Linwood Barclay - Parting Shot

I might as well have told him the sky was green, the way he looked at me. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was putting on a show. Overreacting on purpose.

“That’s nuts,” he said.

“Tell me about Charlene.”

“What about Charlene?”

“Were things a little more serious with her that night than you’ve let on? Was she your girlfriend? Were you seeing her and Sian at the same time?”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

“Help me out here, Jeremy. Something about this is not right. Let me ask you again. All this time, have you been taking the blame for someone else? Willingly?”

“What?”

“I noticed Charlene knows her way around a stick shift. And she made a point yesterday of saying that Sian ran in front of the car, that anyone would have hit her, drunk or not. Why would she say that?”

“That’s just her opinion.” He shook his head angrily. “This is all bullshit.”

I had another question, but we had almost reached our contemplative guy. He must have heard us coming, because he opened his eyes and turned to look in our direction.

“We’ll talk about this later,” I whispered to Jeremy.

“I don’t think so,” he whispered back.

The man on the beach gave us a broad smile. “Hey.”

“You had a real Zen thing going on there,” I said.

The man nodded. “I guess so. It’s just so... wonderful.”

“Yup,” I said. I’ve always been a master of small talk. I glanced at Jeremy, who was looked slightly shell-shocked. His eyes weren’t focused on this new guy, or anything else for that matter. He was just staring.

“Haven’t seen you on the beach before,” the man said.

“We just got here,” I told him.

“Well, it’s nice to meet you.” He extended a hand and I took it. “What’s your name?”

“Cal,” I said.

He put out his hand to Jeremy and asked the same thing. I felt an instant sense of panic.

Don’t tell him your name. Don’t tell him your name .

Jeremy, almost robotically, held out his hand.

“And you are?” the man said.

I tried to catch Jeremy’s eye, but he still wasn’t tracking very well.

He said, “Uh, I’m Alan.”

I breathed an inward sigh of relief. Even in a stunned state, he had enough good sense to give a fake name.

“Well,” the man said, “nice to meet you both. Might see you again. I’m Cory, by the way.”

Alastair Calder led Duckworth up to the second floor of the house and opened the first door on the right.

“This is Cory’s room,” he said.

Maybe Duckworth expected all young men’s rooms to look as though a bomb had just gone off in them, but Cory’s world was meticulous. The bed was made, the desk uncluttered. A shelving unit was packed tightly with CDs and DVDs and books, but there was a sorting system for all of them. The disks were arranged alphabetically, the books into subcategories. Science-fiction novels were grouped, then alphabetized by author, and the same was true for non-fiction titles. Graphic novels were collected according to character, so stories featuring Batman, regardless of who wrote them, were stacked alongside each other.

“He’s neat,” Duckworth said.

“I’ll give him that,” Cory Calder’s father said.

The bed, which was about a foot lower than a typical one, seemed to float in the room. Duckworth noted that the mattress sat directly on a platform, without a box spring, and the supporting legs were set back just far enough to be invisible.

He checked out the desk. There was desktop computer with an oversized monitor not much thicker than a finger. Wireless mouse, wireless keyboard. He gave the mouse a shake and the monitor came to life, but it was password-protected.

“You know your son’s password?”

Alastair shook his head. “No.”

“Could you guess at it?”

“No.”

Duckworth nodded. Nothing about the room was jumping out at him. He scanned the items on the shelves. The DVDs were mostly science fiction or fantasy. Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit . As he scanned the spines of the books, he was hoping for titles along the lines of Do-It-Yourself Tattoos or Kidnapping 101 .

What he had not really expected to find was one called Sedation: A Patient Handbook .

He pulled it from the shelf and showed it to Alastair. “What do you make of that?”

“I don’t know what to make of it,” Alastair said.

There were also, on the same bottom shelf, a number of textbooks that Cory must have hung onto from his high-school or college days, most of them chemistry-related. It was looking to Duckworth as though Cory might have the smarts to keep someone unconscious for a couple of days.

And if the books didn’t supply enough information, there was always the Internet. All you had to do was google it. Which was why Duckworth was sorry he wasn’t going to be able to immediately get into Cory’s computer, if at all.

He went to the closet and opened it.

“Whoa,” he said.

Instead of clothes on hangers, the entire closet had been turned into shelving, but not for socks or shirts or underwear. The compartments were neatly stuffed with boxes — some empty, some not — ranging from the very small to briefcase-sized. The packaging labels indicated that most of this stuff was electronic equipment.

Alastair, standing behind Duckworth, said, “He saves the packaging for everything he gets. And all the instructions and the manuals.”

Duckworth read the labels. Modems, chargers, cables. But more interesting things, too. Surveillance-type equipment. Listening devices. Microphones.

“Why would Cory have stuff like this?” he asked.

Alastair looked. “I don’t know.” His face grew dark.

Duckworth closed the door to the closet. He got down on his knees and lifted the bed skirt, preparing to peer beneath it. But kneeling in the closet, standing, and now getting down again had made him momentarily light-headed. He rested his elbows on the bed and took a moment to ask Cory’s father another question.

“Where does he get the money?”

“Money for what?”

Duckworth tipped his head toward the closet. “All the electronic goodies.”

Alastair swallowed and said, quietly, “I give it to him. I give him what you’d call an allowance, I suppose.” He looked ashamed. “It’s just easier sometimes to let him have what he wants.”

“Sure,” Duckworth said.

His head feeling back to normal, he went down on his hands and knees and peered under the bed. There was almost nothing there, not even dust. But there was something up near the head of the bed, tucked against the wall by the baseboard. Whatever it was, it seemed to reflect the tiny amount of light that was getting under there.

Duckworth shimmied his body along the floor to get closer, and reached his hand under. His arm wasn’t long enough, but he was able to get a better look at the item. It was a jar. About six or seven inches tall, with a metal cap on top. It carried no label, but it appeared to be something spaghetti sauce might have come in.

“Do you have a stick or a ruler or something?” he asked Alastair Calder.

“What is it?”

“Something under here I can’t quite reach.”

“What does it look like?”

“A jar.”

Duckworth heard Alastair opening drawers. Finally he came around the bed and handed the detective a pair of scissors.

“I couldn’t find anything else,” he said.

Duckworth held the scissors by the pointed end, reached under the bed, and was able to connect with the jar. He moved it slightly in his direction, noticed a shimmering, and realized it contained some kind of liquid, in addition to something else. Very carefully, so as not to knock it over, he edged it even closer with the scissors until he was able to reach it with his hand.