The Twenty-Three

by Linwood Barclay

  But something told me they were. Something told me that everything that had been going on in Promise Falls the last month—and stretching back three years—was somehow related.

  We had a serial killer and a madman on the loose. All wrapped up, it seemed, in one person.

  Or not. Maybe we were dealing with a group of people. Some kind of cult. If Mason Helt had been part of this, well, he was dead, and there was still shit happening, so that definitely meant we had been dealing with, at least at some point, more than one person.

  Clive Duncomb was dead, too. And Bill Gaynor was in jail awaiting trial. Their names had been linked, one way or another, to events of the last month, but they couldn’t be linked to Lorraine Plummer’s death, or the poisoning of the water supply.

  I needed to go back to the beginning. Square one.

  Olivia Fisher.

  My phone rang. I looked at the readout, saw who it was.

  “Wanda,” I said.

  “Sorry for not getting back to you sooner,” Wanda Therrieult said. “I don’t suppose I have to explain.”

  “You getting help?”

  “So far I’ve got three medical examiners coming in. A lot of the bodies will have to be autopsied elsewhere. They’ve become our number one export. So what’s this about a dead female at Thackeray?”

  “Yeah, well, that’s all I had at the time when I called. Now I’ve got another possible homicide at the water treatment plant. A man. Neither of them poisonings.”

  “Christ, Barry. What the hell is going on? These things connected?”

  “The body at the water plant, I’d say, is definitely connected to the poisonings. But the body at Thackeray, that may be related to something else.”

  “What?”

  “You be the judge.” I didn’t want to tell her I believed Lorraine Plummer was killed by the same person who’d killed Rosemary Gaynor and Olivia Fisher. I didn’t, as they say, want to lead the witness.

  “Where do you want me first?” Wanda said.

  I told her to head out to Thackeray. The sooner she got there, the sooner Joyce Pilgrim could move on to reviewing the security tapes.

  As I put my phone away, I heard, “Hey!”

  Garvey Ottman and I turned. Coming out of the water plant door was Randall Finley.

  “What the hell is he doing here?” I asked.

  “He asked me to give him a call if anything happened,” Ottman said.

  “You don’t take orders from him,” I said. “He’s not the mayor. He’s not anything, except a pain in the ass.”

  Ottman opened his palms to me, a “What was I supposed to do?” gesture.

  Finley was striding quickly toward us, but as soon as he saw Tate’s body, he stopped.

  “Goddamn, so there he is,” Finley said. He looked at me. “What have we got here?”

  “This is a crime scene, Randy. Get out.”

  “Looks like someone bashed his brains in. Jesus, Barry, this looks like it was deliberate. Like it’s a murder!”

  “Thank you, Randy,” I said.

  “Oh, man, that’s a lunch tosser if I ever saw one.” He took a step closer to the body. “He was a dumb ol’ drunk, but he didn’t deserve that.”

  “Randy, step away.”

  “I just wanted to see what—”

  “Now!” I moved toward him. I was reaching around into my pocket where I kept a pair of plastic wrist cuffs.

  The moment he saw them, he said, “Whoa, hold on there! What the hell you think you’re doing?”

  “Trying to preserve what’s left of this scene that hasn’t already been trampled on.”

  “Okay, okay, I’m going, I’m going.”

  “That way,” I said, pointing back to the plant. “Both of you.”

  Once we were all inside the building, Finley started poking a finger in my face. “You know what I’d like to know? I’d like to know what the hell kind of progress you’re making here. Looks to me like not much!”

  I said to Ottman, “Show me the process. How you treat the water once it comes in from the reservoir.”

  “Yeah, I can—”

  “Christ in a Chrysler, Barry,” Finley said. “You got a dead guy out there and dead people all over town and you want an engineering lesson?”

  To Ottman, I said, “Give me a moment.”

  I approached Finley, slipped a friendly, conspiratorial arm around his shoulder, and said, “There’re things I can’t say in front of Garvey that are for your ears only.”

  “Oh?” he said, no doubt flattered to finally be brought into the loop.

  I led him toward a metal industrial door with a strong handle.

  “I’m putting you under arrest.”

  “You’re what?”

  “Give me your hand.”

  “I will not—”

  I grabbed his wrist, slipped half of the plastic cuff over it, and cinched it tight.

  “You son of a bitch,” he said.

  “Stand here, put your hands down there.” When Finley started to resist, I said to him, through gritted teeth, “I am not fucking around here, Randy.”

  I put the other half of the cuff through the door handle before slipping it over his other wrist and cinching it as tight as the other one.

  “What’s the charge?” Finley asked.

  “Being an asshole in a water treatment plant. It’s an environmental statute. Fecal contamination.”

  “You’re making a big mistake, Barry. A very big mistake.”

  “Not as big as the one you made when you blackmailed my son,” I said, leaning in close to his ear. “I’d rather just take my gun out and shoot you, but the paperwork would be murder. And I have a lot of other things on my plate right now.”

