On Borrowed Time (10 page)

I didn’t need my GPS to tell me which house on the street was the Donovans’. There were at least half a dozen police cars there, along with a coroner’s van and two other official-looking vehicles. In the center of them, and parked directly in front of the house, was Allie’s rented car.

A bunch of neighbors had gathered and were watching from a distance, blocked from the scene by officers there for just that purpose. I went up to one and said that I was a friend of Allie’s and wanted to see her.

He was not impressed. “She’s busy now,” he said.

“I know that. She called me. Can you at least tell her that I’m here? My name’s Richard Kilmer.”

“No,” he said, ever helpful.

I dialed Allie’s number and when she answered, told her I was outside. I heard her ask if I could come in, and I assumed she was in the house. She was told that I could not, and was not given a good answer when she asked how long they would need her. “Sorry,” she said. “They’re not in a compromising mood.”

“I’ll be here,” I told her. “Look for me across the street when you come out.”

I was still there two hours later when she appeared, with three guys I figured were detectives. She did not seem to be in any kind of custody, and she walked over to me. “They’re both dead, Richard. Susan Donovan and her husband.”

I saw that a couple of the neighbors were trying to listen in, so I said, “Let’s go grab a cup of coffee and talk about it.”

We got in our cars, and she followed me to a diner I had passed, down the block from Monticello Raceway. We asked for a booth that was off in the corner, with the one on each side of it unoccupied. As I was starting to do from habit, I looked out the window to see if I could spot the man with the device in his car window. I did not.

Once we sat down, Allie described everything that had happened to her, from the moment she had arrived at the Donovans’. She spoke in a clinical way, strangely devoid of emotion, as if she were trying to keep herself under complete control.

“You okay?” I asked.

She shook her head slightly. “Not so far, but I’m working on it.”

“You want to stop talking about this for a while?”

Another shake of the head. “No. We need to deal with this.”

“Do the cops have any idea who might have done it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “They seemed to want me to do all the talking, and didn’t say much when I was around. But I did overhear a couple of things. Susan Donovan was raped before she was killed, and the house was ransacked. It looked like a robbery that turned deadly.”

“Maybe to them. But I think we know better,” I said. “Soon after she seemed afraid of you over the phone, she and her husband were murdered. That’s pushing the coincidence scale way too far.”

She nodded. “I agree completely,” she said, and then, “I feel like we killed them.”

Even though intellectually I knew better, I was feeling the same thing. But there was nothing to be gained from dwelling on it, and I told her so.

It didn’t work, and she started to cry. “Richard, it’s like I broke into their lives and killed them myself. One minute they’re planning their retirement, or getting ready to go see their grandchildren or something, and then I call them, and their lives come to an end.”

I let us both sit with it for a while. I could have pointed out that there was a real murderer out there, and he wasn’t us, but intellectually she already knew that. For the moment, it wasn’t her intellect that was in control.

Finally, I asked, “What did you tell the police … I’m sure they asked why you were there?”

“I said a friend’s phone bill had shown their number on it and he didn’t know why.” She managed a small smile. “I said that my friend was having memory issues, and that I was trying to piece his life together. They didn’t seem particularly interested in any of that.”

We debated the logic of going to law enforcement and trying to enlist them in our search. It seemed to both of us that it would be a dead end, we had nothing concrete to go on. The things that interested us—that Julie and Jen were both missing and looked so much alike, and that Susan Donovan had seemed afraid on the phone the day before her murder—were unlikely to interest the police.

Especially since no one other than the two current occupants of our diner booth even believed that Jen ever existed.

As if we needed anything else to hang over our conversation, I was hoping she wasn’t thinking what I was, that if in fact the people we were dealing with committed this brutal crime, the chance that Jen was alive was very low.

The coincidences were piling up, and I really had come to believe there could be a conspiracy that had targeted both Jen and me. I still couldn’t begin to understand how it included everybody I knew, and how all evidence of Jen could have been so completely wiped out, but I felt I just had to keep pushing until I had the answers.

