On Borrowed Time (14 page)

We arrived at the Ellenville PD at about two-thirty, but we were quickly brought in to see Kentris without having to wait. After the introductions, he said, “Sorry to bring you all this way; it may turn out to be unrelated to your situation.”

“Why don’t you tell us what you have?” I said.

He told us a story about a man who was found in Ellenville, trying to enter a house that he swore was his, and that he lived in with his wife and child. As it turned out, everything the man had said was completely untrue, and that night he committed suicide.

After his death it was learned that he was a professor at the University of Oklahoma, and that his family had no idea how he got to Ellenville, why he would have made up a new life story, or why he would commit suicide. They described him as a completely stable person, in no way prone to eccentric or unpredictable behavior.

“They thought it had to be murder,” Kentris said, “but the coroner said otherwise.”

“What did you think?” I asked.

“That it was murder. But the door was locked from the outside, so I don’t know how the killer got inside.”

“I keep my apartment locked at all times, but they managed to bug every square inch of the place. It was like I had an open-door policy. I can’t believe a motel room lock could have come close to stopping them.”

Kentris’s story was very interesting to me, because in many ways it mirrored mine, and because it took place so close to Ardmore and Monticello.

“Do you have a picture of this guy that we could look at?” I asked.

Kentris nodded. “I do. We got it from his wife in Oklahoma.”

He took it from the file on his desk and handed it to Allie, who was closest to him. She looked at it, but didn’t seem to have any reaction, and then handed it to me.

“I don’t recall ever seeing him before,” I said.

Kentris nodded and handed us a picture of a second man. “What about him?”

Again, neither Allie nor I recognized him, and we said so.

Kentris handed us a picture of a third man, whom Allie didn’t recognize. But as soon as I saw it, I had no doubt.

“It’s Jen’s father,” I said. I was looking at Ben Ryan, the man I had spent four days with, the man who bragged about his daughter and subtly questioned my intentions. I then went on to explain what I meant, since Kentris had no idea what I was talking about.

“Are you sure about this?” he asked.

“Positive. No doubt in my mind. Is he the guy you were telling us about, the one who died in his motel room?”

Kentris nodded. “That’s the one.”

“Who were the other two men?”

“Nobody related to this case.”

“You were testing me?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I’m a cop; think of it as a lineup.” Then he asked me to tell him what we knew or suspected. He had read my articles, so he knew a lot of it already, but I filled in the blanks, including the connections to Lassiter. He seemed to believe me, which was incredibly gratifying; nobody in a position of authority had ever taken any of this seriously.

Kentris said that he was intrigued enough that he would question Gates at Ardmore General about the dealings he had with Lassiter. “I don’t have jurisdiction up there, but I know the chief. He’ll send someone with me.”

“He told us any dealings he may have had with Lassiter are confidential,” Allie said.

Kentris smiled. “Unless he’s Lassiter’s lawyer or priest, that ain’t going to fly.”

On the way back to the city, I asked Allie to move in with me. Not in those words, of course. We were pulling up at her hotel, and I said, “This place has got to be costing you a fortune.”

She smiled. “In Wisconsin, I could have bought a medium-sized hotel for the money I’ve spent already. Plus season tickets to the Packers.”

“You’re a football fan?”

She smiled. “I had a drawerful of Brett Favre shirts. Which, of course, I have since burned.”

“Allie, this has nothing to do with what happened the other night. In fact, it’s in spite of what happened. But I think you should stay in my apartment. You’ll have your own room, your own bathroom, and the rates are ridiculously cheap.”

“You don’t think it will be awkward?” she asked.

“It probably will be a little, at least at first, but we’ll deal with it. Everything has changed since that phone message. We know Jen is real, and alive. And we know she and Julie are the same person.”

She still hesitated, so I said, “And we’re spending so much time together, it would just be more convenient if we’re in the same place.”

“Okay. Thank you. That would be nice.”

“Can you cook?” I asked.

