The Twenty-Three

by Linwood Barclay

  “Oh,” she said. “You might be right.”

  He closed the door and waved her on. Shaking his head, he said to David, “If the stupid old bat can be fooled that easily, she shouldn’t be behind the wheel. Tell me you couldn’t hear the question on the video.”

  “I can always change the sound, dub music over it, something.”

  “People need to move on about that shit,” Finley said. “Oh, here we go.”

  Another news van was coming down the street, but it was from a local station in Albany, and instead of continuing on in the direction the NBC van had taken, it stopped.

  “Action!” Finley said under his breath. “Get those doors open! Let’s go. Move it, move it, move it!”

  At which point the back doors of all the vans were swung wide. Cases of bottled water were put on display on the sidewalk and nearby picnic tables in the park. Soon, the road was jammed with cars. People were getting out, helping themselves to cases of water—”One case per family for now!” Finley shouted—and tossing them into their trunks.

  Before long, Finley found half a dozen microphones in his face.

  “Why are you doing this?” one reporter asked.

  “Why?” Finley responded. “I think the question if I weren’t here would be, why not? I’m in a unique position to be able to help the people of Promise Falls in their hour of need.”

  “What’s this costing you?”

  Finley shrugged. “No idea. Thousands, probably. But I really don’t give a rat’s ass.” He chuckled. “Can I say that on TV?”

  “Didn’t you just announce your intention to run for mayor again?”

  Finley shook his head, waved the question off. “That may be true, but that has nothing to do with why I’m here today. This is not a day for politics. This is a day for helping, for pitching in. And tomorrow will be a day for healing.”

  He looked past the news crews, wondering where David was. It would be all he could do not to give the man a thumbs-up if he caught sight of him.

  There he was. Sitting on the edge of one of the picnic tables, on his cell phone.

  Later, after the reporters had left, and most of the water had been given away, Finley joined David at the table.

  “I’d call that a success,” Finley said.

  “You mean that you were able to help out people with drinkable water?”

  Finley smiled. “That, too.” He patted David on the back. “What say I give you a ride back to the plant so you can get your car? Then I’m going to slip away for a while. Regroup, gather my strength. We can talk later in the day, do some strategizing.”

  “Sure.”

  “Sounds like a plan. You get hold of that Sam person you were looking for?”

  “No,” David said.

  “That a man or a woman?”

  “A woman.”

  He nodded, pleased. “Well, that’s a relief. Not that I got anything against queers. I sure as hell don’t. I just don’t know if I’d want one running my campaign.”

  David asked, “How did you do it?”

  “How’d I do what?”

  “How’d you ratchet up production so fast? It’s only been a few hours since people started showing up at the hospital, since the outbreak. It normally takes that long to get the plant up and running, doesn’t it? And you’d have to be getting all your people in. I just don’t know how you did so much in such a short amount of time.”

  Finley looked over in the direction of the falls, as though taking in its natural beauty.

  “The water was already bottled,” he said. “It was mostly a question of getting it all into the trucks. I upped production in the last week.”

  “Why’d you do that?” David asked.

  “You know. Summer’s coming. Increased demand. Employees taking holidays. Just wanted to get ahead of things, that’s all. Who could have guessed it would turn out to be so fortuitous?”

  NINETEEN

  Duckworth

  I put in a call to my friend Wanda Therrieult, the Promise Falls coroner, but she wasn’t answering. The bodies were probably already stacking up in the morgue like firewood before the winter. I left her a message that I needed her, but wasn’t hopeful I’d hear back soon.

  I’d have to do the best I could with the Lorraine Plummer investigation on my own.

  Careful not to stand in the pool of dried blood, I surveyed things from the door to her dormitory room. There did not, first of all, appear to be signs of a struggle. The computer chair at her desk was not knocked over. Papers and books had not been tossed about. The couple of posters that hung on the wall—one was for the movie The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the Hollywood version with Daniel Craig; the other a Mahatma Gandhi quote that read, in an elegant typeface, “Be the change you want to see in the world”—were not askew, as one might expect them to be if a person had been thrown up against the wall.

  The door showed no signs of being forced. No splintered wood, no obvious scratches. There was no peephole installed in the door that would have allowed Lorraine to see who might be knocking on her door.

  Of course, Lorraine might not have had a knock at the door. She might have brought her killer to the room. A boyfriend, maybe. Someone she’d just met. Either way, the lack of any real disruption to the room suggested Lorraine might have known her killer.

  Known him well enough, at least, to allow him into her room.

  I had a terrible feeling that the man who’d killed Olivia Fisher and Rosemary Gaynor had struck again.

  So much for Bill Gaynor. And so much for Clive Duncomb.

  I’d been looking at both of them as possible suspects. I didn’t yet know of a connection between the dead security chief and Rosemary Gaynor, but Duncomb had had a motive for killing Olivia Fisher.

  Gaynor, on the other hand, had links to both victims. He was married to one, of course, and there was a motive. There was a hefty life insurance policy on Rosemary, and her husband had debts. His alibi—he’d supposedly been in Boston at the time of her murder—wasn’t airtight. He’d also been the insurance agent for the Fisher family, and therefore had known Olivia.

