One False Move - By Harlan Coben Page 0,25

Myron liked to roll.

Brenda interrupted his thoughts. "What are we going to tell the police?" she asked again.

"I don't know."

"You think he's on the run, right?"

"Yes."

"Then maybe he doesn't want to be found."

"Almost definitely."

"And we know he ran away by his own volition. So what are we going to tell them? That we found some blood on a shirt in his locker? You think the police are going to give a rat's ass?"

"Not even one cheek," Myron agreed.

They finished clearing out the locker. Then Myron drove her to the late practice. He kept his eye on the rearview mirror, looking for the gray Honda Accord. There were many, of course, but none with the same license plate.

He dropped her off at the gym, and then he took Palisades Avenue toward the Englewood Public Library. He had a couple of hours to kill, and he wanted to do some research on the Bradford family.

The Englewood Library sat on Grand Avenue off Palisades Avenue like a clunky spaceship. When it was erected in 1968, the building had probably been praised for its sleek, futuristic design; now it looked like a rejected movie prop for Logan 's Run.

Myron quickly found a reference librarian who was straight from central casting: gray bun, glasses, pearls, boxy build. The nameplate on her desk read "Mrs. Kay." He approached her with his boyish grin, the one that usually made such ladies pinch his cheek and offer him hot cider.

"I hope you can help me," he said.

Mrs. Kay looked at him in that way librarians often do, wary and tired, like cops who know you're going to lie about how fast you were driving.

"I need to look up articles from the Jersey Ledger from twenty years ago."

"Microfiche," Mrs. Kay said. She rose with a great sigh and led him to a machine. "You're in luck."

"Why's that?"

"They just computerized an index. Before that you were on your own."

Mrs. Kay taught him how to use the microfilm machine and the computer indexing service. It looked pretty standard. When she left him alone, Myron first typed in the name Anita Slaughter. No hits. Not a surprise, but hey, you never know. Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you plug in the name, and an article comes up and says, "I ran away to Florence, Italy. You can find me at the Plaza Lucchesi hotel on the Arno River, room 218." Well, not often. But sometimes.

Typing in the Bradford name would produce ten zillion hits. Myron was not sure what he was looking for exactly. He knew who the Bradfords were, of course. They were New Jersey aristocracy, the closest thing the Garden State had to the Kennedys. Old Man Bradford had been the governor in the late sixties, and his older son, Arthur Bradford, was the current front-runner for the same office. Arthur's younger brother, Chance - Myron would have made fun of the name, but when your name is Myron, well, glass houses and big stones and all that - was his campaign manager and - to keep within the Kennedy metaphor - played Robert to Arthur's Jack.

The Bradfords had started modestly enough. Old Man Bradford had come from farm stock. He had owned half the town of Livingston, considered the boonies in the sixties, and sold it in small pieces over the years to developers, who built split-levels and colonials for baby boomers escaping Newark and Brooklyn and the like. Myron in fact had grown up in a split-level that had been built on what had formerly been Bradford farmland.

But Old Man Bradford had been smarter than most. For one thing, he reinvested his money in strong local businesses, mostly malls, but more important, he sold his land slowly, over time, not immediately cashing in. By holding on a bit longer, he became a true baron as the price for land increased at an alarming rate. He married a blue blood aristocrat from Connecticut. She redid the old farmhouse and made it something of a monument to excess. They stayed in Livingston, in the original spot of the old farmhouse, fencing off an enormous chunk of real estate. They were the mansion on the hill, surrounded by hundreds of middle-class cookie-cut houses: feudal lords overlooking the serfdom. Nobody in town really knew the Bradfords. When Myron was a kid, he and his friends just referred to them as the millionaires. They were the stuff of legends. Supposedly, if you climbed their fence,