Tremont studied the photograph as though it might hold a clue to Haley's disappearance. "I remember. Your family trip to Disney World."
"Look at her face, Frank."
He obeyed, his eyes resting there.
"Do you think that girl, with that smile, just decided to run away and not tell anyone? Do you really think that girl took off on her own and was savvy enough to never use her iPhone or ATM or credit cards?"
"No," Frank Tremont said, "I don't."
"Please keep looking, Frank."
"I will, Marcia. I promise."
WHEN PEOPLE THINK OF NEW JERSEY'S highways, they think of either the Garden State Parkway with its mix of shattered warehouses, unkempt graveyards, and worn two-family dwellings, or they think of the New Jersey Turnpike with its factories and smoke-stacks and mammoth industrial complexes that resemble the nightmarish future in Terminator movies. They don't think of Route 15 in Sussex County, the farmland, the old lake communities, the antique barns, the 4-H Fairgrounds, the old minor league baseball stadium.
Following Dan Mercer's directions, Wendy took Route 15 until it became 206, turned right on a gravel road, drove past the U-Store-It units, and arrived at the trailer park in Wykertown. The park was silent and small and had the kind of ghostly look where you half expect to see a rusted child's swing swaying in the wind. The lots were divided up in a grid. Row D, Column 7 was in the far corner, not far from the chain-link fence.
She got out of the car and was amazed by the quiet. Not a sound. No tumbleweeds blew across the dirt, but maybe they should have. The whole park looked like one of those postapocalyptic towns-the bomb dropped and the residents had evaporated. There were clothes-lines, but nothing on them. Foldout chairs with torn seats littered the grounds. Charcoal barbecues and beach toys looked as though they'd been abandoned in mid-play.
Wendy checked her phone service. No bars. Terrific. She climbed the two cinder-block steps and stopped in front of the trailer door. Part of her-the rational part that knew that she was a mother, not a superhero-told her that she should back up and not be an idiot. She would have pondered that decision further, except suddenly the screen door opened and Dan Mercer was there.
When she saw his face, she took a step back.
"What happened to you?"
"Come on in," Dan Mercer mumbled through a swollen jaw. His nose was flattened. Bruises covered his face, but that wasn't the worst of it. The worst were the clusters of burn circles on his arm and face. One looked as though it had gone all the way through his cheek.
She pointed to one of the circles. "They do that with a cigarette?"
He managed a shrug. "I told them my trailer was a no-smoking zone. It made them angry."
"Who?"
"That was a joke. The no-smoking zone."
"Yeah, I got that. Who assaulted you?"
Dan Mercer shook it off. "Why don't you come in?"
"Why don't we stay out here?"
"Gee, Wendy, don't you feel safe with me? As you so bluntly pointed out, you're hardly my type."
"Still," she said.
"I really don't relish going outside right now," he said.
"Oh, but I insist."
"Then good-bye. Sorry to make you drive all this way for nothing."
Dan let the door close as he disappeared inside. Wendy waited a second, trying to call his bluff. It didn't work. Forgetting the earlier warning bells-he didn't look as though he could do much damage in his current condition anyway-she opened the door and stepped inside. Dan was on the other side of the trailer.
"Your hair," she said.
"What about it?"
Dan's once wavy brown hair was now a horrible shade of yellow some might call blond.
"You dye it yourself?"
"No, I went to Dionne, my favorite colorist in the city."
She almost smiled at that. "Really blends you in."
"I know. I look like I just walked out of an eighties glam-rock video."
Dan moved farther away from the door, toward the back corner of the trailer, almost as if he wanted to hide the bruises. Wendy let go of the door. It slammed shut. The light was dim. Sun streaks slashed across the room. The floor near her was worn linoleum, but a poorly cut rug of orange shag, like something the Brady Bunch would have considered too garish, covered the far quarter of the room.
Dan looked small in the corner, hunched over and broken. What was bizarre, what had angered her so, was that she had tried to do a story on Dan Mercer and his "good works" about a year before her sting showed his true predilections. Before that, Dan had seemed to be that rarest of beasts-the honest-to-God do-gooder, a man who truly wanted to make a difference and, most shockingly, a man who didn't couple that desire with self-aggrandizement.
She had-dare she admit this?-fallen for it. Dan was a handsome man with that unruly brown hair and dark blue eyes, and he had that ability to look at you as though you were the only person in the world. He had focus and charm and a self-deprecating sense of humor, and she could see how these miserable kids must have loved that.
But how had she, a pathologically skeptical reporter, not seen through him?
She had even-again, dare she admit it, even to herself?-hoped that he would ask her out. There had been that great, early attraction when he looked at her, that thunderbolt, and she'd felt sure that she'd sent a bit of a lightning storm his way too.
Beyond creepy to think about that now.
From his spot in the corner, Dan tried to stare at her with that same focus, but it wasn't happening. The seemingly beautiful clarity she'd been fooled by before had been shattered. What was left in its place was pitiful, and even now, even after all she knew, Wendy's instincts told her that he simply could not be the monster that he so obviously was.
But, alas, that was crap. She'd been had by a con man-simple as that. His modesty had been a way to cover up his true self. Call it instinct or women's intuition or going with your gut-whenever Wendy had done that, she had been wrong.
"I didn't do it, Wendy."
More I. Some day she was having.
"Yeah, you told me that on the phone," she said. "Care to elaborate?"
He looked lost, not sure how to continue. "Since my arrest, you've been investigating me, right?"
"So?"
"You talked to the kids I worked with at the community center, right? How many?"
"What's the difference?"
"How many, Wendy?"
She had a pretty good idea of where he was going with this. "Forty-seven," she said.
"How many of them claimed that I abused them?"
"Zero. Publicly. But there were some anonymous tips."
"Anonymous tips," Dan repeated. "You mean those anonymous blogs that could have been written by anyone, including you."
"Or a scared kid."
"You didn't even believe those blogs enough to air them."
"That's hardly evidence you're innocent, Dan."
"Funny."
"What?"
"I thought it worked the other way around. Innocent until proven guilty."
She tried not to roll her eyes. This was not a game she wanted to play. Time to turn the tide a bit. "You know what else I found when I was investigating you?"
Dan Mercer seemed to move farther away, almost all the way into the corner. "What?"
"Nothing. No friends, no family, no real connections. Other than your ex-wife, Jenna Wheeler, and the community center, you seem to be pretty much a ghost."
"My parents died when I was young."
"Yes, I know. You grew up in an orphanage in Oregon."
"So?"
"So there are a lot of holes in your resume."
"I'm being set up, Wendy."
"Right. And yet you showed up at the sting house right on time, correct?"
"I thought I was visiting a kid in trouble."