Tell No One

Elizabeth’s image the last time David sees her at the lake, “long, graceful neck, the steady green eyes, the dark hair braided like thick rope down her back” (5), is etched on his memory. At 5’4 and about 115 pounds, Elizabeth cuts a poised and determined figure with “that titanium spine” (4). However, her ability to change her image is important evidence that she is not a ghost. For example, when David sees her on the sky camera, she has aged and wears a “fashionably short cut” (47). She also changes her looks with wigs and facial implants to disguise herself from her pursuers. Personality wise, Elizabeth is brave and intelligent, and she possesses a strong sense of social justice. She works as an attorney who defends the rights of poor and disadvantaged people. This is most apparent when she gives serial offender Helio Gonzalez an alibi for the murder of Brandon Scope because she believes “in the redemption for the street-hardened and morally anesthetized” (241). Her refusal to go along with her father’s plan to frame Helio means that she puts the spotlight back on herself. Ultimately, Elizabeth’s love for David is the predominant influence in her life, and she prefers to live a life of exile with him, rather than fighting all the injustices of the world alone.

Physically, ex-cop Hoyt Parker “is a burly, strong man. Rock-solid, honest Americana” (55) who always protected his daughter, Elizabeth. By the end of the novel, he looks old and broken with “the sagging skin, the thinning hair, the softening gut, the still-impressive but eroding frame” (313). His function in the narrative is his intentional false identification of Elizabeth’s body at the morgue, his murder of the two men at the lake, and his insider knowledge of Scope and his people. His type of rugged masculinity serves as a counterpoint to David’s softer, more modern type. Hoyt only confides in his brother Ken and subsists on allegiances rather than friendships. For example, Hoyt is ruthless about turning on Stephen Beck when it serves him better to align himself with the Scopes. Nevertheless, his self-interest reaches its limits when it comes to his beloved daughter, and he would rather frame himself for what he believes to be her crime of killing Brandon Scope. Killing both himself and Griffin, in his final act of bravado, “Hoyt Parker had died a hero” (344). 

David’s sister, Linda Beck, is a quieter figure than her partner, Shauna. Nevertheless, Linda plays an important role in the narrative because she heads Brandon Scope’s charitable fund. She is the one who took the pictures of Elizabeth when she was assaulted by Scope. Linda also followed Elizabeth’s advice to keep the news secret and continued to do so on the counsel of Hoyt Parker, after Elizabeth’s death. Linda is a passive figure who loves her brother and would rather that he keeps himself safe, rather than endangering himself.

A plus-size model at 6’1 and 190 pounds, Shauna stalks “into a room as though it offends her” (12). Shauna is a happy adopted mother to Mark, yet her relationship with Linda is stormy, and she cannot help being discontented with monogamy and domesticity. Although indirectly related to David, she is a closer confidante for him than Linda and the only one he tells about the Elizabeth apparitions. A big personality, Shauna takes the initiative to secure David hot-shot criminal lawyer Hester Crimstein and makes the effort to take him to Farrell Lynch, who demonstrates the workings of manipulated digital photography and age progression software. However, Coben creates a sense of drama, when an incredulous Shauna is confronted with the anomalies of Elizabeth’s autopsy and the first sighting of Elizabeth in person.

Special Agent Nick Carlson is first introduced with his colleague Tom Stone, wears a buzz cut and grey suit, and is initially the long thin white “pin” to Stone’s “bowling ball” (75). While Stone and the other officers in the novelare eager to frame David for the murders of Elizabeth and Rebecca Schayes, fastidious Carlson, “a neat man, orderly to the point of obsessive compulsive,” is troubled by the way the evidence fails to “mesh” (203). Going rogue from the other investigators, he is the one who investigates the contents of Elizabeth’s safe-box under the name Sarah Goodhart, which has been paid for eight years, regardless of the alleged fact of the owner’s death. He is also the one who discovered the gun that shot Brandon Scope was the one David inherited from his father and runs a forensic analysis on the bullet. As the novel is reaching a close, Carlson claims he is “not sure anymore” (293) when David asks him whether he thinks he is a killer. It is never explicitly stated that Carlson knows of David’s guilt, although he has all of the evidence. Although the reader never learns exactly why David and Elizabeth are living in exile at the end of the novel, they might speculate that Carlson’s findings have something to do with it. 

