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I knew opening that red door would destroy my life.

Yes, that sounds melodramatic and full of foreboding and
I’m not big on either, and true, there was nothing menacing
about the red door. In fact, the door was beyond ordinary, wood and
four-paneled, the kind of door you see standing guard in front of
three out of every four suburban homes, with faded paint and a
knocker at chest level no one ever used and a faux brass knob.

But as I walked toward it, a distant streetlight barely
illuminating my way, the dark opening yawning like a mouth ready to
gobble me whole, the feeling of doom was unshakeable. Each step
forward took great effort as if I were walking not along a somewhat
crackled walk but through still-wet cement. My body displayed all
the classic symptoms of impending menace: Chill down my spine?
Check. Hairs standing up on my arms? Yep. Prickle at the base of
the neck? Present. Tingle in the scalp? Right there.

The house was dark, not a single light on. Chynna warned me that
would be the case. The dwelling somehow seemed a little too
cookie-cutter, a little too nondescript. That bothered me for some
reason. This house was also isolated at the tippy end of the
cul-de-sac, hunkering down in the darkness as though fending off
intruders.

I didn’t like it.

I didn’t like anything about this, but this is what I do.
When Chynna called I had just finished coaching the inner-city
fourth-grade Newark Biddy Basketball team. My team, all kids who,
like me, were products of foster care (we call ourselves the
NoRents, which is short for No Parents --- gallows humor), had
managed to blow a six-point lead with two minutes left. On the
court as in life, the NoRents aren’t great under
pressure.

Chynna called as I was gathering my young hoopsters for my
postgame pep talk, which usually consisted of giving my charges
some life-altering insight like “Good effort,”
“We’ll get them next time,” or “Don’t
forget we have a game next Thursday,” always ending with
“Hands in” and then we yell, “Defense,”
choosing to chant that word, I suppose, because we play none.

“Dan?”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Chynna. Please come.”

Her voice trembled, so I dismissed my team, jumped in my car,
and now I was here. I hadn’t even had time to shower. The
smell of gym sweat mixed now with the smell of fear sweat. I slowed
my pace.

What was wrong with me?

I probably should have showered, for one thing. I’m not
good without a shower. Never have been. But Chynna had been
adamant. Now, she had begged. Before anyone got home. So here I
was, my gray T-shirt darkened with perspiration and clinging to my
chest, heading to that door.

Like most youngsters I work with, Chynna was seriously troubled,
and maybe that was what was setting off the warning bells. I
hadn’t liked her voice on the phone, hadn’t really
warmed to this whole setup. Taking a deep breath, I glanced behind
me. In the distance, I could see some signs of life on this
suburban night --- house lights, a flickering television or maybe
computer monitor, an open garage door --- but in this cul-de-sac,
there was nothing, not a sound or movement, just a hush in the
dark.

My cell phone vibrated, nearly making me jump out of my skin. I
figured that it was Chynna, but no, it was Jenna, my ex-wife. I hit
answer and said, “Hey.”

“Can I ask a favor?” she asked.

“I’m a little busy right now.”

“I just need someone to babysit tomorrow night. You can
bring Shelly if you want.”

“Shelly and I are, uh, having trouble,” I said.

“Again? But she’s great for you.”

“I have trouble holding on to great women.”

“Don’t I know it.”

Jenna, my lovely ex, has been remarried for eight years. Her new
husband is a well-respected surgeon named Noel Wheeler. Noel does
volunteer work for me at the teen center. I like Noel and he likes
me. He has a daughter by a previous marriage, and he and Jenna have
a six-year-old girl named Kari. I’m Kari’s godfather,
and both kids call me Uncle Dan. I’m the family go-to
babysitter.

I know this all sounds very civilized and Pollyanna, and I
suppose it is. In my case, it could be simply a matter of
necessity. I have no one else --- no parents, no siblings --- ergo,
the closest thing I have to family is my ex-wife. The kids I work
with, the ones I advocate for and try to help and defend, are my
life, and in the end I’m not sure I do the slightest bit of
good.

