Nobody's Fool

by Harlan Coben

Genres: Private Investigators; Suspense; Mystery

Synopsis

MALAGA – 2000
Sami Kierce, a young American backpacker, wakes up. He is covered in blood. There’s a knife in his hand.
Beside him, the body of a woman. Anna. Dead. He doesn’t know what happened. He begins to scream.

NEW YORK CITY – 2025
Kierce, now a disgraced detective, is teaching night classes when he recognises a familiar face in the crowd.
Anna. It’s unmistakably her. As soon as she sees Kierce, she runs.
For Kierce there is no choice. He knows he must find this woman and solve the impossible mystery that has haunted his every waking moment.

His investigation will bring him face-to-face with his past. Soon he discovers that some secrets should stay buried . . .

Release date: March 25, 2025

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 352

Reader says this book is...: emotionally riveting (1) entertaining story (1) realistic characters (1) suspenseful (1) terrific writing (1) unexpected twists (1) unputdownable (1)

Sample

Twenty-Two Years Later

I stand behind the tree and snap photos of license plates with a long-lens camera. The lot is full, so I go in order from the most expensive car—I can’t believe there’s a Bentley parked by this toilet—and move on down the list.

I don’t know how long I have before my subject—a wealthy man named Peyton Booth—comes out. Five minutes, maybe ten. But here’s why I take the photos. I send them to my shadow partner at the DMV. Said partner will then look up all the license plates and get the corresponding emails. She’ll email the pics and threaten exposure if they don’t transfer money into this untraceable Cash App account. Only $500. No reason to be greedy. If they don’t respond—and ninety percent don’t—it goes nowhere, but we make enough to make it worthwhile.

Yeah, times are tough.

I’m positioned across the park and dressed like what we used to call a vagrant or hobo or homeless. I forget the proper euphemism they use nowadays, so I ask Debbie.

“‘Unhoused,’” Debbie tells me.

“Really?”

“‘Unsheltered’ too. They both suck.”

“Which do you prefer?”

“Goddess.”

Debbie the Goddess says she’s twenty-three, but she looks younger. She spends a lot of her days standing in front of various, uh, “gentlemen’s clubs”—talk about a euphemism—with tears in her eyes and yells “Daddy, why?” at every guy that walks in or out. She started doing it for kicks—she loves the way some guys turn white and freeze—but now a few of the regulars say hi and maybe throw her a twenty.

“I do it as an exercise in capitalism and ethics,” she tells me.

“How’s that?”

“The capitalism part is obvious.”

Debbie has good teeth. That’s rarely the case out here. Her hair is washed. She’s sleeveless and her arms are clean.

“You make money,” I say. Then: “And the ethics?”

Her lower lip quivers. “Sometimes a guy hears me and runs off. Like I knocked some sense into him. Like I reminded him who he should be. And maybe, just maybe, if some girl had yelled that at my daddy, if some girl like me did something, anything, to stop my daddy from going into a place like that…”

Her voice fades away. She looks down and blinks her eyes and keeps the lip quivering.

I study her face for a second and then I say, “Boo friggin’ hoo.”

The blinking and quivering stop as if her face is a shaken Etch A Sketch. “What?”

“You think I’m buying the Daddy Issues cliché?” I shake my head. “I expect better from you.”

Debbie laughs and punches my arm. “Damn, Kierce, you must have been an awesome cop.”

I shrug. I was. I don’t know how Debbie ended up on the streets. I don’t ask and she doesn’t volunteer, and that seems to suit us both.

I check my watch.

“Showtime?” Debbie asks.

“Has to be.”

“You remember the code?”

I do. If she yells “Daddy, why?” that means wrong guy. If she yells “But Daddy, I’m carrying your child,” that means my man Peyton just exited. Debbie came up with the code. I’m giving her fifty dollars for the job, but if I land what White Shoe needs, I’ll up that to a hundred.

Debbie heads down the path to a spot where she can see the club door. I can’t see it from my perch. Debbie saw Peyton Booth’s pic on my phone, so she knows what he looks like. You probably guessed this, but Peyton is getting divorced. My job here is simple.

