Linwood Barclay - The Twenty-Three

I spin around suddenly and there, directly in front of me, is Olivia Fisher.

She is looking at me quizzically, an almost naive expression on her face. She says, “Didn’t you hear me?”

“I did,” I say. “I just couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from.”

“It was coming from here,” she says, opens her mouth wide, and points into it. But her mouth has opened unnaturally wide, as though her jaw is no longer hinged.

And blood begins to pour from her mouth, like water gushing from an opened fire hydrant. Blood spills over me, and I look down and see that within seconds it is up to my knees.

Even though her mouth is flowing with blood, I can still hear her speaking to me. “Do you know what my favorite number is?”

“No,” I say.

“Twenty-three. Do you know why?”

“Tell me.”

“You already know. You’ve figured it out.”

“No, I haven’t. I’m not sure. I-”

“Oh, dear,” Olivia says. Her mouth is back to normal now, no blood flowing from it. But she has her hands over her stomach, where her entrails are spilling out. She is attempting to stuff them back in.

“How will I explain this to my mother?” she asks.

The alarm wakes me before I can offer her a suggestion.

Maureen sat up in bed as I reached over to kill the alarm. “If that hadn’t gone off, I’d have woken you up,” she said. “You were starting to shout things. You were having a nightmare.”

“Yeah,” I said, throwing back the covers and putting my feet on the floor. I had a headache and my mouth was dry.

“I can make coffee,” Maureen said. “I got bottled water yesterday.”

“You went down to Finley’s circus?”

“I got it at the Stop and Shop.”

I checked my phone, which was recharging on my bedside table. I hadn’t muted it when I’d turned out the light, in case someone tried to reach me in the night. But there was a text message on the screen.

“I never heard this come in,” I said.

“You were out cold,” Maureen said. “When did it show up?”

I looked. The text was from Joyce Pilgrim, and she’d sent it at eleven forty-five p.m. About half an hour after I’d lost consciousness. I told Maureen.

“I hadn’t come to bed yet,” she said, “so I never heard it, either.”

I read the message: Call me when you get this. Might have something.

“Shit,” I said.

Maureen threw back the covers and headed downstairs as I texted back to Joyce: Just got this. If you’re up, phone me.

I took the phone with me into the bathroom, placing it on a shelf just outside the shower. And thought: Is it safe to take a shower?

I’d had one the morning before with no ill effects. Maybe water laced with sodium azide was enough to kill you if you drank it, but its effects were negligible when it washed over your skin. Those granules I’d touched the day before had made my finger itch, but hadn’t burned through my skin or anything.

I made a call to the station to see what the latest updates were. The state health officials believed the contaminated water had moved through the system, but to be on the safe side, they were recommending against drinking anything from the taps for at least another forty-eight hours. Water for nondrinking purposes was believed to be safe. In the case of a shower, they advised, let it run for a good five minutes before stepping in.

Well, that was a relief. The idea of taking a bath with several bottles of Finley Springs water did not appeal to me.

I turned on the water and let it run.

After five minutes, I stripped out of my pajamas and stepped

under the hot spray. I was rinsing shampoo out of my hair while soaping up my ample belly when my cell phone rang.

“Goddamn it.”

I turned off the shower while still soapy, reached out for a towel to get my hands dry enough to pick up the phone without dropping it, then, still in the stall, put the phone to my ear.

“Yeah?”

“It’s Joyce. I got your text.”

“Okay,” I said. “Sorry. I was asleep when you sent yours. Just saw it.”

“I figured.”

“So what have you got?”

“A witness. Maybe. Not a great one, but a witness.”

“Go on,” I said, using my free hand to wipe away some shampoo that was trying to find its way into my eye.

“So I did what you asked. I reviewed the surveillance footage.” She told me about seeing a car park near Lorraine Plummer’s residence around the time of her murder, a man getting out and returning.

“What did he look like?”

“You can’t tell a thing from the video,” she said. “And you can’t get any kind of a good look at the car, either.”

“Well, still, that’s something. Maybe we can get someone to enhance the video, or maybe there are some other cameras along the way to Thackeray we can check. But what’s this about a witness?”

She told me about the appearance of the jogger in the video. How he’d run right past the parked car.

“So last night, I camped out there, thinking maybe this was a regular run this guy takes, and I’d get a chance to ask him whether he noticed that car or not.”

I felt my pulse quicken, which took my mind off the fact that I was freezing as soapy water clung to me. Maureen stepped into the bathroom, looked at me standing naked in the shower with a phone in my hand, gave me an up and down, and left without comment.

“And?” I said.

“He came by. I got out of my car and stopped him and got him to think back to the car and whether he remembered anything.”

“Ok-k-ay.”

“Something wrong?”

“Nothing. Just felt a chill, is all.”

“So I tried to jog his memory, no pun intended, and it kind of came back to him.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. He said the car was a four-door sedan. Hard to tell at night, but dark blue or maybe black. He was a little fuzzy on the make, but he thought North American. Like a Ford.”

“Plate number?” I knew, even as I asked it, that it was a long shot.

“No, he didn’t take any notice of the plate. At least, not the numbers. But he thought maybe it was out of state. He thought it might have been green.”

Green. Vermont plates were green, and Vermont was not very far away.

“Okay,” I said. “So we’ve got a bit to go on with the car.”

“He says he saw the guy,” Joyce Pilgrim said.

I gripped the phone a little tighter. “Tell me.”

“White, about six-three, ball cap-for the Yankees, he thinks-running shoes, dark blue Windbreaker, maybe a hundred and eighty to two hundred pounds.”

“He must have got a long look at him to get that kind of detail.”

“He says he only saw him for a second. And he didn’t see him near the car. Saw him farther away, near the building where Lorraine Plummer was killed. But he was figuring it must have been the guy whose car it was, since there wasn’t anyone else around.”

“This is amazing, Joyce. This is really terrific work.” I took one step out of the shower and reached for a towel. I rubbed it over my soapy hair, tried to blot myself where I could with one available hand. “You got a name for this witness?”

“Yeah, hang on, I wrote it down. Here’s the phone number. It’s-”

“I can’t take it down right now. I can call you back in a couple of minutes. What about the name?” I stepped out of the shower all the way, my feet on the furry white bath mat.

“Rooney,” she said.

“What?”

“Rooney. Victor Rooney.”

The towel slipped out of my hand.

I said nothing. I was trying to grasp the significance. The boyfriend of Olivia Fisher just happened to be running past Lorraine Plummer’s building at the time of her murder.