Linwood Barclay - The Twenty-Three

“This is wonderful,” she said.

“It’s pretty heavy,” he said, grabbing a case and lugging it toward her car. “You have someone to help you when you get home?”

“I can take them in a few bottles at a time,” she said.

David put the smartphone up to his eye, grabbed some pictures.

“You look familiar to me,” the elderly woman said.

“I’m Randall Finley,” he said.

“Oh, you,” she said. “I remember you.”

“You want to open the back door and I’ll just put this on the seat there?”

“You used to be the mayor,” she said.

“Hope to be once again, too,” he said. “But that’s not what this is about today. This is about helping people like you.”

“Do you still use prostitutes?” the woman asked.

“Okay, there you go!” he said once he’d put the water in the backseat. He held the front door open for her.

As she slipped back in, she said, “I’m sure it was you.”

“I think you have me confused with someone else,” he said. “You’re thinking of the former attorney general. That was quite the scandal.”

“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?”

Duckworth

Iput 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.