bea engaged in various kinds of play.” She had seen some of the photos—Bea tied up in black ropes from head to toe in ritualistic fashion; Derek wearing a mask and holding a riding crop. His crooked smirk came back to her, the way he had looked at her almost in invitation the time she’d asked him about his unusual sex life. Free your mind, Officer Hathaway, and your body will follow.

  “I see a reference to pictures of him with some other girl—Aimee Winthrop.”

  “Jimmy and the rest of them figured that’s what Bea and Derek were fighting about the night she went missing, but Derek never confirmed it.”

  “You’ve talked to him. What do you think happened?”

  She considered a moment. “Derek is very good at manipulating the conversation—the longer he talks, the more comfortable he feels. But he always stops just short of being actually cooperative or helpful. Back then, I thought like everyone else did, that he probably killed her. But then the next summer Shannon Blessing went missing, and there isn’t any reason at all to think Derek’s involved there. Or with Mark Roy.”

  Reed was still sifting through the pages, running his fingers over them as though reading by touch rather than sight. “Bea was adopted,” he said after a moment.

  Ellie remembered the framed snapshot on the Nesbits’ mantel, the one taken in China two decades ago when they traveled to bring their baby daughter home. Annie and Dave’s cheeks stretched to the edge, almost unable to contain their joyous smiles, while Bea in the middle looked a bit mystified by her instant family. “So?”

  “So am I.”

  This sudden revelation felt like a test of some sort, and Ellie chose her response carefully. “So? You think it matters?”

  “Oh, it always matters.” He closed the file and set it aside.

  “I meant to the case,” she clarified.

  “So did I.” He cast around again for their waitress. “You know, on second thought, maybe I will have another beer.”

  He seemed smaller than the man from her memory, the one who had pried the nails from Coben’s closet and carried her to freedom. She’d never told anyone how she had laid there and played dead for him, fetal on the floor in the pitch-black, splinters pricking her skin, surrounded by the smell of sweat and blood. She had thought it was Coben coming back with the knife to kill her, to take her hands like he promised he would, and in her delirium she’d thought maybe she could pretend it had already happened and he would just go away again. Instead it was a different voice, this one slightly Southern and as fearful as her own: Abby … Abby, is that you?

  No, she’d thought, almost dreamily. Abby’s already gone.

  She held her head in her hands for a moment as Reed got started on his second beer. Maybe she’d been wrong about him. Maybe she should have paid closer attention back then after it happened, when what she mostly remembered from that time was that she’d been the one in the hospital for a change, with her mom making sure the bedsheets were smooth and comfortable. How delicious that first sweet ginger ale had tasted as it trickled down her swollen, parched throat. She’d had a color TV with remote control, right in her own private bedroom. Flowers and teddy bears. Nana came to visit. Everyone kept her far away from the news stories. Nana had called the reporters “jackals” like it was a dirty word, and Ellie had visualized them mobbed like hungry beasts downstairs outside her window, waiting for any chance to devour her, bite by bite.

  Afterward, when she was grown, Ellie knew vaguely that the stories were out there—she’d heard snatches of it on television, at school, or even idle chatter on the streets of Boston, as Coben transformed from reality into legend, a spook story to be mined for public entertainment—but she’d never bothered to learn the details of her rescue. A hundred officers had looked for her, but Reed was the one who opened the closet door, and that was all she’d needed to know. Now she was starting to wonder if he was really the genius everyone had said he was.

  “How did you find me?” she blurted at him.

  He jerked, almost spilling his beer down his shirtfront. “I’m sorry, what?”

  “Back then. How did you know it was Coben?”

  He licked his lips twice, nervously, which did not give her confidence. “You … you don’t know?”

  She shook her head slowly. This was his big story, right? It had to be. He must have told it a million times by now. Go ahead, she thought. Impress me.

  But Reed did not have the air of a decorated war general reliving his greatest battle. He skimmed the worn edge of their wooden table with his fingers and worried his bottom lip with his teeth. Maybe, she thought with sudden dread, it was just dumb luck. Finally, he took a deep breath and touched his fingertips to his inner wrist. “Actually, it was the tattoos,” he said, punctuating the words with a small, quick smile, like he couldn’t believe it even after all these years. “A couple of people in your neighborhood reported seeing a black Acura around the time that you were abducted. We had similar reports of a dark sedan from when Michelle Holcomb disappeared, and forensics matched the carpet fibers found on her body to the Acura, so we knew this was potentially an important lead. Coben owned one of nearly a thousand blue or black Acuras, and he had an arrest record—two minor arson incidents in his late teens and a complaint of assault from a young woman, but that claim was subsequently dropped.”

  “Aren’t they always,” muttered Ellie, harkening back to his earlier words. She wished she’d thought to order a second beer too.

