Linwood Barclay - Parting Shot

“Okay,” I said. “I was going to take him to New York, but I don’t think that’s such a good idea any more.”

Madeline Plimpton said nothing.

“Hello?”

“I’m just thinking,” she said. “I have a place.”

“A place?”

“On the Cape. Cape Cod. My husband and I bought it years ago. I haven’t been there since he passed away. I still own it, but it’s in the hands of a rental agent. People book it for the summer months. But it’s only May. It might not be rented.”

“Would anyone be able to track us down there? Seems wherever Jeremy goes, people figure it out.”

A hesitation. “I don’t know. It’s owned through a company, so my name’s not really attached to it. I haven’t been to the Cape in years. And Gloria — in case you’re worried she might inadvertently let something slip — probably thinks I sold it years ago. But the good news is, it’s on the beach, you’ve got some privacy, there won’t be many people around through the week, it being so early in the season. I could make a call, see if it’s available right now. It’s not that far out. East Sandwich. Beautiful view of Cape Cod Bay.”

I thought about it. Finding a place to hunker down seemed better than moving from hotel to hotel.

“The question is, how long do we go on like this?” I asked.

A sigh. “I know.”

“Let’s take it a day at a time. You find out if the place is available and we’ll go from there.”

We said our goodbyes.

I found Jeremy right where he was supposed to be, sitting in the passenger seat of my Honda. He was relentlessly pounding the side of his right fist into the top of his thigh with everything he had.

Duckworth brought everyone in. The crime-scene unit, the coroner, extra police to cordon off the area near where Carol Beakman’s car had been found and to interview possible witnesses. Dolores, also known as Dolly, had no identification on her so Duckworth had no last name or address.

But he did know where she worked.

“What about Carol?” Trevor asked. “Where the hell is she?”

That was the question.

Her car had been found with someone else’s body in it. That didn’t bode well for Carol, no matter how one looked at it. She could end up being a second victim, or she might have had something to do with what happened.

The first place Duckworth instructed the uniformed officers to start looking was the Dumpster that sat right next to the silver Corolla. But it was nearly empty, and it didn’t take much of an examination to determine there was no body in it. There might, however, be something in there the killer, or killers, had discarded.

Everything had to be gone over with the proverbial fine-toothed comb.

Now Duckworth had to decide where to focus his attention. He had a homicide and a missing person case.

And those two events tied back, it appeared, to Brian Gaffney.

Brian Gaffney was abducted just after leaving Knight’s.

Carol saw someone she knew as she and Trevor were leaving.

Carol told Trevor she was going to talk to that woman and suggest she get in touch with Duckworth if she saw anything.

Carol disappeared.

Dolores, who worked at a tattoo parlor where a tattoo gun was supposedly stolen, turned up dead in Carol’s car.

And speaking of tattoos, Duckworth now thought there was a strong likelihood that Gaffney was not the intended target. He had more than a passing resemblance to someone else in that bar who Duckworth was now sure was the kid from that court case that had garnered national attention, the one who got off with probation after running a girl down with a car because he’d never been taught to appreciate the consequences of his actions.

God, what a world.

There were plenty of people, Duckworth now realized from the Craig Pierce incident, who’d like to teach that young man — Jeremy Pilford was his name — a lesson or two.

The night before, after he and Maureen returned from their dinner at Knight’s — the best meal Duckworth had had in months, by the way — he went online to refresh his memory on some of the details of the Pilford case.

When he saw the name of the girl Jeremy Pilford had run down with that businessman’s Porsche — Sian McFadden — it all came together for him. It was very possible that whoever had written that tattoo on Brian Gaffney’s back had made a spelling error. “Sean,” he was betting, was supposed to be “Sian.”

As theories went, it wasn’t a bad one.

It had been Duckworth’s plan, until Trevor showed up a couple of hours earlier, hovering over his bed, to start looking into the possible Pilford angle.

In fact, that wasn’t the only thing he wanted to look into. Something, he thought, was fishy across the street from the Gaffney household. Mrs. Beecham’s tale of learning that her caregiver was actually her niece beggared belief. And finding out that the name Norma Lastman had given Mrs. Beecham was different from her van registration also bothered Duckworth.

But those things would have to wait. Right now, Duckworth needed to find out everything he could about Dolores, and that meant a visit to her boss, Mike.

Trevor, who’d finally done as he was told and was waiting by his car, ran toward his father when he appeared.

“What do we do now?” he asked.

“ We don’t do anything,” Duckworth said.

“What do you mean? We have to keep looking for Carol.”

“I know. You got a picture of her?”

Trevor nodded.

“Email it to me.”

Trevor got out his phone, opened up the photos, and turned the device around to show his father. “How about this?”

It was a shot of Carol seated at a restaurant table, presumably across from Trevor. The lighting was poor and half her face was in shadow.

“Any others?”

Trevor swiped his finger across the screen several times, stopping on a selfie shot of Carol and him sitting on a bench with the falls in the background. Trevor had his arm around her, his face pressed up close to hers.

“It’s a good shot of Carol,” Duckworth said, but his voice lacked enthusiasm.

“What?”

“Do you have another one?”

Trevor shook his head. “What’s wrong with this one?”

Duckworth hesitated, then said, “No, it’s fine. Email that to me.”

“There’s a problem. Tell me.”

“It’s the fact that you’re in the picture.”

“I can be cropped out.”

“I know.” Another hesitation. “Here’s the thing, Trevor. I shouldn’t even be talking to you about this any more.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way. But this is now a homicide investigation, as well as a missing person case. You have an involvement, and I am, at least right now, the lead investigator. And you’re my son. That may taint this investigation. My judgment might be called into question at a later date.”

“Yeah, but that would only matter,” Trevor said, “if I was guilty of something. But I didn’t have anything to do with that woman in the trunk of Carol’s car. And I don’t have any idea what’s happened to Carol.”

“I know.”

“You do , right?” Trevor pressed. “You do know I don’t have anything to do with any of this?”

“Of course. But that doesn’t matter. Look, just let me do what I have to do. If you hear from Carol, if you get any new ideas about where she might be, you call me. But you can’t tag along. That just won’t fly.”

Trevor made his hands into fists, then opened them. “It’s not right.”

“Yes, it’s right,” Duckworth said. “One thing.”

“What?”

“That woman in the trunk. Is she the one Carol saw outside Knight’s?”