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Praise for The Request

“Fast-paced and thrilling, with twists at every turn, The Request kept me guessing until its satisfying conclusion.”

—Catherine McKenzie, author of I’ll Never Tell

“David Bell more than delivers on the shocking premise of The Request, which is a gripping exploration of guilt, loyalty, and desperation. [It] combines complex characters, social commentary, and expertly meted-out plot twists that will keep readers guessing—and gasping—until the final page. Bell is a master.”

—Robyn Harding, international bestselling author of The Party

More praise for the work of David Bell

“[Bell is] a bang-up storyteller, armed with enough detours and surprises to keep the pages turning.”

—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“David Bell is a definite natural storyteller and a first-class writer.”

—Suspense Magazine

“Filled with twists and turns. . . . Bell is a master of suspense with well-fleshed-out characters.”

—Midwest Book Review

“[A] twisty, realistic thriller. . . . [Bell] is a skilled storyteller.”

—Houston Chronicle

“A tale straight out of the psychological thriller territory blazed by the likes of Harlan Coben and Lisa Gardner.”

—The Providence Journal

ALSO BY DAVID BELL

Cemetery Girl

The Hiding Place

Never Come Back

The Forgotten Girl

Somebody I Used to Know

Since She Went Away

Bring Her Home

Somebody’s Daughter

Layover

Dedication

For Molly

PROLOGUE

Of all the things I never thought I’d say about my life, there is this—I have a blackmailer.

The blackmail started for a simple reason—I was guilty.

And over the years the guilt has taken a strong hold of me. Like a giant iron fist.

I used to do things differently. Before the blackmailing started.

I used to hand over the money voluntarily. And on my own schedule. I would head to my bank branch and withdraw a couple hundred dollars from the savings account Amanda and I share. Once, after I received a one-thousand-dollar bonus at the PR firm where I worked, I handed the entire amount over. I always placed the crisp stack of cash in a manila envelope. I wrapped the envelope with tape, making sure it was secure and tight, and I drove thirty minutes away from my home and arrived in another town, where I traced the familiar path to a modest two-story house in an old subdivision.

Sometimes I arrived before daylight, telling Amanda I had an early meeting in my office. Other times I rolled up to the house late at night, headlights off, radio silent, claiming a social obligation from work or having made some other plausible excuse.

In those days, before everything else happened, Amanda never questioned me. She believed what I told her.

I always found the house dark, the porch light extinguished. I quickly pulled open the mailbox that sat at the end of the driveway, felt the coolness of the morning or night air against my face, slipped the envelope inside, closed the mailbox tight, and drove off. I’d mastered the smooth transaction, accomplishing my task in mere seconds.

I didn’t write on the envelope. Or leave a note.

But otherwise I did nothing to conceal my identity. It was there if someone wanted to find it.

My fingerprints were on the envelope, the tape, the money. My DNA was on the flap I licked.

I knew for a fact the family was getting the money.

I knew because just six weeks ago, the local paper ran a story. It detailed the anonymous gifts of cash that appeared randomly in the mailbox. The article’s author theorized that the person leaving the money was a Good Samaritan, someone moved by the plight of the family and the medical expenses related to the accident six years earlier that left their middle daughter with permanent disabilities and their youngest daughter dead. In the story, the family explained that the cash helped keep them afloat when times were tough by allowing them to purchase much-needed medical supplies or household items.

“We have insurance,” the father said in the article. “And the government helps some. But it’s never enough. These envelopes are a godsend.”

He went on to say they were initially reluctant to tell anyone about the money. More than anything else, they worried the publicity might scare off the anonymous donor. Clearly this person didn’t want attention or recognition of any kind.

But eventually the family couldn’t stand not saying anything.

They wanted the donor to know how much they appreciated what he or she was doing for them. They wanted the donor to know how much the money helped.

And they insisted they would never test the envelope for fingerprints or DNA. They would never set up a hidden camera to try to catch the person in the act.

And if the donor ever stopped leaving the money for any reason, they would understand. He or she had already been more generous than anyone could have imagined.

“I truly believe the person who gives us this money is an angel,” the mother said. “I know it sounds corny to say that in this day and age, but I really believe it’s an angel.”

—

Just under a month ago, I got caught.

Not by the police. Not by the media.

And not by Amanda.