  As I walked back in Ottman’s direction, Finley yelled, “I’ll sue your ass off! That’s what I’ll do! You haven’t heard the fucking last of this!”

  “You want to show me now?” I asked Ottman.

  “Yeah, sure, right this way.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  GALE Carlson decided to go out.

  Even before catastrophe struck Promise Falls that morning, she’d had no real plans. It might have been a long holiday weekend for her—the dental clinic, which was usually open Saturday mornings, had closed Friday at five and wasn’t to reopen until nine Tuesday morning—but her husband, Angus, was scheduled to work through the weekend. While being bumped up to detective had been good news, being the new guy in the department meant he was at the bottom of the list for getting the weekend off.

  He’d started at six that morning, and Gale had no idea when she would see him again. She had every expectation he’d be doing a double or even a triple shift. He, and every other cop and paramedic and doctor and nurse in town. She’d been watching the news—all the major networks were carrying the story within a couple of hours—and seen interviews with people at the hospital, some still waiting to see a doctor, others weeping at the loss of a loved one. There was footage of that goofball who used to be mayor handing out free water down by the falls, the same brand of bottled water Gale kept in the fridge. And then they went live to a news conference, where the interim head of Promise Falls General, flanked by a doctor and the chief of police, was giving the grim news.

  So far, 123 people were dead.

  It was one of the worst disasters in the state’s history. After 9/11, a few airplane crashes, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York in 1911, which had claimed 146 lives, this was it.

  Nearly three hundred people were being treated for symptoms of hypotension, which—Gale didn’t catch all of it—had something to do with low blood pressure.

  One quote in particular, from the hospital’s head doctor, caught Gale Carlson’s attention.

  “Whatever has affected these people is resistant to any kind of treatment we can offer. There appears to be nothing we can do.”

  Either people made it, or they didn’t. Survival appeared to depend on how much water they had consumed. Only half a cup
of coffee? You probably lived. A large glass of water? Probably not. If you’d had a shower or washed your hands, your skin probably felt like it was crawling, but that wasn’t likely to kill you. And while there was little doubt the drinking water was the cause, the source of the contamination remained a mystery.

  Dozens of patients had been transferred to hospitals in Albany and Syracuse, and a handful had even been sent to New York City. The local emergency staff had been stretched far beyond their capabilities.

  If there was any good news, it was that most people had now gotten the message. The number of people coming to the hospital for treatment in the last couple of hours had dropped off considerably. As bad as it was, it could have been worse, Chief Finderman pointed out. Had this happened on a regular workday, and not on the Saturday of a long weekend, far more people would have been up early, and consumed the contaminated water.

  “Oh!” Gale had said while watching the conference when she caught a brief glimpse of her husband walking past the camera.

  She wanted to phone him then, ask how he was doing, but she knew this was the wrong time to bother him. She felt she’d been bothering him a lot lately, and watching what Angus had to deal with, she felt awash with guilt.

  Maybe her husband was right. Maybe this was no world to bring a child into. Although that had never been his argument, exactly. It wasn’t the state of the world that worried him. It was the quality of parenting, and what he’d endured as a child was certainly not the best.

  But Gale knew she would make a wonderful mother, if only given the chance. She’d spent hours on the Internet Googling “my husband does not want a baby,” and been inundated with stories from marriage-counseling and parenting sites. Gale was hardly alone. Millions of women were married to men who did not want to become fathers.

  Sometimes what Gale really wanted was just one good book, instead of being overwhelmed with online material. Given that she was going stir-crazy at home, she decided to take a walk downtown.

  A walk would do her good. She’d have her phone with her should Angus need to get in touch.

  She had a destination in mind.

  There was a bookstore in the Promise Falls Mall, but there was a used bookstore downtown where she loved to browse. Although the manager stocked mostly fiction, he also had a nonfiction section and, within that, some books on parenting and psychology.

  Maybe she’d find something there, something that would help her persuade Angus that they should take that leap of faith.

  Get pregnant.

  And after all, it wasn’t as though the baby-making process was without its fun. At least, most of the time.

  Gale grabbed her purse. She stepped outside first to see whether she needed a jacket, but it was a pleasant, late-spring day, temperature in the midseventies. No jacket required.

  She and Angus lived in a small two-story house not far from the central business area of Promise Falls. When they first moved here from Ohio, they’d often walked down to the park by the falls, but the novelty of that had worn off. Gale found she strolled down there more frequently on her own, especially when Angus had to work evenings. That had been a regular occurrence when he was in uniform, and likely would still be the case now that he was a detective.

  She thought she might go down there today, after her bookstore visit.

  Gale set herself a steady pace. It didn’t take long before she had walked the several blocks to her destination.

  She was taken aback by what she found.

  There were sheets of plywood where the windows of Naman’s Books used to be, and the brickwork was stained with soot. She’d had no idea that there had been a fire here. When had that happened?

  “Oh, no,” she said under her breath. There were enough bookstores, used and new, going out of business without one having to go up in smoke.

