Linwood Barclay - The Twenty-Three

Two seconds of light as he opened the door, got behind the wheel, and closed the door.

Headlights on.

Drive forward, Joyce thought. Drive forward and let me get a better look at your ride.

The vehicle backed out of the frame.

“Fuck!” Joyce said, and banged a fist on the table hard enough to shake the monitor.

She kept the video rolling until 1:20, but there was nothing else to see.

Joyce leaned back in the computer chair, laced her fingers together at the back of her head, and again shouted, “Fuck!”

She’d really wanted to see what that son of a bitch was driving. But then she realized that even if she couldn’t see it, someone else had.

I have to find that jogger.

Duckworth

I’Dbeen through the Olivia Fisher file several times in the last couple of weeks. I knew the basic facts, which were these: She was a beautiful young woman, twenty-four years old, black hair to her shoulders, round, bright eyes. Five-five, 132 pounds. She’d been born right here, at Promise Falls General Hospital, and done all her schooling in the town. She had never lived away from home, although that might very well have changed.

Olivia was engaged to Victor Rooney, also twenty-four at the time, another Promise Falls born-and-raised kid, who had gone to Thackeray for two years before dropping out. School wasn’t his thing. But he had, in the months prior to Olivia’s death, gotten a job with the town fire department. He had, over the years, held other odd jobs. Some of those had also been with the town, in other capacities.

One, I now remembered from a conversation I’d had not long ago with Olivia’s father, Walden, had been a summer position at the water treatment plant.

They were to be married in three months, at the end of August 2012. The hall had been booked, the invitations mailed. Olivia had just completed an environmental science degree at Thackeray, and was in line for a job at an oceanic institute in Boston. She was going to accept it, even though it would mean living away from Promise Falls, and her family, for the first time in her life. Victor was said to be sorry about leaving Promise Falls, but had planned to apply for a firefighting job anywhere in the Boston area.

None of that happened.

On Friday, May 25, at nine twenty p.m., Olivia Fisher was in Promise Falls Park, not far from the foot of the waterfall, waiting to meet her fiancé. He’d worked an afternoon shift with the fire department and was planning to grab a couple of drinks with his buddies after, at Knight’s. He planned to leave there at nine and walk over to the park-it was only a few blocks from the bar, and he knew he probably wouldn’t be in any shape to drive-but he lost track of time.

Had he left when he’d planned to, it was possible Olivia would not have been grabbed from behind. It was possible a knife would not have penetrated the left side of her abdomen. It was possible that knife would not then have sliced across Olivia to roughly the same position on the other side of her torso.

With that distinctive, signature cut. Curving down slightly in the middle, a crude smile.

The attack most likely took little more than a few seconds. But in that time, Olivia Fisher managed to scream. From all accounts, at least twice.

Two horrific shrieks.

The assailant immediately fled the scene. He did not sexually assault his victim. He did not take her purse, or remove anything from it.

The primary on the case had been former detective and now chief Rhonda Finderman. The incident had happened when I was out of the country, and I had not been involved in the initial investigation.

Rhonda’s notes, however, were thorough. I could find no fault with them. My problem with Rhonda had been her failure to bring to my attention the similarity between the Fisher murder and that of Rosemary Gaynor. But I’d been over that before, and concluded I had to carry the can for that as much as anyone else.

I had learned things about Olivia on my own.

As with Lorraine Plummer, she had been a participant in the sex games of three couples: Adam and Miriam Chalmers, Peter and Georgina Blackmore, and Clive and Liz Duncomb. Excited to meet a published author-Chalmers-she had accepted an invitation to the man’s house for dinner, where everyone else was present. While other young women who’d been brought to the home to be sexually exploited had been drugged, Olivia, at least according to Blackmore, had been a more willing participant.

That had been a month before she died.

I’d considered that one of those six had been involved in Olivia’s death, but nothing had panned out. Following Duncomb’s death, I’d brought in for questioning his wife, Liz-a real piece of work-reasoning that she could have had the same motive as her husband for killing Olivia: the fear that she might talk about what had gone on in that house.

But I didn’t believe Liz had the physical bearing to do what had been done to Olivia.

I’d briefly considered a doctor named Jack Sturgess-whom I’d once suspected in the Rosemary Gaynor murder-in Olivia’s death, but that had been a dead end as well. And Bill Gaynor didn’t look good for it, either.

And neither of them could have had anything to do with Lorraine Plummer’s death.

So I was back where I’d started.

There were other issues with the Fisher crime.

The witnesses. Or, at least, the potential witnesses. There’d been so many of them. Twenty-two, according to Rhonda Finderman’s notes.

Twenty-two people who heard Olivia Fisher’s screams.

And did nothing.

Finderman tracked down more than half of them herself. The others, perhaps motivated by guilt and a wish to get things off their chest, came forward. Some were in other areas of the park.

Two were on the bridge that spanned the falls.

Several others were in an open-window coffee shop across the street from the park. Others were strolling along the sidewalk.

It was a lovely spring evening. The days had grown longer; winter was a quickly fading memory. The sun had set, but the air remained warm enough to manage without a jacket. There was the persistent dull roar of the falls in the background, but sounds carried.

Everyone would have heard Olivia.

There was a consistency to the interviews with those who had heard her cries.

“I figured a call to 911 would already have been made.”

“I would have done something, but I assumed someone closer would have.”

“I thought it was probably just kids goofing around.”

“I didn’t hear anything after the first two screams, so I guessed it was nothing.”

“I leave this kind of thing to the professionals.”

And so on.

Promise Falls had, on that particular evening, suffered a collective lack of responsibility. A wave of not-my-problem.

For a period of time, it brought shame on the town. Promise Falls, in the words of one CNN commentator, was “the town that didn’t care.”

The town was smeared across social media. We earned our own Twitter hashtag: #brokenpromise.

We were, indeed, broken.

But as with all targets of social outrage, we were soon forgotten as the world found others. A flip tweet from a PR person about AIDS in Africa. A comedian making a joke about tsunami victims. A congressman saying blacks were lazy.

Luckily for the twenty-two people who heard but did not act, their names were never made public. Police feared there might be reprisals. But they were all here in the files.

One, I recognized. It was, coincidentally, the father of someone I’d spoken to in the last couple of hours.

Don Harwood. Father of David.