The Twenty-Three 3 (Promise Falls)

by Linwood Barclay

  “Mostly, yeah.”

  “If he’s late getting home, why would that be?”

  She eyed me suspiciously. “What’s all this about? If you want to talk to him, just go up there.”

  “Has your husband called you since he left for work last night?”

  Mrs. Whitehead blinked a couple of times.

  “Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”

  “Why would that be odd? He never calls me from work. That’s when I’m sleeping.”

  “His shift ended several hours ago. Wouldn’t he call you if something kept him at work?”

  She blinked again, as if I were out of focus.

  “But I know what’s going on,” she said. “I heard about it on the radio and from that damn fire truck making all that noise.”

  “The point I’m trying to make,” I said, “is if Mr. Whitehead knew there was a problem with the water, wouldn’t he have called to tell you himself, rather than waiting for you to find out from the radio or someone else?”

  That gave her pause. She looked at me quizzically. “Why didn’t he call me?”

  “That’s my question.”

  “I mean, we’ve had our ups and downs, but I don’t think he’d want me to drink bad water and drop dead. He needs me. He doesn’t know the first thing about how to take care of a home.”

  Looking around, I wasn’t that sure Mrs. Whitehead did, either.

  “Can you tell me any places where your husband might go to, you know, unwind after work? A place to get a drink?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Tate stays out of the bars.”

  Perhaps he didn’t need them, considering he had a fully stocked Pinto.

  “What about friends? Buddies he liked to hang out with?”

  “He doesn’t really have any friends,” she said. “’Cept me.”

  “Could you give me his cell phone number?”

  “Tate doesn’t got a cell phone. He had one a long time ago, but he was always losing it. So he stopped having one. Cost too much anyway. Have you been to the plant? Wouldn’t it make more sense to just go there and talk to him?”

  “He’s not there,” I told her.

  “He’s not?”

  I shook my head.

  She looked around me, cast her eyes up the street in both directions. “I don’t see his car. He’s got a yellow car. A Pinto. He’s kept that thing running for years. It’s never blown up or anything.”

  “His car’s at the plant,” I said.

  She was starting to do something funny with her mouth, working her jaw around anxiously, maybe chewing on the inside of her cheek.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Nothin’.”

  “It’s important we find him, Mrs. Whitehead. You already know what’s going on, with the water. Something bad’s happened. I think your husband might be able to shed some light on that. I need to speak with him.”

  “Sometimes . . . sometimes if there’s not a lot to do, and it’s pretty quiet on that shift, sometimes he’ll take a little break.”

  “A break.”

  She nodded.

  “Where might he take this break?”

  “There’s a room down in the basement of the plant. Where they keep extra pipes and tools and things for when they have to do repairs. He might be there.”

  “Does he go down there to have a drink?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Mrs. Whitehead said.

  “May I use your phone?” I asked.

  My cell would have worked just fine, but I wanted to get into the house and see for myself whether Whitehead was here.

  “Uh, okay,” she said, stepping back to let me in. “It’s in the kitchen.”

  I walked through a living area furnished with items that might have been bought at the time the house was built. In the kitchen, I noticed just one plate with half a piece of toast on it. An empty glass looked as though it had had orange juice in it. Looked as though Mrs. Whitehead had breakfasted alone.

  I found a phone on the counter and dialed Garvey Ottman.

  “Yeah. Duckworth?”

  “Yeah.” I described the room where Mrs. Whitehead said her husband liked to disappear to during his shift. “You got a room like that?”

  “Yup.”

  “Have you looked for Whitehead there?” I asked.

  “No, why would I?”

  “Can you check it out?”

  “Hold on, okay? I’ll head down there now.”

  I could hear hurried, echoing footsteps as Ottman ran through the plant, then down what sounded like a metal stairway.

  “I’m almost there,” he said. “How’d you hear about this?”

  “Mrs. Whitehead,” I said, and gave her a weak smile, “is with me, and she said he sometimes goes down there for a break.”