Jenna said, “Earth to Dan?”

“I’ll be there,” I said to her.

“Six thirty. You’re the best.”

Jenna made a smooching noise into the mouthpiece and hung up. I
looked at the phone for a moment, remembered our own wedding day.
It was a mistake for me to get married. It is a mistake for me to
get too close to people, and yet I can’t help it. Someone cue
the violins so I can wax philosophical about how it is better to
have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. I don’t
think that applies to me. It is in humans’ DNA to repeat the
same mistakes, even after we know better. So here I am, the poor
orphan who scraped his way up to the top of his class at an elite
Ivy League school but never really scraped off who he was. Corny,
but I want someone in my life. Alas, that is not destiny. I am a
loner who isn’t meant to be alone.

“We are evolution’s refuse, Dan. . .
.”

My favorite foster “dad” taught me that. He was a
college professor who loved to get into philosophical debates.

“Think about it, Dan. Throughout mankind, the
strongest and brightest did what? They fought in wars. That only
stopped this past century. Before that, we sent our absolute best
to fight on the front lines. So who stayed home and reproduced
while our finest died on distant battlefields? The lame, the sick,
the weak, the crooked, the cowardly --- in short, the least of us.
That’s what we are the genetic byproduct of, Dan ---
millenniums of weeding out the premium and keeping the flotsam.
That’s why we are all garbage --- the worst leftovers from
centuries of bad breeding.”

I forgo the knocker and rapped on the door lightly with my
knuckles. The door creaked open a crack. I hadn’t realized
that it was ajar.

I didn’t like that either. A lot I didn’t like
here.

As a kid, I watched a lot of horror movies, which was strange
because I hated them. I hated things jumping out at me. And I
really couldn’t stand movie gore. But I would still watch
them and revel in the predictably moronic behavior of the heroines,
and right now those scenes were replaying in my head, the ones
where said moronic heroine knocks on a door and it opens a little
and you scream, “Run, you scantily clad bimbo!” and she
wouldn’t and you couldn’t understand it and two minutes
later, the killer would be scooping out her skull and munching on
her brain.

I should go right now.

In fact, I will. But then I flashed back to Chynna’s call,
to the words she’d said, the trembling in her voice. I
sighed, leaned my face toward the opening, peered into the
foyer.

Darkness.

Enough with the cloak and dagger.

“Chynna?”

My voice echoed. I expected silence. That would be the next
step, right? No reply. I slip the door open a little, take a
tentative step forward . . .

“Dan? I’m in the back. Come in.”

The voice was muffled, distant. Again I didn’t like this,
but there was no way I was backing out now. Backing out had cost me
too much throughout my life. My hesitation was gone. I knew what
had to be done now.

I opened the door, stepped inside, and closed the door behind
me.

Others in my position would have brought a gun or some kind of
weapon. I had thought about it. But that just doesn’t work
for me. No time to worry about that now. No one was home. Chynna
had told me that. And if they were, well, I would handle that when
the moment came.

“Chynna?”

“Go to the den, I’ll be there in a
second.”

The voice sounded . . . off. I saw a light at the end of the
hall and moved toward it. There was a noise now. I stopped and
listened. Sounded like water running. A shower maybe.

“Chynna?”

“Just changing. Out in a second.”

I moved into the low-lit den. I saw one of those dimmer switch
knobs and debated turning it up, but in the end I chose to leave it
alone. My eyes adjusted pretty quickly. The room had cheesy wood
paneling that looked as if it was made from something far closer to
vinyl than anything in the timber family. There were two portraits
of sad clowns with huge flowers on their lapels, the kind of
painting you might pick up at a particularly tacky motel’s
garage sale. There was a giant open bottle of no-name vodka on the
bar.

I thought I heard somebody whisper.

“Chynna?” I called out.

No answer. I stood, listened for more whispering. Nothing.

I started toward the back, toward where I heard the shower
running.

