The Stranger (24 page)

H
E KNOWS

Chris Taylor read the message and wondered yet again how and where this had all gone wrong. The Price job had been for hire. That might have been the mistake, though in most ways, the jobs for hire—and there had been only a handful—were the safest. The payments came from an emotionless third party, a top-level investigation firm. In a sense, it was more on the up-and-up, because there wasn't—and yes, Chris wasn't afraid to use the word—blackmail involved.

The normal protocol was simple: You know a terrible secret about a certain person via the web. That person has two options. He or she can pay to have the secret kept or he can choose not to
pay and have the secret revealed. Chris felt satisfied either way. The end result was either a profit (the person paid the blackmail) or cathartic (the person came clean). In a sense, they needed people to choose both. They needed the money to keep the operation going. They needed the truth to come out because that was what it was all about, what made their enterprise just and good.

A secret revealed is a secret destroyed.

Perhaps, Chris thought, that was the problem with the for-hire cases. Eduardo had pushed for those. They would, Eduardo claimed, work only with a select group of upscale security companies. There would be safety, ease, and always a profit. The way it worked was also deceptively simple: The firm would put out a name. Eduardo would check through their data banks to see if there was a hit—in this case, there was one for Corinne Price via Fake-A-Pregnancy.com. Then a figure would be paid and the secret revealed.

But that meant, of course, that Corinne Price never got the chance to choose. Yes, the secret was revealed in the end. He had told Adam Price the truth. But he had done so strictly for cash. The secret keeper had not been given the option of redemption.

That wasn't right.

Chris used the all-encompassing term
secret
, but really, they weren't just secrets. They were lies and cheats and worse. Corinne Price had lied to her husband when she faked her pregnancy. Kimberly Dann had lied to her hardworking parents about how she was earning cash for college. Kenny Molino had cheated with steroids. Michaela's fiancé, Marcus, had done worse when he set up both his roommate and eventual wife with that revenge tape.

Secrets, Chris believed, were cancers. Secrets festered. Secrets ate
away at your innards, leaving behind nothing but a flimsy husk. Chris had seen up close the damage secrets could do. When Chris was sixteen years old, his beloved father, the man who had taught him how to ride a bike and walked him to school and coached his Little League team, had unearthed a terrible, long-festering secret.

He wasn't Chris's biological father.

A few weeks before their marriage, Chris's mother had one last fling with an ex-boyfriend and gotten pregnant. His mother had always suspected the truth, but it wasn't until Chris was hospitalized after a car accident and his father, his beloved father, had tried to donate blood that the truth finally came out.

“My whole life,” Dad had told him, “has been one big lie.”

Chris's father had tried to do the “right thing” then. He had reminded himself that a father is not merely a sperm donor. A father is there for his child, provides for his child, loves and cares and raises him. But in the end, the lie had just festered too long.

Chris hadn't seen the man in three years. That was what secrets did to people, to families, to lives.

After Chris finished college, he'd landed a job at an Internet start-up called Downing Place. He liked it there. He thought he'd found a home. But for all the company's fancy talk, it was really just a facilitator of the worst kind of secrets. Chris ended up working for one particular site called Fake-A-Pregnancy.com. The company lied, even to itself, pretending that people bought the silicone bellies as “gag” gifts or costume parties or other “novelty funsy” rationales. But they all knew the truth. Someone might, in theory, go to a party dressed as someone pregnant. But fake sonograms? Fake pregnancy tests? Who were they fooling?

It was wrong.

Chris realized right away that it would make no sense to expose the company. That was simply too big a task and, as bizarre as it seemed, Fake-A-Pregnancy had competitors. All of these sites did. And if you went after one, the others would just grow stronger. So Chris remembered a lesson that, ironically, his “father” had taught him as a young child: You do what you can. You save the world one person at a time.

He found a few like-minded people in similar businesses, all with the same access to secrets that he had. Some were much more interested in the moneymaking side of the venture. Others understood that what they were doing was right and just, and while Chris didn't want to make it into some kind of religious crusade, there was an aspect of his new operation that felt like a moral quest.

In the end, the core group had been five—Eduardo, Gabrielle, Merton, Ingrid, and Chris. Eduardo had wanted to do everything online. Make the threat online. Reveal the secret via an untraceable e-mail. Keep it completely anonymous. But Chris didn't agree. What they were doing, like it or not, was devastating people. You were changing lives in a flash. You could dress it up all you wanted, but the person was one thing before his visit, and something entirely different after. You needed to do that face-to-face. You needed to do that with compassion and with a human touch. The secret protectors were faceless websites, machines, robots.

They would be different.

Chris read Adam Price's business card and Gabrielle's short message again:
HE KNOWS

In a sense, the shoe had been put on the other foot. Chris now had a secret, didn't he? But no, his was different. His secret was not
for the sake of deception but protection—or was that just what he told himself? Was he, like so many of the people he encountered, simply rationalizing the secret?

