Linwood Barclay - Fear The Worst

“I’m afraid I don’t-What was it?”

“Could Ms. Wood hear both sides of the conversation you claimed to be having on the phone with Yolanda Mills?”

Claimed?

“Um, I don’t know. Probably not.”

Now it was Jennings’s turn. “Tell me about the phone,” she said.

“What phone?”

“The phone you had in your pocket when I dropped by your house the other morning.”

“That’s the phone that was used to call me from Seattle. Or at least, it had a Seattle number.”

“That’s right,” Jennings said.

“If you know this, why are you asking me?”

“How long had you had that phone?”

“I hadn’t had it any time at all. I found it just before you showed up. I found it in the dirt. That man who was going to kill me, he even mentioned it, said they forgot it there.”

“I’ll just bet,” Detective Marjorie said.

“Look, if you’d given me a second, I’d have handed it over to you,” I said.

“We weren’t able to find any fingerprints on it, other than yours,” Jennings said casually.

Marjorie had moved away from me and was slowly pacing the room, which suddenly seemed very small, as though the walls were closing in.

He asked, “Did Ms. Wood just drop by, or were you expecting her?”

We were back to her now?

“When are we talking about now?” I asked.

“Same as a minute ago,” he said, shaking his head, like I was an idiot who couldn’t follow a simple conversation. “The night you were getting all this news from Seattle.”

“We’d talked on the phone earlier,” I said. “She was going to bring Chinese food.”

“Did you tell her to come right away?” Jennings asked.

Again, I tried to think back. “I asked her to give me an hour.” I let out a long sigh. “I went out for a drive. I do that a lot, looking for Sydney.” I remembered what I had done on that drive. “I stopped by Richard Fletcher’s house.”

“Who’s that?” he asked.

I glanced at Jennings, who already knew this story. “He took a truck for a test drive, but he really just wanted it to deliver a load of manure.”

“You sure he wasn’t delivering this story of yours?” Marjorie asked. “Because it amounts to the same thing.”

“We spoke to him,” Jennings said. “About the shooting at your house.”

“Yes?” I said hopefully.

“It was just like you said,” Jennings said. “He denies dropping by. Says he doesn’t know anything about it. He says he was home all evening with his daughter, and she says the same thing.”

“She’s a kid,” I said. “Of course she’s going to say what her father wants her to say.”

“All we have at the moment is your word against his,” Jennings said.

I was about to say something in protest, but Marjorie cut me off. “You own a gun, Mr. Blake?”

“A gun? No. I don’t own a gun.”

“I’m not talking about a licensed gun. Any gun.”

“I don’t own a gun,” I said. “I never have.”

“Never even went hunting with your dad as a kid?”

“No.”

Marjorie looked unconvinced.

“I’d really appreciate it if you’d tell me what this is all about,” I said. “I don’t understand the point of all this.”

“There never really was a Yolanda Mills, was there?” Marjorie said.

“No,” I said. “I thought we’d pretty much established that. She’s an invention. She was made up by these people, the ones working with that guy who wanted to kill me, who probably shot up my car. They wanted me out of town so they could plant that cocaine in my house. They tore the place apart so it would look like someone had been searching the place for it, but missed it. Their whole plan was for the cops to find it, and arrest me. Then I’d be out of the way.”

“And just who is it who wants you out of the way?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Detective Marjorie grinned and shook his head.

“My daughter’s missing and you think the whole thing is a fucking joke,” I said.

“Do I?” Marjorie said. “I think it’s a joke? You give me a story that’s straight out of The Twilight Zone and I’m the one making a joke? Okay, let me ask you something very serious, then, Mr. Blake. Did you make up Yolanda Mills?”

It was like getting hit in the side of the head with a two-by-four.

“I’m sorry?” I said.

“You heard me.”

I looked at Detective Jennings. “Is he fucking kidding?”

Jennings held my gaze. “Answer his question, Mr. Blake.”

I said to her, leaning closer to her, “From him, I can accept this kind of horseshit. But you? From the beginning, I’ve always thought you were in my corner.”

“This will all go a lot better, and be over a lot quicker, if you just answer the questions,” she said.

“No,” I said, sitting upright. “I did not make up Yolanda Mills.”

Marjorie said, “You sure? You sure you didn’t make her up, and use Kate Wood to back up your story? Use her as a witness?”

“What the hell did she tell you?” I asked. “There’s something you need to know about Kate Wood. No, two things. First, she’s got it in for me because I didn’t want to see her anymore. And second, she’s a nutcase.”

“Isn’t it possible,” Marjorie said, “that you waited until she came over to discover that first email, then later when you took the laptop downstairs, you sent yourself an email from a bogus Hotmail account in Yolanda Mills’s name, which Ms. Wood discovered upstairs? And then you placed your call to her, but you didn’t really place a call to anyone? That you faked it, all for Ms. Wood’s benefit?”

Now it was my turn to smile. Not with amusement, but astonishment. I said to him, “And you thought my story was inventive. You’re out of your fucking mind.”

Jennings remained stone-faced, but Marjorie’s cheeks flushed red with anger. “That’s not exactly answering the question, Mr. Blake,” Jennings said.

“You have to understand something about Kate Wood. She sees conspiracies all over the place. She thinks everyone’s got it in for her, like everyone gets up in the morning and has a meeting to figure out how they’re going to stick it to Kate Wood today. That’s why I felt I had to call her. Because I know how her mind works.”

“So that’s your defense,” Detective Marjorie said. “She’s a nut.”

“I’m just saying you need to know how she sees the world. Is this really what she believes, or did you lead her this way? Because I know it wouldn’t take much. Does she honestly think I was manipulating her? That I set this whole thing up so she’d corroborate some crazy story?” I looked directly at Jennings. “You saw my house when I got back from Seattle. You saw what they did to it.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “It is possible, in theory,” she said slowly, “that you could have done that before you left for Seattle.”

“Is that what you believe?” I asked her point-blank.

“You have to admit it’s possible,” she said.

“That’s not exactly answering the question, either,” I said. “Is that what you believe?”

She grimaced, as though she didn’t want to have to answer. Was that because she didn’t want Marjorie to know she thought I was innocent, or because she didn’t want me to know she’d given up on me?

“Why would I do something like that? Set up a call from someone who didn’t exist? Tear up my house and make it look like someone else did it? Plant cocaine so you could find it? Where would I get cocaine? And if I could get my hands on some, why would I do that? What possible reason could I have for doing something like that?”

Neither of them said anything. I guess they wanted me to figure it out on my own.