  “The arrests were enough to get Coben called in for an interview,” Reed explained. “I wasn’t nearly senior enough to be the one conducting it—in fact, I was mostly combing through the records of other owners of Acuras and occasionally offering advice to the local officers who were manning the tip line. But I saw Coben come in and I saw him leave. The agents who interviewed him said he had almost as many questions for them about the investigation as they had for him. ‘I’m a bit of a true-crime buff,’ I think is how he put it. He seemed wowed by the agents, happy to cooperate with the FBI. He said he had a solid alibi for the night you were abducted, that he’d been at a gallery showing of his latest work. A hundred people would vouch for him. So we kicked him loose,” he said with a shrug. “Nothing to hold him on.”

  “But?”

  “He had those tattoos. Right at both wrists, black bands at the exact spot the pathologists told us that the girls’ hands had been cut off.”

  Ellie tucked her own hands deep into her lap. She could remember it now, the lines marking the ends of his arms as he’d reached for her.

  “So I followed him. I’m not sure why. It was partly the tattoos and partly because he seemed to be so happy on his way out of the precinct. The others we brought in left white-faced and sweating, relieved we were turning them loose, but Coben practically bounced out of the station like we’d been throwing him a party. I followed him to his apartment and sat outside watching for a while. Then he came out with some sort of large wrapped package that looked like it might have been a framed picture, and he took that across town to the gallery. That’s where I got to see his work.”

  Ellie could not repress a shudder. She’d seen some of it; she had no choice. Coben’s huge close-up photographs of people’s hands were part of pop culture now. She had heard that one piece fetched over three million dollars at auction last year. No one owned the pictures that turned out to be the dead girls, she knew that much. Those would live locked up in evidence forevermore.

  “I called it in, said someone should come down to have a look. But by then they were onto Tom Moody.”

  Ellie looked at him with confused eyes. She had no idea who Tom Moody was.

  “A supermarket butcher who had the unfortunate luck to drive a black Acura and an arrest record for statutory rape,” Reed told her grimly. “They
had him downtown for an interview, and he was being evasive about his whereabouts for the night of the abduction. No one wanted to give up a prime suspect to look at some photographs. So I did a little checking, and I found out Coben’s stepfather had owned a working farm in Marengo, only sixty miles away. I figured I could go there and check it out, and well … you know the rest.”

  Cold. She’d been so cold with him that night when they’d hid in the woods together, her leaning heavily on the rough twill of his trousers, trying not to lose consciousness. She’d had no way to be sure he was really an FBI agent, but he’d pulled her out of Coben’s closet and so she was willing to go anywhere he wanted. Her teeth had chattered as he’d said somewhere over her head, “Listen to me—Coben is the guy. Francis Coben. I’ve got Abby with me in the woods but Coben could show up back here at any time. Get some people out here now.”

  Her shoulders slumped as he finished the story. It should have made her feel better because, on some level, he deserved all those accolades that they’d draped over him years ago. He had spotted the clues the others failed to see. Yet she had so few clues to offer him now, it was hard to know where to begin. No killer was going to go skipping out of her precinct, conveniently inked up with meaningful body art.

  “Tell me about the cards,” he said, as if reading her mind. He slid them out of the paper bag but was careful not to touch them.

  “There’s not much to say beyond what you already know. I get them on my birthday or the day after if it falls on a Sunday. There’s no return address and they’re postmarked in Worcester.”

  “I see you’ve lifted some prints.”

  “Nothing of note—well, except for one slightly weird thing. Mark Roy’s prints are on the first two envelopes, but that could be expected, because he was my mailman.”

  “Still,” Reed said ponderously, “an interesting connection.”

  “It’s a small town. We’re all connected in some way or another.”

  “Who else knows about the cards?”

  She flushed so hard she felt it to her toes. “No one. I thought about telling Sam. I mean the chief. But then I would have to explain why I thought they were connected.”

  She recalled Sam’s red face in the office that afternoon as he’d lambasted her for insubordination. “I let you have copies of some of our files, and you use them to go out behind my back and bring in the FBI. I hope you’re not under the impression that our relationship gives you special latitude to pull rank like this, Ellie, because if that’s what you’re thinking, you’re sorely mistaken.”

  Of course it was true, whether Sam wanted it to be so or not. Why else did he think she’d gone to bed with him in the first place? He was still her commanding officer, but she outranked him in power now. Sure, her career would be tarnished too, if their affair came out, but Sam had a lot more to lose.

  “Maybe the cards aren’t connected to the missing persons cases,” Reed suggested as he nudged one aside. “Maybe there’s someone out there who just wants to mess with you.”

  “No one knows me here.” She blurted the first response that came to mind, the truth that kept her apart from everyone else in this small town. People had asked after her history when she’d first arrived, a stranger in these parts where most folks had strong, sturdy New England family trees, taller and more deeply rooted than the oaks that rose up along Main Street. Ellie’s one-word answers had shut down the questioning and created a separateness to her life in Woodbury that suited her just fine.

  “Someone knows your birthday, at the very least,” Reed said as he lined up the cards between them. “And if they know that much, then they could unravel the whole story.”

  She faltered, momentarily wordless in front of this man who had literally written the book on her. Coben’s reign of terror had been told and retold so many times now that she could hardly form a protest: it wasn’t a story. It was her life.