Hot-shot criminal lawyer Hester Crimstein is a caricature of a famous bossy criminal defense lawyer and even has her own TV show, Crimstein On Crime. She stamps into the room, being “quick and cutting” to the point that she leaves people “in tatters” (86). Her speech is peppered with imperatives, as she gives orders to both David and the other officers. Nevertheless, neither Shauna who hires her nor David fully confide in her, and she abandons David when he runs away from the police and fails to cooperate with her plan. The invincible Hester’s inability to defend David serves to highlight the extraordinariness of the case, which cannot be resolved in the usual way.

The Boogeyman who scared the Beck children when they were younger, Jeremiah Renway is the Lake Charmaine recluse who witnessed the events that night at the lake eight years ago. His appearance is otherworldly, as “his thick beard looked like a robin’s nest after a crow attack. His hair was long and matted. His clothes were tattered camouflage” (323). He has been a recluse since 1970 when he set off a life-taking explosion in Eastern State University’s chemistry lab. He saved David’s life at the lake eight years ago and is the one who dug up the bodies of Bartola and Wolf, as an act of “redemption” (325) for his past wrongs and former silence.

Tyrese Barton is the 25-year-old drugdealer father of one of David’s hemophiliac young patients, TJ. Tyrese typically wears “butt-plunge baggy pants and what looked like an oversized varsity jacket, all done by some designer [David] never heard of but soon would” (93). He drives around in a BMW with black-shaded windows, accompanied by his enormous, silent friend Brutus. Nevertheless, Tyrese is loyal and tender-hearted, remembering anyone who does him a favor and wanting the best for his son’s future. He expresses his gratitude to David, who saves TJ’s life, by agreeing to grant him any favor that he needs. Tyrese fulfils this promise when he rescues and defends David from Scope’s clan and ferries him around incognito in a BMW with tinted windows. The unlikely alliance is one that serves to dispel stereotypes of David as the lily-white, law-abiding citizen and Tyrese as a typical amoral drugdealer. 

Elizabeth’s closest friend and one-time roommate, Rebecca Schayes, is the prime casualty of David’s search for Elizabeth. Rebecca is a leading freelance photographer with “unruly sabra locks, her fiery hair curling angrily and flowing freely. Her eyes were wide apart and green” (97), and she appears unchanged to David in eight years. However, Rebecca, now married to banker Gary Lamont, has sacrificed elements of her bohemian lifestyle and is ready to move to the suburbs to start a family. She is reluctant to talk to David about Elizabeth’s alleged car accident, which led to the latter being battered and bruised.

Just at the moment where Rebecca is thinking of moving out of the city to Sands Point and opting for a lifestyle of family security, Gandle and Wu encroach on her studio and kill her. Their ruthless actions indicate that Rebecca may know something related to Elizabeth and Brandon Scope. While the reader cannot be certain of what Rebecca actually knows, her death is a reference point for framing David as a killer, given the proximity of his visit.

Named for a griffin, a mythological creature that has the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion, Griffin Scope is indeed described by Hoyt Parker as being “one of those mythical beasts where you cut off the head and it grows two more” (305-306) because he is rich, powerful, and connected to a vast network of hit-men. The idea of Griffin as a multi-headed beast is also appropriate because almost every character in the novel—from Linda who works at the charitable foundation, to David who benefited from the Scope scholarship foundation, to Elizabeth who worked at Brandon’s side, to Hoyt, who is on the Scope payroll—is connected to the Scopes. It is difficult for the characters to take Scope down because they are dependent on his goodwill.

Nevertheless, in person, Griffin has a respectable, colonial British image, with a “perfect copper-penny silhouette” (262) and his immaculate tailoring from Hong Kong. He also is a gifted leader, “a backslap buy-you-a-drink compadre who had the rare ability to walk the tightrope between friend and employer” (340). Beyond the veneer of respectability, Griffin is ruthless in the lengths he goes to cover up the truth about his criminal son, Brandon, hiring Gandle and Wu to take out anyone who may threaten Brandon’s reputation and therefore his own. Griffin’s selfishness is juxtaposed with his tenderness as a grieving father, who tries to “bargain with God, offering him anything and everything if he’ll somehow make Brandon alive” (264). When this cannot happen, Griffin will settle for the reassurance that Elizabeth, Stephen, and anyone who knows the truth about Brandon is dead.