Linwood Barclay - The Twenty-Three

“Why’s that?”

He looked at me as though I was slow-witted, and there were times when I thought I was. “You gotta be kidding me.”

“I can understand why you might want to put this town behind you,” I said, “but I’d have thought you’d have done it three years ago.”

“Sometimes it takes a while to get your act together.” He finished the toast, wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, balled it up, and tossed it onto the porch. He leaned back, arms outstretched, palms on the porch boards. “You just come by to shoot the shit?”

“I heard from Joyce Pilgrim,” I said.

His face screwed up. “Who?”

“The security chief at Thackeray.”

“Oh yeah, sure.” He nodded. “I talked to her last night. Why’d she call you?”

“Why?” I’d have thought it was obvious.

“Yeah. I mean, what’s the big deal if some guy parked illegally or something?”

“So she didn’t say why she was asking.”

He shook his head.

“Can you tell me again what you told her? About the car and the man you saw?”

He repeated what Joyce had said to me on the phone. The man he’d seen was white, over six feet tall, maybe two hundred pounds, tops. He was wearing a Yankees baseball cap, a dark blue jacket or Windbreaker, and running shoes.

“Was the car parked under a streetlight?”

“I don’t think so.”

“And the car itself?”

“I think it might have been a Taurus. An older one, with the big bulbous fenders.”

“Color?”

He shrugged. “Black, blue? Don’t know.”

“Ms. Pilgrim said you thought the plate was green.”

“I’m not as sure about that, but maybe,” he said. “That’d make it Vermont, right?”

“Could,” I said.

“Why the big deal about this?”

I pressed on. “You have pretty good observational skills.”

“I don’t know. I guess.”

“I mean, late at night, that car not being under a streetlight, and you managed to get a pretty good look at that guy, right down to the ball cap.”

“You make it sound like a bad thing.”

“Not at all. What you saw could be really helpful.”

“Helpful for what ?”

The murder of Lorraine Plummer had probably made the news, but it had been overshadowed by the deaths from poisoned water. It was possible Victor didn’t know about her death. Or was pretending to be uninformed.

“Around the time you were jogging through the campus grounds,” I said evenly, “a young woman was murdered. A summer student.”

I watched his reaction closely.

“Jesus,” he said. “That woman-Pilgrim?-she never said anything about that. So then, this guy she was asking about, he could have been the guy who killed her?”

I waited a second. “Possibly.”

“Wow. I didn’t know that. Wish I’d taken an even closer look.” “Don’t feel bad about that. You saw and remembered more than most people would. Quite a bit more.”

Victor’s eyes narrowed. “There it is again.”

“What?”

“That sounds more like an accusation than praise. I’m trying to help out and you’re making me feel like I did something wrong.”

“Sorry if that’s how I came across,” I said. “Do you jog around there every night?”

“I kind of went back to running just recently, in the last week or so. I thought it’d be a way to get myself back together.”

“You mean back in shape?”

“Partly, but mentally, too, you know.”

“I guess,” I said. “I’m not much of a health nut.”

“No kidding,” he said.

“So tell me about the mentally part.”

“I’ve kind of-I don’t know-let myself go. Been hitting the drinking too hard. Haven’t been able to find a job. It’s taken me a long time to get over things.”

“Olivia.”

“Yeah. But you can only go on like that so long. You have to move on, you know?”

“And taking up running was part of that?”

“Yeah. I thought, if I felt better physically, maybe I’d start feeling better mentally.”

“How’s it going?”

He grinned. “It may be too early to tell.”

“Part of that plan includes moving away?”

“Maybe.”

“And maybe this is just when the town needs you,” I said. “After what happened yesterday.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Maybe the town had it coming,” I said.

Victor Rooney studied me. “Say again?”

“I said maybe the town had it coming. For how it failed Olivia.”

“I’m not following.”

“Have you ever felt that way? That those twenty-two people who heard Olivia’s screams and did nothing, that they were representative of the entire town? That they were a kind of a cross section? That if they’d do nothing, nobody here would?”

“Twenty-two?” he asked. “Was that how many people it was?”

“I think you already know that. Don’t you think sometimes there’re actually twenty-three people to blame?”

He stood. “I got stuff to do.”

“Don’t you blame yourself, too? For not meeting Olivia when you were supposed to?”

Victor stepped up onto the porch, grabbed a T-shirt that had been tossed onto a wicker chair. He slipped it on, and as his head popped out the top, he said, “I don’t know where you’re going with this.”

“If you blame yourself and the whole town, you didn’t end up paying quite as high a price for your failure as more than a hundred others did.”

There was a pair of low-rise sneakers under the chair. He slipped his feet into them, not bothering to do the laces.

“You know any place in this town where I can get an actual cup of coffee?” he asked. “If I have to, I’ll drive to fucking Albany.”

“Why do you think someone would do it?” I asked. “Why would someone poison the water?”

“Who says someone even did it?” Victor said. “Maybe there was some kind of contamination. Sewage, nuclear waste. Something like that.”

“You know a little bit about it, don’t you?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“You worked there one summer. At the water treatment plant.” “That was a long time ago. Just for a couple of months.”

“Long enough to know how the place runs, though.”

“Are you accusing me of something?”

“What’d you take in school, Victor? Engineering? Chemistry?

Wasn’t that it? That’s pretty helpful stuff to know. You’d have thought you could find a job with that kind of background. But you ended up at the fire department for a while, right?”

“I didn’t get my degree,” he said.

“But even so, you’d have learned a few things. Like, how to start up a Ferris wheel, say. Get a bus from the town compound going.”

“Bus?” he said. “You talking about that bus that was on fire?”

I kept on. “Or how to acquire sodium azide. A pretty large quantity.”

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” He dug into his pocket for some keys. “I’m going out.”

He came down the steps and started walking toward the garage. I followed.

“If we review more security footage from Thackeray,” I said, “will we find you running through the campus other nights, or just that one?”

“Leave me alone.”

“Because if it was just the once, that’s quite a coincidence. That you’d happen to be running there the night that girl got killed.”

“You already know I was there at least twice. That woman found me there last night. I went through there a lot. Christ, is there anything you don’t think I’ve done? You think I’ve got something to do with the poisoned water, and that bus, and now you think I killed that girl?”

In my mind, jigsaw puzzle pieces floated about. Victor Rooney jogging around Thackeray at the time of Lorraine Plummer’s death. Lorraine Plummer, one of the women assaulted by a man wearing a hoodie with “23” on it. Mason Helt, wearing said hoodie, killed while attacking Joyce Pilgrim.