“I’ll be right out,” I heard the voice say. I
pulled up, felt a chill. Because now I was closer to the voice. I
could hear it better. And here was the thing I found particularly
strange about it:

It didn’t sound at all like Chynna.

Three things tugged at me. One, panic. This wasn’t Chynna.
Get out of the house. Two, curiosity. If it wasn’t Chynna,
who the hell was it and what was going on? Three, panic again. It
had been Chynna on the phone --- so what had happened to her?

I couldn’t just run out now.

I took one step toward where I’d come in, and that was
when it all happened.

A spotlight snapped on in my face, blinding me. I stumbled back,
hand coming up to my face.

“Dan Mercer?”

I blinked. Female voice. Professional. Deep tone. Sounded oddly
familiar.

“Who’s there?”

Suddenly there were other people in the room. A man with a
camera. Another with what looked liked a boom mike. And the female
with the familiar voice, a stunning woman with chestnut brown hair
and a business suit.

“Wendy Tynes, Eyewitness News. Why are you here,
Dan?”

I opened my mouth, nothing came out. I recognized the woman from
that TV newsmagazine . . .

“Why have you been conversing online in a sexual manner
with a thirteen year-old girl, Dan? We have your communications
with her.”

. . . the one that sets up and catches pedophiles on camera for
all the world to see.

“Are you here to have sex with a twelve-year-old
girl?”

The truth of what was going on here hits me, freezing my bones.
Other people flooded the room. Producers maybe. Another cameraman.
Two cops. The cameras come in closer. The lights get brighter.
Beads of sweat pop up on my brow. I start to stammer, start to
deny.

But it’s over.

Two days later, the show airs. The world sees.

And the life of Dan Mercer, just as I somehow knew when I
approached that door, is destroyed.

* * *

When Marcia McWaid first saw her daughter’s empty bed,
panic did not set in. That would come later.

She had woken up at six am, early for Saturday morning, feeling
pretty terrific. Ted, her husband of twenty years, slept in the bed
next to her. He lay on his stomach, his arm around her waist. Ted
liked to sleep with a shirt on and no pants. None. Nude from the
waist down. “Gives my man down there room to roam,” he
would say with a smirk. And Marcia, imitating her daughters’
teenage singsong tone, would say, “T-M-I” --- Too Much
Information.

Marcia slipped out of his grip and padded down to the kitchen.
She made herself a cup of coffee with the new Keurig pod machine.
Ted loved gadgets --- boys and their toys --- but this one actually
got some use. You take the pod, you stick it in the machine ---
presto, coffee. No video screens, no touch pad, no wireless
connectivity. Marcia loved it.

They’d recently finished an addition on the house --- one
extra bedroom, one bathroom, the kitchen knocked out a bit with a
glassed-in nook. The kitchen nook offered oodles of morning sun and
had thus become Marcia’s favorite spot in the house. She took
her coffee and the newspaper and set herself on the window seat
folding her feet beneath her.

A small slice of heaven.

She let herself read the paper and sip her coffee. In a few
minutes she would have to check the schedule. Ryan, her third
grader, had the early Hoops Basketball game at eight am. Ted
coached. His team was winless for the second straight season.

“Why do your teams never win?” Marcia had asked
him.

“I draft the kids based on two criteria.”

“That being?”

“How nice the father --- and how hot the mom.”

She had slapped at him playfully and maybe Marcia would have
been somewhat concerned if she hadn’t seen the moms on the
sideline and knew, for certain, that he had to be joking. Ted was
actually a great coach, not in terms of strategy but in terms of
handling the boys. They all loved him and his lack of competiveness
so that even the untalented players, the ones who were usually
discouraged and quit during the season, showed up every week. Ted
even took the Bon Jovi song and turned it around, “You give
losing a good name.” The kids would laugh and cheer every
basket and when you’re in third grade that’s how it
should be.