  But Bill Gaynor was not magical.

  He couldn’t have slipped out of prison to do this to Lorraine.

  I’d taken in the room, so now I focused on Lorraine herself. Wanda would be the one to determine with any degree of certainty whether Lorraine had been sexually assaulted, but it didn’t appear to me that she had. Her clothes were intact. Her top had not been pulled up; her pants had not been pulled down.

  This didn’t look like a so-called crime of passion. It struck me as more ritualistic, especially given that this was the third Promise Falls woman I knew of to have been attacked in this way.

  Now I turned my attention to the bed itself.

  The covers were rumpled, but not turned down. Sitting atop them was an open laptop, the monitor dead. I figured Lorraine had been dead several days, so the laptop had probably run out of charge. I’d want to see what she’d been working on. Maybe she’d been sitting on the bed, doing something on her computer, when someone came knocking on the door.

  There was something caught in the folds of the blanket. Something shiny.

  I tiptoed around the body on the floor and approached the bed from the foot. I pulled lightly on the blanket until the item that had caught my eye revealed itself.

  A cell phone.

  I grabbed it delicately by the edges, aware that the screen and the back side might contain fingerprints other than Lorraine’s. I moved it over to the desk, set it down, and pressed the home button with a fingernail.

  Nothing happened. The phone was dead.

  Inches away, already plugged into the wall, was a charging cord. Again, careful not to leave my mucky fingerprints all over the phone, I worked the charger into the base of the phone and waited for the screen to come to life.

  Please, please, please, I thought, do not be password protected. Despite warnings from the tech industry that everyone should have a fo
ur-digit password to get into their phones, many still did not bother. Some required a fingerprint.

  I glanced at Lorraine’s body, dreading the thought of having to position her dead finger onto the phone.

  I got lucky.

  The phone’s main screen, displaying all its various apps, materialized. The first thing I noticed was that she had several phone messages awaiting her. Given what Joyce Pilgrim had told me, they were probably from her frantic parents.

  She also had a text message awaiting her. I tapped on the message app and up came a conversation with someone named Cleo.

  Her last message to Lorraine Plummer had been simply: K.

  What I guessed she meant by that was “okay.” Certainly took a lot less effort to type and got the message across.

  There had been conversation leading up to that, a back-and-forth between Cleo and Lorraine.

  Cleo: Did u hear about Bmore?

  Lorraine: What?

  Cleo: He got arrested. Ran down someone with his car

  Lorraine: Holy shit

  Cleo: Yeah

  Lorraine: Hate to think of this first but what about essay

  Cleo: Yeah I know

  Lorraine: GTG someone here

  “I’ve got to go,” Lorraine was saying. Someone was there. Was the door open? Was there a knock? A recorded phone call would have told me more, but what I had here was pretty good. Lorraine had sent that text at 12:21 a.m. on May 21.

  Then, at 12:22 a.m., Cleo had texted: K.

  Lorraine had not returned that text. If she had a visitor, it was no surprise she hadn’t texted back right away. But she might have texted Cleo later to tell her who’d dropped by.

  Lorraine had never texted Cleo, or anyone else, again.

  I needed to know who’d come to visit Lorraine Plummer at 12:21. I also needed to find out who Cleo was. Still trying to be careful not to smudge the screen, I opened the contacts file and looked for anyone named Cleo.

  I found her in the Gs. Cleo Gough. I got out my own cell phone and entered the number, put the phone to my ear, and took the opportunity to walk out into the hall.

  There was a pickup on the fifth ring. “Hello?”

  “Is this Cleo Gough?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “I’m Detective Barry Duckworth with the Promise Falls police.”

  “What? Who?”

  I repeated it for her. “Okay,” she said in the same tone in which someone might say “Whatever.”

  “I need to speak with you, Ms. Gough.” I had pronounced it goff. “Am I saying that right?”

  “Yeah,” she said cautiously.

  “Are you on the Thackeray campus?”

  “Uh, not exactly. How do you know I go to Thackeray?”

  “I understand you’re a student there. You took Professor Blackmore’s class?”

  “Is this about that? About him running down that guy with his car? I don’t know anything about that. What would I know about that?”

  “Where are you right now, Ms. Gough?”

  She hesitated. “I live just off campus. I guess I could meet you in like ten minutes or something. There’s a Dunkin’s like half a block from here.”

  I wondered whether that was the best place for me to meet Cleo, or anyone else for that matter. I’d been doing so well lately when it came to donuts.

  “Okay,” I said. “Tell me which one.”

  She did.

  I said, “I’ll be the guy who looks like a regular customer.”

  Joyce Pilgrim had posted herself outside the building. When I came out, I asked her how extensive Thackeray’s system of surveillance cameras was.

  “We have them, although we don’t have them everywhere,” she said. She looked more pulled together than when I’d last seen her.

  “What about around here?”

  She pointed. “There’s one down the street, near the athletic center. Another one up that way by the library.”

