Gone Cold by Douglas Corleone Read Free Book Online Page A

someone.
    “Hello, Simon,” the woman said in a heavy British accent. She was lanky, wore a bright red dress she couldn’t quite fill out. She may have been pretty, perhaps even beautiful, but it was impossible to tell under the dense layers of paint on her face. Her eyes were brown, possibly black, their color lost in a whirlwind of electric-blue eye shadow and brightly colored mascara.
    I glanced at Ashdown.
    “Simon,” he said, “I’d like you to meet Zohanna Carlyle.”
    As I sat in silence trying to associate this woman with a case, with a cause, with something, anything, the cop added, “She is also the former Mrs. Ashdown.”
    I turned to him. “Your wife ?”
    “ Ex -wife,” the woman said, crossing her long, black-stockinged legs.
    “I don’t understand,” I said to Ashdown. “You told me we were meeting a mutual friend.”
    Ashdown rocked his head from side to side. “A figure of speech, old boy.”
    “But I don’t even know her.…” I started to say.
    Then it struck me like a sledgehammer to the chest.
    Slowly, I said to the woman, “I take it Carlyle isn’t a return to your maiden name.”
    She shook her head.
    Impossible, I thought. After more than three and a half decades …
    “Tuesday?” I said so quietly I wasn’t sure I said it aloud.
    She parted her ruby red lips in a smile. “I never much fancied that name. Tuesday . An awful day, isn’t it? Stuck there between Monday and Hump Day like the meat in a bleh sandwich. Not to mention I was actually born in the wee hours of a Wednesday morning.” She shook her head but never once took her eyes off me. “No, Tuesday’s not for me. Since you and dear old Daddy left us, I’ve always gone by Zoey.”

 
    Chapter 11
    TWELVE YEARS AGO
    “We went out to the backyard,” Tasha says breathlessly, “to have a kind of picnic. I’d put together ham and cheese sandwiches and made a pitcher of sweet tea. We threw a blanket down on the grass and set it all up then sat down to eat. We’d each taken just a few bites when the telephone rang. I ran inside to get it because I thought it might be Simon. I thought maybe his plane had been delayed or he was landing sooner than expected. I don’t know…”
    Sitting on the sofa next to Tasha as she tells Special Agents John Rendell and Candace West what happened this morning, I want to lift my arm and place it around her shoulders, but I don’t have the strength. But no, it’s more than that, I realize. I don’t want to hold my wife. I don’t want to hold her because I’m angry. I’m angry at her . I don’t want to be, but I can’t help myself. How the hell could she let this happen? How the hell could she allow Hailey to be taken right from under her nose?
    “But it wasn’t Simon,” she says, “it was my mother. She was just calling to check in with me, see how Hailey and I were doing. She calls a lot while Simon’s away. While I was on the phone with her I looked out the window. Hailey was fine. She’d finished half her sandwich and she was sipping her sweet tea. The kitchen phone’s a cordless, so I was about to take it outside. But I noticed a little puddle on the floor. Just a splash of Hailey’s orange juice from this morning. I didn’t want to step in it, so I grabbed a paper towel off the rack and wiped it up. Then I threw the paper towel in the garbage under the sink.”
    I don’t want to be sitting here. I want to launch myself off this couch and jump into our Ford Explorer and start combing the streets looking for Hailey. But Rendell insists that I can be of the most help by staying here and providing him and West with the information they need to find my daughter.
    I lean forward. The more I listen to Tasha tell her story the angrier I get. I don’t want to get angrier; I want to sympathize. We need each other right now, more than we have ever needed each other before. I realize that. But part of me wants to—nearly needs to—stand up and shout, “What the hell were