Broken Promise

by Linwood Barclay

  “Duckworth.”

  “Hey, it’s Wanda.” Wanda Therrieult. The medical examiner who would have conducted the autopsy on Rosemary Gaynor.

  “Yeah, hey,” Duckworth said.

  “Where are you?” He told her. “Swing by.”

  He said he could be there in five minutes.

  • • •

  It was a cold, sterile room, but that was the way it was supposed to be.

  The body was laid out on an aluminum table, draped in a light green sheet that matched the walls. Bright fluorescent lights shone down from the ceiling.

  Wanda Therrieult, fiftyish, short, and round, was sitting at a desk in the corner of the room, tapping away at a keyboard and drinking from a Big Hug Mug when Duckworth entered the room.

  “You want a coffee or anything?” she asked when she saw him, taking off a pair of reading glasses. “I got one of these single-cup things where you can pick what flavor you want.”

  She got up and showed him the machine, and a rack filled with various kinds of coffee that came in tiny containers the size of restaurant creamers.

  “Yeah, sure,” he said, examining the labels. “What the hell is Volluto? Or Arpeggio? What’s that supposed to be? What do you have that’s closest to what I get at Dunkin’?”

  “You’re hopeless,” she said. “I’ll just pick you one.”

  She chose a capsule, put it into the machine, set a mug in place, and hit a button. “Now it’ll work its magic.”

  “You should think about getting a doughnut machine, too. Why hasn’t Williams-Sonoma come up with one of those? A gadget you put on your countertop where you touch a button and out pops a fresh chocolate glazed.”

  Wanda studied him. “I was about to say that’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard, but then thought, I would buy one of those.”

  “It’s twenty years today,” he said.

  “What’s twenty years?”

  “I’ve been with the department two whole decades as of today.”

  “Get out.”

  “Would I lie?”

  “So, what, you joined when you were ten?”

  “I’m a trained investigator, Wanda. I can tell when someone is bullshitting me.”

  She smiled. “Congrats. Was there a thing? A little ceremony?”

  He shook his head. “No. You’re the only one I’ve told. I didn’t even mention it to Maureen. It’s no big deal.”

  “You’re one of the good ones, Barry.” The machine beeped. She handed him his coffee, raised her own, and they clinked mugs. “To twenty years of catching bad guys.”

  “To catching bad guys.”

  “And you’ve got a pretty bad one out there now,” she said, tipping her head in the direction of the body.

  “Show me.”

  Wanda set her mug down, went over to the examining table, and pulled back the sheet, but only as far as the top of the dead woman’s breasts.

  “I wanted to show you something first,” she said, pointing to Rosemary Gaynor’s neck. “You see these impressions here? This bruising?”

  Duckworth took a close look. “Thumbprint there, on this side of the neck, and four fingers over on this side. He grabbed her around the throat.”

  “With his left hand,” she said. “If she had been grabbed by the front, the thumbprint would be a little more to the front of her neck, not so far down the side.”

  “So he throttled her from behind. You suggesting he’s left-handed?”

  “Just the opposite.”

  Wanda pulled the sheet back further, exposing the woman to her knees. The body had been washed clean of blood, making the gash across her abdomen graphically clear. It ran roughly from hip bone to hip bone, dipping slightly en route.

  “Our boy put the knife in and basically sliced his way across, going from her left to right side. The cut runs at a fairly consistent depth all the way, about three inches. Now, you’d figure, if someone was being attacked that way, they’d try to pull back, or fall, something, but that’s not the case here.” She turned and faced him and held out her arms, as though inviting him to dance. “May I?”

  She came around behind him. “This won’t be quite right because you’re taller than I am, and I figure the killer was a good four or five inches taller than the victim in this case, but this will give you the right idea.”

  Wanda pressed herself up against his backside, then, with her left hand, reached over his left shoulder and grabbed his neck, pressing her thumb onto the left side, her fingers digging into the right.

  “Once he was holding her tight up against himself,” she said, “he reached around like this. . . .”

  And she brought her right arm around his right side, reaching as far as she could, and made the motion of driving a knife into the left side of his abdomen, then moved her arm across to his right.

  “The knife was in, and while he held her firmly, he just sawed right across.”

  “Got it,” he said.

  “I’m gonna let you go now before I lose control,” Wanda said flatly. She went around the examination table, across from Duckworth.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  “Yeah. This guy’s a nasty piece of work.”

  Duckworth couldn’t take his eyes off the wound. “You know what it looks like?” he said.

  Wanda nodded. “Yeah.”

  “A smile. It looks like a smile.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  David

  ETHAN had already returned the watch to his grandfather, even before he and Carl had disappeared into the basement to see the trains. Once Samantha Worthington and her son had left, I went back into the house and found Dad in the kitchen holding the item that had once belonged to his own father.

  He looked at me and said, “I’m confused. Was that woman Sam?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said. “Best-looking Sam I ever saw.”

  I went up to my room, closed the door, and took out my cell phone. I called up Randall Finley’s number in my list of “recents,” and dialed.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “I’ll do it,” I said.

  “Good to hear,” Finley said.