Of course, resolving to keep pushing is easy; the tough part is in knowing where to push. “I think we’re looking in the wrong place,” I said.

“Where’s the right place?”

“Julie didn’t disappear in Fort Atkinson, so you had no reason to look for her there. And the same thing is true of Jen and Manhattan.”

Allie nodded. “Jen disappeared in Ardmore.”

“Which is only about twenty minutes from here. That’s where we should be looking.”

“Are you up for going back?” she asked. “It won’t be an easy thing for you to do.”

“I’ll handle it.”

She nodded, and I could see her resolve and determination returning. “When do we go?”

“As soon as we figure out a strategy for when we get there. Right now the people in that town think I’m a total nutcase who tied their police department up for an entire afternoon. They won’t be welcoming me back with open arms.”

“In the meantime, we have to figure out where the Donovans fit into this,” she said.

“I think I’ve got an idea how to do that.”

“Do I want you to write a follow-up?” Scott asked. “Come on, is that a serious question?”

“It’s a serious question,” I confirmed.

“Just to be clear, we’re talking about a follow-up to the piece about Jennifer?”

“We are.”

“Richard, I’ve been asking you to write a follow-up since ten minutes after the first piece hit the street. That edition broke every sales record we’ve ever had, and we got by far the most reader reaction ever.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Is it a yes? How’s this: I’ll clear out up to twelve pages for you, and I’ll refuse advertising if you need more than that. And if a nuclear war breaks out before we go to press, you still get the cover.”

“My deal is you won’t edit it,” I said.

His mood changed instantly. “Won’t edit it? I’m an editor; it says so right on my door.”

“You didn’t change a word the last time.”

“But the point is I could have. It was brilliant, so I didn’t touch it. Retaining that option makes us editors feel secure.”

“Not this piece. It runs the way I write it. Word for word. And I’m going to need Craig Langel to do legwork on it, on the magazine’s dime.”

“Then I’m going to need some information, some hint of what the hell is going on.”

So I told him what was going on, starting with Allie and the missing Julie, then the phone bill, the shrink, the guy who’d been following me, ending with the brutal murder of the Donovans.

He listened until I was finished without asking a single question, then said, “Richard, the first time around this was goofy, you know? A little nuts. Now it’s serious, and downright weird.”

“So you don’t want to run it? I’m coming to you first, Richard, but we both know I can take it elsewhere.”

“Don’t want to run it? Have you lost your mind?” He realized what he’d just said, so added, “Sorry, bad choice of words.”

“And you’ll pay for Craig?” I asked.

“Can’t you find someone cheaper? The son of a bitch charges a fortune.”

I shook my head. “It’s got to be Craig. I trust him.”

“You haven’t really learned the art of compromise, have you?”

I shook my head. “Maybe next semester.”

“Okay, use Craig. But don’t overdo it. When should I expect the piece?”

“I have no idea,” I said.

“That’s helpful. Let me ask you this, Richard. What are you hoping to accomplish with it?”

It was a good question, and one I couldn’t yet completely answer. I decided to be as honest as I could be. “Well, for one thing, it gets Craig working on this, which can only be a positive. And the truth is that my ability to reach the public is one of the only weapons I have, so I have to figure out a way to use it. But most importantly—”

He finished my thought for me. “It might help you find Jen.”

I nodded. “It might help me find Jen.”

As soon as I got home, I called Craig and told him he was officially on the payroll. “I would have done it for nothing, Richard. I told you that.”

“But money’s better, right?”

“Money’s always better.”

I told Craig that we would meet in a day or two and I’d bring him completely up to speed on the situation, but for the moment I told him all I knew about the Donovans, which wasn’t much.

“What do they have to do with your missing girlfriend, except for the fact that the wife sounded scared on the phone?”

“I don’t know, but the more you can find out about them, the better chance we have of making the connection.”

