The Twenty-Three

by Linwood Barclay

  “No,” Crystal said.

  “His car’s still here,” Celeste said.

  “You’re a regular Sherlock Holmes,” Dwayne said. “Look, like I told Crystal here, I’m sure he’s just gone for a walk or something. If he’s not back in an hour, I’ll go looking for him.”

  “I need him,” Crystal said.

  Worry washed over Celeste’s face. “I think we need to find him now. It’s not like him to just walk off.” Something occurred to her. “You know what? I’ll just call him.”

  “What?” Dwayne said, now looking pretty worried himself. “Is that a good idea?”

  “It’s a very good idea,” Crystal said.

  Celeste took her phone from her back pocket, made a couple of taps on the screen, then put it to her ear.

  “It’s ringing,” she said.

  Crystal stood stock-still, and Dwayne appeared to be holding his breath.

  “He’s not picking up,” Celeste said. “I’m going to let it go a few more . . . okay, it’s going to message. Cal, hey, it’s Celeste, and we’re wondering where the hell you are.”

  She ended the call but held on to the phone rather than put it away.

  “Call him again,” Crystal said.

  “Sweetheart,” Celeste said, “let’s give him a minute to hear the message.”

  “No, I think I heard the phone.”

  “What?” Dwayne said. “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “Call him again,” Crystal repeated.

  Celeste made the call. While she held the phone to her ear, Dwayne said, “I didn’t hear a damn thing. You must be hearing—”

  “Shh!” Crystal said.

  No one made a sound.

  Crystal pointed toward the garage. “It’s coming from over there.”

  “I already looked there,” Dwayne said.

  But his wife and Crystal were already moving up the driveway and past the house. The phone was still pressed to Celeste’s ear. “It’s still ringing.”

  As they reached the garage, Crystal said, “Don’t you hear it? It’s in there.” She pointed to the door. “Cal!”

  “Okay, I heard it, too,” Celeste said, and put her phone back into her pocket. She went to the smaller door at the side, attempted to open it but found it locked.

  “Cal!” Crystal had her mouth right up to the door.

  “Have you got the key?” Celeste said to Dwayne.

  “I don’t know why the hell he’d be in there. I always keep the door locked.”

  “Do you have the key?” his wife asked again.

  “Um,” he said, “it might be in the house.”

  “Check your pockets,” she snapped at him. “You never go out of the house without your keys.”

  “Cal!”

  He took a long time hunting for them in his jeans. “I’ve got my truck keys, but I don’t know if the garage key is on—”

  “Of course it is. Give them to me.”

  Dwayne, looking like a man who’d lost all hope, handed the keys over to his wife. There were half a dozen of them on the ring, and he didn’t bother to single out the right one for her.

  The third key did the trick.

  She opened the door, flicked on the light. Crystal managed to duck under her arm and got into the room first.

  Cal was on the floor, on his side. Duct tape was wrapped around his ankles and knees, and had been used to secure his wrists together at his back. There was another strip slapped across his mouth.

  “Oh my God!” Celeste said, and dropped to her knees.

  Cal was conscious, and rolled onto his stomach to allow Celeste to release his hands more easily. But after picking at the tape for several seconds, she turned to Dwayne, who was still standing in the doorway, and asked for a knife.

  “Uh, sure,” he said, and reached into his other pocket for a small jackknife. He extracted a blade, then carefully put it into his wife’s hand. “He’s probably going to say some crazy shit, but you need to keep in mind that he might have been hit on the head or something.”

  “What are you talking about?” Celeste said, focused now on cutting through the tape on Cal’s wrists without nicking him and drawing blood. Crystal was working at the tape on his ankles. She managed to cut through it with her nails, and was now working on the tape that bound his knees together.

  Once Cal’s wrists were free, he rolled back over into a sitting position and worked the tape off his mouth himself, his eyes on Dwayne the entire time. He wadded the tape into a ball and flicked it his way.

  “Pretty smart move, leaving me with my phone,” Cal said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dwayne said.

  Celeste’s eyes darted back and forth between them. “What the hell happened here? What’s going on?”

  Cal helped Crystal free his knees, at which point she threw her arms around his neck and held him tight.

  “I couldn’t find you,” she said.

  “I’m okay,” Cal said, pulling her arms from around him. “Thank you for tracking me down.” He struggled to his feet, picking up a two-foot-long scrap of two-by-four at the same time.

  “You should put that down,” Dwayne said. “We need to talk about this.”

  “We can talk in a minute,” Cal said, and then, his face flushed with an instantaneous rage, swung the board as hard as he could into Dwayne’s right leg above the knee. Dwayne wasn’t able to move quickly enough to avoid it, but when Cal looked like he was ready to take a second swing, he stumbled back and out of the way.

  “Jesus!” he said, grabbing his leg. “I think you broke it!”

  “No,” Cal said, holding up the board and inspecting it. “It’s fine.” Celeste got between them and screamed, “Stop it! Stop it!” She pushed Cal back, then turned to her injured husband. “Did you do this? Did you do this to my brother?”

