Linwood Barclay - Too Close to Home

“Jim, he’s not a killer. He’s an arrogant asshole, I’ll grant you that. But he’s not a killer. He couldn’t have sent those two men here tonight. He had no reason to. He has the disc.”

My head already hurt. Now it was getting much worse.

“This isn’t making any sense at all,” I said.

And then Ellen, who had been looking in the general direction of the back door, screamed.

I whirled around, saw the shadow of someone standing there. A man, a big man.

As he came into the light, I saw that it was Drew.

He opened the door. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. He looked at me. “I decided you were right. I came back. I’ll tell the police what happened.”

In another minute, we heard the sirens.

The ambulance was far too late for Mortie. Drew stood by the door to the shed, watching uncomfortably as the paramedics assessed Mortie’s condition. Once they’d determined he was, in fact, dead, they made no attempts to move him.

By the time Barry Duckworth arrived, there were half a dozen cop cars on the scene. I figured it wouldn’t be long before the TV news crews arrived. At least they wouldn’t have to ask for directions. It would be the second time in a week that they’d been to this part of Promise Falls.

Ellen put on a large pot of coffee. It wasn’t so much that she wanted to be the best host a crime scene ever had. She just needed to keep busy. I guessed it was a good thing that she’d already decided to pour out her booze.

Drew and I came back from watching the paramedics’ examination of Mortie, sat down at the kitchen table. Ellen was looking in the fridge and the freezer, trying to find any treats to put out. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Coffee’s good.”

“Bingo!” Ellen said. She pulled out, from the farthest reaches of the freezer, a frozen cake. It was like an archeological dis covery.

“It’s good you came back,” I said to Drew.

“We’ll see,” he said as Barry appeared in the doorway.

First, we gave him the Reader’s Digest version of what had transpired. When Barry understood that one of our attackers was still at large, he asked Drew, who’d chased the man and seen him get into his car, for a description of the vehicle. Something GM, he said. A Buick, or a Pontiac. Four doors, white. Some mud splattered around the wheel wells. Barry phoned it in so police throughout the Promise Falls area could be watching for it.

Barry took a seat at the kitchen table, accepted Ellen’s offer of coffee and a piece of frozen cake, and asked us to lay it out for him.

I told him my end of the story. The two men showing up, tying me up in the shed, taping my fingers to the hedge trimmer. Ellen told her half, about the dark-haired man bursting into the house, tying her to a chair and leaving her there. Then, later, bringing her out to the shed when I’d demanded to know that she was okay.

That brought us to Drew.

“Where do I know you from?” Barry asked, looking at him warily.

“I robbed a bank,” Drew said matter-of-factly.

“Son of a bitch, that’s who you are,” Barry said.

“Five years ago,” Drew added. “The one at Saratoga and Main.”

“That didn’t go very well,” Barry said.

“If by not going very well, you mean I got caught as I was walking out the door, yeah, that’s right. I spent a little too long in there, someone hit the silent alarm, and you guys were waiting for me when I walked out.”

Barry nodded. “I don’t know that you were cut out for that line of work.”

“No.”

“And you’re out now?”

“About six weeks,” he said. “Mr. Cutter here gave me a job cutting grass.”

“Well, isn’t that nice of him,” Barry said, glancing at me. “And what were you doing out here tonight?”

“I’d busted one of Mr. Cutter’s mowers and was dropping by to fix it before we started out for work again tomorrow.”

Barry looked at me for confirmation. I nodded.

Ellen and I both told Barry what happened after Drew arrived. How he’d seen the dark-haired one take Ellen from the house to the shed, then seen the predicament I was in. How, when Ellen managed to unplug the hedge trimmer, the one whose name I knew to be Mortie lunged for her, and then Drew came in and hit him with the shovel he’d taken from the back of my truck.

“He saved our lives, Barry,” I said.

“These guys,” Barry said, “you ever see either of them before?”

We explained that we’d only gotten a look at Mortie, and only since he’d been dead, but we didn’t know him. And neither Ellen nor I had any idea who the other guy was. “But he had a tattoo,” I said. “On his arm. A knife. And he appeared to have dark hair.”

“That sound right to you?” Barry asked Ellen. She nodded. “You didn’t hear his name at all?”

“Mortie was smart enough not to say it out loud,” I said.

“Maybe he wasn’t planning to kill you,” Barry said. “Otherwise, why be careful about that?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“And you say they were here for a disc?”

“Of a book. I told you about this before but you weren’t interested,” I reminded him. “It was a copy of a book that was on a computer owned by Brett Stockwell, a student of Conrad Chase’s years ago, when he was still a professor and not Thackeray’s president.”

Barry was scribbling things in his notebook. “And this disc would be interesting why, again?”

“Because Conrad later published a book that was pretty much that book.”

Barry frowned. “So what are you saying here? The president of Thackeray College sent a couple of thugs to torture you and get that disc and maybe kill you, too?”

“No,” Ellen said. “He’s not saying that. That wouldn’t make any sense because Conrad already has the disc. I gave it to him earlier today.”

I gave her another puzzled look and shook my head.

A uniformed officer came into the kitchen to speak with Barry. “We checked the dead guy for ID,” he told the detective. “Nothing on him but some cash in his pants pocket. Quite a bit of it, too. Looks like a couple grand.”

“Okay,” he said, and the officer went back outside. Barry looked up from his notebook. “So who the hell else would want this disc, then? Who else knew you had it, who might still think you had it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Conrad’s wife, Illeana, suspected I had it, but if Conrad knew we didn’t have it, it stands to reason she knew, too.”

“Anyone else?”

I tried to think. Penny had said she might have mentioned the existence of the book on a computer Derek had found, but had she mentioned a disc? I didn’t think so.

Barry made some more notes, then put down his pen so he could work his fork through his slice of frozen cake, shove it into his mouth. “You know, Jim, I’ve known you a long time, and you’re a pretty good guy, with a pretty good head on your shoulders, but honestly, this is really getting way out there.”

“Barry,” Ellen said, “don’t you think it’s possible that these men who came here tonight are the same ones who killed the Langleys?”

Barry put down his fork. “I don’t know, Ellen.”

“Whatever the reason, whatever they were looking for, isn’t it a bit much to think that what happened here tonight isn’t related to what happened at the Langleys’ a few nights ago?”

Barry slowly finished chewing the cake in his mouth and swallowed.

“The Langleys get murdered, a computer goes missing, and then a few nights later, two men terrorize us, wanting a disc related to that computer. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

“I see where you’re going with this, Ellen,” Barry said.