Catch him cheating.

This is what I’ve been reduced to since getting chucked off the force for messing up big-time. Worse, even though I’m working for a high-end, whitest-of-white-shoe Manhattan law firm, I am not getting paid. This is a barter arrangement. I’m being sued by the family of a high school kid named PJ Dawson. According to the lawsuit, I perilously pursued PJ onto the rooftop of a three-story building. Because of my negligence, young PJ slipped and fell off the roof, plummeting those three stories and sustaining critical injuries. The White Shoe law firm (actual name is Whit Shaw but everyone calls them White Shoe) is representing me in exchange for my working jobs like this off the books.

America is grand.

Peyton is head of a major conservatively based conglomerate and reportedly, because we are all hypocrites, a big-time playah with da ladies. According to his wife’s statement to her attorney, her soon-to-be ex has a weakness for “bottled blonde skanks with giant fake cans.” The wife had been convinced that Peyton was messing around with his neighbor, but I checked it out thoroughly and yes, the neighbor matches this description, but no, he isn’t messing around with her.

Peyton made sure to leave his Lexus in a remote corner of the lot, far from prying eyes. That’s why I’m set up on this hill, in the one spot where I can position my camera and record any action that might take place. If I set up closer, I would be spotted. If I set up farther away, I would get nada. The only way to make this work is to be here and to know when my man Peyton leaves.

The parking lot is also cleverly set up so that it shares its spaces with an old-school convenience store called Get Some and a florist called—get this—Rose to the Occasion, thus giving the clientele who are visiting the “gentlemen’s club” proper cover. Point is, if I capture Peyton leaving here or parked here, it won’t be a big deal in court. But if I can capture him with a dancer (again with the euphemisms—don’t we all miss the days when you could just say what you mean?), that would be huge.

“Daddy, why…?” Debbie calls out.

I have the camera on a tripod. I check the aim. Yep, right through the windshield of the car. I’m still looking down the barrel of the lens when I hear a voice behind me.

“Where’s Debbie?”

A quick glance tells me it’s an unhoused (or unsheltered) guy.

“She’s working,” I say.

“My name is Raymond.”

“Hey, Raymond.”

“Debbie usually brings me a sandwich.”

“Give her a few, okay, Raymond?”

“She knows I hate mayo.”

“Got it.”

“Debbie tell you how jet planes stay in the air?”

“No.”

“Want me to?”

“Do I have a choice, Raymond?”

“Witches,” he says.

“Witches,” I repeat.

“Flying witches, to be more precise. Three of them per plane. One holds the right wing, one holds the left wing, the third witch, she’s in the back, holding up the tail.”

“I’ve been on planes,” I say. “Even sat by the wing a few times. I’ve never seen a witch.”

I don’t know why I say this, but I sometimes speak and act without considering all the consequences. That might explain why I’ve gone from catching murderers and hardened criminals to quasi-Peeping-Tom-ing near Rose to the Occasion.

Raymond frowns. “They’re invisible, fool.”

“Invisible flying witches?”

“Of course,” he said, as though disgusted with my stupidity. “What, you think gigantic metal tubes can just stay up in the air by themselves? I mean, come on. You just believe everything the government tells you?”

“Fair point, Raymond.”

“Your average Airbus weighs at least 150,000 pounds. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“And we’re supposed to believe something that heavy can stay up in the air all the way across an ocean?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Take the blinders off, man. The Man has been gaslighting you. Ever hear of gravity? The physics don’t work.”

“Ergo, the witches,” I say.

“Right. Witches, man. And it’s all one big joke on mankind.”

I can’t help myself. “What do you mean, Raymond?”

He scowls. “Ain’t it obvious?”

“Not to me.”

“One day,” Raymond says, rubbing his hands together and licking his lips, “when we rubes are least expecting it, all the witches, all at the same time, they’re all going to let go.”

“Of the planes?”