“Okay, I’ll get right on it,” he said, and as well as I knew Craig, I understood that he meant it literally. He would start working on it the moment he hung up the phone.

With nothing specific to do for the rest of the night, I called Allie and asked her if she wanted to have dinner. I could have gone to Legends and hooked up with Willie and John, but I chose Allie instead, as I had pretty much been doing every night.

I told myself that it was because we were working on this together, and the more we talked about it, the better the chance that we would hit on the answer. And I reminded myself that she was alone in a strange city, and I needed to watch out for her. But no matter how many times I told myself that stuff, I knew that there was more to it.

I enjoyed being with her, and I was attracted to her. I wasn’t sure why, and that was disconcerting. Of course, I recognized the obvious fact that it was likely because she looked and acted exactly like Jen. This added a healthy dose of guilt to the mix; I felt like I was betraying Jen by being with Allie, even though nothing romantic had transpired.

Or was ever going to.

I was starting to think that Allie was having the same kind of feelings, and was equally uncomfortable with them. But she hadn’t said anything, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to.

The bottom line was that I couldn’t explain my feelings, even to myself, but I really didn’t have time to figure it out. And I wasn’t prepared to stop spending time with her. I enjoyed it too much.

So Allie and I went to Dock’s, a restaurant on Broadway in the Eighties, and did our best not to talk about anything other than what our next steps should be. It made for a less-than-scintillating conversation, since neither of us had a clue.

My idea to go back to Ardmore still seemed like a good one, especially because the Donovans lived not far from there. I knew that town, I had been there, I’d met and talked with some of the people, and all of that was because Jen brought me there.

It was the only place where it made sense to look.

“When are you going to write the magazine article?” Allie asked.

“As soon as I can figure out what I want to say. But very soon.”

“Am I going to be in it? Is Julie?”

It was a measure of my self-absorption that I hadn’t even thought that she might have the right to privacy in all this. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have asked you.”

“So you do want to write about my part in this?”

I nodded. “Yes. I think it can be a positive. But it’s completely your call.”

She thought for a moment, then said, “Whatever it takes.”

We left the restaurant and walked all the way back to her hotel. It was about a three-mile walk and felt great. I kept looking for the man who had been following us, but he was nowhere to be seen.

I mentioned that to Allie, and she said, “I guess we scared him off.”

We walked another half block before the significance of that statement hit me. “How did we do that?” I asked.

“What?”

“Think about what happened that night. We spotted him, and I went back to the hotel, and you followed later. We never confronted him or gave any indication that we knew he was there. Or that we suspected he had anything to do with us. How the hell could that have scared him off?”

“Maybe it didn’t. Maybe he just decided he had seen enough. Or maybe we were wrong about him in the first place.”

“You believe that?” I asked.

“No way.”

“Donovan was a plumber,” Craig said, as we walked in Central Park.

“I already told you that,” I said.

“I know, but the point is that’s all he was. He wasn’t a spy pretending to be a plumber, or a dope-dealing plumber, or a serial killer plumber. The guy was a plumber, Richard. That’s all. At least that’s all I could find.”

“You have a list of his clients?”

He nodded. “Right here.” He stopped walking and took some papers out of a plastic bag that he used instead of a briefcase. “What do you want to know?”

“Did he have any clients in Ardmore, New York?”

He scanned the papers. “Four of them that he saw in the last six months.”

“Any of them named Ryan?”

He looked again. “Two were companies, the other two residential. No Ryan.”

“I’ve got some other things I want you to do,” I said.

“Can we sit down somewhere? It’s easier for me to take notes. And my hands are already frozen.”

“Sure. How about that bench?”

“What’s with this meeting-in-the-park stuff?” he asked. “You going romantic on me? It’s cold as hell out here.”

We walked over to the bench and sat down, and then I waited for a young couple to pass before I answered him.

“I think my apartment might be bugged; maybe my phones as well.”