Erin did not need prompting: YOU’RE NOT AIMEE. AIMEE WOULD KNOW THE NAME.
Long pause. The longest yet. Myron looked back at Ali. Her eyes were on the screen. Myron could hear his own breathing in his ears, as if he’d stuck seashells on them. Then finally an answer came:
Mark Cooper.
The screen name vanished. GuitarLovurCHC was gone.
For a moment, no one moved. Myron and Ali had their eyes on Erin. She stiffened.
“Erin?”
Something happened to her face. A quiet quake in the corner of her lip. It spread.
“Oh God,” Erin said.
“What is it?”
“Who the hell is Mark Cooper?”
“Was it Aimee or not?”
Erin nodded. “It was Aimee. But…”
Her tone made the room drop ten degrees.
“But what?” Myron said.
“Mark Cooper is not the boy I have a crush on.”
Myron and Ali both looked confused.
Ali said, “Then who is he?”
Erin swallowed. She looked back, first at Myron, then her mother. “Mark Cooper was this creepy guy who went to my summer camp. I told Aimee about him. He used to follow some of us around with this awful leer, you know. Whenever he’d walk by, we would laugh and whisper to one another… ” Her voice dropped off, came back, but lower now. “We’d whisper, ‘Trouble.’ ”
They all watched the monitor now, all hoping that screen name would pop up again. But nothing happened. Aimee did not reappear. She had delivered her message. And now, once again, she was gone.
CHAPTER 46
Claire was on the phone in seconds. She dialed Myron’s cell. When he answered, she said, “Aimee was just online! Two of her friends called!”
Erik Biel sat at the table and listened. His hands were folded. He had spent the past day or so online, searching per Myron’s instructions for people who lived in the area of that cul-de-sac. Now, of course, he knew that he’d been wasting his time. Myron had spotted a car with a Livingston High School decal right away. He had traced it back to one of Aimee’s teachers, a man named Harry Davis, that very night.
He had simply wanted to keep Erik out of the way.
So he gave him busywork.
Claire listened and then let out a little cry. “Oh no, oh my God….”
“What?” Erik said.
She shushed him with her hand.
Erik felt the rage once more. Not at Myron. Not even at Claire. At himself. He stared down at the monogram on his French cuff. His clothes were tailor-made, a custom fit. Big deal. Who did he think he was impressing? He looked up at his wife. He had lied to Myron about the passion. He still longed for her. More than anything he wanted Claire to look at him the way she used to. Maybe Myron had been right. Maybe Claire had indeed loved him. But she had never respected him. She didn’t need him.
She didn’t believe in him.
When their family was in crisis, Claire had run to Myron. She had shut Erik out. And of course, he had taken it.
Erik Biel had done that his whole life. Taken it. His mistress, a mousy thing from his office, was pitiful and needy and treated him like royalty. That made him feel like a man. Claire didn’t. It was that simple. And that pitiful.
“What?” Erik asked again.
She ignored him. He waited. Finally Claire asked Myron to hold on a second. “Myron says he saw her online too. He had Erin ask her a question. She answered in a way… it was her, but she’s in trouble.”
“What did she say?”
“I don’t have time to go into details right now.” Claire put the phone back to her ear and said to Myron — to Myron! — “We need to do something.”
Do something.
The truth was, Erik Biel was not much of a man. He knew that early on. When he was fourteen, he backed out of a fight. The entire school was there. The bully was ready to pounce. Erik had walked away. His mother called him prudent. In the media, walking away is the “brave” thing to do. What a load of crap. No beating, no hospital stay, no concussion or broken bones could have hurt Erik Biel more than not standing up had. He had never forgotten it, never gotten over it. He had chickened out of a fight. The pattern continued. He abandoned his buddies when they got jumped at fraternity party. At a Jets game, he let someone spill beer on his girlfriend. If a man looked at him wrong, Erik Biel always averted his gaze first.
You can couch it in all the psychological vernacular of modern civilization — all that garbage about strength coming from within and that violence never solved anything — but it was all a bunch of self-rationalization. You can live with fooling yourself like that, for a while anyway. And then a crisis hits, a crisis like this, and you realize what you really are, that nice suits and fancy cars and pressed pants make you nothing.
You’re not a man.
But still, even with wimps like Erik, there was one line you don’t cross. You cross it, you never come back. It had to do with your children. A man protects his family at all costs. No matter what the sacrifice. You will take any hit. You will go to the ends of the earth and risk everything to keep them from harm. You don’t back away. Never. Not until your dying breath.
Someone had taken away his little girl.
You don’t sit that fight out.
Erik Biel took out the gun.
It had been his father’s. A Ruger.22. It was an old gun. Probably hadn’t been fired in three decades. Erik had brought it to a gun shop this morning. He purchased ammunition and other sundries he might need. The man behind the counter had cleaned the Ruger for him, tested it out, smirking in disgust at the little man in front of him, so pitiful that he didn’t even know how to load and use his own damn gun.
But the gun was loaded now.
Erik Biel was listening to his wife talk to Myron. They were trying to figure out what to do next. Drew Van Dyne, he heard them say, wasn’t home. They wondered about Harry Davis. Erik smiled. He was ahead of them on that count. He had used Call Block and dialed the teacher’s number. He pretended to be a mortgage broker. Davis had answered and said he wasn’t interested.
That was half an hour ago.
Erik started toward his car. The gun was tucked into his pants.
“Erik? Where are you going?”
He didn’t answer. Myron Bolitar had confronted Harry Davis at the school. The teacher hadn’t talked to Myron. But one way or the other, he sure as hell was going to talk to Erik Biel.
Myron heard Claire say, “Erik? Where are you going?”
His phone clicked.
“Claire, I have someone on the other line. I’ll call you back.” Myron clicked over to the other line.
“Is this Myron Bolitar?”
The voice was familiar. “Yes.”
“This is Detective Lance Banner from the Livingston Police Department. We met yesterday.”
Was it only yesterday? “Sure, Detective, what can I do for you?”
“How far are you from St. Barnabas Hospital?”
“Fifteen, twenty minutes, why?”
“Joan Rochester has just been rushed into surgery.”
CHAPTER 47
Myron sped and made it to the hospital in ten minutes. Lance Banner was waiting for him. “Joan Rochester is still in surgery.” “What happened?”
“You want his story or hers?”
“Both.”
“Dominick Rochester said she fell down the stairs. They’ve been here before. She falls down the stairs a lot, if you get my drift.”
“I do. But you said there were his and her stories?”
“Right. She’s always backed up his before.”
“And this time?”
“She said he beat her up,” Banner said. “And that she wants to press charges.”