Linwood Barclay - Fear The Worst

“You liked her living in your house, I’ll bet.”

“No big deal. So we lived under the same roof a few weeks. She had her life and I had mine.”

“Did you spend time together?”

“Huh?”

“Did you hang out?”

“We had meals together. Sometimes I had to tell her to move her ass so I could use the bathroom.” That seemed unlikely. Bob’s house had several.

“You didn’t think it was kind of cool? Her moving into your dad’s place?”

“You make it sound like something it wasn’t,” he said.

“Did you introduce her to your friends?”

“You don’t know anything about my friends. You don’t know anything about me.” He glared.

“You do drugs, Evan? Do any of your friends sell drugs?”

“You’re crazy. I have to get this car cleaned up.”

I asked, “Why are you stealing?”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Fuck you.”

“The petty cash, Susanne’s watch that went-”

“She found that watch.”

“So I hear. You don’t want to deny the petty cash, too?”

That caught him off guard. “Does my dad know you’re talking to me?”

“Should we go get him? Then I can ask you, with him present, whether you broke into my house.”

“Why the fuck would I do that?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

“I don’t know where this is coming from, but you’re totally nuts.”

“What are you doing on the computer all the time?”

He grinned. “She’s telling you all this shit, isn’t she?”

“She?” I said.

“She’s not my mother, okay? Just because she’s my dad’s girlfriend doesn’t give her the right to spy on me, and then go blabbing to you about what she’s found out.”

“Evan, can I tell you something? Right now, I’m cutting you a whole lot of slack, because the other day, I heard you refer to my ex-wife as a bitch, and right now, all I really want to do is rip your head off. But I’ve decided to be nice, because all that matters to me is finding Sydney. And there’s something about you, I don’t know what it is, but it’s like a bad smell, and I can’t help but think that whatever’s happened to Syd may have something to do with you.”

He shook his head and tried to laugh it off. “You’re a piece of work.”

He hit the switch on the vacuum and turned away from me. I was about to grab him by the shoulder when I heard someone shout, “Tim!”

I turned. Bob Janigan was standing in the open garage doorway. He shouted my name a second time.

I strode over to him, said, “You need to find out what’s up with your boy,” and walked back to my car.

BACK ON THE ROAD, MY CELL RANG.

“What happened?” Susanne asked.

“Our-my house was broken into while I was in Seattle. The place was trashed, searched from top to bottom. Some cash got stolen. Maybe some other stuff, too. I don’t know. And when the police looked around, they found what I’m guessing was cocaine.”

“What?”

“I think Evan knows more than he’s saying.”

Susanne said, “Bob says if you ever go near Evan again he’ll kill you.”

“It’s my other line, Suze. I have to go.”

IT WAS A CRIMINAL LAWYER NAMED EDWIN CHATSWORTH. He was part of the firm I used whenever I needed legal matters dealt with. Like a failed business, but also property matters, title transfers, that kind of thing. Once, a dissatisfied customer had threatened to sue me personally, as opposed to the dealership that employed me, over a used car that turned out to be a genuine lemon.

I’d put in a call to the firm between leaving home and going to see Evan. They said it sounded like a job for Edwin, and promised he would get back to me.

I spelled it out for him the best I could.

“Just guessing,” he said, “but I’d be very surprised if they go ahead with any charges over the coke, assuming it is coke and not a Baggie full of baking soda.”

“Because?”

“Like you said. You invited the cops into your home. The place had been broken into. People other than you had an opportunity to put the drugs in your bed. A judge would toss it out before they’d finished their opening arguments.”

“You sure?”

“No. But that’s what my gut tells me. And this Detective Jennings, don’t talk to her anymore.”

“But she’s also looking for my daughter. I can’t not talk to her about that.”

Chatsworth mulled that one over. “Don’t trust her. She starts veering the conversation to what was in the house, you say nothing without me being there. There’s no way they can prove those drugs were yours.”

“They weren’t. They’re not my drugs.”

“Hey, did I ask you that?”

THE BAG I’D PACKED FOR THE TRIP TO SEATTLE was back in my car. I’d walked into the house with it but, after discovering the state my place was in, never unpacked. And now that Kip Jennings wasn’t going to let me sleep in my own house that night, I’d hung on to the bag.

I went into the mall and had a slice of pepperoni pizza in the food court. I watched all the young people walking by. Tried to catch the faces of all the teenage girls.

You never stopped looking.

Then I got back in the car and drove over to the Just Inn Time. Carter and Owen, the two men who’d been on the front desk the night I’d come in trying to find Syd, were on once again.

I walked up to the counter and said, “I’d like a room.”

AND THAT’S JUST WHAT IT WAS.

A room. A generic, nondescript, plain room. A patternless blue spread covered the double bed in the center. Dull white shades covered the lamps flanking the bed. The bedroom walls were beige, much like the bathroom and the towels and the halls and everything else in this budget-minded hotel.

But that said, it was also clean and well kept. The bathroom came equipped with soap and shampoo and a hair dryer. The closet had one of those mini-safes you can program with a four-digit code, suitable for holding a passport, a video camera, and a few thousand in unmarked bills.

The hotel hadn’t yet moved to fancy flat-screen, wall-mounted TVs. And while the bulky set sitting atop the dresser seemed to be from a couple of decades ago, you could still order up movies-including ones with titles like She’ll Be Cummin’ Round the Mountain When She Cums-if you were so inclined.

I flipped through the channels, left Dr. Phil on in the background to exploit some miserable family stupid enough to air their dirty laundry for the entertainment pleasure of millions, and looked out the second-floor window. I don’t know what I was expecting, exactly. Maybe I thought staring at the Howard Johnson restaurant and hotel off in the distance, the cars and trucks whizzing past on I-95, would somehow provide a clue as to where Syd had gone after I’d dropped her off out front of the Just Inn Time.

It didn’t.

Watching those hundreds of cars and trucks and SUVs racing by, I couldn’t help thinking that if you were in one of those vehicles, in a few short hours you could be anywhere in New England. Boston or Providence, up to Maine. Maybe Vermont or New Hampshire. You could head west and north, be up in Albany in under three hours. Or closer to home, but harder to find, in Manhattan.

And that would just be the same day you got in one of those cars. By now, weeks later, a person could be almost anywhere.

If that person was alive.

I’d been trying very hard, since the moment she’d gone missing, not to let my mind go there. As long as there was no definitive evidence that harm had come to her, I had to believe she was fine. Lost-at least to Susanne and me-but okay.

The image of that blood on Syd’s Civic, though, was a hard thing to get out of my head.