“You said that already.”
“Yeah, hold on, give me a second here.” Regan flipped through the pages of his notebook. “Jeans and a red blouse.”
“What?”
“Your wife.” He pointed at his notes. “You said that she was wearing jeans and a red blouse that morning.”
More images of Monica flooded me. I tried to stem the tide. “So?”
“When we found her body,” Regan said, “she was naked.”
The tremors began in my heart. They spread down my arms, tingling my fingers.
“You didn’t know?”
I swallowed. “Was she . . . ?” My voice died in my throat.
“No,” Regan said. “Not a mark on her, other than the bullet holes.” He did that help-me-understand head-tilt again. “We found her dead in this very room. Did she often parade in here with no clothes on?”
“I told you.” Overload. I tried to process this new data, keep up with him. “She was wearing jeans and a red blouse.”
“So she was dressed already?”
I remembered the sound of the shower. I remembered her coming out, throwing her hair back, lying on the bed, working the jeans over the hips. “Yes.”
“Definitely?”
“Definitely.”
“We’ve been through the whole house. We can’t find a red blouse. Jeans, sure. She had several pairs. But no red blouse. Don’t you think that’s odd?”
“Wait a second,” I said. “Her clothes weren’t near her body?”
“Nope.”
This made no sense. “I’ll look in her closet, then,” I said.
“We already did that, but sure, go ahead. Of course, I’d still like to know how clothes she was wearing ended up back in her closet, wouldn’t you?”
I had no answer.
“Do you own a gun, Dr. Seidman?”
Another subject shift. I tried to keep up, but my head was spinning. “Yes.”
“What kind?”
“A Smith and Wesson thirty-eight. It belonged to my father.”
“Where do you keep it?”
“There’s a compartment in the bedroom closet. It’s on the top shelf in a lockbox.”
Regan reached behind him and pulled out the metal lockbox. “This it?”
“Yes.”
“Open it.”
He tossed it to me. I caught it. The gray-blue metal was cold. But more than that, it felt shockingly light. I moved the wheels to the right combination and flipped it open. I poked through the legal documents—the car title, the deed on the house, the property survey—but that was just to get my bearings. I knew right away. The gun was gone.
“You and your wife were both shot with a thirty-eight,” Regan said. “And yours seems to be missing.”
I kept my eyes on the box, as if I expected the weapon to suddenly materialize in it. I tried to put it together, but nothing was coming to me.
“Any idea where the gun is?”
I shook my head.
“And something else strange,” Regan said.
I looked up at him.
“You and Monica were shot withdifferent thirty-eights.”
“Excuse me?”
He nodded. “Yeah, I found it hard to believe too. I made ballistics check it twice. You and your wife were shot with two different guns, both thirty-eights—and yours seems to be missing.” Regan shrugged theatrically. “Help me understand, Marc.”
I looked at their faces. I didn’t like what I saw. Lenny’s warning came back to me again, firmer this time. “I want to call my lawyer,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Go ahead.”
My mother had been standing by the kitchen door, wringing her hands. How much had she heard? Judging by her face, too much. Mom looked at me expectantly. I nodded, and she went to call Lenny. I folded my arms, but that didn’t feel right. I tapped my foot. Tickner took off the sunglasses. He met my eye and spoke for the first time.
“What’s in the bag?” he asked me.
I just looked at him.
“That gym bag you been groping.” Tickner’s voice, belying his tough looks, had a nerdy cadence to it, a quasi-whine quality. “What’s in it?”
This had all been a mistake. I should have listened to Lenny. I should have called him right away. Now I was not sure how to reply. In the background, I heard my mother urging Lenny to hurry. I was sifting through a response that might work as a semitruthful stall—none were convincing—when a sound ripped my attention away.
The cell phone, the one the kidnappers had sent to my father-in-law, began to ring.
Chapter 4
Tickner and Reganwaited for me to answer.
I excused myself, rising before they had a chance to react. My hand fumbled with the phone as I hurried outside. The sun hit me full in the face. I blinked and looked down at the keypad. The phone’s answer button was located in a different spot from mine. Across the street, two girls donning brightly hued helmets were riding neon bikes. Ribbon strips of pink cascaded out of the handlebars of one.
When I was little, this neighborhood sheltered more than a dozen kids my age. We used to meet up after school. I don’t remember what games we played—we were never organized enough for, say, a real game of baseball or anything like that—but they all involved hiding and chasing and some form of feigned (or borderline-real) violence. Childhood in suburbia is purportedly a time of innocence, but how many of those days ended in tears for at least one kid? We would argue, shift alliances, make declarations of friendship and war, and like some short-term memory case, it was all forgotten the next day. A clean slate every afternoon. New coalitions forged. A new kid running home in tears.
My thumb finally touched down on the right button. I pressed it and brought the phone to my ear, all in one move. My heart thumped against my rib cage. I cleared my throat and, feeling like a total idiot, I simply said, “Hello?”
“Answer yes or no.” The voice had the robotic hum of one of those customer-care phone systems, the ones that tell you to press one for service, press two to check the status of an order. “Do you have the money?”
“Yes.”
“You know the Garden State Plaza?”
“In Paramus,” I said.
“In exactly two hours from now, I want you parked at the north lot. That’s near Nordstrom’s. Section Nine. Someone will approach your car.”
“But—”
“If you’re not alone, we disappear. If you’re being followed, we disappear. If I smell a cop, we disappear. There will be no second chances. Do you understand?”