Linwood Barclay - The Twenty-Three

“Does he go down there to have a drink?”

“I didn’t say that,” Mrs. Whitehead said.

“May I use your phone?” I asked.

My cell would have worked just fine, but I wanted to get into the house and see for myself whether Whitehead was here.

“Uh, okay,” she said, stepping back to let me in. “It’s in the kitchen.”

I walked through a living area furnished with items that might have been bought at the time the house was built. In the kitchen, I noticed just one plate with half a piece of toast on it. An empty glass looked as though it had had orange juice in it. Looked as though Mrs. Whitehead had breakfasted alone.

I found a phone on the counter and dialed Garvey Ottman.

“Yeah. Duckworth?”

“Yeah.” I described the room where Mrs. Whitehead said her husband liked to disappear to during his shift. “You got a room like that?”

“Yup.”

“Have you looked for Whitehead there?” I asked.

“No, why would I?”

“Can you check it out?”

“Hold on, okay? I’ll head down there now.”

I could hear hurried, echoing footsteps as Ottman ran through the plant, then down what sounded like a metal stairway.

“I’m almost there,” he said. “How’d you hear about this?”

“Mrs. Whitehead,” I said, and gave her a weak smile, “is with me, and she said he sometimes goes down there for a break.”

“Jesus, the son of a bitch,” he said. “Okay, I’m here. Hang on.”

I heard a loud, rusty squeak. Some more noises, as though Ottman was moving some things around.

“Shit,” he said.

I felt my pulse quicken. “What? Is he there?” I pictured him passed out, surrounded by empty bottles.

“No,” Ottman said. “He’s not.”

I left a card with Tate Whitehead’s wife and got her to promise-for what that was worth-to call me if he showed up. From there, I headed to Thackeray College. I’d phoned ahead, to the security office once run by Clive Duncomb, and was put through to the new boss of that department, Joyce Pilgrim. I’d already met her, back when I was looking into Duncomb’s fatal shooting of Mason Helt, the lead suspect in a series of campus assaults. Duncomb had used Joyce as bait to flush out the predator, and the plan had worked all too well.

She told me which student residence to meet her out front of, and moments later I found her there, standing at the building’s entrance.

“I called ages ago,” she told me as I walked up. She was pale, drawn, and her voice was shaking.

“We’ve kind of had our hands full,” I told her. “Are you okay?”

“Huh? Yeah, yeah, just a bit shook-up.”

She led me into the building and up a flight of concrete stairs. This was a newer, more modern building for Thackeray, a school that went back to the late eighteen hundreds.

“Who’s the victim?” I asked as we were halfway up.

“Lorraine Plummer,” Joyce Pilgrim told me.

I knew the name. “She was one of the ones Mason Helt attacked.”

“That’s right,” Joyce said.

“Why was she here? Isn’t school over?”

“It is, but there are some summer classes. But of the students taking them, a lot of them live in town. Hardly any in the residences, at least not this one. We’ve got a couple of students on the third floor, at the other end of the building. Lorraine’s the only one, through the summer, living on the second floor.”

“So who found her?”

Joyce told me about the call from the family, who had not heard from their daughter for several days.

“Any idea when it happened?” I asked.

“I’m no expert on that kind of thing,” she said, “but it’s been a while, I’m pretty sure of that.”

You try to go into these things with an open mind. You don’t prejudge, preguess. But, looking back, I’d clearly been expecting something different from what I found.

I had in my head that what I’d be looking at was a sexual assault that had escalated to a homicide. Girl living alone, maybe she meets a boy at some local bar, invites him back to her dorm room, and things get out of hand.

I’d seen that kind of thing before.

The killer wouldn’t have to worry about someone hearing what was happening, given that the building was nearly empty.

That part I had right.

As soon as we came out of the stairwell and into the hall, I had a sense of what we were dealing with. The smell was overwhelming, and it hit me hard because I was gulping air after just the one flight.

God, one lousy flight of stairs and I was winded.

I stopped, reached down into my pocket where I kept a small tube of Vicks VapoRub.

“What are you doing?” Joyce asked.

“You’ll want some of this, too.”

I put a dab on my finger and rubbed some on between my nose and upper lip. The strong menthol smell would mask the stench.

Joyce let me put some on her finger so she could do the same. “Wish I’d had this earlier.” Embarrassment washed over her face. “I threw up.”

“Nothing to be ashamed of,” I said.

Even before we reached the door, I could see the blood that had seeped out below it. The door was closed. Before I could ask, Joyce told me she had closed the door when she’d gone down to wait for me.

“You’ve touched the handle?” I asked her.

Her face fell. “Yes.”

Even so, I managed to turn the knob with my fingernails, just in case some usable prints remained. I nudged the door open with my elbow.

It was not as I had imagined. It was much, much worse.

Lorraine Plummer was stretched out on the floor, slightly on her right side, her dead eyes open, lips parted. I had a view of a bloated tongue, and her skin was bluish in color, indicating she had been dead for some time. She was dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of stretchy workout pants, and covered in blood below the waist.

I glanced back at Joyce Pilgrim, thinking I would have to tell her to stay out in the hall, but it wasn’t necessary.

I got as close to the body as I could without stepping in blood-all of which looked dried-then knelt down for a few seconds, which was no picnic for my knees. I wanted a closer look without actually moving or touching the body. Given what was going on in town, I wasn’t likely to see a medical examiner or a forensics team here for a long time.

It was difficult to tell exactly how she had been attacked, and I’d have to wait until Lorraine Plummer was on an autopsy table with all the blood washed away to be sure, but I was able to make out the wound that was the apparent cause of death.

Someone had sliced across the young woman’s abdomen. The cut ran, roughly, from just above one hip bone to the other. But along the way, it curved down slightly.

I felt a wooziness that was not directly related to the stench in the room. I had seen this individual’s handiwork before. Once, in person, when I’d investigated the murder of Rosemary Gaynor. And a second time, when I had seen autopsy photos from the Olivia Fisher homicide.

The slice that looked like a smile.

THEdriver of the fire truck told Cal Weaver there were so many casualties from whatever was making people sick that he couldn’t even guess when officials might get to Lucy Brighton.

Cal took the man’s suggestion to leave a detailed note on the door. He walked back to Crystal, still sitting on the front step with the clipboard and sheets of paper she was drawing on.

He sat down next to her and said, “Do you have a clean sheet there?”

Crystal slipped one out from underneath and put it on the top. Cal took the clipboard and pen from her and wrote at the top of the page “NOTICE” and underlined it three times.

In bullet form, he indicated that the body of Lucy Brighton was in the home, in the upstairs bathroom. He wrote that the only other resident of the house, Crystal, age eleven, was safe and with him. He put his name and contact information at the end, adding that he had a key to the house and would return to let the authorities in.