Promise Me

CHAPTER 56

A week later, Myron sat at Baumgart’s Restaurant with Livingston police detective Lance Banner and Essex County investigator Loren Muse. Myron had ordered the Kung Pao Chicken. Banner had ordered a Chinese fish special. Muse was having a grilled cheese sandwich.

“Grilled cheese at a Chinese restaurant?” Myron said.

Loren Muse shrugged mid-bite.

Banner used chopsticks. “Jake Wolf is pleading self-defense,” he said. “He claims that Drew Van Dyne pulled a gun on him. Said that he made wild threats.”

“What kind of threats?”

“Van Dyne was ranting that Wolf hurt Aimee Biel. Something like that. They’re both a little vague on the specifics.”

“Both?”

“Jake Wolf’s star witness. His wife, Lorraine.”

“That night,” Myron said, “Lorraine told us she pulled the trigger.”

“My guess is, she did. We did a powder residue check on Jake Wolf’s hand. He was clean.”

“Did you check his wife?”

“She refused,” Banner said. “Jake Wolf forbade it.”

“So he’s taking the hit for his wife?”

Banner looked at Loren Muse. He nodded slowly.

“What?” Myron asked.

“We’ll get to that.”

“Get to what?”

“Look, Myron, I think you’re right,” Banner said. “Jake Wolf is trying to take the hit for the whole family. On the one hand, he’s claiming self-defense. There is some evidence to back it up. Van Dyne had a bit of a history. He also had a gun on him — it’s registered in his name. On the other hand, Jake Wolf is willing to do some time in exchange for giving his wife and kid a pass.”

“His kid?”

“He wants a guarantee that his son still goes to Dartmouth. And that Randy will be cleared of all subsequent allegations, including anything related to the shooting, the cheating scandal, and his possible relationship with Van Dyne and drugs.”

“Well,” Myron said. But it added up. Jake Wolf was an ass, but Myron had seen the way he looked at his son at that graduation party. “He’s still trying to salvage Randy’s future.”

“Yep.”

“Will he be able to?”

“I don’t know,” Banner said. “The prosecutor has no jurisdiction over Dartmouth. If they want to rescind their acceptance, they can and probably will.”

“What Jake is doing,” Myron said. “It’s almost admirable.”

“If not twisted,” Banner added.

Myron looked at Loren Muse. “You’re awfully quiet.”

“Because I think Banner has it wrong.”

Banner frowned. “I don’t have it wrong.”

Loren put down the sandwich and brushed the crumbs off her hands. “For starters, you’re going to put the wrong person in jail. The powder residue test proves that Jake Wolf didn’t shoot Drew Van Dyne.”

“He said he wore gloves.”

Now Loren Muse frowned.

Myron said, “She has a point.”

“Gee, Myron, thanks.”

“Hey, I’m on your side here. Lorraine Wolf told me she shot Drew Van Dyne. Shouldn’t she be the one on trial?”

Loren Muse turned to him. “I never said I thought it was Lorraine Wolf.”

“Excuse me?”

“Sometimes the most obvious answer is the right one.”

Myron shook his head. “I’m not following you.”

“Go back a second,” Loren Muse said.

“How far back?”

“All the way to Edna Skylar on the streets of New York City.”

“Right.”

“Maybe we had it right all along. From the moment she called us.”

“I’m still not following.”

“Edna Skylar confirmed what we already knew: that Katie Rochester was a runaway. And at first, that’s what we all thought about Aimee Biel too, right?”

“So?”

Loren Muse said nothing.

“Wait a minute. Are you saying you think Aimee Biel ran away?”

“There are a lot of unanswered questions,” Loren said.

“So ask them.”

“Ask who?”

“What do you mean, who? Ask Aimee Biel.”

“We tried.” Loren Muse smiled. “Aimee’s lawyer won’t let us talk to her.”

Myron sat back.

“Don’t you find that odd?”

“Her parents want her to put it behind her.”

“Why?”

“Because it was a traumatic experience for her,” Myron said.

Loren Muse just looked at him. So did Lance Banner.

“That story she told you,” Loren said. “About being drugged and held in some log cabin.”

“What about it?”

