Far From True

by Linwood Barclay

  “Oh,” she said. “You.”

  They had met, of course, during the investigation that had followed her husband’s death.

  “Mrs. Sturgess,” he said. “I’m sorry to disturb you.”

  “I’m sure you are. Well, you better get it out of your system because I’m getting out of here as soon as I can.”

  “May I come in?”

  “Why the hell not?”

  She left the door open as she turned and went back into the house. Duckworth noticed the moving boxes everywhere. Framed pictures leaned up against boxes, square shadows on the walls where they’d once hung. Three rolled-up area rugs were in the living room.

  “I’m not waiting for the house to be sold,” she said without his having to ask. “It can sit on the market empty. Let them stage it if they have to.”

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “Texas,” she said. “Outside Houston. I have family there. I’m putting all this on a truck, sending it that way, putting it into storage until I find a place to live. I can’t get out of this goddamn town fast enough.”

  Duckworth said nothing.

  “They’ve crucified him,” Tanya Sturgess said. “They’ve fucking crucified him. Accused my husband of monstrous things when he’s not here to defend himself. Agnes Pickens was the one behind it all. Why else would she throw herself off the falls? The woman was consumed with guilt.”

  Duckworth listened.

  “You know what happened last Thursday? Believe me, if I didn’t ever have to leave this house, I wouldn’t, but I had to go to the store the other day. I’m going up and down the aisle and a woman sees me—I don’t even know who she was—and she looks me right in the eye and she says, ‘What was it like to be married to a man who steals a baby?’ What gives her the right to speak to me that way? What gives her the right?”

  “People judge,” Duckworth said.

  “Don’t they, though?”

  He followed the woman into a ground-floor study, where she’d evidently been packing books. She took a handful off the shelf and dropped them into a box.

  “Is that why you’re here?” she asked. “To destroy whatever small shred of reputation Jack might have left?”

  “I’m here following up on one thing,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s from three years ago.”

  “Three years?”

  “Three years ago, this month. The third anniversary is actually later this month. I wondered if your husband kept his old appointment books. Something that would tell me what he was doing at that time. That day, if possible.”

  “Why on earth would you need to know that?”

  “It’s part of the overall investigation,” he said.

  She dropped some more books into the box. “Well, you’re two days too late.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She opened her arms wide to indicate the scope of the task before her. “I’m going through all this stuff and I’m not taking it all with me. I’m pitching as I pack. I didn’t see any reason to keep Jack’s old appointment books. They went out with the trash.”

  Even if the doctor’s own calendar was gone, the hospital might have what he was looking for, Duckworth thought. If Sturgess had been the ER doctor on call, for example, on the night Olivia Fisher was murdered, it would have been hard for him to slip out to the park to kill someone.

  “The only one who keeps stuff like that is me,” Tanya Sturgess said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I keep my own old date books.”

  Duckworth nodded slowly. “Would you have one from three years ago?”

  She studied him. “Why should I look? Why should I bother? Why should I help you?”

  Duckworth could think of several reasons why helping him was in his interest, but not one that was in hers.

  He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. If I were you, I wouldn’t help me at all. But it could be important.”

  Tanya Sturgess dumped some books on a desk and said, “Follow me.”

  She went to a drawer in the kitchen, pulled out several old date books with wire spines. “Three years ago?”

  Duckworth nodded.

  She found the right one, opened it, fanned the pages until she got to May. “Here we go,” she said, and handed the book to him.

  It wasn’t like he was looking for a notation for the day Olivia Fisher died with a note that read: “Jack kills girl, home late for dinner.” But knowing what the doctor was up to that week might help.

  He scanned the week’s entries. On Tuesday evening, she’d written down “dinner Mannings.” Friday at eleven, “mani-pedi.” Wednesday: “Dry cleaning.”

  He saw an entry for Monday at ten thirty a.m. that caught his eye. “What’s this, Dr. Gleber?”

  “Dentist,” she said. “That would have been my semiannual cleaning.”

  “Okay.”

  “Really, what’s this about?” she asked.

  He ignored the question and continued to study the days leading up to the day Olivia had been murdered: May 25. Duckworth noticed an appointment for the twenty-second that appeared to be something medical: “1 p.m. Seward clinic.”

  Duckworth showed it to Jack Sturgess’s wife. “What would this be? Is Dr. Seward your doctor?”

  “Seward’s not a doctor. He’s a physiotherapist.”

  “You were seeing a physio?”

  “Let me see that,” she said, taking back the book. She went back a couple of weeks. “I remember this.”

  “What?”

  “This was when Jack got hurt.”

  “Hurt?”

  “Two weeks before. Yes, here it is. We went to see friends in Maine, and Jack was hiking in the woods and twisted his ankle. His right ankle. Hurt so much he couldn’t drive home. Had to use a cane for a few weeks, and went to the Seward clinic for physio. It was a couple of months before he could walk normally again.”

  “So all through this period, this week here,” Duckworth said, taking the book back and pointing to the two pages, “your husband was basically disabled? He had trouble getting around?”

