Linwood Barclay - Fear The Worst

“What the hell happened to you?” he asked as I got into the air-conditioned Accord.

I turned the mirror around to get a look at myself. My nose and left cheek were swollen and decorated with small red shreds of tissue. And my clothes were dusted and grass-stained.

“What are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere?” he asked.

“Take me back,” I said.

“What happened to the Si you went out in? Did the car get stolen?”

“Just drive, Andy.”

“Do you need me to take you to a hospital or something?”

I turned in my seat and said patiently, “No more questions, Andy. Just get me back.”

He did as he was asked, but that didn’t stop him from looking over every few seconds. While I’d been waiting for him to show up, I’d put in a call to Kip Jennings, and still had the phone in my hand, hoping she’d call back any second.

As we approached the dealership, I glanced over at the 7-Eleven parking lot, where I’d noticed the Chrysler van when Eric, or whoever he really was, and I left for our test drive.

The van was gone. But sitting right next to where it had been parked was the red Civic.

“Pull in here,” I instructed Andy.

He wheeled the Accord into the vacant lot and I got out. The Civic was unlocked, the keys in the ignition. I went around to the passenger side, opened the door, saw dark splotches of blood on the dark gray fabric seats. I reached in, took the key, waited for a break in the traffic, and ran across the street to the dealership, leaving Andy to get back across with the car by himself.

As I entered the showroom my cell rang. I flipped it open, put it to my ear, and said, “Yeah.”

“Jennings.”

Once I started talking, I couldn’t keep my voice from shaking. “Some guy just tried to kill me.”

“Are you hurt?”

“He acted like he wanted to buy a car, we got out on the highway, he wanted to know where Syd was, and then he was going for a gun-”

“Where are you?”

“The dealership.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes. Well, no, but mostly yes.”

“How long ago?”

I had no idea. I glanced at my watch. “It all started more than an hour ago. I escaped on the Merritt Parkway about three quarters of an hour ago.”

“Five minutes,” she said and hung up.

I heard sirens in three.

JENNINGS WAS LOOKING AT THE PHOTOCOPY we’d taken of Eric Downes’s driver’s license prior to the test drive.

“It’s a fake,” she told me.

“Let me see,” I said. I studied the photo on the license. It was a man with roughly the same facial shape and hair color as the one who’d tried to kill me, but it wasn’t him. The more I looked, the more I realized it wasn’t even close.

“That’s not the guy,” I said. “He handed over his license to me, I didn’t even look at it before I gave it to Shannon to copy. He could have handed me my mother’s ID and it would have worked.”

Jennings didn’t bother to lecture me on the obvious holes in our system.

“He said they were looking for Syd,” I said.

“Who’s ‘they’?” Jennings asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. While I was telling her my story, a team of cops descended on the red Civic across the street.

“You have surveillance cameras here?” she asked, looking about the showroom. “We might be able to get a look at him.”

“We only turn them on when we’re closed,” I said.

“Super,” Jennings said. She leaned in and got a closer look at my nose. “You should see a doctor.”

“I don’t think it’s broken,” I said. I had been, for as long as I could stand it, holding an ice pack on it. Laura Cantrell had found one in the lunchroom fridge.

Jennings asked countless questions. Not just about the man’s appearance, but his voice, his clothes, mannerisms, patterns of speech.

“He knew all about the Seattle thing,” I said. “He admitted he was in my house. They planted the coke, thinking you’d arrest me, that’d be one more headache for me to deal with.”

“Why would they want to do that?”

I paused. “He said I was a problem waiting to happen. Because I won’t stop looking for Syd.”

“A problem for who?” she asked. “Aside from that guy from the flower shop.”

“Just about everyone else who runs a business near the hotel,” I said.

Jennings’s eyes were piercing. “Have there been others?”

“Other what?”

“Other misunderstandings? Like the one you had with Ian Shaw?”

“No,” I said.

Jennings didn’t look convinced. She was about to ask me something else when her cell rang. She dug her phone from her purse, looked at who was calling, and said, “I have to take this.” She turned and stepped away.

I took the opportunity to go into Laura Cantrell’s office with my warm, damp ice pack.

“Thanks,” I said.

She took it from me gingerly, looking for a place to put it down where it wouldn’t leave a wet spot, and finally set it atop a crinkled copy of Motor Trend.

“I’m taking a leave,” I said.

“Tim,” she said.

“I’m going to look for Sydney and I’m not coming back until I’ve found her. If I have to, I’ll put my house up for sale to keep myself afloat.”

“I guess you do what you have to do,” she said. “But you know, at the end of the day, I can’t hold on to your job forever.”

“I’d expect nothing more.”

“Jesus, Tim, I know you’re going through a lot, but you don’t have to be an asshole.”

“I’ll turn my contacts over to Andy. He can have my customers. He’s already got a head start.”

“I was going to tell you about that,” she said.

“I don’t care, Laura,” I said.

I was about to turn and leave when Laura said, “This is kind of difficult, Tim, but…”

“What?” I asked.

“You are driving a company car.”

I wanted to see whether she could look me in the eye and ask for my keys, and damned if she didn’t. “I can help you out as best I can, but I can’t justify giving a car to someone on a leave,” she said.

Riverside Honda had plenty of used cars to choose from, but suddenly I didn’t want to give my own employer the business. “Give me a day or two?”

“Of course,” Laura said.

“I’ll give Bob a call,” I said, half grinning to myself. “I’ll bet he can put me into something.”

Detective Jennings was waiting by my desk. Her cell phone was tucked away.

“Tell me again why you think this guy was going to kill you,” she said.

“To get Syd to come back. I guess he figured she’d hear, somehow, if I was dead, and she’d feel she had to come back for the funeral.”

Jennings didn’t say anything for a moment.

“What?” I asked.

“That tends to support the idea that Syd is alive.”

I blinked. “You got some reason to believe that she isn’t?”

“That was the lab calling,” she said. “We got the DNA results, on the blood from your daughter’s car.”

I was feeling faint.

“We got two hits. One was your daughter.”

I WAS ALREADY FEELING WOOZY. Jennings put me in my own desk chair, then sat down across from me.

“Some of the blood on the steering wheel and door handle of Sydney’s car turned out to be hers,” Jennings said.

“That doesn’t mean she’s dead,” I said. “It just means that she lost a bit of blood. She could have had a cut finger or something.”

“That’s true,” Jennings said.

I was trying hard to focus, and thought back a couple of sentences. “Some?” I said.

“Some what?”

“You said some of the blood on the steering wheel was Syd’s.”

“We’ve acquired quite a database over the last few years of suspects and convicted criminals.” She paused. “And from the deceased. When we get a DNA sample, we run it against what we already have, see if we get lucky.”