Linwood Barclay - Fear The Worst

“Hey,” I said. “I’m guessing you’re Cassie.”

She didn’t say anything.

I stood well away from the window. “Doing some last-minute studying?”

“My mom’s a cop and she’s coming back any minute,” she said.

“I’ll leave you be,” I said and turned for my house. Kip Jennings was coming down the driveway.

“Morning,” I said. “You’ve trained your daughter well.”

“What?”

“The whole talking-to-strangers thing. I backed right off.”

“I have to get her to school. I was dropping by here on the way. We’re done with your house. You can have it back.”

“Great.”

“It’s still a mess.”

“I figured.”

“There are companies you can call to help with the cleanup. I can get you a list.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“You’re not going to be charged,” she said. “The cocaine.”

“Nice to know.”

“And it was coke,” she said. “But cut with so much lactose you’d be one pissed-off junkie if you paid very much for it.”

“It wasn’t mine.”

She regarded me thoughtfully, then said, “Doesn’t much matter one way or another. The D.A. would never have gotten a conviction.”

“I think it’s important that you know I’m innocent.”

“I’ll bet you do,” she said. “To tell you the truth, I think you’re probably telling the truth.”

Probably.

“Because,” she said, “I believe we were meant to find it.”

“Meant?”

From her car: “Mom! I’m gonna be late!”

“Hold your horses!” Jennings shouted. “Yeah. Meant to find it, meant to think it was yours.”

I remembered Edwin Chatsworth advising me not to talk to this woman, but said, “They tore the place apart like they were looking for something. They knew the moment I came home I’d call the police. Then the police would find the cocaine.”

Detective Jennings nodded back. “Yeah. And then we put the heat on you.”

I looked at her. “Why would someone do that?”

“What a coincidence. I was going to ask you that.”

“Mom!”

Jennings sighed. “She’s just like her father.”

I had thought Jennings was a single mom. “He a police officer, too?” I asked.

Something in Jennings’s face twitched, even though she tried hard not to show it. “No,” she said. “He’s an engineer. And he’s working somewhere in Alaska, and if we’re lucky, he won’t ever be coming back.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I didn’t.

“Divorced, three years,” she said. She puffed herself up a bit. “And Cassie and I, we’re good.”

“She’s tough,” I said. “That comes across pretty quick.”

“Mr. Blake,” she said, “you need to think why someone would go to all the trouble to get you out of town and then see if they could get you framed for drug possession.”

I looked up the street at nothing in particular.

“And you need to keep thinking about the question I asked you before. Just how well did you know what your daughter was up to?”

I said, “The bloodstains on Syd’s car… have you found out anything yet?”

“You’ll be the second to know,” she said, then got into her car and drove her daughter to school.

I DECIDED TO TACKLE THE CLEANUP a room at a time.

First, of course, I went upstairs to check for any phone or email messages, even a fax. There was nothing. It occurred to me that with all of today’s technologies, there were now more ways than ever to know with absolute certainty that no one wanted to get in touch with me.

Then I went back down to the kitchen. It made sense to put this room in order first. I found some garbage bags under the sink and dumped in food that could not be saved. Items from the refrigerator that had been tossed about and gone bad, spilled cereal that covered the floor.

I’d been going at it for about an hour when I heard someone shouting over the drone of the vacuum cleaner.

“Hello?”

The front door was open. Standing there was a slight man in a suit that had to be five sizes too big for him. You could slip three fingers between his neck and his buttoned shirt collar. His stringy black tie was askew, and it seemed awfully early in the day to look this unkempt. His concave chest made him look as though he was caving in on himself. He was the guy who got sand kicked in his face on the back page of my comic books when I was a kid.

“I rang but you couldn’t hear me,” he said.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

“Are you Tim Blake?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Arnold Chilton,” he said. “I think Bob Janigan mentioned me to you?”

Huh?

Then I remembered. The detective, or security expert, whatever. The one Bob said might be able to help us track down Sydney. I was surprised, knowing how pissed Bob was with me at the moment, that he’d still decided to go ahead with this.

“Bob got in touch with me a few days ago,” he said, “but I’ve kind of been swamped getting my mom moved into a nursing home.”

“Oh,” I said. I extended a hand and he took it.

Arnold Chilton whistled as he took in the mess. I hadn’t started on the living room yet. “That must have been some party,” he said.

“It wasn’t a party,” I said. “Someone broke in and tore up the place.”

“Wow,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“You got some time for some questions?” he asked.

“Why don’t we go outside?” I suggested. “There’s really nowhere to sit down in here yet.”

“Okeydoke,” Chilton said. We walked out onto the front lawn, turned, and looked back at the house.

“This is good of Bob to bring you into this,” I said. “He and I, we don’t always see eye to eye on everything.”

“He said something like that.”

“I’ll just bet he did,” I said. “The police are investigating Syd’s disappearance, of course, but having someone else on this, that’s great. I’ve been doing everything I can to find her-I even went on a wild-goose chase to Seattle this week-but haven’t made much headway. You know her car was found?”

“Didn’t know that,” Chilton said.

I thought the mention of the Seattle trip and the discovery of Syd’s car would have sparked further questions.

“Have you spoken to Detective Jennings?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Kip Jennings,” I said. “The police detective?”

“I think Bob did mention her, or his wife Susanne did.”

“Susanne is not his wife,” I said. “We used to be married, but she hasn’t married Bob. Yet.”

“That’s right! I knew that.”

“Did they tell you about Detective Jennings? Did they give you her number? Because you’re going to want to talk to her.”

“I’m pretty sure they mentioned her. I just don’t think I wrote it down.”

“I have her number,” I offered.

“Good,” he said, nodding agreeably.

“So, are you, what, a friend of Bob’s?” I asked. “Or have you done work for him before?”

“Yeah, I’ve done some stuff for him in the past,” Chilton said.

I wondered why my ex-wife’s boyfriend might have used the services of a private detective. And whatever reason it might have been, did Arnold Chilton actually produce any results? He wasn’t inspiring me with confidence.

“So, let’s get down to cases,” he said. “Tell me about the day your daughter disappeared.”

I told the story for the hundredth time. Chilton scribbled into a tattered notebook that had been jammed into a jacket pocket.

“What about friends?” he asked. “You got some names of her friends?”

“Patty Swain,” I said. “And there was a guy she used to go out with a few times, Jeff Bluestein. He helped me set up the website.” That reminded me. I had meant to ask him, when he’d popped by the dealership with Patty, to double-check that emails sent to the site were actually getting there. Not fully understanding how all that stuff worked, I was paranoid about things going wrong.