Fear the Worst

by Linwood Barclay

  His normal cheerfulness was not in evidence when I wheeled my chair around to see him.

  “Andy,” I said.

  “Laura wants to see me in five,” he said.

  “Any last words you’d like me to pass along to your family?”

  “Tim, really, I think she’s going to carve me out a new one,” he said.

  “We all hit these kinds of stretches,” I said.

  “I haven’t sold a car in two weeks. I had that one guy, I was sure he was going to get the Civic, I call him up, he got a Chevy Cobalt. I mean, come on, give me a fucking break. A Cobalt?”

  “Happens,” I said.

  “I think she’s going to fire me. I’ve tried working my contacts, even family. I’ve already sold my mom a car, but my dad still refuses to buy Japanese. Says that’s why the country’s going into the toilet, we’re not buying from Detroit. I tell him if Detroit hadn’t been so slow to get its head out of its ass and stop making big SUVs, it would have been fine, and then he gets all pissed and tells me if I like the Japs so much maybe I should go live over there and live on sushi. I don’t know if I can pay my rent this month. I’d rather kill myself than move back in with my parents. Things keep going like this, I’ll be making sperm bank donations to get lunch money.”

  “Been there, done that,” I said, recalling desperate times in college. “You run the risk of repetitive strain injury.” Despite everything, Andy grinned. “Get out the used-car ads,” I told him.

  “Huh?”

  “From the newspapers, online, anything in this area. See who’s selling their cars privately.”

  Andy looked at me. It was taking a minute for him to figure this out.

  “You call them up, you say hey, I saw your ad for your Pontiac Vibe or whatever it is, you don’t want to buy it, but you wondered whether they’d made up their mind about a replacement vehicle, that we have great financing and lease rates on at the moment, and if they’d like to come in, you’d love to get them into a new Honda, bring their current car in for a trade.”

  “That’s a fucking awesome idea.” He smiled giddily. “So I tell Cantrell I’m working a whole bunch of new leads.”

  “Just be ready when she rips a page out of the phone book and hands it to you.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “She’ll say, ‘Leads, you need fucking leads? Here’s a whole page of them.’ She has one phone book in there, all she uses it for is to rip out pages.”

  “Hey, you’re first up, right?” Andy was looking over my shoulder. I turned around, saw a stocky, wide-shouldered, middle-aged guy who looked to have cut himself shaving a couple of times that morning, like he didn’t do it that often but today he wanted to make a good impression and it backfired. He had on a crisp, clean work shirt, but his worn jeans and scuffed work boots betrayed him. It was like he was thinking, if the top half of me makes a good impression, no one’ll notice the rest of me.

  He was admiring a pickup truck in the showroom.

  “Hi,” I said, out of my chair. As I headed over to him, I caught Laura out of the corner of my eye, summoning Andy, the poor bastard.

  “Hey,” said the guy. He had a deep, gruff voice.

  “The Ridgeline,” I said, nodding at the blue truck. “Gets a ‘recommended’ rating in Consumer Reports.”

  “Nice truck,” he said, slowly walking around it.

  “What are you driving now?” I asked.

  “F-150,” he said. The Ford. Also a good truck, recommended by Consumer, but not something I felt needed pointing out. I glanced out the showroom window, looking for it, but instead what caught my eye was a plain, unmarked Chevy, and Kip Jennings getting out.

  “Would it be possible to take one of these for a test drive?” he asked.

  “Sure thing,” I said. “I just need a driver’s license from you, we make a photocopy.”

  He fished out his wallet, gave me his license, which I scanned. His name was Richard Fletcher, and I extended a hand. “Mr. Fletcher, good to meet you, I’m Tim Blake.” I handed him one of my business cards, which included not only my work number but my home and cell numbers.

  “Hey,” he said, slipping it into his pocket.

  I walked the license over to the girl at reception so she could make a copy, all the while glancing out into the lot at Jennings. She was short—she probably topped out at five feet—with strong facial features. A woman my mother might have referred to as handsome instead of pretty, but the latter word was also apt. I would have handed Mr. Fletcher off to Andy, but he was in Laura’s office getting chewed out. If I had to let a customer cool his heels while I found out what had happened to my daughter, tough. But Jennings was on her cell, so I took another moment to get this guy set up for a test drive.

  I instructed one of the younger guys in the office to track down a Ridgeline, hang some dealer plates off it, and bring it up to the door ASAP.

  “We’ll have one ready for you in just a couple of minutes,” I said to Fletcher. “Normally I’d tag along for the test drive—”

  Fletcher looked dismayed. “Last place I went let me take it out alone. Not so much, you know, pressure?”

  “Yeah, well, I was about to say, if you’re okay going alone, I just have to talk to this person—”

  “That’s perfect,” he said.

  “One of the fellows will be bringing up one of our demo trucks in a second. We can talk after?”

  Even though Jennings was still on her phone, I bolted out of the showroom and walked briskly across the lot toward her. She saw me coming, held up an index finger to indicate that she’d be just another second. I stood patiently, like a kid waiting to see the teacher, while she finished her call.