Chris had known that what they were doing was dangerous, that they were making enemies, that some would not understand the good and want to retaliate or continue to live in their “secrets” bubble.

Now Ingrid was dead. Murdered.

HE KNOWS

And so the response was obvious: He had to be stopped.

K
imberly Dann's dorm room
was in a seemingly ultrahip section of Greenwich Village in New York City. Beachwood wasn't Hicksville, not even close. Many of their residents had migrated from New York City, wanting to escape the hustle and bustle and live a somewhat more financially comfortable life in a place with lower property values and tax rates. But Beachwood certainly wasn't Manhattan, either. Johanna had done enough traveling—this was her sixth time here—to know that there was no place like this isle. The city did indeed sleep and rest and all that, but when you are here, your senses were always alive. You were plugged in. You felt the constant surges and crackles.

The door flung open the moment Johanna knocked, as though Kimberly had been standing by the door, hand on the knob, waiting.

“Oh, Aunt Johanna!”

Tears streamed down Kimberly's face. She collapsed onto Johanna and sobbed. Johanna held her up and let her cry. She stroked her hair down to her back the way she'd seen Heidi do a dozen times, like when Kimberly fell at the zoo and scraped her knee or when that jerk Frank Velle down the block had taken back his invitation to the prom because he was “upgrading” to Nicola Shindler.

Holding her friend's daughter, Johanna felt her own heart start to break anew. She closed her eyes and made what she hoped were comforting shushing sounds. She didn't say, “It's going to be okay,” or offer false words of comfort. She just held her and let her cry. Then Johanna let herself cry too. Why not? Why the hell pretend that this wasn't crushing her too?

What Johanna needed to do would come soon enough. Let them both have their cries in the meantime.

After some time had passed, Kimberly let go and took a step back. “I got my bag,” she said. “When is our flight?”

“Let's sit and talk first, okay?”

They looked for places to sit, but since this was a dorm room, Johanna took the corner of the bed while Kimberly collapsed on what looked like an upscale beanbag chair. It was true that Johanna had come on her own dime to interrogate Adam Price, but she was here for more than that. She'd promised Marty that she'd accompany Kimberly back home for Heidi's funeral. “Kimmy's so upset,” Marty had said. “I don't want her traveling alone, you know?”

Johanna knew.

“I need to ask you something,” Johanna said.

Kimberly was still drying her face. “Okay.”

“The night before your mom was killed, you two talked on the phone, right?”

Kimberly started to cry again.

“Kimberly?”

“I miss her so much.”

“I know you do, honey. We all do. But I need you to focus for a second, okay?”

Kimberly nodded through the tears.

“What did you and your mom talk about?”

“What difference does it make?”

“I'm looking into who murdered her.”

Kimberly started to cry again.

“Kimberly?”

“Didn't Mom interrupt a robbery?”

That was one of the county boys' hypotheses. Drug fiends desperate for money had broken in, and before they could find anything of value, Heidi had interrupted them and gotten killed for her trouble.

“No, honey, that's not what happened.”

“Then what?”

“That's what I'm trying to figure out. Kimberly, listen to me. Another woman was murdered by the same person.”

Kimberly blinked like someone had whacked her with a two-by-four. “What?”

“I need you to tell me what you and your mom talked about.”

Kimberly's eyes started dancing around the room. “It was nothing.”

“I don't believe that, Kimberly.”

Kimberly started crying again.

“I checked the phone records. You and your mom exchanged a bunch of texts, but you've only talked on the phone three times this semester. The first call lasted six minutes. The second, only four. But the night before she was murdered, the call between you two lasted more than two hours. What did you two talk about?”

“Please, Aunt Johanna, it doesn't matter anymore.”

“Like hell it doesn't.” There was steel in Johanna's voice now. “Tell me.”

“I can't. . . .”

Johanna dropped off the bed and knelt in front of Kimberly. She took the girl's face in her hands and forced her to look directly at her. “Look at me.”

It took some time, but Kimberly did.

“Whatever happened to your mother, it's not your fault. You hear me? She loved you and she would want you to go on and live the best life you can. I'll be there for you. Always. Because that's what your mother would have wanted. Do you hear me?”

The girl nodded.

“So now,” Johanna said, “I need you to tell me about her last phone call.”

A
dam watched
from what he hoped was a safe distance as Gabrielle Dunbar hurriedly packed a suitcase in the trunk of her car.

A half hour ago, Adam had decided to take one more run at Gabrielle on his way to work. But as he turned down her street, Gabrielle Dunbar was throwing a suitcase in the trunk. Her two children—Adam estimated them to be about twelve and ten—lugged smaller bags. He pulled his car to the side, kept a safe distance, and watched.

So now what?

The night before, Adam had tried to reach out to the other three people Gribbel had been able to identify and locate in that photograph on Gabrielle Dunbar's page. None gave him anything useful
on the stranger. No surprise. Whatever line of bull he threw at them, they were all naturally wary of a “stranger”—yep, irony strikes again—asking them in one fashion or another to identify a person, possibly a friend or coworker, from a group photograph. None of them lived close enough for Adam to chance, as he had with Gabrielle, confronting them in person.