He nods in satisfaction. “That’s right. All the witches will just let go of the planes at the same time. Cackling. Like witches do, you know. Cackling and watching the planes, all of them, plummet back to earth.”

He looks at me.

“Dark,” I say.

“Mark my words. Get right with the Lord now before that day.”

Down on the street below, I hear Debbie shout, “But Daddy, I’m carrying your child.”

Bingo.

“Can we talk about this later, Raymond?”

“Tell Debbie I’m waiting on that sandwich. And no mayo.”

“I’ll do that.”

I look through the camera lens and see Peyton in full business suit. My heart sinks when I see he’s alone. He gets in the driver’s side. I wait, hoping someone will join him. No one does. He starts up his car.

But he doesn’t back out.

I smile now as I watch through the lens. My man Peyton is waiting for someone. I know it.

Still looking through the lens, I hear Debbie shout “Daddy, why?” as a mustached guy in a business suit makes his way into the lot.

My phone rings. It’s Arthur, my young attorney-handler at White Shoe Law. “Are you on him?”

“I am.”

“Good. We sign the papers first thing tomorrow.”

“I know.”

“If we don’t get evidence he cheated, she can’t break the prenup.”

“I know.”

“Will you have something or not?”

Someone opens the passenger door of Peyton’s car and slips in. Peyton turns.

They start making out big-time.

But it’s not a chesty bottled blonde he is making out with.

It’s the mustached man in a business suit.

That night—a few minutes before it all went wrong yet again—I was teaching a night class at the vaguely yet fancifully named “Academy Night Adult School” on the Lower East Side. The school still advertises in those free magazines-cum-pamphlets you see on the streets and interior subway cards above the seats on the F and M lines. The pamphlet advertising my course calls me a “world renowned ex-police detective” alongside a headshot of me so unflattering the DMV is jealous.

My class runs from eight to ten p.m., and it’s pay-as-you-go. We charge sixteen bucks a class. Cash. I split that fifty-fifty with Chilton, “headmaster” of the Academy Night Adult School, which is why we make sure the amount is an even number. Chilton is also the sole custodian of the building, so I don’t know how legit the whole enterprise is. I don’t care much either.

We are situated in the shadows of the Baruch Houses, high-rises near the Williamsburg Bridge on Rivington Street, a street you may or may not find on a map. The building is more ruins than edifice, opened in 1901 as a public bathhouse, the first in the city. Upon hearing this, some people feel this locale will be exotic or glamorous. It’s not. Public baths were built for hygiene, not leisure.

I looked it up once. Back in the day, there was one bathtub for every seventy-nine families on the Lower East Side. You can almost gag on the stench of that statistic, can’t you? There are few signs of what this place used to be, though my classroom is cavernous concrete and has pretty good acoustics and sometimes I can see, if not smell, the ghosts from the past.

But I’m prone to that.

My class is on criminology. I decided to call it—get this—No Shit, Sherlock. Right, yeah, fair, but admit it’s catchy. At the start of every class, I write a different quote from Sherlock Holmes (from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for you literalists) on the roll-in whiteboard. We then discuss it. And we go from there. I started six weeks ago with two students. Tonight, I count twenty-three, twenty-one of whom paid for the class, and two—Debbie and Raymond—who are here gratis on a Sami Kierce scholarship. Debbie is enthralled and wide-eyed. Raymond clips his toenails the entire class, studying each nail before cutting them with the precision of my grandmother’s lunch group dividing a check.

The class makeup is eclectic. In the front of the room are three women in their seventies who call themselves the Pink Panthers. They are amateur detectives who love to watch true-crime shows or find a story in the paper and investigate it. I’ve seen some of what the Pink Panthers can do, and it’s pretty impressive. Weirdly enough, as though de-aging, there are three matching young women in the back, twenty-five-ish I’d guess, attractive, who, I’m told, are minor-league Instagram influencers who just started a true-crime podcast called Three Dead Hots. There are several wannabe true-crime podcasters in the room, I suspect. There are also true-crime fanatics. A guy named Hex, who always wears gray sweatpants with matching hoodie, wants to solve his aunt’s murder from 1982. There is also Golfer Gary, who always wears an ironed golf polo with a logo from some ritzy club. I would say he’s a poser, down here in the Lower East Side with us, but I’m a trained detective, and something about his demeanor reeks of old money. I don’t know his deal, but I’m curious. Everyone is a story, but this class feels like a bit more than that.

