First Published: 2001
Beck and Elizabeth have been very close since they met at the age of seven.
They fell in love and some months ago, they got married. They first kissed when they were in a camp which belongs to Beck's family, and they have a tradition: leave a notch under the engraved initials of their names in a tree. That is what they do a few months after their marriage. After they leave their mark in the tree, they go for a swim. Elizabeth leaves the lake, and Beck, who is sitll swimming, hears her scream, and he tries to go to her, but he is hit in the head and is left unconscious.
Eight years later Beck is a paediatrician in New Jersey. It is the day before the anniversary of Elizabeth's death. Shauna, his sister's partner and Beck's good friend, takes him to lunch and asks him to go and spend time with her and his nephew, and Beck agrees to go after visiting Elizabeth's parents. That afternoon Beck gets a strange email. It contains his and Elizabeth's initials, and twently-one slashes, which copy the notches which should be in the tree if Elizabeth were alive. There is a hyperlink, but when Beck clicks on it, it sends a message of error, and it says 'kissing time', and Beck remembers that for him and Elizabeth kissing time was 6.15, so he thinks that he needs to access the link the next day at that time.
Sheriff Lowell comes to see him. He is the one who led the investigation into Elizabeth's death. The man who killed her, Killroy, is behind bars, and now Lowell says that they have found the bodies of two males near the lake where Elizabeth was attacked, and there are a few things they have found, but Lowell refuses to give any details.
The next day Beck is before the computer and opens the email. Lowell calls him to ask him if he knows someone by the name of Sarah Goodhart, and as he has accessed the link, he tells the sheriff he will get back to him. The link takes him to a video showing a busy street, and then a woman appears, wearing a cap, and when she looks at the camera, Beck is shocked to discover that it is Elizabeth, and then she goes. When he tries to access again, there is again the message of error, and then he gets a new email with a new link and a new time, and the message warns him not to tell anyone as he is being watched.
Then Beck remembers Lowell's question and the name, Sarah Goodhart. He and Elizabeth had a silly game of using their second name and the name of their street, and Sarah Goodhart is actually the name that Elizabeth used. Beck tries to call the sheriff but the line is engaged. Beck keeps thinking about the image of the woman on the video. He knows that Elizabeth is dead. He didn't identify the body; it was her father and uncle, but there is no reason to think that they made a mistake.
Apart from this main story, there is a subplot in which a man called Vic Letty has picked up an envelope with money from a safe deposit box. He works for cable television, and using the knowledge of the porn films the clients watch, he blackmails them, but if they do not pay, he doesn't do anything against them. We know that his last victim was someone powerful, Randall Slope. Now on returning to his flat, he finds two strangers, and he is asked if he works with someone else. As he denies working with more people, he is shot several times until he is dead. The killers, we discover later, are Larry Gandle and Eric Wu, and we know that they work for the Slope family. Gandle receives a call, informing that Bob and Mel's bodies have been discovered, so this means these are the men the police have found close to the lake.
Intense start for this mystery. I imagine that Elizabeth's disappearance is connected to the Slopes. Is she actually alive? If so, how come her father identified her dead body? If she is not alive, who is the woman Beck saw on the video?
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