  “But I can’t get to it just yet. I’ve got a family matter to deal with.”

  “Well, deal with it as fast as you can,” Finley said. “We got lots to do.”

  “And there’s something I want to make clear.”

  “Go right ahead, David.”

  “I won’t do dirty. I won’t do underhanded. I see you pulling stunts like you got in trouble for seven years ago, I’m out. That clear?”

  “Crystal,” Randall Finley said. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  “I’ll be in touch tomorrow,” I said, and ended the call.

  Now it was time to go to the hospital.

  • • •

  Mom and Dad made noises about coming with me, but I suggested it would be better if I went on my own to talk to Marla.

  I found her on the third floor of Promise Falls General. I checked in at the nurses’ station to confirm which room she was in.

  “Who are you?” a nurse asked, almost accusingly.

  “I’m her cousin,” I said. “I’m Agnes Pickens’s nephew.”

  “Oh,” she said, her tone changing instantly. Being a relative of the hospital administrator had bought me some instant respectability. “Ms. Pickens and her husband were just here. I think they’ve gone to the cafeteria for coffee. If you’d like to wait—”

  “No, that’s okay, I can head straight down. It’s three-oh-nine, right?”

  “Yes, but—”

  I gave her a friendly wave as I continued on down the hallway. I entered Marla’s room—a private one, no surprise there—tentatively, in case she might be sleeping. I peered around the corner, and there she was, eyes shut, wrist bandaged, the bed propped up at a forty-five-degree angle.

  I bumped a chair, which set off the smallest squeak, but it was enough to make Marla open her eyes. Sh
e looked at me blankly for a second, so I said, “Hi, it’s David,” remembering her problem with faces, even those you’d figure she would know best.

  “Hey,” she said groggily.

  I came up alongside the bed and took hold of her hand, the one not connected to the bandaged wrist.

  “I heard,” I said.

  “I guess I kind of lost it for a second,” she said, glancing at the bandages. “Mom wants them to keep me overnight.” She rolled her eyes. “I’m worried they’re going to move me to the psych ward. I do not need to go to the psych ward.”

  “Well, what you did, it’s got everyone worried.”

  “I’m fine. Really.” She looked at me. “The policeman was very mean to me.”

  “What policeman?”

  “The one asking all the questions. Duck something.”

  “Duckworth.”

  “He made a big deal out of what I do. Like just because I make up reviews I’d lie about what’s going on with that woman who died.”

  “He has to ask tough questions,” I said. “It’s his job.”

  “Mom says she’s going to try and get him fired.”

  “I’m sure she’d like to,” I said, giving her hand a little squeeze. “My mom gave me a little history lesson today.”

  “About what?”

  “About when I hit my head on the raft. How if it hadn’t been for you, I’d have been a goner.”

  The corners of her mouth went up a fraction of an inch. “No problem.”

  “I want to help, Marla. You’re in a jam. The baby thing, your having Matthew—”

  “I told you, someone came to the door and—”

  “I know. What I was going to say was, Matthew being with you, it doesn’t look good in connection with what happened to Mrs. Gaynor. You get that, right?”

  She nodded.

  “So I’m going to start asking around. Find out how Matthew could have ended up with you. Find your angel.”

  She smiled. “You believe me.”

  What I had come to believe was that Marla believed it. “Yes,” I said. “I want you to answer a few questions so I can get started. You up to that?”

  A weary nod.

  “I know your face blindness makes it hard to describe people, but the woman who came to the door with Matthew, is there anything you can tell me about her? Hair color?”

  “Uh, black?” she said, as if she was asking me.

  “I wasn’t there,” I said. “But you think it was black?”

  She nodded. Rosemary Gaynor had black hair, but if it had been her at the door it would have meant she’d handed off her own baby to Marla. That didn’t make a lot of sense.

  And plenty of women had black hair.

  “I know the smaller details are tough, but how about skin color? Black, white?”

  “Kind of . . . in between.”

  “Okay. Anything else? Eye color?”

  She shook her head.

  “Moles or scars, anything like that?”

  Another shake.

  “How about her voice? What did she say to you and what was her voice like?”

  “It was pretty. She said, ‘I want you to look after this little man. His name is Matthew. I know you’ll do a good job.’ That was about all. Her voice was kind of singsong? You know what I mean?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “And she left me the stroller. She said she was sorry she didn’t have anything else for me. And then she was gone.”

  “Did she leave in a car?”

  Marla concentrated. “Yeah, there was a car.” She sighed. “I’m even worse with those than faces. It was black, I think.”

  “A pickup truck? An SUV? A van? A convertible?”

  She bit her lip. “Well, it wasn’t a convertible. A van, maybe. But I wasn’t paying much attention because I had Matthew to look after.”

  “Didn’t you think it was kind of strange? Someone just doing that?”

  “Sure,” she said, looking at me like I was an idiot. “But it was such a wonderful thing, I didn’t want to question it. I thought, Maybe this is how the universe is supposed to unfold. I lose a child, but then I’m given one to make up for that.”

  I thought there was more—or less—to this than the universe trying to make things right.