“I think I’m really good at it, but I’ve never actually met someone who shared that opinion.”

We went up to her room and I waited while she packed and checked out. Then we drove to my apartment, and while she unpacked I went downstairs and picked up a pizza.

When I got back, she was straightening up the apartment. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Attempting to make the place livable; it’s going to be an uphill struggle.”

“It was by definition already livable,” I said. “I know that because I’ve been living in it.”

“But now I’m going to be here, so we need to set the bar a little higher.”

I couldn’t help myself. “That’s what Jen said.”

Allie started to say something but then caught herself. Finally, “And she’ll say it again when she comes back.”

We had dinner and some wine and talked about the effect Kentris might have on our situation. “He’s got to help,” I said. “He’s part of law enforcement; he can get access to things that we can’t.”

“And he seemed to believe us,” she said. “That’s a pleasant switch from everybody else in the world.”

“We need to keep him motivated. It’s an old case for him, and new cases must come in every day.”

We decided to watch a movie, and chose
The Freshman
, with Marlon Brando and Matthew Broderick. It turned out that it had been a favorite of both of ours, and we both felt like seeing something familiar and funny.

There was no doubt that I was attracted to Allie. Actually, it was more than that, but that was as much as I would admit to at the time.

When the movie was over we were both ready for bed—separate beds, to be exact. There was no serious thought of anything else, and there was not going to be.

I went to the closet to get a blanket, sheets, and a pillow for Allie to use. I had offered her my room rather than the adjacent guest room, since it was larger and more comfortable, but she declined. There was a door connecting the two rooms, but I decided not to mention it, or, for that matter, ever open it.

I woke up at what my alarm clock said was 1:27 in the morning, and I realized it was the sound of a cell phone ringing that got me up. At first I started to grope for my cell phone, but quickly realized from the faintness of the sound that it was Allie’s phone.

Middle-of-the-night calls are jarring, even when they’re not to me. In this case it was even more jarring than usual because of all that had gone on. I had no real reason to think that the call had anything to do with me, but I couldn’t eliminate the possibility either.

I got up and stood near the connecting door, hoping I would hear something, and feeling guilty about trying. I didn’t put my ear to the door; that felt like it would be too drastic an invasion of privacy. But I certainly considered it.

I could barely hear Allie talking, and I certainly couldn’t make out what she was saying. But then I heard her let out a small scream, followed by what I thought was crying.

I called through the door, “Allie, are you all right?”

She didn’t answer me, which tended to confirm my belief that she wasn’t quite all right.

“Allie?”

Again no answer; privacy or not, there was no way I was going to sleep anymore without knowing that she was okay, or what was going on.

I knocked on the connecting door, then waited a few seconds and opened it. For a moment it seemed like the darkened room was empty, but it couldn’t have been, because I heard soft sobbing.

I finally saw Allie, sitting in the corner on the floor, shaking and crying. I went over to her.

“Allie, what is it?”

“She’s dead, Richard. Julie is dead.”

The next morning I wanted to go with Allie to Des Moines.

At that point all she knew was that Julie’s car and body were found in a ravine near Atlantic, Iowa, and that test results proved it was Julie.

The phone call had come from Allie’s mother, who was distraught. Add in Allie’s own shock and grief, and it’s not surprising that she did not get many of the details.

Allie and I had stayed up all night, and for most of that time she either sobbed quietly or yelled angrily. By morning she was starting to allow her mind to doubt the devastating news. Nothing else throughout this roller-coaster ride had proven to be what it seemed; why should this be any different?

I, of course, had my own special point of view, which I did not share with Allie. I certainly wanted it to be a false alarm or a misidentification, and not be Julie’s body that was found. But if it was her, then I desperately wanted her not to be Jen.

I wanted to get on the plane with Allie, to be there and comfort her, but she wouldn’t hear of it. “I appreciate it, but no,” she said. “You have things to do; you have someone to find. If this is really Julie, then my search is over.”

