Linwood Barclay - The Twenty-Three

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 four-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 G s. 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.”