the Third Twin (1996)

Hank’s voice was slurred. “Jeez, I’ve been partying so hard I wouldn’t remember.” Berrington rolled up his eyes. It was Hank’s birthday yesterday, of course. He was sure to be drunk or drugged or both. “No, wait a minute! There was something. I remember. It was the middle of the fucking night. She said she was with the Boston police.”

“She?” That could have been Jeannie, Berrington thought with a premonition of bad news.

“Yeah, it was a woman.”

“Did she give her name? That would enable us to check her bona fides.”

“Sure she did, but I can’t remember. Sarah or Carol or Margaret or—Susan, that was it, Detective Susan Farber.”

That settled it. Susan Farber was the author of Identical Twins Reared Apart, the only book on the subject. Jeannie had used the first name that came into her head. That meant she had the list of clones. Berrington was appalled. Grimly, he pressed on with his questions. “What did she say, sir?”

“She asked my date and place of birth.”

That would establish that she was talking to the right Henry King.

“I thought it was, like, a little weird,” Hank went on. “Was it some kind of scam?”

Berrington invented something on the spur of the moment. “She was prospecting for leads for an insurance company.

It’s illegal, but they do it. AT and T is sorry you were bothered, Mr. King, and we thank you for cooperating with our investigation.”

“Sure.”

Berrington hung up, feeling completely desolate. Jeannie had the names. It was only a matter of time before she tracked them all down.

Berrington was in the deepest trouble of his life.

54

MISH DELAWARE REFUSED POINT-BLANK TO DRIVE TO Philadelphia and interview Harvey Jones. “We did that yesterday, honey,” she said when Jeannie finally got her on the phone at seven-thirty A.M. ‘Today’s my granddaughter’s first birthday. I have a life, you know?”

“But you know I’m right!” Jeannie protested. “I was right about Wayne Stattner—he was a double for Steve.”

“Except for his hair. And he had an alibi.”

“But what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to call the Philadelphia police and talk to someone on the Sex Crimes Unit there and ask them to go see him. I’ll fax them the E-FIT picture. They’ll check whether Harvey Jones resembles the picture and ask him if he can account for his movements last Sunday afternoon. If the answers are ‘Yes’ and ‘No,’ we got a suspect.”

Jeannie banged the phone down in a fury. After all she had been through! After she had stayed up all night tracking down the clones!

She sure as hell was not going to sit around waiting for the police to do something. She decided she would go to Philadelphia and check Harvey out. She would not accost him or even speak to him. But she could park outside his home and see if he came out. Failing that, she could speak to his neighbors and show them the picture of Steve that Charles had given her. One way or another she would establish that he was Steve’s double.

She got to Philadelphia around ten-thirty. In University City there were smartly dressed black families congregating outside the gospel churches and idle teenagers smoking on the stoops of the aging houses, but the students were still in bed, their presence betrayed only by rusty Toyotas and sagging Chevrolets with bumper stickers hailing college sports teams and local radio stations.

Harvey Jones’s building was a huge, ramshackle Victorian house divided into apartments. Jeannie found a parking slot across the street and watched the front door for a while.

At eleven o’clock she went in.

The building was hanging on grimly to the vestiges of respectability. A threadbare runner climbed the stairs wearily, and there were dusty plastic flowers in cheap vases on the window ledges. Neat paper notices, written in the cursive hand of an elderly woman, asked tenants to shut their doors quietly, put out their garbage in securely closed plastic sacks, and not let children play in the hallways.

He lives here, Jeannie thought, and her skin crawled. I wonder if he’s here now.

Harvey’s address was 5B, which had to be the top floor. She knocked on the first door on the ground floor. A bleary-eyed man with long hair and a tangled beard came to the door barefoot. She showed him the photo. He shook his head and slammed the door. She remembered the resident in Lisa’s building who had said to her, “Where do you think you are, lady—Hicksville, USA? I don’t even know what my neighbor looks like.”

She clenched her teeth and walked up four flights to the top of the house. There was a card in a little metal frame attached to the door of 5B, saying simply “Jones.” The door had no other features.

Jeannie stood outside, listening. All she could hear was the frightened beating of her heart. No sound came from inside. He probably was not there.