  “Jesus, the son of a bitch,” he said. “Okay, I’m here. Hang on.”

  I heard a loud, rusty squeak. Some more noises, as though Ottman was moving some things around.

  “Shit,” he said.

  I felt my pulse quicken. “What? Is he there?” I pictured him passed out, surrounded by empty bottles.

  “No,” Ottman said. “He’s not.”

  I left a card with Tate Whitehead’s wife and got her to promise—for what that was worth—to call me if he showed up. From there, I headed to Thackeray College. I’d phoned ahead, to the security office once run by Clive Duncomb, and was put through to the new boss of that department, Joyce Pilgrim. I’d already met her, back when I was looking into Duncomb’s fatal shooting of Mason Helt, the lead suspect in a series of campus assaults. Duncomb had used Joyce as bait to flush out the predator, and the plan had worked all too well.

  She told me which student residence to meet her out front of, and moments later I found her there, standing at the building’s entrance.

  “I called ages ago,” she told me as I walked up. She was pale, drawn, and her voice was shaking.

  “We’ve kind of had our hands full,” I told her. “Are you okay?”

  “Huh? Yeah, yeah, just a bit shook-up.”

  She led me into the building and up a flight of concrete stairs. This was a newer, more modern building for Thackeray, a school that went back to the late eighteen hundreds.

  “Who’s the victim?” I asked as we were halfway up.

  “Lorraine Plummer,” Joyce Pilgrim told me.

  I knew the name. “She was one of the ones Mason Helt attacked.”

  “That’s right,” Joyce said.

  “Why was she here? Isn’t school over?”

  “It is, but there are some summer classes. But of the students taking them, a lot of them live in town. Hardly any in the residences, at least not this one. We’ve got a couple of students on the third floor, at the other end of the building. Lorraine’s the only one, through the summer, living on the second floor.”

  “So who found her?”

  Joyce told me about the call from the family, who had not heard from their daughter for several days.

  “Any idea when it happened?” I asked.

  “I’m no expert on that kind of thing,” she said, “but it’s been a while, I’m pretty sure of that.”

  You try to go into these things with an open mind. You don’t prejudge, preguess. But, looking back, I’d clearly been expecting something different from what I found.

  I had in my head that what I’d be looking at was a sexual assault that had escalated to a homicide. Girl living alone, maybe she meets a boy at some local bar, invites him back to her dorm room, and things get out of hand.

  I’d seen that kind of thing before.

  The killer wouldn’t have to worry about someone hearing what was happening, given that the building was nearly empty.

  That part I had right.

  As soon as we came out of the stairwell and into the hall, I had a sense of what we were dealing with. The smell was overwhelming, and it hit me hard because I was gulping air after just the one flight.

  God, one lousy flight of stairs a
nd I was winded.

  I stopped, reached down into my pocket where I kept a small tube of Vicks VapoRub.

  “What are you doing?” Joyce asked.

  “You’ll want some of this, too.”

  I put a dab on my finger and rubbed some on between my nose and upper lip. The strong menthol smell would mask the stench.

  Joyce let me put some on her finger so she could do the same. “Wish I’d had this earlier.” Embarrassment washed over her face. “I threw up.”

  “Nothing to be ashamed of,” I said.

  Even before we reached the door, I could see the blood that had seeped out below it. The door was closed. Before I could ask, Joyce told me she had closed the door when she’d gone down to wait for me.

  “You’ve touched the handle?” I asked her.

  Her face fell. “Yes.”

  Even so, I managed to turn the knob with my fingernails, just in case some usable prints remained. I nudged the door open with my elbow.

  It was not as I had imagined. It was much, much worse.

  Lorraine Plummer was stretched out on the floor, slightly on her right side, her dead eyes open, lips parted. I had a view of a bloated tongue, and her skin was bluish in color, indicating she had been dead for some time. She was dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of stretchy workout pants, and covered in blood below the waist.

