Linwood Barclay - A Tap on the Window

We went north through the village of Cayuga, then headed east through the Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge. Once we’d driven out the other side of it, I found my way back to the thruway. It was the same interchange where I’d gotten off. Before I rolled through the tollgate and picked up my ticket, I asked Claire if she needed anything.

“I don’t know,” she said.

I pulled into a gas station — as it turned out, I’d rented a car that had less than a quarter of a tank in it — and filled up. Then I ran into the convenience store and loaded up on bottled water, candy bars, potato chips. Anything to keep us going.

“Help yourself,” I said when I got back into the car.

As I was grabbing my ticket and speeding up the ramp to get back on the thruway, Claire looked into the bag and pulled out a Mars bar. It pleased me when she peeled back the wrapper and took a bite.

“I’ve got questions, Claire. Can you handle some questions?”

She chewed some candy, swallowed, and looked blankly at me. “I guess.” She sounded like she was in a trance.

“Do you know who it was? Do you know who killed Dennis?”

“I didn’t see him,” she said.

“But do you have an idea?’

She nodded.

“Who?”

“Phyllis Pearce’s son,” Claire said.

“What? She has a son? Who’s that?”

“You don’t know?” she asked.

I waited.

“Ricky Haines,” Claire said. “The cop. Maybe the creepiest guy on the Griffon force, because he’s all nice, but when he starts feeling you up, you start thinking maybe he’s not what he pretends to be.”

He’s driving so quickly, when he has to make a turn from a gravel road to pavement, the truck skitters on its back wheels, nearly flips over. But he wrenches the wheel, manages to right the vehicle, and once he hits blacktop he floors it.

Now, driving in a straight line, he can manage the phone. He grabs it with his right, places a call, puts the phone to his ear.

“Hello?” his mother says urgently.

“It’s me,” he says.

“What’s happened, Richard? Did you find them?”

“I found them,” Ricky Haines says.

“And?”

“I got them.”

“You did?”

“I got Mullavey. And I’m pretty sure I got the girl, too.”

“Pretty sure?” Phyllis Pearce likes to deal in absolutes. “What do you mean, pretty sure?”

“I saw her go down. I couldn’t exactly check her pulse, with Weaver shooting at me.”

“What about him? What did you do with him?”

“I told you. He was shooting at me. I had to get out of there. I couldn’t get a good shot at him.”

“What about the notebook?”

“I don’t have it.”

“God, you’re hopeless! Where are you now?”

“On the road. I’m coming home.”

“No!” she says. “You have to go back! You have to finish this!”

“No, listen. I waited, a little while, at the end of the road, the only way out, figuring Weaver’d drive out eventually. I hid the truck and I was in the woods. When they didn’t show up, I drove back past the place, saw that the boat was gone. Decided then I better get out of there.”

“Boat? What are you talking about, a boat?”

“I followed them to a cottage on Cayuga Lake. Weaver must have took off in a boat.”

“Did he see you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. And I don’t know what Mullavey and the girl told him before I got there.”

“My God, what a mess,” Phyllis says.

“It’s not that bad, Mom. The only one left who might know anything is Weaver.”

“And he’s probably got the book, too.” She can’t hold back any longer: “You should have gotten Mullavey that first day! That’s what you should have done!”

Ricky thinks she’s losing it. But he knows his mom. He knows she freaks out at first, but then she calms down, thinks things through. Mom usually has a plan. When he hears nothing from her for several seconds, he’s pretty sure that’s what is going on.

“I know all that,” he says. “I know I’ve made some mistakes. But some things I got right, you know that.”

“Shut up,” Phyllis says. “Just shut up and let me think.”

He waits. He feels tears coming on, blinks a few times to clear his vision. He thinks of all the things that could have been done better, the different decisions that could have been made. And not just by him. She deserves plenty of the blame, too, but she gets so angry when he reminds her of that.

Finally she says, “You come home. I’ll see what I can do.”

Ricky tosses the phone onto the seat next to him. He’s not relieved, but he feels slightly better.

Mom will figure something out.

Ricky Haines.

Tumblers fell into place.

If it was Ricky who’d followed us to Cayuga Lake, it was most likely Ricky who’d planted the tracking device in my car. It had to have been Ricky’s idea to seize my car. To avoid suspicion, he’d said that he’d been told to do it by Quinn, who in turn had been told to do it by Augie.

Once the car’d been brought in, Ricky could have had access to it and planted the trackers. And since no one had actually given an order to have the car searched, no one was going to find them before the car was returned to me.

Brindle, I was guessing, wasn’t in on it with his partner. If he had been, he wouldn’t have been so pissed when I got sprung by the chief on the Tapscott business. It also explained why Haines had offered to call my lawyer for me. It wasn’t in his interest that I be held in custody. He needed me on the outside, leading him to Claire and Dennis.

What else had Ricky probably done?

I felt I should be calling Augie, but I still had what you might call trust issues. I wanted to hear what Claire had to say before I called anyone with the Griffon police.

She started her story, more or less, from the beginning.

“I had a job for the summer working at Smith’s. The ice cream place? Down by the water?”

I nodded. We used to go down there, Donna and Scott and I, after dinner on a warm summer’s evening.

“That’s kind of close to Hooper’s office, and Dennis would drop by every day after work and get an ice cream. He kept coming so often, I could tell he was kind of into me, and things weren’t going so well between me and Roman anyway. You know Roman?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I don’t know what I was thinking there. He’s kind of a douche, to be honest, but I guess I kind of thought it was cool that he wants to be a movie writer, you know? But he was into some sketchy stuff, like — okay, I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but Roman’s twenty-one and he makes money by buying beer and—”

“I know all about it,” I said. “And that he had Sean and Hanna delivering for him, and they got to keep a share of the profits.”

“Wow, okay. Anyway, I didn’t like the way he’d send Hanna out there to deal with stuff. And there was other stuff with Roman. I mean, he creeped me out sometimes.”

“The texts.”

“God, did you see that on my phone? It wasn’t just the picture. He was always asking me to send pictures of myself and I didn’t want to do it. So, I started going out with Dennis, and Roman was pretty pissed.”

We were booting it down the interstate, cruising at eighty, Buffalo nearly an hour away, Griffon half an hour after that.