No, I got caught by the family’s eldest daughter, the one who wasn’t quoted in the article about the anonymous angelic donations.

I’d been reluctant to go back and make another delivery. I feared that the article might have stirred up too much attention and might drive someone—another reporter, a neighbor, a random fame seeker who wanted something to brag about on social media—to stake the place out and catch me. Over time, my guilt grew greater than my fear. And I went back with another envelope.

After I dropped it off and was two miles from their house, a car pulled alongside me on the empty road. The sky was gray, just lightening toward sunrise. No one else was out.

At first I ignored the driver, but they paced me, and then made an aggressive move—increasing their speed, pulling ahead, and cutting over into my lane so I had no choice but to slow and then stop unless I wanted to go into the culvert that ran on my right.

The other driver stopped as well, blocking me in and allowing me no path forward.

I sat frozen in the car, my hands gripping the wheel. I was ready to slam the car into reverse and back up, turn around if I had to.

But then the driver stepped out. Instead of a cop or a menacing figure, I saw a woman about my age. She wore a long-sleeve T-shirt and jeans. Running shoes. Her dirty blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she walked briskly toward my car, her stride long and confident. She twirled her finger, telling me to roll down the window. Which I did.

“Is everything okay?” I asked. “Are you hurt?”

“Just listen,” she said. She spoke in clipped sentences, her voice husky, with a trace of a Kentucky accent. “You know who I am, right?”

I hadn’t seen her photo in six years. But the face wasn’t that different. A few smile lines around the eyes. A few gray strands in the hair. But it was her.

Dawn Steiner. The elder sister of Maggie and Emily Steiner. Maggie was killed in the accident, and Emily was left with a permanent injury to her leg, one that hindered her ability to walk and work.

My heart thumped. Triple time. The morning was cool, but beads of sweat popped out on my forehead like I was a sick man.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“Shhh. You know me, then. And I know you. So, like I said, just listen.”

Her tone was flat as the road. Calm. Clear. Precise.

“I need money. I need my cut of what you have. In fact, I need more than that. I lost a sister here. And what you give to my parents . . . Let’s just say it doesn’t trickle down to me. And I have things I need the money for. I have obligations to keep up with. And you seem to be doing just fine. Help me out, and I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

“About the money?”

“About why you do this at all. My parents believe what they want to believe about their anonymous Good Samaritan. It helps them deal with the shit sandwich they’ve been given to eat. They can open up the envelope of money when it shows up, and they can turn to each other and say, ‘See, the world’s not such a bad place.’ But I’m not like that.”

“I’m going to go.”

“You’ll stay. You’ll listen. See, I had to ask myself, my cynical self, why would someone give money to my family this way? If you wanted to help them out, you could just donate to the fund that was set up after the accident. No, whoever is coming in the middle of the night and leaving money is up to something else. And what could that be?” She snapped her fingers. “Guilt. That’s the only explanation. Someone with a lot of guilt. A lot. Now, your friend Aaron, the one who went to prison, he’s done his time. And his life on the outside can’t be that great. He couldn’t just go around like Santa, leaving goodies for a struggling family.” She shook her head, a look of amusement on her face. “And your friend, the other one? The rich guy? What’s his name?”

“Leave my friends out of it.”

“One look at him and you can see he wouldn’t give his money to somebody. He’s a jerk through and through. He looks like the type to have an accident. Not the type to care if anyone got hurt. And not the type to feel guilt.”

“You’re wrong,” I said. “I’m just trying to help. You can’t conclude anything from my gesture.”

“I can’t? Okay. I’ll go to the police and the press and tell them it’s you leaving the money. I’ll tell them there’s something fishy about the accident. You riding in the backseat of your own car. They’ll want to look into that now that the story is back on everybody’s minds. If you want to take the chance that they open it back up, I’ll go do it.”

She turned to go, her movements possessing a military crispness.

“Wait.” Heavy resignation pressed down on me, like bricks piled on my back. “I don’t know what you want.”

She told me the amount. Ten thousand dollars.

And she told me she needed it in one month. Thirty days.

“That’s the deadline. Thirty days. Round up the money or I go to the police and the media and tell them you’ve been leaving the envelopes. From there . . . like I said, they’ll start digging into everything in your life. You’re a pretty well-known guy in this town. It could be embarrassing for that kind of thing to hit the news.”