  “I’m hurt,” he said. “I’m hurt bad.”

  Celeste, shaking her head in disbelief, looked back at Cal and asked, “Did he do this?”

  But before he could answer, something beyond him caught Celeste’s eyes. A large black plastic tarp was draped over something in the middle of the garage floor.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  Cal turned around to see what his sister was looking at. Celeste walked to the middle of the room, reached down, and took hold of a corner of the tarp and started to pull.

  “No,” Dwayne said. “Don’t.”

  Celeste gave the tarp a strong tug to reveal what had been hidden beneath.

  Dozens of boxes of stereo components. Receivers, mostly. By Sony, Denon, Onkyo. A box marked “3-D Projector.” Several more boxes filled with Blu-ray disc players.

  “Where the hell did those come from?” Dwayne said.

  FORTY-ONE

  ANGUS Carlson said, “They’ve pulled me off active duty until the investigation is over.”

  “I’m sorry,” Gale said, slipping an arm over his shoulder to comfort him. They were sitting on the curb out front of their house, under a streetlamp. “But you did the right thing.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. It seemed like it at the time. At least the guy isn’t dead. I shot him in the leg.”

  “You did what you had to do. And you’ve got all those witnesses in the hospital. They’ll all back you up.”

  “The gun was empty.”

  “What?”

  “The guy who was waving a gun around at the woman wearing the hijab—”

  “Which one is that?”

  “What?”

  “There’re the hijab and the niqab and the burka,” Gale said. “Right?”

  “The burka covers everything, and the niqab is like that, but you can see the eyes.”

  “Then which one is the hijab?”

  “That’s the scarf that goes around the head, covers the hair, but you can see the face.”

  “Is that what the woman was wearing? That one?”

  “Yeah. I was trying to tell you about the gun.”

  “I�
��m sorry,” Gale said.

  “When they checked the guy’s gun, there were no bullets in it. I just hope they don’t use that against me. I mean, he was waving it around, acting like a crazy person.”

  “You couldn’t know his gun wasn’t loaded,” she said. “It’s not like you have X-ray vision. I mean, lots of people have been shot by the police for waving around toy guns. It wasn’t a toy gun, was it?”

  “No, it was real. But when something like this happens, they look at everything. The other guy, he’ll probably get a lawyer who’ll say somehow I should have known, that I shot him needlessly, that I could have defused the situation some other way. But I talked to the chief, and she told me not to worry.”

  “Then don’t.” She paused. “How long are you off duty?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Will they still let you be a detective?”

  Angus shook his head. “No idea. Probably, but I don’t know. This kind of thing, you think you’re in the clear, and then they find something to nail you on.” He laughed derisively. “Wouldn’t my mom just love to hear about this?”

  “Angus.”

  “It’s been great telling her how good I’m doing, how things have turned out for me, despite all the shit she put me through. But now, this happens, and—”

  “Don’t talk about her,” Gale said. “I hate it when you bring her up. Just don’t do it.”

  Angus became sullen. “Fine.”

  They were both quiet for a minute. Finally, Gale said, “The hijab-niqab-burka thing got me thinking.”

  “Thinking about what?”

  “Actually, it doesn’t really have to do with that. But it’s just the way things link in your mind, you know. Anyway, it’s probably totally nothing.”

  Angus Carlson closed his eyes and dropped his head. “Gale, just tell me.”

  “I went for a walk this morning. I had to get out of the house, just to do something, you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, you know Naman’s?”

  “The bookstore?”

  “Yeah, he sells used books. He doesn’t carry just-published stuff.”

  “He got firebombed the other night,” Angus said. “Someone threw a Molotov cocktail through his window.”

  “I didn’t know that. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have bothered, but I went down there looking for a book.”

  “What book?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

  “Come on, what book?”

  Now it was her time to sigh. “I wanted to see if there were any books about couples. You know, like us. Couples who don’t have children, and why that is, and why one partner might want a child and the other doesn’t.”

  “Gale.”

  “You asked me what I was looking for and I told you. But listen to me.”

  “Okay, go on.”

  “So I walked down to the store, and it was all boarded up, but Naman was there, inside, kind of going through the damage. It was just awful. Books that didn’t catch on fire were all water-damaged from when the fire department got there, but even so, there were some books that weren’t damaged that much at all, except for smelling like smoke. I slipped inside and I talked to him and I felt so bad for him.”

  “Sure.”

  “I mean, people were blaming him just because he’s Muslim or whatever he is. Thinking he had something to do with the bombing at the drive-in, or what happened to the water.”

  “People can be like that,” Angus said. “They don’t know what to do with the anger, and they racially profile, and then that kind of thing happens.”

  “Which is why I feel really bad to even mention this, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “There was a book in his store, on the floor, right there in front of me, about poison.”

  Angus stiffened, turned his head toward his wife. “A book?”

  Gale nodded. “I can’t remember the exact title. But it was a kind of guide, of all the poisons that are out there. All these ways that you can kill people.”

  Angus appeared to be thinking. “Just because he had a book like that doesn’t mean he’s the one who poisoned the town’s water.”

