One False Move: A Myron Bolitar Novel by Harlan Coben Page B

the shirt a quick, gentle once-over. The stain was thick and looked a bit sticky, if not wet. Since the shirt had been wrapped in a plastic bag, it was hard to say how long the blood had been there. Probably not long, though.
    Okay, good. Now what?
    The position of the stain itself was puzzling. If Horace had been wearing the shirt, how could the blood have ended up on just that one spot? If, for example, he had a bloody nose, the stain would be more widespread. If he had been shot, well, there’d be a hole inthe shirt. If he had hit somebody else, again the stain would probably be more like a spray or at least more dispersed than this.
    Why was the stain so concentrated in that one spot?
    Myron studied the shirt again. Only one scenario fit: Horace had
not
been wearing the shirt when the injury occurred. Strange but probably true. The shirt had been used to stave off blood flow, like a bandage. That would explain both the placement and concentration. The fan shape indicated it had probably been pressed against a bleeding nose.
    Okey-dokey, we’re on a roll. It didn’t help him in any way, shape, or form. But rolling was good. Myron liked to roll.
    Brenda interrupted his thoughts. “What are we going to tell the police?” she asked again.
    “I don’t know.”
    “You think he’s on the run, right?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then maybe he doesn’t want to be found.”
    “Almost definitely.”
    “And we know he ran away by his own volition. So what are we going to tell them? That we found some blood on a shirt in his locker? You think the police are going to give a rat’s ass?”
    “Not even one cheek,” Myron agreed.
    They finished clearing out the locker. Then Myron drove her to the late practice. He kept his eye on the rearview mirror, looking for the gray Honda Accord. There were many, of course, but none with the same license plate.
    He dropped her off at the gym, and then he tookPalisades Avenue toward the Englewood Public Library. He had a couple of hours to kill, and he wanted to do some research on the Bradford family.
    The Englewood Library sat on Grand Avenue off Palisades Avenue like a clunky spaceship. When it was erected in 1968, the building had probably been praised for its sleek, futuristic design; now it looked like a rejected movie prop for
Logan’s Run
.
    Myron quickly found a reference librarian who was straight from central casting: gray bun, glasses, pearls, boxy build. The nameplate on her desk read “Mrs. Kay.” He approached her with his boyish grin, the one that usually made such ladies pinch his cheek and offer him hot cider.
    “I hope you can help me,” he said.
    Mrs. Kay looked at him in that way librarians often do, wary and tired, like cops who know you’re going to lie about how fast you were driving.
    “I need to look up articles from the
Jersey Ledger
from twenty years ago.”
    “Microfiche,” Mrs. Kay said. She rose with a great sigh and led him to a machine. “You’re in luck.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “They just computerized an index. Before that you were on your own.”
    Mrs. Kay taught him how to use the microfilm machine and the computer indexing service. It looked pretty standard. When she left him alone, Myron first typed in the name Anita Slaughter. No hits. Not a surprise, but hey, you never know. Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you plug in the name, and an article comes up and says, “I ran away to Florence, Italy. Youcan find me at the Plaza Lucchesi hotel on the Arno River, room 218.” Well, not often. But sometimes.
    Typing in the Bradford name would produce ten zillion hits. Myron was not sure what he was looking for exactly. He knew who the Bradfords were, of course. They were New Jersey aristocracy, the closest thing the Garden State had to the Kennedys. Old Man Bradford had been the governor in the late sixties, and his older son, Arthur Bradford, was the current front-runner for the same office. Arthur’s younger brother, Chance—Myron would have made