Linwood Barclay - Fear The Worst

“Have you touched anything since then?”

“I put that clock back on the mantel,” I said. “It was my father’s.” The gesture was akin to straightening your cap after you’ve been run over by an eighteen-wheeler.

There were a couple of uniformed cops wandering around the house, taking pictures, muttering among themselves. They’d found a basement window that had been kicked in.

“You’d been gone how long?”

“About forty-eight hours. I left here early two days ago. After nine. So two days and four hours, give or take.”

“Seattle,” Jennings said.

“That’s right,” I said.

“And your daughter?”

“I didn’t find her,” I said.

Jennings’s eyes softened for a moment. “So you got home, you opened the door,” she said. “Did you see anyone? Was anyone running away from the house when you pulled into the driveway?”

“No,” I said.

I told her what I’d found. In the living room, cushions tossed from the furniture, then cut open, the foam scattered about in chunks. Every shelf cleared, every cabinet emptied. Books thrown about, CDs all over the place. Audio equipment pulled from the shelves, some components still hanging from them by their wires, hanging precariously like a truck on a cliff in an Indiana Jones movie.

In the kitchen, every cupboard emptied. And then, the boxes that were in the cupboard, emptied. Cornflakes all over the floor. Things pulled out of the fridge, the door hanging open.

It was the same story everywhere. All the drawers in my bedroom dresser pulled out and turned over. So many clothes on the floor you couldn’t see the carpet. Socks, underwear, shirts. Items ripped off hangers in the closet, thrown here and there.

Syd’s room was no different, although she didn’t have quite as much stuff to trash as I did, since most of her clothes were still at her mother’s house. The dresser had been emptied. Unlike my bed, which didn’t appear to have been touched, Syd’s mattress had been cut open. The contents of the closet were on the bedroom floor.

In my computer room, all the desk drawers had been opened, the shelves cleared off.

The basement damage was minimal. The washer and dryer had been opened, and a box of Tide detergent had been emptied onto the floor. The toolbox on my workbench had been dumped out.

Our boxes of stuff-those things you accumulate through life that you don’t know what to do with but haven’t the nerve to pitch, like your children’s kindergarten drawings, photos, books you’ll never read again, old files and business papers from your parents’ house-had been opened and rummaged through, but only a couple had been dumped out.

Standing amid the wreckage in the living room, I asked Jennings, “What kind of little bastards would do this?”

“You think it was kids?” Jennings asked.

“You don’t?”

We went through the house slowly, our shoes crunching on cornflakes as we went through the kitchen. She walked and talked. “Have you noticed whether anything was stolen?”

“How could you tell?” I said, surveying the wreckage. “I really haven’t had a chance to go through the place and check.”

“Your computer missing?”

“No, it’s still up there.”

“Your daughter’s laptop?”

I recalled seeing it, nodded.

“Laptop’s pretty easy to walk off with,” Jennings said.

“Yes.”

“How about silverware?”

I had noticed it earlier, dumped from a buffet drawer onto the living room carpet. “It’s here. Would kids even steal silverware?”

“How about iPods, little things like that that are easy to pocket?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have one. Syd does, but it’s in my car. But they didn’t take the small TV here.” I pointed to the set hanging from the kitchen cabinet. Someone would have needed a screwdriver to free it from its bracket.

“They didn’t break it, either,” Kip Jennings said. “You keep any cash in the house?”

“Not a lot,” I said. “Some, in this drawer over here. Just a few bills, fives and tens, for things like pizza, charities, stuff like that.”

“Have a look,” she said.

I opened it. The cash was normally tucked between the edge of the cutlery tray and the side of the drawer.

“It’s gone,” I said.

“Other than the cash, anything jump out at you as being missing?”

“Not really. What are you getting at?”

“You think maybe it was kids, and maybe it was. But you see any spray paint on the walls? Any TVs kicked in? Doesn’t look like anyone’s defecated on your rug.”

“A silver lining to everything,” I said.

“It’s the kind of thing kids will do.”

“So you don’t think it was kids,” I said.

“I’ll tell you this much. I don’t think anybody came in here to steal stuff at random. They were looking for something. They were looking for it pretty hard, too.”

“Looking for what?” I asked.

“You tell me,” Jennings said.

“You think I know and I’m not telling you?”

“No. At least, not necessarily. But you know better than I what you might have hidden in this house.”

“I don’t have anything hidden,” I said.

“Maybe it wasn’t you who hid it,” she said.

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying your daughter’s missing and we don’t know why. She said she was working at that hotel, but no one there’s even heard of her. That tells me your daughter wasn’t exactly being honest with you about everything. So maybe she was hiding something in this house-or at least somebody thought she might have been-that she didn’t share with you.”

“I don’t believe that.”

Kip put her hands on her hips and studied me. “This is a pretty thorough search. In all the years I’ve been with the police, I’ve seen very few places torn apart like this. I’ve never even seen cops tear apart a place like this. This took a while. Looks like they weren’t too worried about you walking in the door unexpectedly. Looks like they knew they had time.”

Our eyes met.

“Who knew you were going to Seattle?” she asked.

Whom had I told? Who knew? Kate. My boss, Laura Cantrell. My colleague in the showroom, Andy Hertz. Susanne, of course, and no doubt Bob and Evan. And anyone else any of these people might have told.

I was missing the obvious, of course.

Yolanda Mills, whoever she was, knew I was off to Seattle. She’d practically invited me there.

“Maybe I was set up,” I said.

“Come again?” Jennings asked.

“I was set up. The woman who called me, who said she’d seen my daughter. She knew I wasn’t going to be home.”

“Refresh my memory.”

I told her about Yolanda Mills, how I couldn’t find her in Seattle, how the cops out there believed she’d called me from a disposable cell phone.

“Seattle’s about as far away as someone could send you and still be in the country,” Jennings said. “Once you were on your way to the airport, they knew they had at least a couple of days to go through your house.”

“But she had a picture of her,” I said. “She sent it to me. It was a picture of Syd. I’m as sure of that as I can be.”

“Can I see it?”

“Computer,” I said.

I led us into the study, stepping over tossed books and dumped shoe boxes spilling out receipts. While the computer tower and monitor had been shoved about, they were reasonably intact. I fired it up, opened the email program, and found the message and attached photo from Yolanda Mills. I opened it for Detective Jennings to see.

“It’s not the greatest picture in the world,” she said. “The way her hair is falling, you can’t see much of her face.”

“You see this?” I said, pointing to the coral, fringed scarf that Syd had tied about her neck. “I know that scarf. Syd has one just like it. You put that scarf with that hair, and that bit of nose you can see there, and that’s her. I’d bet my life on it.”