Linwood Barclay - The Twenty-Three

I stood before the mirror, did up the tie, folded my collar back down over it. Ran my fingers through my hair. Checked for anything between my teeth. I wished Maureen were here. Not in the actual men’s room, but at the station, to give me the once-over before I went before the cameras. A few years ago, she’d recorded me on the six o’clock news when I’d made a statement for the press about the death of Thackeray College’s president.

She’d played it for me when I got home, paused it at just the right moment.

“You see that?” she’d said.

“See what?”

She’d gone right up to the screen and pointed to my mouth.

“That,” she said, “is a donut sprinkle.”

So ever since, I’d made an effort when I went before the cameras.

I came back to my desk. I still had another five minutes before I had to go outside. I sat down and unfolded the two notices to Olivia Fisher. As I was reading through them, I picked up the phone and entered the extension that would connect me to the traffic department’s fine collection office.

“Traffic, Harrigan.”

“Hey,” I said. “It’s Detective Barry Duckworth. I’m wondering if you can do a favor for me.”

“Let me guess. You got a parking ticket.”

“No,” I said. I explained that notices of an unpaid fine were still being sent out to a homicide victim.

“Oh, shit, that’s awful,” Harrigan said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“There should be a number on the top of the notice there-that’d be the ticket number. You see that?”

“Yeah.”

“You want to read that off to me?”

I did. “Will that cover both notices?”

“Yeah, we can put a stop to those.”

“That’s terrific,” I said, my eye scanning down the page at the other information that had been included. The make and model and year of Olivia’s vehicle, which happened to be a 2004 Nissan Sentra.

“I hardly knew what to say when this person’s father showed me these-”

I stopped midsentence. I’d come upon another bit of information from the original ticket that stopped me cold.

“You there?” Harrigan said.

“I’m here,” I said.

“Is there anything else I can do for you?”

My mind had suddenly kicked into overdrive. I was trying to bring up a conversation from a few weeks ago.

When I’d been talking to Bill Gaynor.

Right after the discovery of his wife’s body.

What was it I’d asked him? Right. Had his wife ever been in any kind of trouble with the law? Was she in any way known to the police?

What was it he’d said?

“Are you serious? Of course not. Okay, she got a speeding ticket a week or so ago, but I’d hardly call that being in trouble with the law.”

Yeah, that was what he’d said.

“Detective Duckworth?” Harrigan said.

“Yeah, I’m here. Listen, can you find a more recent ticket in the system if I give you a name? I haven’t got the ticket number or anything like that. But it would have been for driving over the posted speed limit.”

“Sure.”

“Rosemary Gaynor.”

“Spell it.”

I did. In the background I could hear several keystrokes.

“Yeah, okay, I think I have it here. This would have been on April twenty-two. Does that sound about right?”

“It does. Read me every single detail off that ticket.”

Harrigan obliged.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “That’s good. Thank you.”

I hung up the phone, trying to get my head around what I’d just learned. Wondering if it meant anything. Wondering if it was just a coincidence.

The phone rang.

“We’re on,” Rhonda Finderman said.

“You’re on your own,” I told her.

“Ineed more stuff,” Crystal said to Cal about an hour after he and Dwayne got back to the house. Cal had made a quick visit to the police station, and now was sitting on the porch of his sister and brother-in-law’s place.

“What stuff?” Cal asked.

“I need more paper and pencils and my homework and more clothes,” she said. “They’re all in my house. I need to go to the house and get all that stuff. Is my mom still there?”

“No,” Cal said. “She’s not.”

“Did the funeral people take her away?”

“More or less,” he said. “I can check into that for you.”

Crystal appeared to be thinking. “Did they do anything with what happened in the house when they took my mom away?”

Cal guessed what Crystal was referring to. Her mother had been violently ill in the kitchen and the bathroom. “They didn’t,” he said. “But it’s been taken care of.”

What Cal had not told Crystal was that, on his way back with Dwayne, he’d called the morgue to confirm that Lucy’s body had been removed from the house. Then he’d told Dwayne there was a way he could pay him back for getting him out of his arrangement with Harry.

“You name it,” Dwayne had said.

“It won’t be fun.”

They went to Lucy’s house and cleaned up. “Jesus,” Dwayne had said when he saw what they had to do.

“I’ll find cleaning supplies,” Cal had said.

It took them the better part of an hour to get the job done. Cal opened most of the windows to let fresh air blow through.

Anyone who came into the house now, Cal believed, wouldn’t know what had happened.

Except for Crystal, of course.

“So all the throw-up is gone?” Crystal asked.

Cal nodded.

The girl did some more thinking. “I want to go back over.”

“I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.”

“I have to get things. And you won’t know where everything is.”

“Still, I think-”

She looked up into his face. “I can do it.”

Cal put his palm to her cheek. “Okay. Do you want to go now?”

Cal tipped his head in the direction of his car, parked at the curb.

“I guess,” she said.

“I’ll let Celeste know.”

Cal went into the house and found his sister upstairs, sitting alone in her bedroom.

“Heading out for a while,” he told her.

“Thank you,” she said softly.

“You don’t have to keep saying that.”

“I feel like I can’t say it enough. You really got Dwayne out of a mess.”

Cal nodded. “I won’t save him again,” he said.

“It won’t happen again,” Celeste said. “He’s not a bad man.”

Cal looked her in the eye. “Maybe not. But he’s a stupid one. And that can be just as dangerous.”

“You think I should leave him.”

“The risks he takes ultimately become your risks. When he enters into business with bad people, he’s taking you along for the ride. He does something like this again, it won’t be the other guy I take it out on.”

On the way over in the car, Crystal asked, “Do you believe in ghosts?” She was looking down at her clipboard, sketching something, not watching the world go by as they drove to her house.

He glanced over at her. “No,” he said. “Why?”

“Will my mom’s ghost be in the house?”

Cal shook his head. “No. But your memories of her will be. And that’s okay.”

“I don’t want to live there all by myself.”

Cal tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “You won’t be doing that. It’s against the law for someone your age to live by herself. You have to be eighteen to live on your own.”

“Eighteen?”

“That’s when the law considers you an adult,” Cal told her.

“Oh.” She drew some more lines, then turned the pencil at a sharp angle and moved it back and forth furiously. Shading.

“My mom owned the house, right?”

“I would imagine so. Unless she was renting it from someone.”