Linwood Barclay - The Twenty-Three

“Yes,” Gerald Brighton said. “I hear you. Let me, uh, let me see what I can do and I’ll get back to you.”

“I look forward to your call,” Cal said, and slipped the phone back into his jacket.

He heard a noise to his right. Dwayne was coming out the side door of the freestanding double garage that sat on the back corner of the property. He took a set of keys from his pocket, inserted one into a lock, turned it, then put the keys back where he’d gotten them.

He turned and saw Cal standing there.

“You been watching me?” he asked.

“I just got off the phone,” Cal said.

“Let me guess,” Dwayne said. “You’re inviting some more people to stay over at my house. Well, why the hell not?”

He started walking Cal’s way.

“I’m not the enemy,” Cal said.

“Who said you were?”

“I care about Celeste and you. If there’s anything going on I can help you guys out with, just tell me.”

Dwayne kept on walking, past Cal and toward his truck.

“Thanks very much, but I got everything under control,” he said. Then Dwayne opened the door, hauled himself up into the driver’s seat, backed the vehicle onto the street, and drove off.

Duckworth

“Ihaven’t touched him,” Garvey Ottman said. “I mean, other than to drag him out and put him there. Which I guess, technically, is touching him.”

We were standing at the edge of the reservoir behind the treatment plant in the shadow of the water tower. It was a large man-made pond with a concrete bottom, a kind of gigantic kids’ wading pool. It was fed by streams and nearby rivers; then from here water moved through the treatment plant and, finally, was pumped up into the tower, where simple gravity delivered it to all the homes and businesses of Promise Falls.

Tate Whitehead’s body was resting, faceup, dead eyes open, on the concrete walkway that encircled the reservoir. His clothes were still drenched. According to Ottman, he had only pulled him out of the water about half an hour ago.

“I didn’t try to do nothing like mouth-to-mouth,” Ottman said. “I mean, it was pretty obvious he was dead. If I thought he’d had any life in him, I’d have done something, or at least called an ambulance. Maybe it’s just as well he was dead, ’cause no ambulance was likely to get here anytime soon anyway. But I woulda done it if I had to.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “You’re right. He’s very dead, and likely has been for several hours. Tell me about finding him.”

“Okay, so, I came out here to take some samples. I’ve been taking samples at each step of the process to see where the trouble might be, you follow me?”

“Yes.”

“Because if the water in the reservoir is okay, then the contamination, whatever it is, must be further along.”

“I get that.”

“But if it was from farm runoff or that kind of thing, and got into the river upstream of here, I’d find traces in the reservoir.”

“Tate,” I said, nodding my head in the direction of the body.

“Right. So I’m out here, and I see something dark just under the surface, right about there, where the bottom slopes up some, and I get close and I can see it’s a person, and I’m thinking, holy shit. So I run and grab a pole to pull him in a bit, then step in and haul him out.” He pointed to his rubber boots. “I had these on.”

It was good to know Ottman hadn’t ruined a pair of shoes.

“You know what I think?” Ottman asked.

“What do you think?”

“I think he must have come out here to hoist a few, lost his balance, hit his head on the edge when he was falling in, and went unconscious and drowned.”

“Maybe,” I said, kneeling down next to the body. “Help me turn him to the side some.”

He knelt down next to me and we gently rolled Tate Whitehead over a quarter turn, far enough that I could get a look at the back of his head. It was a pulpy, bloody mess. The skull had been cracked open.

“I don’t think it played out the way you just said,” I told Ottman.

“Jesus,” he said. “You see that? How the hell would he hurt his head that bad falling in? You’d have to fall out of a tree headfirst to bust your noggin like that.”

I stood. “Stay here,” I told him.

I began a slow clockwise walk around the edge of the reservoir. Beyond the concrete walkway was a strip of well-maintained lawn, and then trees were beyond that. This was not the forested area we had searched earlier. That had been on the other side of the building, by the parking lot. At the time, I’d been thinking Whitehead would have been close to the booze supply in his Pinto.

I kept my eyes down, scanning the reservoir’s edge as well as the walkway. It took nearly five minutes, and I was about three-quarters of the way around-I should have gone counterclockwise-when I saw what I was expecting I might find.

A few drops of blood.

I got down on my knees for a closer look.

“What is it?” Ottman shouted over to me.

Half a dozen drops within a few inches of the edge. Whitehead’s attacker had probably been hiding in the nearby trees. When Whitehead passed, probably somewhat under the influence and an easy target, his assailant came at him from behind, bashed him in the head, and pushed him into the water in one swift motion. Otherwise, there would have been more blood on the walkway.

I stepped off the concrete walkway and into the nearby grass, scanning the ground. It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for.

A large rock, half again as large as a closed fist. There was what looked to be blood and hair on it.

I did not touch it.

“What’d ya find?” Ottman shouted.

I walked back to where he had remained standing over the body.

“D’ja find something?” he asked.

“So let’s say Tate here went into the reservoir early in his shift. There would have been no one else here throughout the night?”

“That’s right. The place kind of runs itself, with minimal supervision.”

Once Whitehead was dead, his killer, or killers, had hours to do whatever they wanted in the treatment plant.

“What have your samples shown so far?”

Ottman, glancing at the body, said, “Can we talk someplace else? I can’t keep looking at this. I’m feeling queasy.”

I motioned him a few feet away, by the trees.

“The sample,” I said.

“Okay, well, it takes time, but the water here is looking pretty good. Since you’ve been gone, we’ve had the state health authorities here collecting samples of their own. They’re testing the reservoir, they’re testing the water once it’s been treated before it pumps up to the tower, and they’re testing all over town.”

“What have they found?”

“Don’t know yet,” he said. “You can’t do an instant test on E. coli.”

I was starting to think this had nothing to do with E. coli. I was starting to think it had a lot more to do with dead squirrels and painted mannequins and a flaming bus and a Thackeray student in a hoodie, and, worst of all, at least until today, the bombing of the drive-in theater.

Not to mention the murders of Olivia Fisher, Rosemary Gaynor, and now Lorraine Plummer.

While I believed the three women had been murdered by the same person, I didn’t know that they were connected to the other incidents. I didn’t even know, with any certainty, that all those other incidents were connected to one another.

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.