  The dead doctor’s wife nodded.

  Did a guy with a bum ankle attack a woman in a park? And run away after he’d killed her?

  “Thank you,” Duckworth said, and handed the book back to Tanya Sturgess.

  He’d want to confirm the doctor’s injury with the Seward clinic, but he felt, with some confidence, that he could rule out Jack Sturgess in the murder of Olivia Fisher, and because the modus operandi was identical, the death of Rosemary Gaynor, too.

  “Tell me about the Gaynors,” Duckworth said.

  “I know what you’re trying to do.”

  “What am I trying to do, Mrs. Sturgess?”

  “You’re trying to find a way to blame Jack for that, too. For what happened to her. That’d really help you out, wouldn’t it? Find a way to prove Jack killed Rosemary. Well, he didn’t do that, and I won’t help you frame him for it. You want to pin everything you can on him. He’s not here to defend himself. Have you found a way to connect him to the Lindbergh kidnapping? The Kennedy assassination?”

  “That’s not what I’m doing,” Duckworth said. “I don’t think he killed Rosemary Gaynor any more than you do. But I want to find out who did.”

  She eyed him dubiously. “You’re trying to trick me.”

  Duckworth shook his head. “No. Let me ask you again about the Gaynors. How well did you know them?”

  “Bill and Jack were friends. I didn’t really know Rosemary. We went out for dinner once or twice a year.”

  “Did Bill and Rosemary get along?”

  “I suppose. They did when we were all together. The four of us never socialized after the baby came, or even in the months before that. When Bill and
Rosemary were in Boston.”

  “But you saw Bill occasionally in the period before his wife died?”

  “I did. The odd time.”

  “What was he like?”

  “I guess, looking back, I’d say he was on edge.” Bitterly, she said, “I didn’t like him then and I hate him even more now. He’s as much to blame as Agnes Pickens. He was a horrible person, dragging Jack into a scheme to get that baby for him and his wife. Jack devoted his life to helping others and look what he got for it.”

  That didn’t quite line up with the facts as Duckworth knew them. Jack Sturgess needed money to pay off gambling debts. He saw Bill and Rosemary’s quest for a child as an opportunity to get it. And as far as Duckworth could tell, no one had forced Sturgess to murder Marshall Kemper or Doris Stemple. Or threaten to plunge a syringe into the neck of David Harwood’s father.

  But Duckworth thought it best to keep those thoughts to himself for the moment.

  “What do you mean by ‘on edge’?”

  “Nervous. Anytime I’d walk into the room where the two were huddled together, he’d suddenly clam up.”

  “When was the last time you found them doing that?”

  She thought. “Just before Bill went to Boston on that last conference. When Rosemary was killed. He seemed very worried.”

  Around that time, Duckworth had learned from his interviews with the Gaynors’ nanny, Sarita Gomez, Bill had come to realize that his wife knew the adoption of Matthew was not legal.

  She remembered something. “One time I walked in on him when he was in Jack’s study, waiting for him to get back from a hospital call. Bill was looking at one of Jack’s old medical books about surgical technique. When he realized I was there, he closed it and put it back on the shelf, his face red as a beet. You’d have thought I’d caught him looking at porn.”

  • • •

  Duckworth was still thinking about Tanya Sturgess’s comments as he got back behind the wheel of his car, and his phone started to ring.

  “Duckworth.”

  “It’s me,” Rhonda Finderman said. “You called.”

  Duckworth had to think for a moment about why he’d been trying to get in touch with her.

  “Right,” he said. “I’ve got a story I want to tell you, and you’re going to think I’m crazy, but you need to hear it right to the end.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Cal

  I bolted from Clive Duncomb’s office, down a flight of stairs, out of the Thackeray College admin building, and straight to my car. I had the phone to my ear the entire time, trying to get Samantha Worthington to explain to me what had happened.

  “His parents came to visit. . . . They stalled me . . . trying to make me late to pick up Carl,” she said. The pauses were her catching her breath. It sounded like she was running, too.

  “But you don’t know for sure,” I said, reaching into my pocket for my keys with my other hand, “that Ed’s going to get Carl.”

  “He’s here! You saw him this morning! They’re working together.”

  “Hang on,” I said. “Putting you on speaker.”

  I got the car open, tossed my phone onto the passenger seat, keyed the ignition. Backing out of the spot, I nearly broadsided a FedEx truck.

  “Asshole!” someone yelled.

  I got the car aimed for downtown. I didn’t even know where I was going.

  “Sam?” I shouted. “You still there?”

  “Yes!”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m running to the school! They slashed my tires! Those bastards!”

  “Where’s the school?”

  “It’s Clinton Public!”

  I thought back to my days as a Promise Falls cop, when I could walk this town blindfolded and always know where I was. I knew Clinton. After accessing the GPS in my brain for a second, I could picture the location of the school.

  But the school was quite a hike from Thackeray. Even breaking every speed limit and running every light, I was a good fifteen minutes away.

