Never Look Away: A Thriller Read online

  “My cell was dead.”

  “So you fell asleep on the couch. Did you see your wife in the morning?”

  “Okay, that’s the thing? I think I might have heard her saying something to me while I was sleeping it off, but I can’t exactly swear to it.”

  “So what does your wife usually do on a Saturday?”

  “She kind of has a routine. She goes out around eight-thirty. Most weekends, she goes out by herself, even if I haven’t been out with my buds the night before. I’ve offered to go with her sometimes, but only because I know she’ll say no. She kinda likes to go on her own. I don’t take any offense or anything.”

  “Where does she go?” Duckworth asked.

  “To the malls. She likes to go to all of them. Every damn one between here and Albany. She likes Crossgates and Colonie Center. How much clothes and shoes and jewelry and makeup does one woman need?”

  “She drops a lot of money on Saturdays?”

  “I don’t know how she affords it. We’re kind of on a limited budget,” Lyall said. “What I don’t get is if all the malls have exactly the same stores, what’s the point in going to one after another?”

  “I don’t know,” Duckworth said, thinking it was the first thing Lyall Kowalski had said that bordered on insightful.

  “So after she’s done with the malls, she makes the grocery her last stop, because she doesn’t want all her Lean Cuisines melting while she’s wandering around JCPenney.”

  “But you don’t actually know where, exactly, she would have gone.”

  “No.”

  “Where does she buy groceries?”

  Lyall shrugged. “Grocery store?”

  The dog, built like a three-foot cross section of a punching bag with legs, walked through the room, nails clicking on the uncarpeted wood floor. He collapsed on a square of area rug in front of an empty chair.

  “If this were like other Saturdays, what time would you be expecting her back?”

  “Three or four? Five at the latest.”

  “When did you get up?”

  “Around one,” Lyall said.

  “And did you try calling your wife at all?”

  “I tried her cell but it goes straight to message. And she hasn’t called here to say she was going to be late or anything.”

  Duckworth nodded slowly. He asked, “When was the last time you actually saw or spoke to your wife, Mr. Kowalski?”

  He thought a moment. “I guess, middle of yesterday? She called me from work to check what time we were going out for dinner.” He winced, as if someone had stuck a pin in his arm.

  “So you didn’t speak to her later yesterday or last night, not at all?”

  Lyall shook his head.

  “And you didn’t actually talk to her this morning?”

  Another shake.

  “When Mick dropped you off here last night, did you notice whether Leanne’s car was here?”

  “I wasn’t all that observant at the time.”

  “For all you know,” Duckworth said, “she wasn’t even here last night.”

  “Where would she be if she wasn’t here?”

  “I don’t know. What I’m asking is whether you can actually say, with any certainty, that your wife was here when you got home in the middle of the night, or was here this morning.”

  He looked slightly dumbstruck. “I’m just assuming she was here. Wouldn’t make sense for her not to be here.”

  “Do you have a list of the bank and credit cards your wife uses?”

  “What for?” he asked.

  “We could check, see where she used them, it would tell us where she’s been.”

  Lyall scratched his head. “When Leanne buys anything, she tends to use cash.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “We kinda had our cards canceled.”

  Duckworth sighed. “Has Leanne ever done this before? Gone out and not come back until late, or maybe stayed over with a friend for the night? Is it possible—and I’m sorry to have to ask this—that she might have a boyfriend?”

  Lyall shook his head, clenched his fists, and pressed his meaty lips together. “Shit no, I mean, no, she wouldn’t do that.”

  Duckworth sensed something. “Mr. Kowalski?”

  “She’s my girl. She’s not going to mess around on me. No way.”

  “Has she ever done anything like that before?”

  He waited a beat too long before answering. “No.”

  “I need you to be straight with me here,” Duckworth said. “This kinda stuff, it happens to the best of us.”

  Lyall’s lips moved in and out. Finally, he said, “It was years ago. We were going through a rough patch. Not like now. Things are pretty good now. She had a thing with some guy she met in a bar. Just a one-nighter, that was all there was to it. Some guy passing through.”

  “Who was the man?”

  “I never knew. But she told me. Not to confess, but to stick it to me, you know? Saying things like if I wasn’t going to show her a good time, there was plenty of guys who would. I cleaned up my act after that.”

  Duckworth looked around the room, then let his eyes settle back on Lyall.

  The man was on the verge of tears. “I’m real scared something’s happened to her. Like maybe she had a car accident or something. Have you checked on that? She drives a Ford Explorer. It’s blue and it’s, like, a 1990, so it’s kind of eaten up with rust.”

  “I don’t have any report of an accident involving that make of vehicle,” Duckworth said. “Mr. Kowalski, how close are your wife and Jan Harwood?”

  He blinked. “They work together.”

  “Are they friends? Do they get together after work? Have they ever, I don’t know, gone on a girls’ weekend away?”

  “Shit no,” he said. “Just between you and me, Leanne thinks Jan’s a bit stuck-up, you know? Think she’s better than everybody.”

  Last thing, Duckworth asked Lyall Kowalski some basic questions, wrote down the answers in his notebook.

  “What’s your wife’s date of birth?”