  * * *

  After dinner, they walked through the small parking lot together, the peals of laughter and splashing from the pool growing quieter in the distance. The delighted, playful noise was a stark contrast to Ellie’s grim thoughts as she imagined a faceless killer lurking like a shark, ready to suck down one of the swimmers at any moment. Her birthday was only a week away now, so time was running short. “Just to warn you,” she said to Reed, “Sam may not let us have those files tomorrow.”

  “Then we’ll work around him,” Reed replied, as though this was no obstacle at all. Ellie tried to share his confidence.

  “What did you mean when you said it mattered that Bea was adopted? You think … you think she was abducted because of her race or her background or something?” The other victims were both Caucasian.

  “I meant that everything matters when it comes to these kind of cases—any little detail that might explain how the victim was in a position to come into contact with the perpetrator. If your suspicions are correct that these three cases are the work of one individual, then that person had reasons for picking Bea, Shannon, and Mark. They might not be reasons that are obvious or make sense to us, but you can believe he had a purpose in mind when he took them. There are no random victims.”

  “I was.” She had been out minding her own business, riding her bike, when Coben happened to spot her.

  Reed halted on the asphalt and looked down at her with something close to understanding, or tenderness, with an empathy that made her squirm. She figured this was the part where he corrected her with some essential part of the Coben narrative that she had missed, that Coben had been stalking her for weeks. Instead, he took off his glasses and wiped the muggy film from the lenses with the hem of his shirt. Nearby, the cicadas in the trees hummed like a live wire.

  “Bea was a college freshman,” he said finally. “She was probably starting to think seriously about who she was and how she fit in with the world, to explore her identity. She’d spent her life until that point getting good grades and doing exactly what her parents expected of her. Now she had a boyfriend, someone who maybe didn’t treat her very well. Their relationship was rocky. Her relationship with her parents was strained by these new choices. Emotionally, psychologically, Bea Nesbit was going through a lot of turmoil at the time she went missing. That’s all I’m saying.”

  Ellie turned this information over in her mind and compared it with the other victims. Shannon Blessing was struggling to stay sober. Mark Roy was depressed over the death of his young son. Years ago, Abigail Ellery Hathaway had been fourteen years old and alone at midnight on her birthday, a celebration that had never occurred because Daniel was rushed to the hospital that morning. Ellie blinked back sudden tears. Vulnerable, she thought. We were all vulnerable. She drew a shaky breath, suddenly eager to change the subject. “Well, that’s, ah, it’s cool that you were adopted. I mean, it’s interesting.”

  He smiled a bit, just a flash of even white teeth. “Yes, it was interesting to every single newspaper writer we encountered growing up. The captions on the family photos always read: ‘Pictured, right to left, State Senator Angus Markham, his wife Maryann, their three daughters, Kimberly, Lynnette, and Suzanne, and their adopted son, Reed.’”

  Oh, she thought, wincing. Wrong topic. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine, really,” he said, waving her off. “They love me. I love them. That’s never been a question.” Implicit in his words was that there were other questions, but she knew better than to voice them. “It’s what I was getting at before, though, about how people’s stories matter. I wouldn’t be standing here if I hadn’t decided to look for my birth mother when I was eighteen. My parents were hesitant at first, but they gave me their blessing and what little information they had—and then the help of a first-rate private investigator. He found her pretty easily, buried in a Las Vegas cemetery.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. She had wondered through the years if maybe her father was dead too. Maybe that was why he’d never called, never come back, but she’d been too chicken to try to
find out.

  “She was murdered,” Reed continued, squinting toward the sky.

  “That’s awful.”

  He nodded. “Found strangled inside her apartment. I talked to the detective who investigated, and he was very polite, very sympathetic, but he had no real answers for me about who she was or what had happened to her. I knew then I wasn’t going to be a poli-sci major as originally planned.”

  She saw it then, how if he had not switched careers, she wouldn’t be standing here either, and maybe there were other women out there, even now—girls who would have been Coben’s next victims if Reed had never stopped him. She hugged herself, feeling a deep stab of envy at these women who didn’t even know what they had missed.

  “Please let me see you home,” Reed said, breaking the silence, but Ellie shook her head.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  Reed placed a hand to his chest in dramatic fashion as they reached her pickup truck. “Please, I insist. I’m originally from the great state of Virginia, you see, and so I am constitutionally obligated to escort a lady to her door.”

  “That’s not necessary, really. I’ve got the same measure of protection you do,” she said, indicating the gun at her hip.

  “Yes, but I’m not the one receiving the cards. Someone in these parts knows your secret, Ellery, and they want your attention.”

  Ellie paused. “Well,” she said after a beat, “they can be sure they have it.”

  He waited a moment and then seemed to realize she wasn’t going to change her mind about asking him home with her. “Good night, then. I’ll phone you in the morning, shall I, and we can plot our course for the day?”

  “In the morning.” She squared her shoulders and climbed into her truck, determined not to be peering into every shadow. A sudden thought struck her, and she lowered the window to call out to him. “Agent Markham? Did they ever catch the person—the one who killed your mother?”