Linwood Barclay: Parting Shot

“You were too clever by half,” Pierce said.

“I don’t... I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t you want to know how I found you?” Pierce offered him half a smile with his grotesque, partially eaten face. “It was actually so fucking easy.”

“I... I...”

“It was revenge. Revenge with a J. Your clever little signature on the Just Deserts posting. I mean, you can’t spell worth a shit, but that was deliberate, right? Thing is, if the only place you’d ever used it was on that site, you’d have been fine. But I did a search, found you’d used it on other sites. With your real name attached. Looked you up, found you lived right in my own backyard.”

“Please, you’ve made a mistake.”

“Drove by your house, kept watch on you, stuck a little tracker to your van. You’ve been hunting that Pilford kid, haven’t you? He was next on your list.”

“I need a doctor,” Cory said, starting to cry. “Please, please get me some help.”

Craig clucked his tongue sympathetically. “Is it all hurty?”

“Everything... It all went wrong,” Cory said, a bloody tear running down his cheek. “It’s not fair. It’s not fair.”

“Ahh, who’s the big baby now?” Pierce asked, wrapping both hands around the poker and driving it straight down, like a spear, through Cory Calder’s heart.

I let Jeremy sleep on the way back.

He nodded off next to me a couple of miles out of Sandwich, even before we went over the Sagamore Bridge. There was a McDonald’s on the other side. I did the drive-through and grabbed coffee and a couple of breakfast sandwiches. Jeremy woke up long enough to wolf one down, then went back to sleep. We’d never gotten to bed the night before, and what with all the commotion that followed, there’d been no opportunity to nod off.

I hadn’t had a chance yet, but I was far from sleepy.

I was anxious to get going. I had an appointment to keep with the man who’d answered Kiln’s phone, and I was going to have to drive flat out to get back to Promise Falls in time to keep it.

A lot had happened since the phone call.

First, there’d been that woman running up the road, who turned out to be Carol Beakman. As soon as she told me her name, I recognized it from my chat with Barry Duckworth. She told me she had been kidnapped by Cory Calder but had managed to free herself while he was out of the cabin. She’d wandered up North Shore in the other direction, banging on doors, failing to find anyone home. Then, when she saw all the commotion at the other end of the road — fire trucks and ambulances and police cars — she started running that way.

I identified myself, told her I had just recently been speaking with Barry Duckworth, that he’d been trying to find her. She burst into tears at that point and said she had to let his son Trevor know she was okay.

Before I offered her my cell phone to call him, I had to assess whether Calder remained a threat.

“I don’t know,” Carol said. “I don’t know where he is.” She glanced back down the road and said, fearfully, “Unless he’s gone back to the cabin.”

I hailed Higgins, told him in as few words as possible that Carol Beakman had been abducted and that her kidnapper, a man named Cory Calder, might be found a short distance down the road.

He rounded up another officer and together they booted it down the road and stormed the cabin while Carol and I watched from afar. A few seconds later, lights came on, and a few seconds after that, Higgins emerged and shouted at the top of his lungs: “Weaver!”

I left Carol in the care of another officer and ran.

“Have a look and see if that’s your Calder character,” he said, pointing his thumb inside.

I took three steps into the cabin and looked at the bloody, beaten body on the floor in front of me. A poker was sticking straight up from his chest. It was hard to be one hundred percent certain, given that much of his face had been turned to pulp, but this looked like the man Jeremy and I had met on the beach.

I came back out. “I think so,” I said.

“This is turning into one clusterfuck of a night,” Higgins said.

I went back to see how Carol Beakman was doing. Another team of paramedics had arrived and were checking her out. At that point, I gave her my phone so that she could call Trevor Duckworth.

There was a lot of crying.

Not long after she’d handed the phone back to me, it rang.

Barry.

“Name a favor,” he said. “Whatever it is, it’s yours.”

Once we were done, the phone rang yet again, and I saw that it was Madeline Plimpton. I nearly answered, then decided against it. Maybe I was being paranoid. But she’d just have to worry until later.

Police Chief Bertram arrived moments later, and appeared dismayed that between the time of our conversation and his arrival, a mere shit show had turned into a disaster movie.

There were so many questions to be answered, and statements to be made, that I was worried we wouldn’t get away in time for my meeting in Promise Falls. But around five thirty in the morning, Jeremy and I were allowed to leave.

We didn’t have to pack. His backpack and my suitcase were still in the beach house, burned by now to a crisp.

Jeremy woke up somewhere around the exit to Lee, almost to the Massachusetts — New York line.

“What do you think happened to that Calder guy?” he asked. “Who killed him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe it was that woman he’d kidnapped.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Maybe Kiln?”

“Possibly,” I said. “Right now, I’m happy to let the East Sandwich police figure it out.”

About a mile later, he said, “I’m kinda glad to be going home.”

“I can’t take you straight there,” I told him.

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s like I told you last night, we’re going to fly under the radar for a few more hours.”

“Radio silence, under the radar. Where do you get these phrases?”

“I watch a lot of movies,” I said. “Let me put it another way. We keep our mouths shut. I don’t want anyone to know we’re back in town, that we’re alive.”

“What, like, including my mom?”

“Everyone,” I said.

“Yeah, right, my mom sent someone to kill us. That’s what you think?”

“No. But your mother has a history of being a bit careless with information. That’s why we’re not telling anyone we’re back. Not for a few more hours.”

“I don’t get why,” he said.

We passed the sign that welcomed us to New York state, and were delivered from the Mass Pike to the New York Thruway system. “I don’t think what happened last night had anything do with Just Deserts or any other social-media outrage.”

“Then what?”

“If and when I have something confirmed, I’ll lay it all out for you. And your mom.”

“Is it the stick-shift shit?”

“You’re gonna have to wait. I’m going to drop you at my sister’s.”

Jeremy shook his head. “No way.”

I gave him as stern a look as I could muster. “It’s not up for debate.”

I called ahead to my sister’s house and got her husband Dwayne. I said I had a favor to ask of them, and Dwayne, being somewhat in my debt from a previous incident, told me to name it.

I dropped Jeremy off and then made one last phone call to see if things were good to go.

They were.

It was five minutes to ten when I parked half a block down from Kelly’s Diner. As I reached the door, I did a scan of the street in both directions.

Nothing out of the ordinary caught my eye.

I pushed open the door and went inside. The morning rush was over. Only about half the tables were busy. There was a line of booths down the right wall, and the high-backed seats made it difficult to see who was occupying them.