  “Uh, February ninth. She was born in 1973.”

  “Her full name?”

  Lyall sniffed, then said, “Leanne Katherine Kowalski. Well, her name before she met me was Bothwick.”

  Duckworth kept scribbling. “Weight?”

  “Whoa. One-forty? No, one-twenty? She’s kind of skinny. And she’s around five-six or -seven.”

  “Hair?”

  “Black. It’s kinda short, with some streaks in it.”

  Duckworth asked for a picture. The best Lyall could come up with was a wedding photo of the two of them, a ten-year-old shot of them jamming wedding cake into each other’s mouths.

  Before he pulled away from the curb out front of the Kowalski house, Duckworth got out his phone, waited for someone to answer, and said, “Gunner.”

  “Yeah, hey, Detective.”

  “You still at Five Mountains?”

  “I’ve been here all day,” he said. “Just finishing up now.”

  “How’d it go?”

  “Okay, so, the first thing we did was check a couple more times to see if we could track down that third ticket bought online.”

  “Right.”

  “We thought maybe there was a glitch in the system, but we’ve pretty much ruled that out. If she came into the park, she didn’t do it with a ticket purchased over the Internet.”

  “Okay,” Duckworth said.

  “Then, with the pictures the husband provided, we spent the rest of the day looking at all the people coming in and going out through the gates, trying to spot the wife. We narrowed it down to the time frame basically established from when the husband and the kid got there, and when he called the police.”

  “I’m with ya.”

  “It’s not easy. There’s so many people, sometimes you can’t make them out, sometimes they’re wearing hats that cover half their face, so the thing is, she might have been there and we didn’t see her. But we looked for a woman ma
tching her description, dressed the way the husband described her.”

  “And nothing.”

  “Nothing. If she’s there, we can’t find her.”

  “Okay, look, thanks, I appreciate it. Go home.”

  “You don’t have to ask me twice,” he said.

  “Is Campion still around?”

  “Yeah, she’s been here all day. I can see her outside the door.”

  “You wanna put her on?”

  Duckworth heard Gunner put down the phone and call out to Officer Didi Campion. Twenty seconds later, the phone was picked up.

  “Campion here.”

  “It’s Barry, Didi. Long day, huh?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I want to ask you again about the time you spent with the kid this morning.”

  “Sure.”

  “Did he actually say the mother was there with them at the park?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Had the boy seen Mrs. Harwood that morning?”

  “He was asking about her. He was asking what had happened to her. I certainly got the sense he’d seen her at the park.”

  “Do you think—how do I put this—he could have been convinced his mother had been there even if she hadn’t?”

  “You mean like, the dad says we’re just going to meet your mom now, your mom just went into the bathroom, something like that?”

  “That’s kind of how I was thinking,” Duckworth said.

  Campion said, “Hmmm.”

  “I mean, the kid’s only what, four years old? Tell a four-year-old enough times that he’s invisible and he’ll start believing it. Maybe the dad made him think his mother was there even if she wasn’t.”

  “The kid was kind of dozy,” Campion said. “Like, tired, not stupid.”

  “This Harwood guy, he says the three of them are going to Five Mountains for the day, but he only gets two tickets. He says his wife has been talking suicide, tells us his wife went to the doctor about it, but turns out she never went.”

  “She didn’t?”

  “No. I talked to Dr. Samuels today. And her boss, who runs the heating and cooling company? He says he didn’t see any signs that she was depressed the last couple of weeks. If anything, she was excited about something. Kind of, I don’t know, anticipating something.”

  “Weird.”

  “So far, the only person who’s saying the wife’s suicidal is the husband. Doctor never saw her, her boss says she was fine.”

  “So the husband, he’s laying the groundwork.”

  “This Bertram guy, the wife’s boss, said Harwood took his wife for a drive someplace on Friday. When Bertram asked her where they were going, she said it was a secret or something, a surprise.”

  “So where you going with this, Detective?”

  “You still on shift?”

  Campion sighed. “I’m kind of doing a double. Wanna make it a triple? Having a life is hugely overrated.”

  “You’ve put out news releases before, right?”

  “I’ve worked that end, yeah.”

  “I told Harwood we’d put out a release tomorrow, but I think we need to put one out tonight. Shake the bushes, you know? We’ve still got time to make the eleven o’clock news. Something simple. A picture of Jan Harwood, believed last seen in the vicinity of Five Mountains. Police seeking any information about the woman’s whereabouts, contact us, blah blah blah, the usual drill.”

  “I’m on it,” Campion said.

  Duckworth thanked her and closed the phone. He was starting to wonder whether Jan Harwood ever even made it to Five Mountains. He was starting to wonder just what her husband might have done with her.

  How the hell that fit in with Leanne Kowalski, he had no idea. But two women who worked together, going missing at the same time—that was one hell of a coincidence. He decided to put his focus, for now, on Jan Harwood. Maybe he’d turn up Leanne Kowalski along the way.

  SIXTEEN

  I was about a half an hour out of Rochester when my cell rang.

  “It was on the news,” Mom said. “They had it on the TV.”

  “What?” I said. “What did they have?”