Marcia’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Patricia, had
rehearsal for the freshman play, an abridged version of the musical
Les Miserables. She had several small parts, but that
didn’t seem to affect the workload. And her oldest child,
Haley, the high school senior, was running a “captain’s
practice” for the girls’ lacrosse team. Captain’s
practices were unofficial, a way to sneak in early practices under
the guidelines issued by high school sports. In short, no coaches,
nothing official, just a casual gathering, glorified pickup games
if you will, run by the captains.

Like most suburban parents, Marcia had a love-hate relationship
with sports. She knew the relative long-term irrelevancy and yet
still managed to get caught up in it.

A half hour of peace to start the day. That was all she
needed.

She finished the first cup, pod-made herself a second, picked up
the “Styles” section of the paper. The house remained
silent. She padded upstairs and looked over her charges. Ryan slept
on his side, his face conveniently facing the door so that his
mother could notice the echo of his father.

Patricia’s room was next. She too was still sleeping.

“Honey?”

Patricia stirred, might have made a noise. Her room, like
Ryan’s, looked as if someone had strategically placed sticks
of dynamite in the drawers, blowing them open; some clothes
sprawled dead on the floor, others lay wounded midway, clinging to
the armoire like the fallen on a barricade before the French
Revolution.

“Patricia? You have rehearsal in an hour.”

“I’m up,” she groaned in a voice that
indicated she was anything but. Marcia moved to the next room,
Haley’s, and took a quick peek.

The bed was empty.

It was also made, but that was no surprise. Unlike her
siblings’ abodes, this one was neat, clean, anally organized.
It could be a showroom in a furniture store. There were no clothes
on this floor, every drawer fully closed. The trophies --- and
there were many --- were perfectly aligned on four shelves. Ted had
put in the fourth shelf just recently, after Haley’s team had
won the holiday tournament in Franklin Lakes. Haley had
painstakingly divided up the trophies among the four shelves, not
wanting the new one to have only one. Marcia was not sure why
exactly. Part of it was because Haley didn’t want it to look
like she was just waiting for more to come, but more of it was her
general abhorrence to disorganization. She kept each trophy
equidistant from the others, moving them closer together as more
came in, three inches separating them, then two, then one. Haley
was about balance. She was the good girl and while that was a
wonderful thing --- a girl who was ambitious, did her homework
without being asked, never wanted others to think badly of her,
ridiculously competitive --- there was a tightly wound aspect, a
quasi-OCD quality, that worried Marcia.

Marcia wondered what time Haley had gotten home. Haley
didn’t have a curfew anymore because there had simply never
been a need. She was responsible and a senior and never took
advantage. Marcia had been tired and gone up to sleep at ten. Ted,
in his constant state of “randy,” soon followed
her.

Marcia was about to move on, let it go, when something, she
couldn’t say what, made her decide to throw in a load of
laundry. She started toward Haley’s bathroom. The younger
siblings, Ryan and Patricia, believed that “hamper” was
a euphemism for “floor” or really “anyplace but
the hamper,” but Haley, of course, dutifully, religiously,
and nightly put the clothes she’d worn that day into the
hamper. And that was when Marcia started to feel a small rock form
in her chest.

There were no clothes in the hamper.

The rock in her chest grew when Marcia checked Haley’s
toothbrush, then the sink and shower.

All bone-dry.

The rock grew when she called out to Ted, trying to keep the
panic out of her voice. It grew when they drove to captain’s
practice and found out that Haley had never showed. It grew when
she called Haley’s friends while Ted sent out an e-mail blast
--- and no one knew where Haley was. It grew when they called the
local police, who, despite Marcia’s and Ted’s
protestations, believed that Haley was a runaway, a kid blowing off
some steam. It grew when, forty-eight hours later, the FBI was
brought in. It grew when there was still no sign of Haley after a
week.

It was as if the earth had swallowed her whole.

A month passed. Nothing. Then two. Still no word. And then
finally, during the third month, word came --- and the rock that
had grown in Marcia’s chest, the one that wouldn’t let
her breathe and kept her up nights, stopped growing.

Excerpted from CAUGHT © Copyright 2010 by Harlan Coben.
Reprinted with permission by Dutton Adult. All rights reserved.

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