I went along with her wishes, and drove her to the airport. I don’t think Allie said three words the entire trip, and I couldn’t blame her. She was dreading what she was going to see, dreading the potential finality of it.

We hugged at the curb; it wasn’t a five-minute epic, but it was a long one.

And it made me really sad. I was getting tired of losing people I cared about.

Allie called me that night. She said that Julie’s car had gone down a ravine, and was mostly concealed by the dense vegetation. She had asked to see the body, but was told that she couldn’t, that the accident had happened six months ago, and that the body was decomposed. A 911 call had been made by the person who finally spotted it, but he hadn’t hung around to talk to police.

“You were so sure that was Julie’s voice on the machine the other night,” I said.

“Yes, I was. But maybe I just wanted it to be. I don’t know, Richard. I want to continue to hope, but they said the chance that the DNA is wrong is one in six billion. Even I can’t hang on to odds like that.”

The news was stunning to me, but if Julie died six months ago, and Jen just called me, then she and Julie were obviously different people.

Allie said that the police had very few questions for her. It was obvious they saw it as an accident, and it was in their best interest to do so. At this point, it was not like they were going to solve it if they called it a murder.

They gave Julie’s possessions to Allie, but she hadn’t yet gotten the strength to look through them. She was going to her mother’s in the morning, and perhaps she’d do so then.

She was tired, so she got off the phone. She said she’d be calling me again, but I didn’t know if she really would.

Or if she really should.

After I’d hung up the phone, I started to consider what I had learned.

There was a great deal, but none of it really fit together. One thing that was completely obvious was that there was some kind of conspiracy at work against me. The bugging, being followed, the Donovan murders, and much more certainly proved that to me.

But the thing that remained separate and apart from the events of the last few weeks was the circumstances of Jen’s disappearance. It was simply impossible that everyone that Jen and I had ever met was part of the conspiracy. No matter what forces were for some reason arrayed against me now, and no matter why I was their target, the total erasure of Jen’s existence did not make any sense.

I was going to miss Allie; there was no question about that. I had become very attached to her, perhaps too much so, but losing her so suddenly was already starting to hurt. It was also simply amazing to me that Julie had turned out not to be Jen.

Not having Allie around was also going to deprive me of something that I’d not had much recent experience with … someone who believed me. The only other person who came close to filling that bill was Lieutenant Kentris, and I was planning to rely on him as much as he would allow.

One thing I was starting to believe more and more was that Sean Lassiter was somehow involved. There were too many coincidences for that not to be the case. In addition to his stated desire to “get” me, I had mentioned him to Dr. Garber as part of the story I was working on, and I was pretty sure he was involved with Gates at the hospital in Ardmore. Sealing the deal was that the Ardmore hospital was a client of Frank Donovan.

Lassiter had to be in the middle of this.

When I got back from lunch, I had a voice mail from Craig Langel asking that I contact him. He was calling to update me on what he’d learned about Sean Lassiter’s recent life.

“He’s been running a company called Biodyne for the last two years,” he said. “It’s a small start-up with private funding, the source of which could be Lassiter himself.”

“Where is it located?”

“Mahwah.”

I was hoping it would be upstate New York, not this New Jersey town, and I mentioned that to Craig.

“There have been seventy-one phone calls from Biodyne to the hospital in Ardmore in the last six weeks.”

“You have their phone bill?” Craig’s contacts and ability to get things he shouldn’t have never ceased to amaze me.

He laughed. “Nothing is secret, Richard. How many times have I told you that? And you of all people should know that by now.”

“So he’s doing business in Ardmore; I knew Gates was hiding something. Has he got a new drug they’re testing up there?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ll keep you posted.”

We got off the phone and I put in a call to Lieutenant Kentris, to tell him what I learned. He wasn’t in, but called me back in twenty minutes.

“I’ve confirmed that Lassiter has been doing business with Gates at the hospital,” I said.