  “They had a picture of Jan, and that the police were looking for help to find her. That’s good, right, that they did that?”

  “Yeah,” I said slowly. “But the detective, he said they were going to make a decision about that tomorrow. I wonder what made him change his mind. How much did they say?”

  “Not much,” my mother said. “They gave her name and age and height and what she was last seen wearing.”

  From some distance away, my father shouted, “Eye color!”

  “That’s right. They said what color eyes she has and hair and that kind of thing.”

  “And where it happened?”

  “Just a mention,” Mom said. “It said she was last seen near Five Mountains. But they didn’t have anything about that man trying to take Ethan. Shouldn’t they have had something on that?”

  I said, “I wonder why Detective Duckworth didn’t call me. You’d think, if he was deciding to change the timing of the release, he would have let me know.”

  I wondered how long it would be before someone from my own paper called, asking what the hell was going on, how the Standard could get scooped on the disappearance of the spouse of one of its own staff members. Even if we didn’t have an edition until the next day, it could have gone up on the website.

  I didn’t have time to worry about that now.

  “Are you almost there?” Mom asked. Dad yelled, “Tell him to keep drinking coffee!”

  “Pretty close,” I said. “I was going to get a hotel, go see Jan’s parents in the morning, but now I’m thinking maybe I should just knock on the door tonight. I can’t lay in my hotel all night thinking about her. I have to do something right away.”

  I didn’t hear anything on the other end.

  “Mom?”

  “I’m sorry. I was just nodding. I guess I was thinking you could see me.” She laughed tiredly.

  “How’s Ethan?”

  “I just left him on the couch. I’m afraid if I move him he’ll wake up and never settle down again. Your father and I are going to turn in now. But if something happens, if you have any news, you call us, okay?”

  “I will. You too.”

  Before putting the phone back into my jacket, I considered calling Detective Duckworth and asking him why he’d decided to go ahead with releasing Jan’s picture now. But I was almost to Rochester, and I needed to focus on my upcoming meeting with Jan’s parents.

  I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it, not after all the things Jan had said about them. But I wasn’t there to criticize them for how they’d raised Jan. I wasn’t there to lay blame, decide who was right and who was wrong.

  I wanted to know if they’d seen Jan. Plain and simple. Had she been there? Had she called them? Did they have any idea where she might be?

  Just after midnight I got off 90 and headed north on 490. Not long after that, I got off at the Palymra Road exit and quickly found my way to Lincoln Avenue.

  The streetlamps were the only thing casting any light at 12:10 a.m. You might have thought, on a Saturday night, that there might have been a house or two with the lights on, a party going on. But maybe this was a street made up mostly of older residents. No lights on after ten on a Saturday night.

  I rolled down the street and came to a stop out front of the house I had seen only once before. The Oldsmobile was in the driveway. The house was dark save for one light over the front door.

  I killed the engine and sat in the car a moment, listening to the engine tick as it cooled.

  I wondered if Jan could be in that house.

  If Jan had returned here, it was hard to imagine the kind of confrontation she was likely to have had that could have ended with an invitation to spend the night.

  “Let’s do this,” I said under my breath.

  I got out of the car and closed the door as quietly as I co
uld. No sense waking any more people on Lincoln than I had to. I walked across the empty street, up the driveway, and onto the front porch of the home of Horace and Gretchen Richler.

  I stood in the glow of the single bulb, looking for a doorbell button. I found it mounted in the right side of the doorframe and pushed on it, hard, with my thumb.

  No bell went off inside the house, at least none that I could hear. I glanced over at the metal mailbox hanging from the wall, noticed the “No Flyers or Junk Mail!” sticker. Maybe the Richlers didn’t like to be troubled with nuisance callers or mail. One way to deal with that was to disconnect the doorbell.

  Or it could just be broken. To be certain, I leaned on the button a second time, but still heard nothing from inside the house.

  I opened the metal storm door and saw a tarnished brass knocker on the main door. I rapped it five times. I didn’t know whether it would wake the Richlers, but it sounded like five gunshots out here on the porch.

  When I didn’t see any lights going on after fifteen seconds, I did it again. I was about to do it a third time when I could see, through the window, light cascading down the stairs.

  Someone was up.

  I rapped two more times, lightly, so they wouldn’t think whoever was at the front door had taken off before they’d made the decision to come downstairs. In another moment Horace Richler appeared, in a bathrobe and pajamas, what hair he had pointing in several directions.

  Before he got to the door, he shouted, “Who is it?”

  “Mr. Richler?” I called out. Not shouting, but loud enough that I hoped he could hear me through the door. “I need to speak to you.”

  “Who the hell is it? You know what time it is? I gotta gun, you know!”

  If he really did, it wasn’t in his hands at this moment.

  “My name is David Harwood! Please, I need to speak to you! It’s very important.”

  There was someone else coming down the stairs now. It was Gretchen Richler, in a nightgown and robe, her hair also in disarray. I could just make out her asking her husband who it was, what was going on.

  “It’s about Jan!” I said.

  I thought I saw Horace Richler hesitate for a second as he reached for the door, wondering if he heard me correctly. I heard a deadbolt turn back, a chain slide, then the door opened about a foot.