  She thought she heard noise inside, things being shuffled about, and noticed that the glass door, which had been covered over with cardboard on the inside, was ajar. She peeked inside.

  “Naman?” she said.

  “Hello?”

  “Naman, what on earth has happened?”

  The owner of the store appeared in the sliver between the door and the jamb, one dark eye taking Gale in.

  “It is you,” he said, and opened the door wide enough that she was able to see him. The corner of his mouth went up in an attempt at a smile. “One of my best customers.”

  “I didn’t know,” Gale said. “What happened?”

  “A fire,” he said.

  “When?”

  “A few nights ago.”

  “How did it happen?”

  He shook his head, suggesting he did not want to talk about it.

  “Come on,” Gale said. “Tell me.”

  “Some guys in a truck. They drove by, threw something through the window. A what-do-you-call-it. Cocktail. Molotov cocktail. A bottle on fire. It broke the glass and landed in the books and the fire started.”

  “Oh my God,” she said, peering in to try to see the damage. “I’m coming in.”

  “It’s not safe.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m tough.”

  He stepped back to allow her to come in. He had set up two spotlights on stands so he could see what he was doing.

  “They haven’t turned the electric back on yet, so I am running extension cords out back, borrowing power from a neighbor. It’s not as bad as it was. It was all wet after the fire department came, water in the basement, thousands of books wet and ruined. I have a Dumpster out back for the stuff I cannot save. But I am going through, book by book, seeing what is salvageable.”

  “This is horrible. Did they catch the people who did it?”

  Naman shook his head.

  “Why would someone do this?”

  “They called me a terrorist,” he said.

  “Oh, Naman.”

  “They see a different kind of name out front, and suddenly I am the kind of guy who would blow up a drive-in theater. Good thing they already set the store on fire, or they would be back today to blame me for what has happened to the water.”

  “Those kinds of things, they bring out the ugly side of people.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I don’t know what to say. Do you want me to ask my husband if they are having any luck tracking them down?”

  “Your husband?”

  “He works for the police. He’s a detective now.”

  “I don’t think you ever mentioned that before,” Naman said.

  “Maybe not.”

  “I think I would have remembered.” He glanced upward. “The man who had the apartment upstairs, he was a private detective. Not with the police, but working for himself.”

  “Really?”

  Naman nodded. “But he is gone. I don’t think he will come back. Anyway.” He went over to the counter, where he’d been sorting books into boxes. “What were you looking for today? I mean, I am not open, but if I have what you want and it is a little water damaged, I would give it to you for free.”

  “I was looking for . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “What?”

  “It’s kind of personal.”

  “Oh.”

  She laughed. “But if I’d found it, I’d have been bringing it up to you to pay for, so . . .”

  “What kind of book?”

  “Just . . . advice about marriages. The different things that couples go through.”

  “You don’t have to tell me.”

  She laughed again. “It’s not that.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “But I know what you were thinking. It’s just, Angus—that’s my husband—and I can’t seem to agree on whether to start a family. I want to, and he’s hesitant.”

  “Oh. I don’t know if I have any books like that. In good condition, or damaged. You know, you should go to the bookstore in the mall, maybe. Or look online.”

  “I guess. I just—I’ve always liked coming here. I love
books, and old books. I love the smell of them.”

  “They all smell of smoke now,” Naman said sadly.

  “Are you going to reopen?”

  “We’ll see. I have to clean up first.”

  “I should let you get back to it. I’m so sorry.” Gale turned and, as she took a step toward the door, stumbled over something. “Stupid me,” she said, bending over and picking up a book that had clearly been drenched by the firefighters. It had dried, and expanded to twice its original thickness.

  “Guess this is one for the Dumpster,” she said. She looked at the title. “Deadly Doses: A Writer’s Guide to Poison.”

  “I’ll take that,” Naman said, extending a hand.

  Gale gave it to him. “Guess you won’t want that one around when you’ve got nutcases accusing you of awful things.”

  She offered an awkward chuckle.

  “No,” said Naman. “I guess I don’t.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  DAVID Harwood went straight home.

  His father was in front of the TV in the living room, watching CNN. “They just had something on Promise Falls,” Don said as his son walked through.

  David wasn’t interested. He was headed for the kitchen, where he kept a laptop tucked at the far end of the counter. He grabbed it, set it up on the table, and sat himself down.

  He heard someone bounding down the stairs. A second later, Ethan was in the kitchen.

  “Did you find out what happened to Carl?” Ethan asked. “Did he drink the water and get sick?”

  “No,” David said, opening a browser and tapping away with his fingers to fill in the search field. His eyes were on the screen. “I mean, not that I know of.”

  “Why were you asking if he was in school?”

  “Ethan, I’m doing something here.”

  “What about his mom? Did she drink the water?”

  “Ethan!” David snapped. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  Ethan frowned, turned, and walked out of the kitchen.

  David had entered “Brandon + Worthington + Boston + bank.”

  He figured adding “bank” would narrow the search down, pinpoint stories about the Brandon Worthington who had been sentenced to prison for bank robbery.