Linwood Barclay - Lone Wolf

“What have the police told you?” I asked Grace.

“Orville?” she said. “Are you kidding? He couldn’t find his ass in a snowstorm, let alone Tiff’s killer.”

“You got any ideas of your own?” Lawrence asked.

Grace shook her head sadly. “I don’t know. A few bags of fertilizer, a plastic drum, why the hell would you kill someone to get that?”

Lawrence cocked his head. “A plastic drum?”

Grace nodded. “Well, we noticed one missing. Can’t say for sure it was taken that night, but we had five of them out back, fifty-five-gallon ones, and now there’s only four.”

“Did you tell the police about that?” he asked.

“What would be the point? I mean, so we lost a drum. You think Orville’s really going to care about that?”

Back in the car, Lawrence asked me to direct him to the mayor’s house.

“What was that about the drum?” I asked.

“If you’re going to make a bomb out of fertilizer and diesel fuel, you need something to put it in,” Lawrence said.

I said nothing.

A few minutes later, we were sitting where I’d been the day before, Alice Holland on the couch, her black husband, George, leaning up against the wall. I thought George and Lawrence exchanged some sort of glance as we walked inside, a shared-history thing, I don’t know.

“I understand,” the mayor said, “that the fishing-resort proposal is no longer on the table.”

“You heard about Leonard Colebert,” I said.

“Another bear attack. I heard about it on the radio. It’s a terrible tragedy. It’s really quite astonishing. All the years I’ve lived here, I’ve never known anyone to be killed by a bear. And now, two in a week.”

“Technically speaking,” I said, “the bear didn’t kill him. But the fall running away from it did.”

George Holland said, “That resort would have been a terrible thing for that lake. And how long would it have taken, once it had been built, for that lake to have been totally fished out? Who’d come up to the resort then?”

Alice Holland said, “I would never have wished the man dead, and I think we could have somehow stopped that project, but Braynor’s certainly better off without it. What do you suppose it is, this bear? A grizzly?”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t really know my bears, but the man who saw it, Bob Spooner-he’s a friend of my father’s and a guest at his camp-didn’t give me the impression that it was as large as a grizzly. It looked to him like the bear that we’d heard about earlier. Similar markings.”

“I suppose I’ll have to speak to Chief Thorne. He may need to organize some hunters, go in and kill this bear before it strikes again.”

“He’s ahead of you there. He was out in the woods this morning, brought two men with him who looked like they’d just come from a casting call for Elmer Fudd, the Movie . They were looking for the bear when the incident happened, but they were in a different part of the woods.”

The mayor shook her head sadly, then studied us. “But that’s not why you’re here, is it?”

“No,” I said.

“This is the friend you mentioned yesterday.”

Lawrence said, “I used to be a cop. Now I’m private.”

Alice leaned forward on the couch. “Interesting.”

“Zack told me about your phone calls. They’re still coming?”

She nodded. “Another one last night, after you left”-she nodded toward me-“and one today. There’ll be at least one more before the day’s over, I’m sure. Especially with the parade being tomorrow.”

“We just hang up, soon as we know what it is,” her husband said.

“I brought some equipment along,” Lawrence said. “In my trunk. It may help in a number of ways. We might be able to trace the call, get a number, maybe determine whether it’s a pay phone, but best of all, we’ll have a recording of the caller’s voice. You get a chance to listen to it a few times, you might figure out who it is, if it’s someone you already know.”

George’s eyebrows went up. “So you want to hook this up to our phone? Don’t you need a warrant for something like that?”

“Well, first of all, I’m not the police, and second, it’s your phone, and you know about it.”

George looked at Alice who said, “What do you think?”

He nodded. “Sure, if you think it will do some good.”

“Don’t know, yet, for sure,” said Lawrence. “The main thing is, keep him on the phone this time instead of hanging up on him. Keep him talking awhile. It might even be better”-he was talking specifically to George now-“if you let your wife take the call, even though I can understand you wanting to take it instead, spare her the abuse.”

“It’s okay, George,” Alice said. “If it helps.”

He nodded regretfully. “I guess.”

“I’ll get the stuff,” Lawrence said. Then, to me, “Maybe you can find out the other thing while I’m doing that.” Lawrence left.

“Ms. Holland, do you know where I can find the head of the Fifty Lakes Gay and Lesbian Coalition?”

“Stuart Lethbridge?”

“That’s the guy.”

“He doesn’t live in Braynor. He’s over in Red Lake, about ten miles west. I think he runs a comic book store just off the main street.”

“A comics store?”

I must have looked more than just surprised. I guess I looked interested, because Alice nodded and asked, “You like comic books?”

I smiled. “Sort of.”

Lawrence was back with a couple of hard plastic, high-tech-looking cases. He opened them up on the kitchen counter and I went over to peek inside. There were headphones and mini tape recorders and larger tape recorders, and something that looked like a gun with a furry barrel. I saw some small black things that looked like buttons.

“What are these?” I asked.

“Microphones,” Lawrence said. “You plant them, you listen in from afar. But I don’t need those right now.”

He gently lifted out some other devices, packed into the case in gray foam, and put them on the counter by the phone. To Alice and George, he said, “I’ll get this set up, then show you what to do. And I’ll leave you my cell number, and Zack’s, and his dad’s, so you can get in touch when you’ve got something for us to listen to. When he’s called before, have you recognized the voice?”

“I don’t think so,” Alice said, “but I think he’s disguising it, going really low.”

“I’d like to get my hands on this bastard,” George Holland said. “I’d like five minutes alone with him.”

“If it’s up to me,” Lawrence said, “I’ll give you ten.”

“So why do you want to see Lethbridge?” I asked once we were back in the Jag and on our way to Red Lake.

“Just nice to get to know all the players,” he said. “If he weren’t pushing to be included in the parade, a lot of this other shit wouldn’t even be happening.”

“But does this have anything to do with the Wickenses?”

Lawrence took the Jag through a tight turn, barely slowing down. “I dunno. If we knew all that, I could go home.”

Red Lake, even though it sounded like nothing more than a hunting lodge, was actually a slightly larger town than Braynor, maybe a couple of thousand people or so. The main street was lined with small, independent stores. No Gap here. No American Eagle. No Home Depot. But there was Onley’s Men’s Wear, and Katie’s Wool Bin, and Red Lake Hardware with a display of snowblowers on the sidewalk out front.

“There,” I said, pointing.

Just in from the corner at the second cross street, a small shop with one big sign in the window: “Comics.”

“Think a town like this could support two comic stores?” Lawrence asked.