“There are holes.”

A cold pinprick started at the base of Myron’s neck and slid south down his spine. “What holes?”

“First off, we have the anonymous source who called me. The one who saw her tooling around with Drew Van Dyne. If Aimee were kidnapped, how could that be exactly?”

“Your witness was wrong.”

“Right. She happened to pick out the make of the car and described Drew Van Dyne to a tee. But hey, she’s probably wrong.”

“You can’t trust anonymous sources,” Myron tried.

“Fine, then let’s move on to hole two. This late-night abortion story. We checked at St. Barnabas. Nobody told her anything about parental notification. More than that, it’s not true. The laws might change on that subject, but either way, in her case—”

“She’s eighteen,” Myron interrupted. Eighteen. An adult. That age again.

“Exactly. And there’s more.”

Myron waited.

“Hole three: We found Aimee’s fingerprints at Drew Van Dyne’s house.”

“They had an affair. Of course her prints were there. They could be weeks old.”

“We found prints on a soda can. The can was still on the kitchen counter.”

Myron said nothing, but he felt something deep inside of him start to give way.

“All your suspects — Harry Davis, Jake Wolf, Drew Van Dyne. We checked them all out thoroughly. None of them could have pulled off a purported kidnapping.” Loren Muse spread her hands. “So it’s like that old axiom in reverse. When you’ve eliminated all the other possibilities, you have to go back to your first, most obvious solution.”

“You think Aimee ran away.”

Loren Muse shrugged, shifted in her chair. “Here she is, a confused young woman. Pregnant with a teacher’s child. Her dad is having an affair. She’s caught up in this cheating scandal. She must have felt trapped, don’t you think?”

Myron found himself almost nodding.

“There is no physical evidence — none at all — that Aimee was abducted. And think about it. Why would someone kidnap her anyway? What would be the motive in a case like this? The normal motives are, what, sexual assault, for one. We know that didn’t happen. Her doctor told us that much. There was no physical or sexual trauma. Why else are people kidnapped? For ransom. Well, we know that didn’t happen either.”

Myron kept very still. It was almost exactly what Erik had said. If you wanted to keep Aimee quiet, you didn’t kidnap her. You killed her. But now she was alive. Ergo…

Loren Muse kept pounding at him. “Do you have a motive for a kidnapping, Myron?”

“No,” he said. “But what about the ATM machine? How do you figure that in?”

“You mean both girls using the same one?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it was a coincidence after all.”

“Come on, Muse.”

“Okay, fine, then let’s turn it around.” She pointed at him. “How does that ATM transaction fit into a kidnapping scenario? Would Wolf know about it? Davis, Van Dyne?”

Myron saw her point. “But there are other things too,” he countered. “Like that phone call from a pay phone in the subway. Or the fact that she was online.”

“All of which fit into her being a runaway,” Loren said. “If someone did abduct her like she claims, why would they risk a call from a pay phone? Why would you put her on the Internet?”

Myron shook his head. He knew that she was making sense. He just refused to accept it. “So that’s how this ends? It’s not Davis. It’s not Wolf or Van Dyne or anyone. Aimee Biel just ran away?”

Loren Muse and Lance Banner exchanged another glance.

Then Lance Banner said, “Yes, that’s the working theory. And remember: There’s no law against what she did. In the end a lot of people got hurt or even killed. But running away is not against the law.”

Loren Muse kept quiet again. Myron didn’t like it. “What?” he snapped at her.

“Nothing. What Banner said — the evidence all points that way. It might even explain why Aimee’s parents don’t want us talking to her. They don’t want all that coming out — her affair, her pregnancy, heck, like it or not, she was helped in the cheating scandal too. So keeping it all quiet. Making her look like a victim instead of a runaway. It’s the right move.”

“But?”

She looked at Banner. He sighed and shook his head. Loren Muse started fiddling with her fork. “But both Jake and Lorraine Wolf wanted to take the blame for shooting Drew Van Dyne.”

“So?”

“You don’t find that odd?”

“No. We just explained why. Lorraine killed him. Jake wants to take the fall to protect her.”

“And the fact that they were cleaning up the evidence and moving the body?”