We are a little more than halfway through class when someone slinks in through the side door.

My spidey senses tingle. Or maybe that’s hindsight.

I only see the form in my peripheral vision. I don’t take a close look. People wander in here all the time. Last class, a man with a dirty-gray beard so bushy that it looked like he was midway through eating a sheep shuffled in. He cupped his hands around his mouth and screamed, “Himmler likes tuna steaks!” and then left.

This part of the class is show-n-tell. Leisure Suit Lenny is up. I don’t know what to make of him. He sits a little too close to the influencers, but there is something harmless about him too. He puts a box on a decrepit concrete slab we use as a table and starts taking out gizmos.

“These are tracking devices,” Lenny tells the class.

You’ve probably heard the “Yep, that’s me, you may be wondering how I ended up here” record-scratch movie cliché on some meme. That summer with Anna knocked me off the rails. When I came home, nothing felt right. I hid in my room a lot. I didn’t want to go to medical school anymore. My parents understood the best they could, but they were also sure it would pass. Defer a year, they urged me. So I did. Defer another year. I did. But I still couldn’t go back. I spent my life wanting to be a physician. I tossed it away. This crushed my parents.

“I always carry at least three tracking devices with me,” Lenny continues.

Instagram Influencer One says, “Seriously? Three?”

“Always. See this one here?” Lenny lifts what looks like, well, a black rectangular tracker in the air. “This is an Alert1A4. Do you remember those ‘I fell and I can’t get up’ commercials?”

Lots of nods. Raymond presses down on the nail clipper. The cut nail flies.

Golf Shirt Gary grabs his cheek: “Ow, what the…? That almost went in my eye!”

Raymond raises his hand and then points to himself. “My bad, that’s totally on me.”

Lenny remains steadfast in his presentation. “This is a more advanced tracker because it can do more. I can mute it from this end”—he demonstrates—“and leave the speaker on so this can be both a listening device and a tracker. Problem is, the battery life isn’t great.” He looks around the room. “That’s true for all of these, by the way. The GPS’s battery drains too fast. Now this one—” He pulls out a device shaped like a thick coin. “This can last for up to six months—but you have to be within twenty yards to pick it up.”

Instagram Influencer Two raises her hand, chews her gum, and says, “This is kind of stalkery.”

One (also chewing gum): “Definitely.”

Three (also chewing gum): “Perv-level stuff.”

Two: “Like, there’s other ways to meet people.”

One: “Do you carry zip ties too?”

“No!” Lenny’s face turns red. “I don’t use these for anything like that!”

One: “Then, like, what do you use it for?”

“In case there’s a crime in progress. Like this one.” He lifts a small GPS tracker high in the air with both hands like it’s Simba in the beginning of The Lion King. “This one has a strong magnet. I can stick it on a car.”

Two: “Aaaaaand you’ve definitely done that before, right?”

One: “Like, more than once.”

Three: “Like, to meet a girl.”

One: “I had a guy do that to me once.”

Two: “Get out.”

Three: “For realz?”

One: “Like, he slapped a GPS on my car so he could set up a time for us to”—finger quotes—“‘bump’ into each other.”

Two: “Ew.”

One: “You mean like a pervy meet-cute?”

Three: “Exactly.”

Two: “Did it work?”

Three shrugs. “Kinda, yeah. But he drove a Porsche.”

One: “What do you drive, Lenny?”

Lenny throws up his hands. “I don’t do any of that.”

One: “Feels pervy to me.”

Two: “Creepy AF. Unless, well, what car do you drive, Lenny?”

Lenny whines, “Mr. Kierce?”

“Okay,” I say, and I move next to him, picking up the first GPS and casually tossing it in the air. “I think we should…”

And that is when I see Anna.

