He swung it open, and about four feet inside was a secondary wall and a regular-sized door. He unlocked it with a second key, opened the door toward him, and stepped into what seemed to be almost total blackness, although there was a hint of light.
He reached along the inside of the secondary wall with his right hand and found a bank of switches. He flipped them all up, and instantly the inside of the container was bathed in light.
While one might have expected the inside walls to be exactly the same as the outside-metal and vertically ribbed-they were instead smooth and painted a soft moss green. The interior walls, perfectly drywalled, were adorned with large examples of modern art. Underfoot was not metal but gleaming wood flooring. Just inside the door were a leather couch, a matching leather reclining chair, and a 46-inch flat-screen TV mounted to the wall. About halfway down the container was a narrow, gleaming kitchen area with aluminum countertops and dozens of recessed pot lights. Beyond that, an elegant bathroom and bedroom.
Oscar Fine heard a sound. A second later, something brushed up against his leg.
He looked down as a rust-colored cat purred softly.
“I bought you some milk,” Oscar said. It was for the cat that Oscar had left on a couple of nightlights. He set the bottle on the counter, hugged it to himself with his left arm while he uncapped it with his right, and poured some into a bowl on the floor. The cat slinked noiselessly to the bowl and lowered its head down into it.
Oscar took the gun from his jacket, set it on the counter, then opened an oversized kitchen cabinet door to reveal a refrigerator. Oscar set the milk inside and took out a can of Coke. He popped the lid with his index finger, then poured the drink into a heavy-bottomed glass.
“How was your day?” he asked the cat.
Oscar sat on a leather stool at the kitchen counter. A silver laptop lay there, its screen black. He hit a button on the side, and while he waited for the machine to get up and running, he reached for a remote and brought the flat-screen TV to life. It was already on CNN, and he left it there.
The laptop was ready to go and he checked his mail first. Nothing but spam. If only you could find those people, he thought. They had it coming even more than Miles. He checked a couple of his favorite book-marked sites. One showed how his various investments were doing. Checking that tended to depress him these days. The other site, which always cheered him, featured short videos of kittens falling asleep.
He glanced up occasionally at the TV while he surfed around.
Onscreen, the news anchor was saying, “… in an unusual turn of events, a person who makes his living reporting the news finds himself at the center of it. Police are refusing to say whether they believe Jan Harwood is alive or dead, but they have indicated that her husband, David Harwood, a reporter for the Standard, a paper in Promise Falls, north of Albany, is what they are calling a person of interest. The woman has not been seen since she accompanied her husband Friday on a trip to Lake George.”
Oscar Fine glanced up from his laptop to the television for only a second, not really interested, then back to his computer. Then he looked back up again.
They had flashed a picture of this missing woman. Oscar Fine only caught a glimpse of the image before the newscast moved on to a shot of a house where it was believed this David and Jan Harwood lived, then another shot of the reporter’s parents’ house, and an older woman coming to the door, telling the media to go away.
Oscar kept waiting for them to show the woman’s picture again, but they did not.
He returned his attention to the laptop, and with his right hand did a Google news search of “Jan Harwood” and “Promise Falls.” That took him to a couple of sites, including that of the Promise Falls Standard, where he found a full story, by Samantha Henry, as well as a picture of the missing woman.
He clicked on it, blew it up. He stared at it a good minute. The woman’s hair was very different. He remembered her hair as red, but now it was black. And she’d worn heavy makeup, eyelashes like spider’s legs. This woman here, she had a toned-down look. Looked like your average housewife. Okay, better than that. A MILF.
He clicked again, blew the picture up even more. There it was. The small scar, shaped like an L, on her cheek. She probably thought she’d pancaked it enough to make it invisible the one and only time they’d met. But he’d seen it.
That scar was all the proof he needed. That, and the throbbing at the end of his left arm, where his hand used to be.
Oscar Fine had some calls to make.
Part Four
THIRTY-THREE
Duckworth and I had moved away from the open grave containing the body of Leanne Kowalski. I was shaking.
I said, “I’m gonna be sick.” And I was. Duckworth gave me a few seconds to make sure I wasn’t going to do it again.
“How can it be her?” I asked. “What’s she doing up here?”
“Let’s go back to my car,” Duckworth said. He was sweating. He’d been crouching next to me when I first looked at the body, and getting back up had left him short of breath.
“If Leanne’s here…,” I started.
“Yes?”
I felt I had to ask. “Is there another grave? Is this the only one?”
Duckworth looked at me intently, like he was trying to see inside my head. “Do you think there’s another one?”
“What?” I said.
“Come on.”
We said nothing on the way back to his car. He opened my door for me and helped me into the car like I was an invalid, then got in around the other side. Neither of us spoke for the better part of a minute. Duckworth turned the key ahead far enough to let him put the front windows down. A light breeze blew through the car.
I turned and looked at him. He was staring straight ahead, hands on the wheel, even though the engine was off.
“Did you already know who it was?” I asked him. “Did you know it was Leanne Kowalski?”
Duckworth ignored the question and asked one of his own. “When you came up here Friday with your wife, Mr. Harwood, did you bring Leanne Kowalski with you?”
I rested my head on the headrest and closed my eyes. “What? No,” I said. “Why would we do that?”
“Did she follow you up here? Did you arrange to meet her up here?”
“No and no.”
For a moment I wondered whether Leanne Kowalski could have, somehow, been the woman who sent me the anonymous email, who wanted to meet me at Ted’s. But I couldn’t think of a way for those dots to connect.
“You don’t think it’s odd that Leanne Kowalski’s body turns up within a mile or two of the place where you claim you were meeting this source of yours?”
I turned. “Odd? Do I think it’s fucking odd? You’re damn right I think it’s odd. You want me to list the fucking odd things that have happened to me in the last two days? How about this. My wife goes missing. Some stranger tries to grab my son. I find out Jan has a birth certificate for some kid who got run over by a car when she was five, that my wife may not even be who she says she is. She goes into that store and tells the guy a story about not knowing why I’ve brought her up here, like I’ve tricked her. Why the hell did she do that? Why did she lie to him? Why was there no ticket for her to get into Five Mountains? Why did she lie to me about seeing Dr. Samuels about wanting to kill herself? So when you ask me if I think it’s odd that Leanne Kowalski is lying dead over there, yeah, I find that pretty fucking odd. Just like everything else that’s going on.”
Duckworth nodded slowly. Finally, he said, “And would you think it odd if I told you that a preliminary examination of your car-the one you used to drive up here Friday with your wife-has turned up samples of blood and hair in the trunk, and a crumpled receipt for a roll of duct tape in the glove box?”