  Knowing a reasonable explanation was unlikely to come from Marla, I tried to figure it out myself. If what Marla believed was really what happened, how did one make sense of it?

  For someone to be able to take Matthew’s baby, Rosemary Gaynor must have already been dead. Otherwise she would have tried to stop it from happening.

  So someone kills Matthew’s mother. And there’s this baby in the house.

  The killer doesn’t harm Matthew. Whatever has motivated him—or her—to murder the woman, it’s not enough to do in the baby, too.

  The killer could have just left. The baby would have been found eventually.

  But no. The killer—or someone—wants to leave the baby with someone.

  Why Marla?

  Of all the people in Promise Falls the baby could have been left with, it’s Marla. Who lives clear across town. And who has a history—albeit a short one—of trying to steal a baby out of a hospital.

  Oh, shit.

  It was perfect.

  “David?” Marla asked. “Hello?”

  “What?”

  “You looked all spaced-out there for a second.” She smiled. “You look like I feel. Like I’m in dreamland or something. They’ve got me on something. I kind of go in and out. Last time I felt like this was when I was at the cabin.”

  “I was just thinking,” I said. “That’s all.”

  I asked her a bunch of other things. About this student named Derek she’d told me about earlier in the day who’d gotten her pregnant, and where I might be able to find him. I tried asking again whether there was any chance she might have a connection to the Gaynors. I’d brought along one of my reporter’s notebooks and was scribbling down everything Marla said in case something that didn’t seem important now would turn out to be later.

  But the entire time, I was thinking about something else.

  About how, if I—let’s say—had wanted to kill Rosemary Gaynor, and wanted to pin the crime on someone else, who better than some crazy woman who’d tried to kidnap a baby months earlier? What better way to frame her than to leave the dead woman’s baby with her?

  Maybe even leave a little blood on the door.

  Was that a reach? Was that totally ridiculous?

  To pull off something like that, someone would have to know what Marla had done. And her escapade had been pretty well hushed up by my aunt. There’d been nothing in the news, no charges laid.

  For someone to put Rosemary Gaynor’s death on Marla, that person would have to be connected somehow to both Marla and the Gaynors. Otherwise there’d be no way that person would know how to exploit Marla’s history.

  But who—

  “Excuse me, who are you?”

  I turned and saw a man standing in the hospital room doorway. He was wearing a proper suit, was about six feet tall, and looked like he thought he owned the place.

  “I’m David Harwood,” I said. “I’m Marla’s cousin. And you . . . ?”

  “I’m Marla’s doctor,” he said. “Dr. Sturgess. I don’t believe we’ve ever met, David.”

  THIRTY

  “I’VE got a good feeling,” Clive Duncomb said. “This is the night we’re going to catch this son of a bitch.”

  The entire Thackeray College security team was crowded into Duncomb’s office, including Joyce Pilgrim, the lone female member. Thirty-two, five-five, one hundred and thirty-nine pounds, short brown hair. At Duncomb’s request, she had not shown up tonight in anything resembling a security uniform. She was in jeans, a pullover sweater, and a light jacket.

  Duncomb wasn’t happy, but didn’t say anything. When he had first suggested to Joyce that she act as a decoy, in a bid to draw out the man who’d been attacking young w
omen on campus, he’d wanted her to wear high heels, fishnets, and a skintight top. Joyce had pointed out that this sicko was attacking students, not hookers, and if she was going to be wandering the campus as bait, she wasn’t going to be spending her time fending off requests for blow jobs. She suspected Duncomb just wanted to see how she’d look in an outfit like that, the pig.

  Maybe he was the predator, she thought.

  Okay, she knew that wasn’t true. The description provided by the three women who’d been attacked so far didn’t match Duncomb. Not as tall as the security chief. Slighter of build. They knew they were looking for a young man, although they didn’t have much of a description. In each attack, he’d been wearing a numbered sports sweater with a hood.

  When she took a job at the college as a security guard, she couldn’t have anticipated that she’d be doing something like this. What Duncomb expected of her sounded more like police work. Which was exciting and distressing at the same time. She liked doing something more important, more challenging than wandering around making sure lecture room doors were locked.

  But still, she knew she wasn’t adequately trained for this. She had raised the point, and not for the first time, at the beginning of this meeting.

  “God, you sound like that hick Promise Falls cop,” Duncomb said.

  “What cop?” Joyce asked.

  “He was here this morning, throwing his weight around, suggesting we didn’t know how to look after our own affairs. I spent eighteen years with the Boston PD. I think I know a thing or two more than some local hot shot who spends most of his time investigating the murders of forest creatures.”

  “Huh?” Joyce said.

  “Never mind. We’ve got this. And besides, you’ve got more backup than anyone could ever hope for. You got me, the boys here”—and he pointed to the three other men in the room, not one of them over the age of twenty-five, and all grinning like village idiots—“and most important, you’ve got protection in your purse, and I’m not talking condoms.”

  The other three laughed.

  Duncomb was speaking, of course, of the handgun he had provided Joyce. Not only had he given her a weapon, but instruction in its use. Almost three minutes’ worth.

  “And we’ll be in constant communication,” Duncomb reminded her.