  I glanced back at Joyce Pilgrim, thinking I would have to tell her to stay out in the hall, but it wasn’t necessary.

  I got as close to the body as I could without stepping in blood—all of which looked dried—then knelt down for a few seconds, which was no picnic for my knees. I wanted a closer look without actually moving or touching the body. Given what was going on in town, I wasn’t likely to see a medical examiner or a forensics team here for a long time.

  It was difficult to tell exactly how she had been attacked, and I’d have to wait until Lorraine Plummer was on an autopsy table with all the blood washed away to be sure, but I was able to make out the wound that was the apparent cause of death.

  Someone had sliced across the young woman’s abdomen. The cut ran, roughly, from just above one hip bone to the other. But along the way, it curved down slightly.

  I felt a wooziness that was not directly related to the stench in the room. I had seen this individual’s handiwork before. Once, in person, when I’d investigated the murder of Rosemary Gaynor. And a second time, when I had seen autopsy photos from the Olivia Fisher homicide.

  The slice that looked like a smile.

  SIXTEEN

  THE driver of the fire truck told Cal Weaver there were so many casualties from whatever was making people sick that he couldn’t even guess when officials might get to Lucy Brighton.

  Cal took the man’s suggestion to leave a detailed note on the door. He walked back to Crystal, still sitting on the front step with the clipboard and sheets of paper she was drawing on.

  He sat down next to her and said, “Do you have a clean sheet there?”

  Crystal slipped one out from underneath and put it on the top. Cal took the clipboard and pen from her and wrote at the top of the page “NOTICE” and underlined it three times.

  In bullet form, he indicated that the body of Lucy Brighton was in the home, in the upstairs bathroom. He wrote that the only other resident of the house, Crystal, age eleven, was safe and with him. He put his name and contact information at the end, adding that he had a key to the house and would return to let the authorities in.

  “Where would I find some tape?” Cal asked Crystal.

  She told him which kitchen drawer to look in. Also, he was going to get in touch with her father. Where would he find that information?

  “All that stuff is in my mom’s phone,” she said.

  Cal nodded. He’d find the phone and bring it along. “You trust me to pack a bag for you?” he asked Crystal.

  “Okay.”

  “You have a suitcase or anything somewhere?”

  “There’s a backpack in my room.”

  “You have any prescriptions or anything like that you take that I need to pack?”

  The girl shook her head. Cal had already decided he’d buy the girl a new toothbrush. He wasn’t going back into, or taking anything out of, that bathroom unless it was absolutely necessary.

  “I’ll be as quick as I can,” he said.

  “I need clothes to put on now.” She was still in her pajamas.

  “Okay.”

  He went into the house and found Lucy’s phone right away, on the kitchen table. In a drawer he found a roll of duct tape. He located her purse up in her bedroom and took a set of keys so he could lock up the house when they left. Finally, Cal went into Crystal’s room and threw some tops and pants and socks and underwear into a red backpack. He kept one change of clothes separate. On her dresser was the collection of markers he’d recently bought her. He grabbed those, too.

  He came out the front door, set the backpack next to Crystal, taped his sign securely to the front door, tossed the roll of tape back into the house, locked the door, and pocketed the keys.

  “Have you had any breakfast?” Cal asked Lucy’s daughter.

  “No,” she said.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Kinda.”

  “Let’s go get something to eat,” he said, resting a light hand on her shoulder.

  “Okay.”

  She stood and they walked to Cal’s car. Once inside, he handed her a top and some pants and suggested she put them on over her pajamas. They drove to Kelly’s, the downtown diner, where they got a seat by the window. Crystal ordered French toast with extra syrup and powdered sugar.

  Cal, out of habit, ordered coffee.

  “We can’t do coffee,” the waitress said. “You see anybody in here drinking coffee? You haven’t heard what’s going on?”

  “What was I thinking?” he said.

  “People dying all over the place,” she said.

