Fool Me Once by Harlan Coben Page A

garbage cans. Still, they could have found a place, maybe a sewer or something.” Kierce hesitated.
    “What?”
    “Thing is, we located the Beretta, like I said. But we didn’t find the murder weapon. The thirty-eight.”
    Maya sat back. “I’d be surprised if they kept it, wouldn’t you?”
    “I guess. Except . . .”
    “Except what?”
    “Punks like these guys don’t always dump the gun. They should. But they don’t. It has value. So they reuse it. Or they sell it to a buddy. Whatever.”
    “But this was a pretty big case, right? High profile, lots of media?”
    “True.”
    Maya watched him. “But you don’t buy that, do you? You have another theory.”
    “I do.” Kierce looked away. “But it makes no sense.”
    “What doesn’t?”
    He started scratching his arm. A nervous tic of some kind. “The thirty-eights we took from your husband’s body. We ran themthrough ballistics. You know. To see if the bullets matched any other cases in our database.”
    Maya looked up at him. Kierce kept scratching. “I’m guessing from your expression,” she said, “that you found a match.”
    “We did, yeah.”
    “So these guys. They’ve killed before.”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “But you just said . . .”
    “Same gun. Doesn’t mean the same guys. In fact, Fred Katen, the one you identified as the shooter, had a stone-cold alibi for the first murder. He was serving time. He couldn’t have done it.”
    “When?”
    “When what?”
    “When was the first murder?”
    “Four months ago.”
    The room chilled. Kierce didn’t have to say it. He knew. She knew. Kierce couldn’t meet her eye. He looked away, nodded, and said, “The same gun that killed your husband also killed your sister.”

Chapter 8
    A re you okay?” Kierce asked.
    “Fine.”
    “I know this is a lot to take in.”
    “Don’t patronize me, Detective.”
    “I’m sorry. You’re right. Let’s go through this again, okay?”
    Maya nodded. She stared straight ahead.
    “We need to look at this in a whole new way now. The two murders seemed random and unconnected, but now that we know the same gun was used for both . . .”
    Maya said nothing.
    “When your sister was shot, you were deployed in the Middle East. Is that correct?”
    “At Camp Arifjan,” she said. “In Kuwait.”
    “I know.”
    “What?”
    “We checked. Just to make sure.”
    “Make sure . . . ?” She almost smiled. “Ah. You mean like to make sure I didn’t somehow sneak home and shoot my sister and then go back to Kuwait and, what, wait four months and kill my husband?”
    Kierce didn’t reply. He didn’t have to. “It all checked out. Your alibi is rock solid.”
    “Super,” she said.
    Maya flashed back again to Joe’s call. The tears. The shock. That call. That damn call had been the end of Maya’s life as she knew it. Nothing would ever be the same after that. It was remarkable when you thought about it. You travel halfway around the world to some hellhole to fight a crazed enemy. You’d think that was where the danger would originate from, that the real threat to her would be from an armed combatant. You’d think, if your life were about to get blown apart, that it would come from an RPG or an IED or a fanatic carrying an AKM.
    But no. The enemy had struck, as enemies often do, where she had least expected it: back home in the good ol’ USA.
    “Maya?”
    “I’m listening.”
    “The officers investigating your sister’s murder believed it was a home invasion. She was . . . Do you know the details?”
    “Enough of them.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “I asked you not to patronize me.”
    “I’m not. I’m just being a human being. What was done to her . . .”
    Maya took out her app again. She wanted to see her daughter’s face. She needed that anchor. But she stopped herself. No. Not now. Don’t bring Lily into this. Not even in the most innocuous way.
    “At the time of the murder, the cops also took a good look at