“You’re asking for too much. Far too much. I can’t come up with that much money on such short notice. I have a family. And we just . . .” It sounded silly to mention it in contrast to her lost and injured sisters. But I said it anyway. “We’re having work done on our house this spring. I put down a deposit. That was a lot of what we had saved.”

Dawn gave me a stare as cold as ice. She used her left fist and rapped on the hood of the car twice. “Cry me a river. I think you’ll find a way. I don’t believe you have a choice. Ten thousand. Thirty days.”

She drove off, leaving me sitting in the road as the sun came up. Just like that—I had a blackmailer.

I thought back to that article, the one in which Dawn’s mother had called me an angel.

—

Everything I’m about to tell you proves how wrong she was. . . .

CHAPTER ONE

“Ryan.”

Someone called my name. I was leaving the Juniper Pig and stepping into the parking lot, heading for my car. The voice that came through the dark was sharp and husky, a knife swipe through the night, and I jumped.

I couldn’t tell if a man or a woman had spoken.

After work I’d stopped by the Pig, the microbrewery I’d owned a small stake in for the last sixteen months. I was one of three partners, and my contribution had been the smallest, but we took turns going by in the evenings to see how things were running. And that night was my turn.

I hadn’t wanted to stop by the bar. Amanda was waiting at home with our baby, Henry, and thinking of seeing them made my stomach flutter with anticipation and joy. My time away from them felt longer than the hours that passed on the clock, and returning to them every evening was sweet relief. Since Henry had been born, I’d been trying hard to curb my tendency to overwork. But it wasn’t easy. Since my dad died while I was in college, leaving my mother and me high and dry, I’d been compelled to keep going forward, to keep pushing at work. . . .

I hoped Henry would change that. I hoped I could slow down.

But a shadowy figure came toward me in the darkness, freezing my progress. The person was short, the face in shadow.

It was early April, the air still cool, the days still lengthening. I waited, watching. I’d just posted to my Instagram account, sharing a photo of the beer I’d just sampled, one of our brewers’ latest concoctions, the HopPig IPA.

“Who is that?” I asked.

“Ryan?”

Dawn Steiner? Her deadline loomed that week, just two days away, but I hadn’t seen or heard from her since that morning almost a month ago. And I’d made almost no progress on finding the money for her. Had she decided to come looking for me?

But then I saw who it was and slipped my phone back into my pocket.

“Is that really you?” I asked the figure still standing in the shadows of the building. Relieved.

He stepped closer, moving into the crisp light that spilled from the windows of the Pig. “It’s me,” he said. “Indeed.”

Blake Norton. My best friend from college. And also my most challenging. He was loyal, fun, and charming. He was immature, reckless, and juvenile. He was Butch Cassidy crossed with Bluto from Animal House.

I hadn’t seen him in six months, even though we lived in the same small city, Rossingville, Kentucky. He held out his hand, and we shook.

Blake looked thinner, healthier, like maybe he’d dropped fifteen or twenty pounds. His face was less puffy. I wondered if he’d stopped drinking and started exercising more, if he was on one of his periodic health kicks. He was shorter than me by two inches, and he wore a neatly trimmed beard. His shoulder-length hair was off his face and combed into place for a change, and his flannel shirt appeared to be free of stains, the sleeves rolled to his elbows with a measure of precision.

“Why are you skulking around in the parking lot?” I asked.

I realized I was happy to see him. Years of friendship, countless memories big and small, and an endless supply of fierce loyalty brought a smile to my face.

“Skulking.” He smiled as well. “I could always count on you to come up with a ten-dollar word like ‘skulking.’”

“I got one of those calendars for Christmas,” I said, “the kind that gives you a new word every day. Today’s was ‘skulking.’”

Blake shook his head. “No, you know all the fancy words. You always have. I remember you were an English major when we started college. You switched to marketing later, but I know what your real passion was.”

“You know why I switched to something more reliable as well as I do,” I said. “I minored in English. And before Henry was born, I read a lot. And you’re still not answering my question.”

Blake turned to the side, his brown lace-up boots scraping against the gravel of the lot as he did. He looked at the Pig, then faced me again. “I shouldn’t go in there. Too much temptation.”

“You quit drinking?” I asked.

“I stopped drinking. I’ll never quit.” He shrugged. “It’s been about six weeks now.”