  Cal, catching the woman’s eye, gave her a cautious nod toward Crystal, who had her head down. But the waitress missed the signal, and said, “Can’t do tea, neither. Want a milk?”

  “No, thanks,” he said. “Have you got bottled water?”

  “Yeah, that local stuff.”

  Cal thought. “Could you pour some into a mug and nuke it and toss in a tea bag?”

  The waitress sighed, as if this were the biggest imposition she’d encountered in her career. “You’ll get charged for the water, and for the tea.”

  “I’m good for it,” Cal said.

  “And I hope you aren’t expecting our fine china. We don’t know if it’s safe to wash the dishes. We’re doin’ paper plates and plastic cutlery.”

  “No problem.”

  “What about you, kid? Anything to drink?”

  Crystal raised her head. “Milk, please.” A pause, and then, “I know all about what happened. My mom is dead.”

  The waitress was stunned into silence.

  “She drank the water and she threw up and then she died in the bathroom,” Crystal said, as though describing what she’d studied in school the day before.

  “I—I’m sorry.” She looked back at Cal. “I’m so sorry. Your wife?”

  “No.”

  The waitress took another look at Crystal, as though puzzling over why she didn’t appear more upset.

  “Can I have that tea?” Cal asked.

  The waitress disappeared. Crystal resumed working on her drawing while Cal opened the list of contacts on Lucy Brighton’s phone.

  “What’s your dad’s name again?” he asked her.

  Without looking up, she said, “Gerald.”

  “Not Jerry?”

  Her head went back and forth. Cal found Gerald Brighton quickly under the Bs. “You okay here for a couple of minutes? I’m going to give your dad a call.”

  “Okay.”

  He slid out of the booth, went out onto the sidewalk, and stood where he could keep an eye on Crystal through the glass. He e-mailed Gerald Brighton’s
contact info off Lucy’s phone to his own, brought it up on the screen, and hit the number.

  It rang five times before going to voice mail. “Yeah, hey, you’ve reached Gerald Brighton. Leave your name and number and maybe, just maybe, if you’re really lucky, I’ll get back to you!”

  A pause. Cal said, “Mr. Brighton, this is Cal Weaver, in Promise Falls, New York. I need to speak to you about your wife, Lucy, and daughter, Crystal. It’s urgent.” He gave his number, ended the call, and went back inside.

  Crystal said, “No answer, right?”

  “Yeah,” Cal said, slipping into the booth.

  “He doesn’t usually answer his phone.”

  “What did your mother do when she had an emergency and needed to get in touch with him?”

  “She always leaves—she always left a message and he calls back later sometimes if he feels like it.”

  The waitress returned with a paper cup of boiled bottled water and a tea bag. “French toast is almost ready, sweetheart,” she said.

  Cal bobbed the tea bag up and down in the water. “Talk to me,” he said to Crystal.

  She looked up. “About what?”

  “I just wondered how you are. Which I guess is a pretty dumb question.”

  “I feel things,” she said. “But I don’t know how to show them.”

  “I get that.”

  She turned the clipboard around so he could see what she had been working on. The clouds, even darker now, as though heavy with rain.

  “They’re about to burst,” Crystal said.

  Cal’s heart felt connected to a fifty-pound anchor. “So they are.”

  The waitress set Crystal’s French toast in front of her. “You need anything, let me know,” she said.

  Cal and Crystal didn’t say another word to each other during breakfast.

  “Whose house is this?” Crystal asked when Cal stopped the car.

  “My sister and her husband live here,” he told her. “Her name is Celeste and his name is Dwayne. She’s very, very nice.”

  “What about Dwayne?”

  “He’s okay.”

  Crystal seemed to perceive some meaning there. “Is he a douche?”

  Cal, for the first time in days, laughed. “A bit. But he’s had a rough time lately. He’s got a paving company and he does a lot of work for the town, but they’ve been cutting back, so he hasn’t had much work.”