  “Where are you?” I shouted. I was wondering if I should swing by and grab her along the way, but if we were both going to get there at the same time, I’d just head straight for the school.

  “It’s a few blocks,” she said, sounding very winded. “Not . . . too . . . long.”

  “When does school officially let out?”

  “Now, right now!”

  “Hang up, call the school, see if they can call Carl to the office!”

  “I tried that! I can’t”—a pause to catch her breath—“get through!”

  “Then call the police!”

  “They won’t care!”

  “What?”

  “They never care about this shit!”

  If she meant custody disputes, she was half-right. There were some things a cop in a patrol car couldn’t solve. But what she was talking about now seemed to suggest an outright kidnapping that was about to take place.

  My heart was pounding, my hands slippery with sweat on the steering wheel. Ahead of me, cars were stopped at a light.

  “I’m a long way away!” I shouted. “I don’t know if I can get there in time!”

  I didn’t know whether Samantha had heard me. I grabbed the phone, put it to my ear. Said, “You there?”

  Nothing.

  The light turned green up ahead, but the cars were moving ahead slowly. I laid on the horn, swerved around two cars, narrowly missing a pickup truck coming in the opposite lane. Floored it.

  As I sped into town, I realized I didn’t know the whole story. For all I knew, Sam had abducted her own kid and what was going on now was payback. Maybe she’d been in the midst of a custody dispute and run off with Carl without the court’s permission.

  But if that was the case, the courts didn’t usually send thugs around to your place of work and threaten you. Ed did not come across as an officer of the court.

  So I gambled that the angels were with Sam and her boy. My gut told me that Ed taking Carl away was very, very wrong. Even if it turned out Sam didn’t have the law on her side, kidnapping a kid from school was no way to resolve custody disputes.

  “Come on, come on,” I said, seeing another set of cars bunching up ahead of me at the next intersection. I was looking for an opening. Too many cars coming the other way for me to pass. I wondered whether, if I took the next right, I could make up some time on less-traveled residential streets.

  “Let’s go, let’s go,” I shouted at the drivers ahead of me.

  I made the decision. When I got to the intersection, I’d hang a right. Find another way to get to Clinton Public.

  An old Volkswagen inched far enough ahead that I could make the turn. I cranked the wheel, put my foot down on the gas.

  Just as a jogger crossed my path.

  “Shit!” I said, slamming my foot on the brake pedal so hard I was surprised it didn’t snap off.

  The jogger, a shirtless man in shorts and running shoes who was probably in his midthirties, stopped as abruptly as I had, turned, and looked at me. He slapped both hands onto the hood of the Accord.

  “The fuck!” he screamed, spraying spit.

  Had I hit him? I was pretty sure I hadn’t. But if I was going to be any help to Sam and Carl, I was going to have to run him down anyway.

  I powered down the window. “You ran right in front of me!”

  He pointed to the WALK sign. “You see that! Are you blind?”

  He wasn’t moving. If I could get him to move from the front of the car, if I could get him to approach my window, I could boot it.

  “Yeah!” I said. “It says walk, not run!”

  The man shook his head, started coming around the fender. Good, good. Come give me shit face-to-face, so my way is clear and I can floor it.

  He came up alongside the car. But
as he did, several other people started walking through the intersection, blocking my way.

  “You fucking think you own the road?” he asked, at my window now, hands on the sill, close enough that I could smell his sweat. “Is what you got to do so important it justifies running people over? That what you think?”

  I didn’t think I was going to make it.

  I didn’t think I was going to make it in time to help Carl.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  ED idled his pickup truck down the street from Clinton Public Elementary School. He figured that Carl Worthington’s route to his mother’s work, or their home, would take him this way, right past where he was parked. It was a good thing the little guy had never seen him. It’d be easier to pull off what he had planned that way.

  Of course, there was a chance he wouldn’t be walking this way, if he decided to go to a friend’s house, say, before going home. But Ed’s information was that his mother picked him up most days. He’d probably be looking for her, standing around, wondering why she was late.

  That worked for Ed. He had his story ready.

  Ed sat behind the wheel of the truck, waiting for the bell to ring, which was when he’d go on high alert. While Carl had never seen him, he’d seen plenty of pictures of the kid—Yolanda had given them to him—so he didn’t anticipate having any trouble picking out the little bastard.

  While he waited, he ate a Mars bar. Unwrapped it, bit off half, chewed it up in a few seconds, then shoved the other half into his mouth. Licked his lips, glanced into the rearview mirror to make sure he didn’t have chocolate in the corners of his mouth. His mother had taught him that. Always check the corners of your mouth.

  He looked okay.

  The bell rang.

  Seconds later, school doors flew open and hordes of kids made their escape. Jesus, there were way more of them coming out at once than he’d imagined. Ed had to keep a close watch on everyone.

  But then he saw him. And just as he’d hoped, he was coming this way. He’d gotten about twenty yards from the school when he stopped, looked around.

  “Looking for your mommy?” Ed said.

  He got out of the truck, stood by the open driver’s door.