Linwood Barclay - The Twenty-Three

Or not. Maybe we were dealing with a group of people. Some kind of cult. If Mason Helt had been part of this, well, he was dead, and there was still shit happening, so that definitely meant we had been dealing with, at least at some point, more than one person.

Clive Duncomb was dead, too. And Bill Gaynor was in jail awaiting trial. Their names had been linked, one way or another, to events of the last month, but they couldn’t be linked to Lorraine Plummer’s death, or the poisoning of the water supply.

I needed to go back to the beginning. Square one.

Olivia Fisher.

My phone rang. I looked at the readout, saw who it was.

“Wanda,” I said.

“Sorry for not getting back to you sooner,” Wanda Therrieult said. “I don’t suppose I have to explain.”

“You getting help?”

“So far I’ve got three medical examiners coming in. A lot of the bodies will have to be autopsied elsewhere. They’ve become our number one export. So what’s this about a dead female at Thackeray?”

“Yeah, well, that’s all I had at the time when I called. Now I’ve got another possible homicide at the water treatment plant. A man. Neither of them poisonings.”

“Christ, Barry. What the hell is going on? These things connected?”

“The body at the water plant, I’d say, is definitely connected to the poisonings. But the body at Thackeray, that may be related to something else.”

“What?”

“You be the judge.” I didn’t want to tell her I believed Lorraine Plummer was killed by the same person who’d killed Rosemary Gaynor and Olivia Fisher. I didn’t, as they say, want to lead the witness.

“Where do you want me first?” Wanda said.

I told her to head out to Thackeray. The sooner she got there, the sooner Joyce Pilgrim could move on to reviewing the security tapes.

As I put my phone away, I heard, “Hey!”

Garvey Ottman and I turned. Coming out of the water plant door was Randall Finley.

“What the hell is he doing here?” I asked.

“He asked me to give him a call if anything happened,” Ottman said.

“You don’t take orders from him,” I said. “He’s not the mayor. He’s not anything, except a pain in the ass.”

Ottman opened his palms to me, a “What was I supposed to do?” gesture.

Finley was striding quickly toward us, but as soon as he saw Tate’s body, he stopped.

“Goddamn, so there he is,” Finley said. He looked at me. “What have we got here?”

“This is a crime scene, Randy. Get out.”

“Looks like someone bashed his brains in. Jesus, Barry, this looks like it was deliberate. Like it’s a murder!”

“Thank you, Randy,” I said.

“Oh, man, that’s a lunch tosser if I ever saw one.” He took a step closer to the body. “He was a dumb ol’ drunk, but he didn’t deserve that.”

“Randy, step away.”

“I just wanted to see what-”

“Now!” I moved toward him. I was reaching around into my pocket where I kept a pair of plastic wrist cuffs.

The moment he saw them, he said, “Whoa, hold on there! What the hell you think you’re doing?”

“Trying to preserve what’s left of this scene that hasn’t already been trampled on.”

“Okay, okay, I’m going, I’m going.”

“That way,” I said, pointing back to the plant. “Both of you.”

Once we were all inside the building, Finley started poking a finger in my face. “You know what I’d like to know? I’d like to know what the hell kind of progress you’re making here. Looks to me like not much!”

I said to Ottman, “Show me the process. How you treat the water once it comes in from the reservoir.”

“Yeah, I can-”

“Christ in a Chrysler, Barry,” Finley said. “You got a dead guy out there and dead people all over town and you want an engineering lesson?”

To Ottman, I said, “Give me a moment.”

I approached Finley, slipped a friendly, conspiratorial arm around his shoulder, and said, “There’re things I can’t say in front of Garvey that are for your ears only.”

“Oh?” he said, no doubt flattered to finally be brought into the loop.

I led him toward a metal industrial door with a strong handle.

“I’m putting you under arrest.”

“You’re what?”

“Give me your hand.”

“I will not-”

I grabbed his wrist, slipped half of the plastic cuff over it, and cinched it tight.

“You son of a bitch,” he said.

“Stand here, put your hands down there.” When Finley started to resist, I said to him, through gritted teeth, “I am not fucking around here, Randy.”

I put the other half of the cuff through the door handle before slipping it over his other wrist and cinching it as tight as the other one.

“What’s the charge?” Finley asked.

“Being an asshole in a water treatment plant. It’s an environmental statute. Fecal contamination.”

“You’re making a big mistake, Barry. A very big mistake.”

“Not as big as the one you made when you blackmailed my son,” I said, leaning in close to his ear. “I’d rather just take my gun out and shoot you, but the paperwork would be murder. And I have a lot of other things on my plate right now.”

As I walked back in Ottman’s direction, Finley yelled, “I’ll sue your ass off! That’s what I’ll do! You haven’t heard the fucking last of this!”

“You want to show me now?” I asked Ottman.

“Yeah, sure, right this way.”

GALECarlson decided to go out.

Even before catastrophe struck Promise Falls that morning, she’d had no real plans. It might have been a long holiday weekend for her-the dental clinic, which was usually open Saturday mornings, had closed Friday at five and wasn’t to reopen until nine Tuesday morning-but her husband, Angus, was scheduled to work through the weekend. While being bumped up to detective had been good news, being the new guy in the department meant he was at the bottom of the list for getting the weekend off.

He’d started at six that morning, and Gale had no idea when she would see him again. She had every expectation he’d be doing a double or even a triple shift. He, and every other cop and paramedic and doctor and nurse in town. She’d been watching the news-all the major networks were carrying the story within a couple of hours-and seen interviews with people at the hospital, some still waiting to see a doctor, others weeping at the loss of a loved one. There was footage of that goofball who used to be mayor handing out free water down by the falls, the same brand of bottled water Gale kept in the fridge. And then they went live to a news conference, where the interim head of Promise Falls General, flanked by a doctor and the chief of police, was giving the grim news.

So far, 123 people were dead.

It was one of the worst disasters in the state’s history. After 9/11, a few airplane crashes, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York in 1911, which had claimed 146 lives, this was it.

Nearly three hundred people were being treated for symptoms of hypotension, which-Gale didn’t catch all of it-had something to do with low blood pressure.

One quote in particular, from the hospital’s head doctor, caught Gale Carlson’s attention.

“Whatever has affected these people is resistant to any kind of treatment we can offer. There appears to be nothing we can do.”

Either people made it, or they didn’t. Survival appeared to depend on how much water they had consumed. Only half a cup of coffee? You probably lived. A large glass of water? Probably not. If you’d had a shower or washed your hands, your skin probably felt like it was crawling, but that wasn’t likely to kill you. And while there was little doubt the drinking water was the cause, the source of the contamination remained a mystery.