Harlan Coben by No Second Chance Page B

as part of my grand scheme to deflect my guilt and avenge my own shooting. Or something like that.
    And round and round we go.
    In sum, when you cut through it all, they—and I—have nothing. No ransom money. No idea who did it. No idea why. And most important: no small corpse.
    That is where we are today—a year and a half after the abduction. The file is still technically open, but Regan and Tickner have moved on to new cases. I haven’t heard a word from either in nearly six months.The media gnawed on us for a few weeks, but with nothing new to feed on, they too, slithered toward juicier troughs.
    The Dunkin’ Donuts Munchkins were gone. Everyone started heading to a parking lot overloaded with minivans. After the game we coaches take our budding athletes to Schrafft’s Ice Cream Parlor, a tradition in our town. Every coach in every other league in every other age group follows the same tradition. The place was packed. Nothing like an ice cream cone in the autumn frost to burrow the chill into the bone.
    I stood with my Cookies-n-Cream cone and surveyed the scene. Children and fathers. It was getting to be too much for me. I checked my watch. Time for me to leave anyway. I met Lenny’s eye and motioned that I was going. He mouthed the words Your will at me. In case I didn’t get the drift, he even made a signing motion with his hand. I waved that I understood. I got back into my car and flipped on the radio.
    For a long while, I sat there and watched the flow of families. I kept my eyes on the fathers mostly. I gauged their reactions to this most domestic of activities, hoping to see a flicker of doubt, something in the eyes that might comfort me. But I didn’t.
    I’m not sure how long I stayed like that. Not more than ten minutes, I suppose. An old favorite by James Taylor came on the radio. It brought me back. I smiled, started up the car, and made my way toward the hospital.
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    An hour later, I was scrubbing up to perform surgery on an eight-year-old boy with—to use terminology familiar to both layman and professional—a facial smash. Zia Leroux, my medical partner, was there.
    I’m not sure why I first chose to be a plastic surgeon. It was neither the siren song of easy dollars nor the ideal of helping my fellowman. I had wanted to be a surgeon pretty much from the get-go, but I saw myself more in the vascular or cardiac fields. Life’s turns come in funny ways though. During my second year of residency, the cardiac surgeon who ran our rotation was—what’s the phrase?—a total prick. On the other hand, the doctor in charge of the cosmetic surgery, Liam Reese, was incredible. Dr. Reese had that enviable have-it-all feel to him, that combination of good looks, calm confidence, and internal warmth thatnaturally drew people. You wanted to please him. You wanted to be like him.
    Dr. Reese became my mentor. He showed how reconstructive surgery was creative, a Humpty-Dumpty process that forced you to find new ways to put back together what had been destroyed. The bones in the face and skull are the most complex stretch of skeletal landscape in the human body. We who repair them are artists. We are jazz musicians. If you talk to orthopedic or thoracic surgeons, they can be pretty specific about their procedures. Our work—reconstruction—is never exactly the same. We improvise. Dr. Reese taught me that. He appealed to my inner techno-weenie with talk of microsurgery and bone grafts and synthetic skin. I remember visiting him in Scarsdale. His wife was long legged and beautiful. His daughter was school valedictorian. His son was captain of the basketball team and the nicest kid I’ve ever met. At the age of forty-nine Dr. Reese was killed in a car crash on Route 684 heading to Connecticut. Somebody might find something poignant in that, but that person wouldn’t be me.
    When I was finishing up residency, I landed a one-year fellowship to