Free The Stranger by Harlan Coben Page A

ordered the wood-grilled salmon. She was forty-nine, big and bouncy with strawlike hair. She wore a tiger-print top with a somewhat plunging neckline. Heidi had a boisterous yet melodic laugh. The stranger had been listening to it for the past two hours. There was something mesmerizing in the sound.
    â€œI’ve grown to like her,” the stranger said.
    â€œMe too.” Ingrid pulled her blond hair back with both hands, forming an imaginary ponytail and then letting it free. She did that a lot. She had the kind of long, too-straight hair that constantly fell in front of her face. “There’s a certain zest for life there, you know?”
    He knew exactly what Ingrid meant.
    â€œIn the end,” Ingrid said, “we are doing her a favor.”
    That was the justification. The stranger agreed with it. If the foundation is rotten, you need to demolish the entire house. You can’t just fix it with a coat of paint or a few planks of wood. He knew that. He understood it. He lived it.
    He believed it.
    But that didn’t mean that he relished being the one to work the explosives. That was also how he looked at it. He was the one who blew up the house with the rotting foundation—but he never stuck around to see how or if it was rebuilt.
    He didn’t even stick around to make sure that no one had been left inside the house when it went up.
    The waitress came over and gave the ladies the check. Everyone dug into their purses with care and produced cash. The womanwho had the linguini did the math, dividing the bill up with precision. The two Crabfest eaters pulled out bills one at a time. Then they each opened their change purse as though it were a rusted chastity belt.
    Heidi just threw in some twenties.
    Something about the way she did it—with care and ease—touched him. He guessed that the Danns were okay with money, but who knew in today’s world? Heidi and her husband, Marty, had been married twenty years. They had three kids. Their oldest daughter, Kimberly, was a freshman at NYU in Manhattan. The two boys, Charlie and John, were still in high school. Heidi worked various makeup counters at the Macy’s in University Heights. Marty Dann was a vice president in sales and marketing for TTI Floor Care in Glenwillow. TTI was all about vacuum cleaners. They owned Hoover, Oreck, Royal, and the division where Marty had worked for the past eleven years, Dirt Devil. He traveled a lot for his job, mostly to Bentonville, Arkansas, because that was where Walmart’s corporate offices were.
    Ingrid was studying the stranger’s face. “I can handle this on my own, if you’d like.”
    He shook his head. This was his job. Ingrid was here because he would need to approach a woman and that sometimes looked odd. A man-and-woman couple approaching someone? No worries. A man approaching another man in, say, a bar or American Legion Hall? Again no worries. But if a twenty-seven-year-old man approached a forty-nine-year-old woman near, say, a Red Lobster?
    That could get tricky.
    Ingrid had already paid the bill, so they moved quickly. Heidi had arrived on her own in a gray Nissan Sentra. He and Ingrid had parkedtheir rent-a-car two spots away. They waited by the car, key in hand, ready to pretend that they were about to get in it and drive off.
    They didn’t want to draw attention to themselves.
    Five minutes later, the four women exited the restaurant. They hoped Heidi would end up alone now, but they had no way of knowing for certain. One of her friends could walk her to the car, in which case they would have to follow Heidi back to her house and either try to confront her there (never a good idea to confront a victim on their own property—it made them more defensive) or wait until she headed out again.
    The women all bid one another adieu with hugs. Heidi, he could see, was a good hugger. She hugged as though she meant it. When she hugged, her eyes closed and the person