So his mind went back to Gabrielle Dunbar.

She was hiding something. That much had been obvious to him yesterday—and suddenly she was rushing out of the house again with her third suitcase.

Coincidence?

He didn't think so. He stayed in his car and watched. Gabrielle threw the bag into the trunk and struggled to slam it closed. She swept her children into the car, both in the backseat, and made sure they were strapped in. She opened her own door, paused, and then Gabrielle looked down the street right at him.

Damn.

Adam quickly slid down in the driver's seat. Had she spotted him? He didn't think so. Or if she had, would she know who he was from this distance? And hold up, so what if she had? He had come here to confront her, right? He raised himself back up slowly, but Gabrielle wasn't looking in his direction anymore. She'd gotten into the car and had started moving.

Man, he was no good at this.

Gabrielle's car started down the block. Adam thought about his next move but not for very long. In for a penny, in for a pound. Adam shifted into drive and started to follow.

He wasn't sure how far to stay back so that she wouldn't see him and yet he wouldn't lose her. All of his knowledge on this
subject had come from a lifetime of watching TV. Would anyone even know what a tail was if they hadn't watched television? She turned right. Adam followed. They started toward Route 208 and then down Interstate 287. Adam checked his gas tank. Nearly full. Okay, good. Just how long did he plan on following her anyway? And when he caught up, what exactly did he plan on doing then?

One step at a time.

His cell phone rang. He glanced down and saw the name
JOHANNA
pop up.

He had programmed her phone number into his smartphone after her visit last night. Did he fully trust her? Pretty much, yeah. She had a simple agenda: Find her friend's killer. As long as that wasn't Corinne, Johanna could be, he thought, an asset and even an ally. If the killer was Corinne, then he had bigger problems than trusting a cop from Ohio.

“Hello?”

“I'm about to board a plane,” Johanna said.

“Heading back home?”

“I'm already back home.”

“In Ohio?”

“At the Cleveland airport, yeah. I had to take Heidi's daughter home, but I'm flying back out to Newark in a few. What are you up to?”

“I'm tailing Gabrielle Dunbar.”

“Tailing?”

“Isn't that what you cops call it when you follow someone?”

He quickly explained how he came to her house and saw her packing up.

“So what's your plan here, Adam?”

“I don't know. I can't just sit around and do nothing.”

“Fair point.”

“Why did you call?”

“I learned something last night.”

“I'm listening.”

“Whatever is happening here,” she said, “this isn't just about one website.”

“I don't understand.”

“This stranger guy. He doesn't just tell his victims about their wives faking pregnancies. He has access to other sites. Or at least one other site.”

“How do you know this?”

“I talked to Heidi's daughter.”

“So what was the secret?”

“I promised I wouldn't tell—and you don't need to know, trust me on that. The key thing is, your stranger may be blackmailing a whole slew of people for a variety of reasons, not just for faking a pregnancy.”

“So what do we think is going on here exactly?” Adam asked. “This stranger and Ingrid were blackmailing people about what they do online?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“So why is my wife missing?”

“Don't know.”

“And who killed your friend? And Ingrid?”

“Don't know and don't know. Maybe something went wrong with the blackmail. Heidi was tough. Maybe she stood up to them. Maybe the stranger and Ingrid had a falling-out.”

Up ahead, Gabrielle was pulling off an exit to Route 23. Adam hit his turn signal and stayed with her.

“So what's the connection between your friend and my wife?”

“Other than the stranger, I don't see any.”

“Hold up,” Adam said.

“What?”

“Gabrielle's pulling into a driveway.”

“Where?”

“Lockwood Avenue in Pequannock.”

“That's in New Jersey?”

“Yeah.”

Adam wasn't sure whether he should stay back and stop suddenly or drive past and find a spot to pull over. He opted for the latter, cruising by the yellow split-level with the aluminum siding and red shutters. A man opened the front door, smiled, and strolled toward Gabrielle's car. Adam didn't recognize him. The car doors opened. The girl came out of the car first. The man gave her an awkward hug.

“So what's going on?” Johanna asked.

“False alarm, I guess. Looks like she's dropping her kids off at her ex's place.”

“Okay, they're calling my flight. I'll call you when I land. Don't do anything stupid in the meantime.”

Johanna hung up. Now Gabrielle's son got out of the car. Another awkward hug. The man who might have been the ex waved at Gabrielle. She may have waved back, but he couldn't tell from here. A woman appeared at the doorway. A younger woman. A
much
younger woman. An old story, Adam thought. Gabrielle stayed in the car as the probable ex opened the trunk. He took out
one of the suitcases and closed it again. He started back toward the front of the car with a puzzled look on his face.

Gabrielle hit reverse and pulled out before he could reach her. She started driving back down the street.

With a lot of luggage still in her car.

So where was she going?

In for a penny . . .

Adam saw no reason not to keep following her.