I stop, blink. I almost do one of those headshakes to clear out the cobwebs.

I know this is impossible, and so for a few moments, I don’t really react. I try to let the moment pass.

This would not be the first time I’ve seen dead people.

Last year, I went through a stage where I would hallucinate and even have full conversations with my “other” murdered lover, Nicole.

Yes, murdered.

I guess I’m not safe to date, ladies.

Tasteless joke.

But when I had visions of Nicole, she hadn’t aged. I saw her as she was back then, the way she’d looked on the day she was murdered—the same heartachingly beautiful twenty-six-year-old that I’d known as my fiancée.

I’ve also imagined seeing Anna before. You know how it is. I’d be in a crowded park or maybe a jam-packed Manhattan bar and I would see a woman with long auburn hair and for a moment I would be certain it was Anna, but then I would blink or tap her shoulder and I would see her face and reality returned.

I do that now. I blink. I blink again. Now I go through with it and give my head a tiny shake to clear it. But even as I do, I know this isn’t the same. In the past, the “Anna visions,” which is way too strong a term for it, was always the Anna I knew, age-twenty-one (or however old she really was) Anna. She’d have the long auburn hair and nebulous eyes, which is weird. I don’t remember Anna’s eye color—maybe because her eyes were shut the last time I saw her—but now, among the malodorous ghosts of the former bathhouse, I see the hazel in this woman’s and yes, now I remember.

Anna had hazel eyes.

Someone—I think it’s Golf Shirt Gary—says, “Kierce? You okay?”

But this woman doesn’t have long auburn hair. It’s short and blond. Anna never wore eyeglasses when I knew her. This woman has stylish round wire frames. Anna was twenty-one-ish years old. This woman is in her midforties.

It can’t be her.

The Maybe Anna startles back now. She had been leaning against the wall but moves fast, hurrying out of the room.

“Kierce?”

“Continue your show-n-tell, Lenny. I’ll be right back.”

I sprint after her.

All heads turn. The students, of course, know something is up. They’re in a criminology class and so are both inherently and situationally nosey. They’re hyperaware. I hear the squeak of chairs as if they’re readying to join me.

“Stay,” I command.

They listen, though grudgingly.

I exit the room. I hear footsteps echoing below me. Everything in here echoes. I start toward them. As I do, some degree of sanity returns. I remind myself again that I’ve hallucinated before. I mentioned that already, with my murdered fiancée, Nicole. I had entire conversations with Nicole. At one point, Hallucination Nicole even talked me down from a bridge from which I planned to jump. She had sagely advised and then convinced me—a hallucination, mind you—to go home to my pregnant fiancée (now my wife), Molly.

Before you think me completely insane, I eventually learned these hallucinations were not my fault. They were a side effect of a terrible drug, one that nearly killed me, blended with whatever weird chemical makeup courses through my body and, not to dismiss my own role in this, a past that had involved excess drinking.

But once I stopped taking the drug, the hallucinations stopped.

Still, wasn’t a hallucination the best explanation?

It can’t be Anna.

It makes no sense.

And yet, in another way, it might explain everything.

It is funny how fast your perception changes. I’m already accepting that what I’ve believed for the past quarter century was wrong.

Only one way to find out.

Everything echoes in here so I can clearly hear her heading down the stairs. I follow, taking the steps two or even three at a time. I can see her. She has hit the ground level.

“Stop,” I say.

I don’t yell. No need to yell with all the echo in this place. But more than that, I don’t want to scare her. I simply want her to stop running.

“Please,” I add. “I just want to talk.”

Perhaps she saw the crazy look in my eye and just figured that I was a threat. Perhaps, like Tuna Himmler, she had just wandered in, seeking a little shelter from the outdoors, a safe place to sit and reflect and let down her guard.

But she didn’t look poor or down on her luck or any of that. I spotted what looked like a thick gold bracelet on her wrist. Her camel coat reeked of cashmere and big bucks.

She is almost at the main door.