  It didn’t exactly sound like police business. Jennings said, “Well, what do you expect? If you don’t study, you’re not going to do well. If you don’t do your homework, you’re going to get a zero. It’s not rocket science, Cassie. You don’t do the work, you don’t get the marks…. Yeah, okay…. I don’t know yet. Maybe hot dogs or something. I got to go, sweetheart.”

  She flipped the phone shut and slipped it into the purse slung over her shoulder.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to listen in.”

  “That’s okay,” Kip Jennings said. “My daughter. She doesn’t think it’s fair that you get a zero when you don’t hand in an assignment.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Twelve,” she said.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Richard Fletcher get into the gleaming new pickup and drive it off the lot. But I was focused on Jennings, what she might have to say.

  She must have seen the look on my face, a mixture of hope, expectation, and dread, so she got to it right away. She took half a step back so that when she looked up at me she didn’t have to crane her neck so much.

  “You have time to take a ride with me?” she asked.

  “Where?” I asked.

  Please don’t say the morgue.

  “Up to Derby,” she said.

  “What’s in Derby?”

  “Your daughter’s car,” Jennings said.

  FIVE

  “WHERE DID YOU FIND IT?” I asked, sitting up front in Kip Jennings’s gray four-door Chevy. It had none of the trappings of a regular police car. No obvious markings, no rooftop light, no barrier between the front and back seats. Just lots of discarded junk food wrappers and empty coffee cups.

  “I didn’t find it,” Jennings said. “It was found in a Wal-Mart lot. It had been sitting there a few days. The management finally called the cops to have it towed.”

  “Was there anyone…” I hesitated. “Was there anyone in the car?” I was thinking about the trunk.

  Jennings glanced over at me. “No,” she said, then looked at the tiny satellite navigation screen that had been stuck to the top of the dash. “I always have this on even when I know where I’m going. I just like watching it.”

  “How long’s the car been there?”

  “Not s
ure. It was parked with a few others, no one really noticed it for a while.”

  I closed my eyes a moment, opened them, watched the trees go by as we headed north up the winding two-lane Derby Milford Road, about a twenty-minute drive.

  “Where’s the car now?” I pictured a brilliantly lit forensics lab the size of an airplane hangar, the car being gone over for clues by technicians in hazmat suits.

  “In a local compound, where they take cars they’ve towed for parking illegally, that kind of thing. They ran the plate, which I’d had flagged in the system. That’s when they called me. Look, I haven’t even seen the car yet. You know the car, you can tell me if you notice anything out of the ordinary about it.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Everything about this was out of the ordinary. My daughter was missing. At times over the last couple of weeks, I’d tried to find comfort in the thought that while Syd might have run off, that didn’t have to mean harm had come to her.

  The first couple of days she was gone, I told myself it was about the fight we’d had. My questioning her about the Versace sunglasses, asking about the receipt. That had pissed Syd off big-time, and I could imagine her wanting to punish me for thinking she might have stolen them.

  But as the days went on, it seemed unlikely that that argument had sparked her disappearance. Then I tried to tell myself that it was something else that had made her angry enough to run away. Something I’d done, or maybe Susanne.

  Maybe she was punishing both of us, I imagined. For splitting up. For ruining what had been, for a long time, a pretty decent little family. For making her shunt back and forth between houses for five years, for having to move now, at seventeen, into Bob’s house. Sure, it was a bigger place, he had more money, could give her things I couldn’t, but maybe all this change was unsettling, messing her up.

  Now, though, there were more logistical questions. I wasn’t just asking myself why she was gone. I was asking myself how. If she didn’t have wheels, how had she gotten to wherever she’d gone? Why leave the car behind?

  I couldn’t think of any reasons that made me feel optimistic.

  Jennings hung a left at the end of Derby Milford Road, went another couple of miles, straight past the Wal-Mart where I presumed Syd’s silver Civic had been found, then pulled off onto a gravel lot where a couple of tow trucks were parked outside a low cinder-block building that adjoined a fenced-in compound full of cars.

  Jennings found a badge in her purse and flashed it at someone in the office window. The metal gate that led into the compound buzzed; then Jennings went through and beckoned me to follow her.

  The Civic was tucked in between a GMC Yukon and a Toyota Celica from the 1980s. Syd’s car looked the same as the last time I’d seen it, yet it was somehow different. It wasn’t just Syd’s car now. There was something ominous about it, as though it was sentient, knew things it didn’t want to tell us.

  “Don’t touch it,” Jennings said. “Don’t touch anything. In fact, put your hands in your pockets.”

  I did as I was told. Jennings set her purse down on the hood of the Celica and took out a pair of surgical-type gloves. She pulled them on, giving them a good snap at the wrist.

  I walked slowly around the car, peering into the windows. Sydney was proud of this little car, and kept it tidy. Unlike Jennings’s vehicle, there were no discarded Big Mac boxes or Dunkin’ Donuts cups.

  “Do you have the keys?” I asked.

  “No,” Jennings said. “But the car was found unlocked.”