Myron shrugged. “That would be the natural reaction.”

“Even if you killed in self-defense?”

“In their case, yes. They were trying to protect it all. If Van Dyne is found dead in their house, even if they shot him in self-defense, all the stuff about Randy would come out. The drugs, the cheating, all of it.”

She nodded. “That’s the theory. That’s what Lance here believes. And that’s probably what happened.”

Myron tried not to sound too impatient. “But?”

“But maybe that’s not how it happened. Maybe Jake and Lorraine came home and found the body there.”

Myron stopped breathing. There is something inside of you. It can bend. It can stretch. But then, every once in a while, you can feel it pulling too far. If you let it go there, you will break inside. You will snap in two. You know that. Myron had known Aimee his whole life. And right now, if he was right about where Loren Muse was going, he was close to breaking. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Maybe the Wolfs came home and saw a body. And maybe they assumed that Randy had done it.” She leaned closer. “Van Dyne was Randy’s drug supplier. He had also stolen Randy’s girlfriend. So maybe Mom and Dad saw the body and figured that Randy shot him. Maybe they panicked and loaded the body in his car.”

“What, you think Randy killed Drew Van Dyne?”

“No. I said that’s what they thought. Randy has an alibi.”

“So what’s your point?”

“If Aimee Biel hadn’t been kidnapped,” Muse said, “if she ran away and stayed with Drew Van Dyne, maybe she was with him in the house. And maybe, just maybe, Aimee, our scared little girl, really did want to put it all behind her. Maybe she was ready for college, ready to move on and cut off all ties, except this guy, this Drew Van Dyne, wouldn’t let go….”

Myron closed his eyes. That little thing inside of him — it was being pulled hard. He stopped it, shook his head. “You’re wrong.”

She shrugged. “Probably.”

“I’ve known this girl all my life.”

“I know, Myron. She’s a young, sweet girl, right? Young sweet girls can’t be killers, can they?”

He thought about Aimee Biel, the way she laughed at him in his basement, the way she climbed up the jungle gym when she was three. He remembered her blowing out candles at her birthday party. He remembered watching her in a school play when she was in eighth grade. He remembered it all and he felt the anger starting to mount.

“You’re wrong,” Myron said again.

He waited on the sidewalk across the street from their house.

Erik came out first. His face was tight, grim. Aimee and Claire followed. Myron stood there and watched. Aimee spotted him first. She smiled at him and waved. Myron studied that smile. It looked the same to him. The same smile he’d seen on the playground when she was three. The same one he’d seen in the basement a few weeks ago.

There was nothing different.

Except now the smile gave him a chill.

He looked at Erik and then at Claire. Their eyes were hard, protective, but there was something else there, something beyond exhaustion and surrender, something primitive and instinctive. Erik and Claire walked with their daughter. But they did not touch her. That was what Myron noticed. They were not touching their own daughter.

“Hi, Myron!” Aimee shouted.

“Hi.”

Aimee ran across the street. Her parents did not move. Neither did Myron. Aimee threw her arms around him, almost knocking him over. Myron tried to hug her back. But he couldn’t quite do it. Aimee gripped him harder.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

He didn’t say anything. Her embrace, it felt the same. It felt warm and strong. No different than before.

And yet he wanted it to end.

Myron felt his heart drop and shatter. God help him, he just wanted her to let go, to get her away from him. He wanted this girl he’d loved for so long to be gone. He took hold of her shoulders and gently pushed her off.

Claire was behind her now. She said to Myron, “We’re in a rush. We’ll get together soon.”

He nodded. The two women walked away. Erik waited by the car. Myron watched them. Claire was next to her daughter, but she still wouldn’t touch her. Aimee got in the car. Erik and Claire glanced at each other. They did not speak. Aimee was in the back. They both sat in the front. Natural enough, Myron supposed, but it still seemed to him as if they were trying to keep their distance from Aimee, as if they wondered — or perhaps knew — about the stranger who now lived with them. Claire looked back at him.

They know, Myron thought.

Myron watched the car pull away. As it disappeared down the street, he realized something:

He hadn’t kept his promise.

He hadn’t brought home their baby.

Their baby was gone.