Run Away - Harlan Coben Page 0,53
or browsing or whatever people called it nowadays.
The desk was partner-style, so that two people could sit facing each other. The top was cluttered with scraps of paper, three pairs of drugstore reading glasses, a dozen or so assorted pens and markers. There was a bag of cherry cough drops on the left, a few paperback books, bills strewn about with no reason or guiding principle behind them.
In the center of the desk, facing the glass, was a slightly faded photograph of six men with huge smiles. Two were up front, with arms around each other’s shoulders, the other four slightly behind them with folded arms. It’d been snapped in front of the parlor—opening day from the looks of the ribbons and the oversized faux scissors. The clothes, the facial hair, the poses—the whole vibe made it feel like a Doobie Brothers album cover.
Elena picked up the photograph and showed it to Nap. Nap nodded and pointed to the guy in the front on the right.
“That’s the victim. Damien Gorse.”
Nap slid his finger toward the guy next to him—a hefty dude in full leather motorcycle wear and a salt-’n’-pepper handlebar mustache. “That’s the partner, Neil Raff.”
Elena sat in the swivel chair in front of the monitor. The computer’s mouse was red and in the shape of a heart. For a moment Elena just stared at it. A heart. Damien Gorse’s computer mouse was in the shape of a heart. As an investigator, you keep your head down and you think analytically because that was often the best. You focus on your particular goal—in this case finding Henry Thorpe—but Joel had always told her not to forget the devastation, the lives lost or destroyed or irrevocably torn apart. Damien Gorse had sat in this chair and used this heart-shaped mouse. The heart-shaped mouse was a gift—it had to be, it was not the kind of thing you buy for yourself—and the person who gave it to him wanted Damien to know that he was in some way loved.
“Don’t let those emotions cloud you,” Joel would tell her. “Let them fuel you.”
When Elena touched the mouse, the screen lit up. A photograph appeared of Damien Gorse and Neil Raff, with an older woman between the two. They were on a beach somewhere, all smiles.
In the center of the screen was a box asking for a password. Elena looked over at Nap as if he might know. He shrugged no-idea at her. There were Post-it notes all over the computer. She scanned them for what might be a password, but nothing jumped out at her. She opened the top drawer. Nothing.
“You have someone who can crack this?” she asked.
“Yeah, but he’s not here yet.”
The front door flew open, and a man she recognized from the photographs as Neil Raff burst into his own tattoo parlor. The outfit was denim now rather than leather—almost more dated than in the photograph—and the handlebar mustache was now full-on salt. But there was no mistaking him for anyone else. Dazed, he turned his head and looked about his own business, as though seeing it for the first time, through red-tinged, swollen-from-crying eyes.
Nap hurried over to the man. Elena watched. Nap put a hand on the man’s shoulder and lowered his head and talked softly. Nap was good. Again, something in the way Nap carried himself brought on Joel’s echo. It stirred her. God, she missed Joel. Every part of him. She missed the conversations, the company, the heart, but right now she couldn’t help but think of how much she missed the sex. This may sound odd to some, but making love to Joel was the greatest thing she would ever do. She missed the weight of him on her. She missed the way he looked at her when he was inside her, as if she were the only woman on God’s green earth. She missed—and this wasn’t very feminist of her—the way Joel towered over her and made her feel safe.
She was thinking this because it suddenly dawned on her, as she looked at the photographs of Gorse and Raff, as she thought back to what Nap had said about the owners taking the cash home to their safe, and as she watched the devastation on the face of Neil Raff, that she recognized this particular grief, the gut-wrenching, all-consuming devastation of losing a life partner rather than a friend or business partner.
She could be projecting, but she didn’t think so.
Nap got Raff seated on a