  She was walking around it in a crouched position, looking at it in a trained, professional way. She seemed to be studying the handle on the driver’s door.

  “What?” I asked from the other side of the car.

  She held up one gloved hand, index finger pointed up, as if to say, “Give me a sec.”

  I came around the back of the car, stood there and watched as she gingerly opened the door with one finger, slipping it under the handle and lifting very carefully.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  Again, she said nothing. Once she had the door wide open, she looked down, next to the driver’s seat, and reached down. There were a couple of small levers there, one for the gas cap and one for the trunk. Next thing I knew, the trunk lid, right in front of me, clicked and popped open an inch.

  Even though Jennings had said earlier that no one had been found in the car, the unlocked trunk provoked an overwhelming sense of dread.

  “Don’t open it,” Jennings said. “Don’t touch anything.”

  I didn’t have to be told.

  She came around to the back of the car and slipped a gloved index finger under the far right lip of the lid, where someone would be unlikely to have touched it, and slowly lifted. There was nothing inside except for the first-aid roadside emergency kit I’d put in there myself when I got Syd the car. It didn’t appear to have been touched.

  “Anything missing?” Detective Jennings asked.

  “Not since the last time I looked in here,” I said.

  She left the trunk open and returned to the open front door. She leaned in over the driver’s seat, still careful not to touch anything. Her short frame was twisted awkwardly, unable to touch any part of the car for balance as she looked around.

  Then, suddenly, she jumped back. It was as though something in the car had sprung up and shoved her.

  My heart thumped. “What?” I asked.

  She spun her body around and let out an enormous sneeze over the Celica. “Sorry,” she said. “I felt this tickle coming, and I didn’t want to contaminate the car with my own DNA.”

  Once I’d had a moment to recover, I said, “DNA?”

  Jennings said, “I’m going to want the crime scene investigators to go over this car.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Is that just routine? Is that something you always do?”

  Jennings studied me for a moment, weighing something. Then, “Come here.”

  Delicately, she moved the door back three-quarters closed, drew me closer, and pointed to the outside handle. “You see those smudges?”

  I did. Smears of something dark. Reddish brown.

  She pulled the door wide again and pointed to the steering wheel. “Don’t touch it,” she said again. But she pointed to the wheel. “You see that?”

  More smears of what appeared to be on the door handle.

  “I see it,” I said. “It’s blood, isn’t it?”

  “That’d be my guess, yes,” Kip Jennings said.

  SIX

  “WE’RE GOING TO NEED TO GET A SAMPLE of your daughter’s DNA,” Jennings said during the drive back. “A hair from her brush would do the trick. And then we can compare that to the blood sample.”

  “Yeah,” I said, but I was barely listening.

  “Can you think of any reason why your daughter would be in Derby? Did she have friends there? A boyfriend, maybe?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’m having the car brought in, we’ll go over it thoroughly, and as soon as I know anything, I’ll pass that information on to you and your wife. Sorry, your ex-wife. And I’ll have someone come by your house later today, for something we can use to get a DNA sample.”

  I nodded slowly. “You’re suddenly taking this seriously.”

  “I’ve never not taken this seriously, Mr. Blake,” Kip Jennings said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “I have to make a call,” I said.

  “I have another question for you,” she said. “A favor for my counterparts over in Bridgeport. If you don’t mind.” I shook my head absently, neither refusing to answer nor agreeing. “I’m sure there’s no connection here, but there was an incident around the time that your daughter disappeared.”

  “Someone else is missing?”

  “Not exactly. You ever heard of someone by the name of Randall Tripe?”

  “What was that again?”

  “Tripe. Really. And he u
sually went by Randy instead of Randall.”

  “Went by? Not anymore?”

  “No. Do you recognize the name?”

  “No. Should I?”

  “Probably not,” she said.

  “What happened to him?”

  “Something that could have been expected sooner or later,” she said. “He was a low-life entrepreneur. A bit of prostitution, theft, moved stolen property, sold guns, even ran something of an employment agency. And he still found time to work in the odd stretch in prison. He was found in a Dumpster down by the docks in Bridgeport the day after you reported Sydney missing. He’d been shot in the chest. Judging from the wound, he might have survived if someone had got him some help, but instead he got dumped in the trash and was left for dead.” She rooted through her purse on the console between us, trying to look inside it and watch the road at the same time. “I’ve got a mug shot here someplace.”

  “I don’t understand what that has to do with Sydney.”

  “Nothing, I suspect.” She was starting to drift across the center-line, looked up, corrected, went back to the purse. “Here it is.” She handed me a folded sheet of white paper. I opened it up. A police arrest sheet, dated more than a year ago. Randall Tripe was white, unshaven, fat, forty-two at the time, balding, and looked like no one I knew or would ever want to know.

  I gave it back. “I don’t recognize him.”

  “Okay,” she said, tucking the sheet back into her purse.

  “This can’t be good news,” I said.

  “Hmm?”

  “Blood on the car.”

  “We’ll see,” she said. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

  We drove on for another minute. I felt I was drifting into some kind of dream state, that none of this was happening.

  “Your daughter,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”