Central Park by Guillaume Musso (ebook reader macos .TXT) 📕

as if she’d just stepped out of the movie Grease or an episode of Glee.

“Okay, that sounds good—thank you.” Alice sat on a bar stool. “You don’t happen to have a map of the area, do you?”

“We might. I’ll go look in the office.”

“Thanks.”

Less than two minutes later, Barbie returned with a map of New England. Alice unfolded it on the counter. It was a good old-fashioned AAA map from before the age of GPS, smartphones, and the Internet, before this crazy time when people had become slaves to technology.

“Do you mind if I write on it?”

“It’s yours. On the house. And here’s your smoothie.”

Alice thanked her with a smile. She liked this girl—kind, easygoing, sweet. How old was she? Eighteen? Nineteen at most. Alice was thirty-eight. The sentence formed inside her mind, irrefutable: I’m old enough to be her mother. An observation she made more and more often these days when encountering young people. She found herself in a no-man’s-land—feeling twenty years old in her head but being almost twice that age in her body.

Damn the passing of time. Master of those who have no master, as the Arab proverb says.

She pushed away these thoughts and concentrated on the map. She had always needed to visualize things in order to orient herself. With the ballpoint pen, she circled various places. First New York, which they had left two hours earlier, then Boston, where they were heading. They were currently close to Hartford, Connecticut, midway between the two big cities. Another ink circle—Krieg had told them that Dunn worked in a retirement home in Concord, New Hampshire. That was much farther north, at least 150 miles away. Krieg had also stated that Dunn lived in Lincoln. It took Alice almost a minute to locate it on the map. It was a little village stuck in the middle of a mountain range.

“Do you know this place?” she asked her new friend.

“Yeah, there’s a ski resort near there, Loon Mountain. I’ve been there with my boyfriend.”

“What’s it like?”

“Kind of boring. And it’s not exactly next door.”

The cop nodded. It was so hot in the restaurant that she took off her sweater and sat there in a T-shirt.

Gabriel returned, cigarette pack in hand, and sat on the stool next to Alice’s.

“Can I get you a drink, sir?”

“Do you have any espresso?”

“Sorry, we don’t.”

“Maybe a Perrier?”

“We don’t have that either.”

Alice became annoyed. “Stop being so picky, Keyne!”

“Okay, just give me a regular coffee.”

While the waitress poured the coffee, Gabriel looked her up and down, lingering shamelessly on the fleshiest part of her anatomy.

“Have a good look, why don’t you?” Alice whispered.

He rolled his eyes.

“You’re such a typical guy.” She sighed.

“I never claimed otherwise,” he said, taking a cigarette from his pack and tucking it behind his ear.

Alice had her reply in mind, but she never got a chance to deliver it.

“I think your fax just came through,” Barbie trilled. She slipped into the office for a few seconds and then returned to the counter, holding two printed pages that she had stapled together.

Gabriel and Alice examined Caleb Dunn’s mug shot.

“Well, it’s better than nothing, I guess,” Alice said, disappointed.

The photograph was a grainy black-and-white image that did not reveal much. Dunn looked like Joe Average: dark-haired, medium height, no distinguishing features, ordinary in every respect.

“Just barely,” Gabriel agreed. “It could be anyone.”

Overcoming his disappointment, he turned the page and saw that Thomas Krieg had written the address of Dunn’s house and the address and phone number of the retirement home.

“Doesn’t that strike you as weird?” he asked. “A retirement home employing an ex-con?”

Alice didn’t reply. She was still staring at the mug shot, attempting to figure out the mysterious Dunn.

Gabriel took a sip of his coffee and made a grimace of disgust. “Can I borrow your phone? I need to check something.”

He called the retirement home where Dunn worked. He identified himself to the receptionist—“Special Agent Keyne, FBI”—and asked to speak to the manager. As had become their habit, he pressed speakerphone so Alice could listen in on the conversation.

“Julius Mason. How can I help you?”

Gabriel said it was a routine inquiry and asked for information about Dunn.

“I hope nothing has happened to Caleb,” Mason said, sounding worried.

“Did he turn up today?”

The manager almost choked. “What do you mean? Caleb Dunn hasn’t worked for us in almost two years!”

“Really? Sorry, I wasn’t aware of that.”

Gabriel struggled to sound unfazed. Alice couldn’t help smiling. So, even the FBI couldn’t manage to keep its files updated. The slowness of bureaucracy was not solely a French phenomenon.

Embarrassed, Gabriel hardened his voice and began interrogating the manager.

“Did you know that Dunn had a criminal record when you hired him?”

“Criminal record? Come on, all he did was sell a few ounces of pot and yell at the cop who arrested him. So what? He hardly merited a prison sentence.”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

“That’s right—my way.”

Alice smiled again. This guy was not easy to interrogate.

“When Dunn worked for you, did he ever behave in a strange or inappropriate way? Anything strike you as unusual?”

“Not at all. Caleb was always very professional, very helpful. Our staff and our residents all spoke very highly of him.”

“So why is he no longer working for you?”

Mason sighed. “The board of directors wanted to reduce costs. To save a few dollars, we now use an external security firm. It costs less, but it’s much more impersonal.”

“Do you know if he found other employment?”

“Of course, and very quickly. I recommended him myself to a hospital in Maine that needed a reliable security guard.”

“Do you know the name of that hospital?”

“So you can update your damned files and continue harassing honest citizens?”

“Mr. Mason, please.”

“Sebago Hospital. In Cumberland County.”

Gabriel and Alice exchanged an astounded look. The same tension electrified their bodies. Sebago Hospital was where Elizabeth Hardy had worked—the nurse found murdered at her home ten days earlier.

Cops from their heads to their toes.

Cops to their bones.

Cops to the very cores of their beings.

They didn’t have