Run Away - Harlan Coben Page 0,20

you dead. Then I’ll have to make it look like a bad home invasion. That means I go into your house. What are Kelsey and Kiera doing in there, Kevin? Homework? Watching TV? Having a nice snack? Whatever. I’ll go in, and I’ll do things so horrible you’ll be glad you’re dead.”

Kevin shook his head, tears coming to his eyes. “Please.”

“Or,” Ash said, “you can drop the screwdriver right now.”

Kevin did as he was asked. The screwdriver clanked on the concrete floor.

“I don’t understand. I never hurt anyone. Why are you doing this?”

Ash shrugged.

“Please don’t hurt my girls. I’ll do whatever you want. Just don’t…” He swallowed and stood a little taller. “So…so what now?”

Ash crossed the garage and placed the muzzle of the gun against the side of Kevin’s temple. Kevin closed his eyes right before Ash pulled the trigger.

The echo was loud inside the garage, drawn out, but Ash doubted anyone outside of it would take notice.

Kevin was dead before he hit the floor.

Ash moved fast. He placed the gun in Kevin’s right hand and pulled the trigger, firing a bullet straight into the ground. Now there would be gunpowder residue on the hand. He pulled the phone out of Kevin’s back pocket and used Kevin’s thumb to unlock it. Then he quickly scrolled through and found his wife’s contact information.

Courtney’s name was typed into the contacts with two hearts before and after her name.

Hearts. Kevin had put hearts next to his wife’s name.

Ash typed up a simple text: I’m sorry. Please forgive me.

He hit Send, dropped the phone on the workbench, and headed back to the car.

Don’t rush. Don’t walk too quickly.

Ash figured that there was probably an 80 to 85 percent chance the suicide scenario would hold. You had a gunshot wound to the head—to the victim’s right temple, the way a righty might do it if the wound was self-inflicted. That was why Ash had made note of which hand Kevin was holding the screwdriver in. You had a suicide text. You had gun residue on the hand. The extra bullet would probably look like Kevin had tried once and chickened out and then steeled himself for the real deal.

So the suicide scenario would probably be a buy. Eighty, eighty-five percent—maybe more like 90 percent when you added in that Kevin was out of work and probably depressed about it. If some cop was super aggressive or watched too much CSI, he might find some stuff didn’t add up. For example, there hadn’t been enough time to prop Kevin up before firing the second shot, so if some crime tech really spent the money to study the bullet’s trajectory, he might notice the shot originated from near the floor.

Someone might even spot Ash right now, or the car, and that might raise a few eyebrows too.

But that was all doubtful.

Either way, he and Dee Dee would be long gone. The car would be wiped down and abandoned. Nothing would track back to them.

Ash was good at this.

He got into the passenger side of the car. No curtains on the block had moved. No doors had opened. No cars had driven by.

Dee Dee said, “Is he…?”

Ash nodded.

Dee Dee smiled and started the car down the road.

Chapter

Eight

Ingrid met Simon at the door when he arrived home. She threw her arms around him.

“I’d just crashed in bed,” Ingrid said, “when the police arrived.”

“I know.”

“And suddenly the door buzzer kept going off. It took me forever to wake up. I figured it was a delivery, except they always protect me from that stuff.”

By “they,” she meant the doormen in the building. Ingrid worked one overnight shift in the emergency room per week. The doormen knew that meant she slept during the next day, so if there were any deliveries, they were to leave them for Simon to bring up when he got home at six thirty.

“I threw on some sweats. This cop comes up. He actually asked me for an alibi. Like I was a suspect.”

Simon knew, of course. Ingrid had contacted him as soon as the doorman told her why she was being buzzed. Hester then had sent a colleague from her firm to be with Ingrid for the police questioning.

“And I just got a call from Mary in the ER. The cops actually went to the hospital to double-check I was there. Can you believe this?”

“They wanted an alibi for me too,” Simon said. “Hester thinks it’s just routine.”

“I don’t understand though. What happened exactly? Aaron was