Free Midnight Club by James Patterson

answered his own superficial question. “You too, sport. Do you like your mom’s beach house?”
    “Sure, it’s neat. Are you coming out there with us?” Sam asked, once again checking them out, both their reactions to his innocent-sounding question.
    “Well, I don’t know. We’ll see, pal, but I think there will be enough other things for us to do for a while. I was thinking of taking Sam upstate to see my parents,” Roger announced to Sarah.
    It was purely informational. He had Sam for two weeks during the summer, and two more weeks at Christmas, no strings attached. He could take him anywhere he liked. When he had called Sarah yesterday, Roger had even made a crack that this was a good time for Sam to be away—while she was working on such a potentially “dangerous” story.
    Sarah was conscious of the way Roger had used pumpkin, pal, and sport to address Sam. It was a little like the way she might avoid using the same word twice in a sentence in her writing, very self-conscious and uncomfortable. She was surprised at how hard these occasional meetings continued to be.
    “Do you remember going up to Batavia?” Sarah asked Sam. She sensed that her voice was strained and sounded slightly unreal.
    “Sure Sam remembers,” his father said.
    “Of course. Grandpa and Grandma live there. The snow gets twenty feet high in the winter. Mom calls it Outer Bavaria.”
    “She’s quite the writer. Great imagination.”
    Sarah didn’t want to let Sam go, and the three of them continued to exchange cheery, if hollow-sounding, small talk in front of a flight insurance kiosk.
    Both of them waved good-bye, their own zany two-handed wave. They smiled as if this were no big deal.
    Sarah finally forced herself to turn away. She started to walk back toward the airport parking lot and her car.
    She noticed that she was biting her lower lip, and then, finally, she was crying. Hot tears streamed down both her cheeks, her throat, and under the collar of her blouse. Her mascara streaked, but she didn’t care. She coughed and began to choke as strangers stared.
    A passing woman finally stopped and asked if she was all right, if she needed any help.
    Sarah tried to explain that she was just being dumb—her ex-husband had two weeks of visiting rights with her little boy, and she missed Sam already.
    The woman gave Sarah a sympathetic hug, and she kept lightly patting her arm while they talked. New Yorkers could perform such kind acts sometimes, Sarah knew, and it was especially touching when they did. She knew that she still loved Roger, in a strange, perplexing way. Sarah knew, too, at that moment, if not before, that she was over him. She had to move on with her life.
    She felt so lonely, though. Sharing the moment with a stranger in Kennedy Airport, Sarah thought she had never been so alone in her life. All that she had was Sam, and now she didn’t even have him.

24
    LATER THAT MORNING, she was unusually apprehensive from the moment she entered One Police Plaza. She didn’t want to repeat the previous day’s ordeal with Lieutenant Stefanovitch, but she needed to see some more of the videotapes, possibly all of them.
    Fortunately, she was the first to arrive at the small interior office where the television monitor and VCR unit had been set up the day before.
    An obliging secretary unlocked the inner office. Sarah then made herself as comfortable as possible in the enemy’s camp. Over the next few minutes she developed a workable system for viewing the videotapes by herself.
    Shortly past noon, the door to the office opened slowly. Sarah’s eyes rose from the sheaf of log notes in her hands. Lieutenant Stefanovitch had arrived.
    He hesitated before coming all the way into the room. Actually, he looked different today, almost like a real policeman. He was wearing a brown tweed sports jacket, green khaki shirt, semi-pressed trousers, and desert boots.
    “I didn’t know you were here.” He smiled. He was actually being