  “I know. I know that.”

  “Did you say anything?”

  She nodded. “I picked it up and handed it to him. This was right after he’d made some comment about people being suspicious of him. And I made a bad joke of it, I guess, saying something like ‘Well, I guess you better not let anyone see you with this, then.’”

  “You said that.”

  “Yeah.” She screwed up her face worriedly. “You think I shouldn’t have said that?”

  “I don’t know. Like you said, it’s probably nothing.”

  “You’re right. It probably is.”

  “Unless,” Carlson said, “it is something.”

  “That’s kind of what I was thinking, too,” Gale said.

  DAY TWO

  FORTY-TWO

  DAVID set out Sunday at daybreak. He could make it to Lake Luzerne in under an hour, he figured. And if Sam and Carl were at Camp Sunrise, that’d be fantastic, because checking all the other campsites could take several hours.

  “Where are you off to so early?” his mother asked him when she found him in the kitchen. She and Don were always up before David, so it was a surprise to find him there.

  “Just something I have to do,” he said.

  “Is it something for Mr. Finley?” she asked.

  “No.” That got him thinking that he really needed to get in touch with Randy. The man had, after all, hired him to do a job, and David had not exactly been giving one hundred percent. Despite the contempt David felt for him, he felt some measure of guilt that he wasn’t earning his salary.

  He didn’t want to call and wake the man, so he decided to send him a text that Finley could discover whenever he got around to looking at his phone.

  Will be away much of today but hope to connect late afternoon. Sorry about this.

  David sent the text.

  He was about to put his phone away when he saw the telltale dots that told him Finley was writing a reply.

  Fine.

  That didn’t sound like the Finley David knew. Where was the outrage? The bluster? The guilt-tripping?

  Maybe, David thought, he’d been terminated. Maybe Finley’s short response meant he had found someone else to work for him. David wasn’t sure whether to be hurt or relieved. He didn’t like working for the man, but he also needed the job.

  David phoned him.

  “Am I fired?” David asked when Finley answered.

  “I don’t know,” Finley said.

  “Look, I know I’ve had some things going on, but I’m hoping to get them all sorted out. I’ve got to take a run up to Lake Luzerne today, but once I’m done up there, I can—”

  “Jane’s dead.”

  Finley filled him in. A stunned David didn’t know what to say beyond that he was sorry.

  “I may pull out,” Finley said. “I’m thinking, the hell with it.”

  “Don’t make a decision right away,” David counseled. “Take care . . . of what you have to take care of. Give it some time. Then decide.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said.

  “Don’t understand what?”

  “She was the reason,” Finley said.

  David started to say something else but realized Finley had ended the call.

  “What happened?” Arlene asked as Don came into the room.

  David shook his head and asked, “Can you look after Ethan today?”

  Don asked, “Can we have coffee today or is the water still going to kill us?”

  Arlene asked her son, “Do you know? Is the water safe yet?”

  “They should have it fixed by now,” Don said. “I don’t know why the hell they can’t have it fixed by now. They should have been able to flush the system. I’ve half a mind to go over to the plant myself and see what the hell they’re doing.”
/>   “Yes,” Arlene said. “I’m sure they’d welcome your input.”

  If I don’t have a job, David thought, I’ll be losing this house and moving back in with them.

  “Can you look after Ethan?” he asked again.

  “Of course,” Arlene said.

  David was out the door.

  David didn’t have GPS built into his car, or even one of those stick-on mini-nav systems that could be put atop the dashboard. But he had looked up the location for Camp Sunrise on his phone’s map app. He wasn’t expecting it to be difficult to find.

  He was there in just over an hour, and along the way he had to think about just what the purpose of this trip was. Was his search for Sam solely motivated by concern for her, or was this more about him?

  About half-and-half, he concluded.

  He was, without a doubt, worried for her safety. Brandon was looking for her, and he wanted to be sure Sam and her son were safe, that Brandon had not found them. But he also realized Sam was no fool. The fact that she’d gotten herself and Carl out of town so quickly was evidence of that.

  But that wasn’t enough for David. He had to know.

  And, he admitted to himself, he wanted Sam to know he cared enough to look for her.

  When he reached Camp Sunrise, he found a small, tollbooth-like structure between the entrance and exit lanes. It was designed to look like a mini log cabin, with wooden gates in the raised position on both sides. There was no one in the booth, so there was nothing to stop him from driving straight in.

  It wasn’t even nine in the morning yet, and the camp was a sleepy place. Few people were out and about, but as he drove the narrow, winding roads that led through the forested grounds, he noticed exceptions. There was a man frying up some bacon on a Coleman stove set up on a picnic table. At another campsite, a woman was running an extension cord from an electrical post to a cappuccino maker resting on the top of a stump.

  “Roughing it,” David said under his breath.

  David didn’t see any empty campsites. This was a long weekend, and it seemed a safe bet that the place was filled to capacity. There were tents, small trailers, and those hybrid tent-trailer things, with two wheels and a metal chassis, that opened up to sleep four or more people.