Linwood Barclay - The Twenty-Three

She made a list of the fifteen men.

Then Joyce went through the Thackeray student database and found the e-mail addresses for all of them, and prepared to send out a group message.

She had written something about trying to find the person who was running through the campus on the night of May 20 and into the morning of May 21. But before she hit the send button, she thought for a moment. Up to now, her suspicions were focused on the man in the car that had edged into the frame of the closed-circuit television footage. And she wanted to find the jogger who might have gotten a better look at that car, and the driver.

But what if, Joyce wondered, the jogger had killed Lorraine Plummer? What if the man in the car had nothing to do with it? She could hardly expect a possible suspect to write back and say: “Yeah, that was me! I was running around at that time and have no alibi!”

Maybe an e-mail wasn’t such a good idea.

So, name by name, she began researching the fifteen students. She started with Facebook, but she found only a couple of them there. It was Joyce’s experience that while it was young people who’d turned Facebook into a social media phenomenon, now that all their parents and grandparents were on it, posting pictures of their cats and grandkids and dim-witted sayings like “Click Like If You Love Your Niece,” it was no longer the place to be.

Joyce did broader Google searches on them all.

She didn’t turn up much of interest on any of them, at least nothing that mentioned whether they were track stars or marathon runners. And the thing was, just because a guy went for a jog at midnight did not mean he was competing for the Olympics. He might just be out for exercise.

Joyce was at home, having a late dinner with her husband, when Hilda called her back.

“I don’t have anything for you,” she said. “I mean, I don’t have anyone who’s specifically in a track program who’s attending Thackeray. I’d say eighty percent of the kids enrolled in summer stuff are from the town, anyway.”

Joyce decided she had to come at this from a different direction.

“I’m going back out,” she told her husband late that evening.

“Are you kidding me?”

She had told him about finding Lorraine Plummer, of course, but had decided not to dwell on it. She did not want to be the wife who came home and went to pieces about what had happened at work, even if discovering a murder was not the sort of thing that happened to most people encountered on the job.

“Do you want to talk about it?” her husband kept asking.

“No,” she said. “I do not want to talk about it.”

What she found, oddly enough, was that she wanted to be at the college, not at home. When Clive Duncomb had been her boss, she hated every second she was there-the guy was such a sexist asshole-but now that she was in charge, she felt a new commitment. A responsibility.

Thackeray was-she almost felt embarrassed to say this to herself because it bordered on corny-her beat . She knew she wasn’t a cop. Far from it. But she was in charge of security, and the death of Lorraine Plummer meant Thackeray wasn’t secure .

She wanted to do something about that.

Joyce was certainly not going to try to track down a killer. If she found out anything, she would pass it along to the Promise Falls police. That Duckworth guy. But given what the town had been through today, she knew the Plummer murder wasn’t going to get the attention it normally would.

At least the coroner finally showed up. Wanda Something. After she’d finished her examination of the body, she had a pretty grim look on her face. At first, Joyce figured in that line of work, everything you had to do put you in a foul mood. But Joyce could tell this was different. And when Wanda got on the phone to tell someone about what she’d found, Joyce listened in, and picked up a vibe that whoever had killed Lorraine, this was not his first outing.

Jesus.

Once the sun had set, Joyce indicated she was heading back out to the campus. Her husband said he would come with her.

“No way,” Joyce said. “Unless you’d like me to come to work with you on Tuesday morning. Hold your hand while you plaster and drywall.”

Soon after, Joyce Pilgrim was sitting in her car, parked on the street in the exact same place where that vehicle had been parked during the period Duckworth believed Lorraine had been murdered. She was, admittedly, early. If-and there were several ifs-this particular person did his run at the same time every night, she had several hours to wait. This was, of course, if he ran every night. And if he took the same route.

And, if all those ifs aligned, he’d be useful to Joyce only if he remembered seeing that car that night. Even then, he’d be useful only if he was good at telling one car from another.

Still, it was all she had at the moment.

Thackeray was a quiet place this time of year. The occasional student walked past. Once in a while, a car drove by.

Joyce was thinking she should have brought along some coffee, but that would mean, at some point, having to run to the nearest available bathroom. Just like when you’re waiting for the cable guy to show up, the two minutes you leave the house to mail a letter, that’s when he rings the bell.

At least she had music.

She had no way to run her iPhone through her old clunker’s stereo system, but she did have CDs. She opened up her folder of discs, found her favorite, and slipped it into the slot in the dash.

Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life .

Joyce loved Stevie. No other artist-not since the dawn of time-even came close.

She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel, bounced her shoe off the side of the transmission hump. She played the entire disc, popped it out, replaced it with Original Musiquarium , which was made up of hits from 1972 to 1980.

Joyce was halfway through Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants when she saw him.

It was nearly ten, and he was running toward her on the other side of the street. Not flat out. A steady jog, pacing himself. As he got closer, Joyce sized him up. Late twenties, early thirties. Too old to be a student, she thought, and a little on the young side to be a professor, although she had to admit there were a few on campus who’d never seen a first-run episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation .

She couldn’t be certain this was the same guy she’d seen in the video, but it was certainly possible. He had the earbuds trailing down to a music player clipped to the band of his running shorts.

Joyce killed the music and got out of her car. She stood in the middle of the road, waved her hands at him when he got to be about sixty yards away.

He slowed, stopped about twenty feet from her, and pulled the buds from his ears. Between breaths, he said, “You okay?”

“Yeah.” Joyce showed him her ID, told him she was with Thackeray College security.

“Am I not allowed to run here?” he asked. “I didn’t think it would be a problem.”

“You’re not affiliated with Thackeray?” Joyce asked. “Enrolled here, or work here?”

The man shook his head. “No. But come on, it’s not really private property, is it?”

Joyce smiled. “I don’t care about that. But I need to ask you some questions.”

The man glanced at his watch. “I’ve been trying to beat my previous time.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s important. So you don’t live on campus?”

“No, I live in town. But I like running through here. It’s pretty. And I only just kind of started doing it. I used to run years ago, but I’m trying to get myself back in some kind of shape. More exercise, less drinking, if you know what I mean.”