I move faster now, caution to the wind and all that. I see Maybe Anna reaching for the knob that will lead her outside into the Lower East Side night. No time to delay. Her hand lands on the knob and turns it. I leap toward her and grab her by the forearm.

She screams. Loudly. Like I stabbed her.

“Anna,” I say.

“Let go of me!”

I don’t. I hold on and stare at her face. She turns away from me, tries to pull away. I hold on tighter. She finally turns and looks up at me. Our eyes meet.

And there is no doubt anymore.

“Anna,” I say again.

“Let me go.”

“Do you remember me?”

“You’re hurting my arm.”

Then I hear a familiar deep voice: “Kierce?”

It’s Chilton. He’s in his tight white custodial suit, the sleeves rolled up his bloated arms like tourniquets. Chilton is Jamaican, a big man with a heavy Rasta accent, shaved head, hoop earring. He wants to be called Black Mr. Clean. No one calls him that, but to be fair, he isn’t far off.

Anna doesn’t hesitate. She uses the distraction to pull her arm free of my grip. I reach for her again, grabbing the camel—yep, cashmere—coat and making my move because in my peripheral vision I can see Chilton bearing down on me. Time is short. I don’t want to let her out of my sight, but I know that forcing her to stay would be the wrong move. Every mistake I’ve made in my life—and there have been plenty—has derived from moments when I’ve acted impulsively.

Chilton gets to me and puts a hand on my shoulder. His hand is the approximate size and weight of a manhole cover. He gives my shoulder an eagle-talon squeeze, and I almost drop to my knees.

Anna runs outside.

I couldn’t move even if I wanted to. Which I don’t. I don’t need to follow her.

I got what I want.

Chilton lets up the pressure. I stand to my full height, which is probably a foot shorter than his. He stares down at me, hands on his hips now.

“What the hell, Kierce?”

I am nothing if not fast with the lies. “She didn’t pay for the class.”

“Say what now?”

“The woman came in, she took the class, and when I asked her to pay—”

“And you chased her?” Clinton asked, shock in his voice.

“Yes.”

“A white woman?”

“Don’t be racist, Chilton.”

“You think this is funny?”

I lift my hand, palm down, and rock it back and forth in a gesture indicating “maybe a little.”

“You don’t chase after a white woman,” he says. “Not in this city. What did I say to you on the very first day you came to work for me?”

“‘If you don’t make me money, you’re dead to me.’”

“And after that?”

“Not to chase white women?”

Chilton shakes his head. “Not to cause trouble.”

“Oh,” I say, “right.”

“I gave you this job as a favor.”

“I know, Chilton.”

It wasn’t so much a favor as a quid pro quo. My old cop partner, Marty, tore up three parking tickets in exchange for Chilton giving me this gig.

“Don’t make me regret my generosity,” Chilton says.

“Sorry, you’re right. I overreacted.” Then I point up. “I have over twenty paying students upstairs.”

That gets Chilton’s attention. “Seriously? That many?” He shoos me toward the stairs. “Go, go.”

He doesn’t have to tell me twice, even though he just did.

“Maybe next week, we move the price up to eighteen dollars,” Chilton suggests. “See if we lose anyone. Then the next class, twenty.”

“Subtle,” I say as I hurry back up the stairs. The class is totally silent when I get there. They all stare at me.

“Lenny,” I say, “can I see you in the hallway for a second?”

The class “ooo”s like this is third grade and I’m sending Lenny to the principal’s office. Lenny actually looks nervous, so I add, “You’re not in any trouble.”

When we are clear of the door, I unlock my mobile phone with my face and hand it to him. “I need a favor.”

Lenny looks down at my phone. “What?”

“Download the GPS app,” I tell him.

When I grabbed Maybe Anna’s coat at the door, I dropped one of Lenny’s trackers into the pocket.

“What’s that?”

“I need the app,” I say.

“Why?”

“I’m on my way to a meet-cute.”

Maybe Anna is already on the FDR Drive.

That means she is either a world-class sprinter or she drov. . .