“That’s good. I’m glad to hear it.”

“Yeah. It is. I even joined a gym.” He held up his right arm and flexed, even though there was no way to see anything beneath the shirt. “Bright-eyed. Bushy-tailed. That’s me.”

“A gym? You couldn’t run twenty feet in college.”

“Ten if I was lucky. And that was only if someone was giving away beer or pizza.”

I laughed. “True enough. Well, I’m happy for you.”

Cars passed on the street, their headlights making us squint. The air smelled like rain, and some thick clouds obscured the early-emerging stars. I wore a denim jacket but felt a shiver as the wind kicked up.

Blake pointed across the street to the coffee shop. “I was hoping we could talk. Just a few minutes. I know they don’t sell anything stronger than caffeine over there.”

I checked the time on my Apple watch. Amanda expected me. And I really wanted to get home before Henry went to sleep. Being home for his bedtime mattered to me. A great deal. Taking part in the bedtime ritual helped ease my sense of missing out during the long hours I was away at work.

“I can’t,” I said. “Really, I just can’t. Amanda’s been with Henry all day, and I already got delayed here. One of our servers is going through a breakup, and he wanted my advice. That took longer than I expected. You know how seriously college kids take breakups. How about lunch tomorrow? That would work a lot better.”

“I know, I know. You’ve got a family now. And you’re dedicated. And juggling a lot. I get it. And I know these kids who work here look at you like you’re their sensitive big brother. I’m sure they bring you their problems all the time.”

“It happens. They’re away from home. They have crises. . . .”

But he started shaking his head. “But I kind of need this. It’s an emergency.”

“An emergency? What are you talking about?”

But he simply pointed across the street. And smiled, a look I recognized and remembered well. The look said, Come on. You’re going to want to hear this.

It was certainly tough to say no to an old friend. And it was tough to say no to Blake. Sometimes it felt like he could convince anyone of anything. And while I’d learned over the years to recognize when he was stretching the truth or attempting to lead me down some path I shouldn’t take, a part of me always felt a little thrill at the thought of taking the ride.

Blake knew me so well. And he knew so much about me.

What emergency was he contending with tonight? Six months since we’d last talked and he looked like a man transformed?

“Ten minutes,” I said, pointing at the watch. “Talk fast when we get there.”

He nodded, and we went to the curb, waiting for a break in the passing traffic, and then crossed the street side by side like when we were in college, doing every damn thing together.

CHAPTER TWO

The place was called the Ground Floor, and the weeknight crowd was light. Most of the students from the state university in town went to a coffee shop near campus, one run by some recent graduates. The bell dinged over our heads as we pushed through the glass door, and Blake stepped aside, allowing an elderly couple to pass. They thanked him, and Blake gave them his brightest smile.

“You two go straight home now,” he said. “And don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“We’re too old for that,” the woman said, placing her hand on Blake’s arm.

“I doubt that,” he said, leaning in a little.

And they all laughed.

The Ground Floor catered to a professional crowd, one that came in early in the morning and during the afternoon and then drifted away when the sun went down. But I stopped in there from time to time since it was across the street from the Pig, and it seemed neighborly to support each other’s businesses. And I also knew the Ground Floor because my small PR firm had helped the shop with a branding campaign two years earlier. One of our designers had redone their logo, giving it a more modern look, and while I hadn’t worked on that job, I figured anyone who gave business to our slowly growing outfit deserved to receive my coffee patronage.

At the counter I ordered an Americano while Blake opted for a blend, and we settled in at an isolated table in a corner of the room. Al Stewart’s “Time Passages” played overhead, and the steamer hissed as it blew froth behind the counter. I loved the rich smell of the roasting beans, the lingering scent of the pastries baked that morning. I pulled out my phone and texted Amanda, telling her I was delayed but wouldn’t be long. It took a lot of willpower, but I ignored the flurry of notifications that came up, real-time responses to my beer photo from the Pig and a post from earlier in the day, a shot I’d taken of Henry being bathed.

Be there soon.

And as soon as I hit SEND and heard the swooshing sound of the text heading her way, I wished I’d just told Blake no, that I’d stuck to just going to lunch with him.

But he’d used the word “emergency.” Why?

I had my suspicions. When we’d met in college, we quickly settled into roles. Blake was wild, and I was serious. I studied too much, and Blake would get me to loosen up.

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