  “What about this building?”

  “None in the hallways or directly outside.”

  “But to get here, someone would have to go past one of those other cameras.”

  Joyce nodded slowly. “Probably.”

  “How long does your security system hold on to video?”

  “A week.”

  So there was time. I told her my hunch about when Lorraine Plummer had been killed. I wanted to know who showed up on any surveillance cameras in the hour leading up to that time, and the hour after.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she said. “You got a number where I can reach you?”

  We exchanged contact information. “Ms. Pilgrim,” I said, “I am completely and totally counting on you here. I don’t know how much you know about what else is going on in Promise Falls today, but Putin could drop a nuclear bomb on Thackeray today and we wouldn’t be able to get to it for a week.”

  “I get it, Detective,” she said.

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  Her eyes met mine. “I’ve got a job to do, just like you.”

  I parked in front of the Dunkin’ Donuts that Cleo Gough had directed me to and went inside. A young woman seated by the window who appeared to be watching everyone who came in the door raised her head when she saw me. I definitely looked like a patron.

  She was early twenties, stick thin, with alternating streaks of black and blond hair.

  “You the cop?” she asked.

  “I am.”

  “I wanna see some ID.”

  “That’s smart.” I got mine out and gave her plenty of time to examine it.

  “Okay,” she said. “There are a lot of sick fucks out there, you know.” Sitting there, she seemed to recoil in her seat, even though I’d passed the initial test.

  “You want something?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Black coffee, I guess.”

  “Anything to eat? I’m buying.”

  Cleo shook her head. I went to the counter, ordered two coffees.

  “Haven’t you heard?” the kid behind the counter asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said.

  “All I can give you is something bottled. Water, juice, milk, anything like that.”

  I called over to Cleo to ask what she might like instead. “Orange juice.”

  “Make it two,” I told the kid. I surveyed the wondrous baked offerings. It was past noon, and I’d had nothing since breakfast. This was not a case of my treating myself to something I shouldn’t have. This was a matter of basic survival. And I did not have to get a donut. There were sandwiches.

  “A ham and cheese on a bun,” I said. “And that strawberry and vanilla sprinkle thing you’ve got there. Actually, two of them.”

  If today had taught me anything, it was that we could end up dead at any minute. Delayed gratification did not seem like an option at the moment.

  The kid put everything on a tray. Once I’d paid, I took it and sat down opposite Cleo. She looked disapproving as I handed her the juice.

  “That’s terrible for you,” she said. “Not the sandwich so much, but the other stuff. It’s no wonder you’ re—”

  She stopped herself.

  “Fat?” I said.

  “I wasn’t going to say that.”

  “That’s okay.” I smiled, bit into the sandwich. “God, I’m so hungry. I’ve been going all day. Guess you heard about the water thing.”

  An eye roll. “Seriously? Like, people getting sick everywhere? Of course I heard.”

  I nodded. “Good. I was working on that, then got sidetracked with something out at Thackeray. So you don’t live on campus?”

  “No.”

  I had to wait a minute before my next question. I had a mouth full of ham and cheese. I dabbed the corner of my mouth with a napkin.

  “You have a friend named Lorraine Plummer?”

  A shrug. “I guess.”

  “You guess she’s a friend?”

  “I have a class with her. We don’t hang out, but I know her.”

  “We
ll enough to text with her.”

  “Yeah,” Cleo said very slowly, stretching the word out.

  “When’s the last time you were texting with her?”

  “I don’t know. A few nights ago.”

  “About Professor Blackmore? About his class? You take that class?”

  “Yeah.” A nod. “Except there is no class now. He’s in jail or something.”

  “You haven’t been in touch with Lorraine since then?”

  Her head went from side to side. She opened her juice, took a sip. “So?”

  “I just wondered why you hadn’t been in touch with her since then.”

  “Why?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Because I didn’t need to. The next morning, I decided to go back home for a couple of days.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Syracuse. I figured, what with Professor Blackmore getting arrested and everything, that class was toast, and I only had one other class, so I decided to blow it off and come back last night.”

  “Why come back now? It’s a long weekend. Why not come back Monday night?”

  “Two days is all I want to spend with my mom and dad.” She did something funny with her mouth. “Mostly I went home to see if they’d give me some money. They gave me five hundred, so then I came back.”

  That was believable. I could remember Trevor’s time in school. His most brilliantly argued pieces of writing were not his essays, but pleas to Maureen and me for more funds.

  I was almost finished with the sandwich. I’d been glancing at the two donuts, the sense of anticipation building.

  “Do you know Lorraine well?”

  “Is she in some kind of trouble?”

  “I just wondered how well you know her.”

  “Not that well, like I said. I’m not going to say anything else until you tell me what’s going on with her. Like, she’s totally not the kind of person to do drugs or anything like that, so if that’s what you think, you’re totally wrong.”

  I could not bring myself to eat a donut while telling Cleo a friend of hers—even one who was not that close—was dead. I pushed the tray off to one side.

  “A couple of nights ago, shortly after you finished texting with Lorraine,” I said, “someone came to her room.”