Linwood Barclay - Far From True

“She loved her grandfather very much. I mean, she’s not a demonstrative child, but I could tell. Crystal loved him and he loved her. He was patient with her, with all her idiosyncrasies, which was kind of something, for him.”

“What do you mean?”

“My father, and Miriam even more so... they tended to view the world from their own perspective. If something didn’t bother Miriam, she couldn’t understand why it would bother anyone else. She’d be the person who played her music loud and couldn’t figure out why her neighbors wanted her to turn it down. Maybe, in some ways, they were perfect for each other. Classic hedonists.”

“Your father only cared about himself?”

“Mostly, although I think, in the case of his daughter and granddaughter, he was willing to make an exception.”

Ranch-style homes allow for bigger basements, and this place was no exception. I wandered off a few steps into a large room that contained a pool table, half a dozen pinball games lined up against one wall, a foosball game. Perhaps most impressive, at least to the kid in me, a slot car racetrack on a table about five by ten feet. It was completely scenicked, with hills and trees and buildings, even viewing stands filled with miniature people.

“Your dad liked to play,” I said.

“Yes,” Lucy Brighton said, still standing by the bookshelves. “He was a boy at heart.”

I examined the sliding glass doors that led out to the pool. Once the alarm had been deactivated, the intruder would have felt no hesitation about fleeing this way. But there was no security pad near the door, which told me whoever’d entered the house had done so through the front door.

“Cameras?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Dad didn’t have surveillance cameras.”

Too bad. I rejoined her by the bookcase near the base of the stairs. “I don’t know what to say, Lucy. Okay, someone was in the house. But we don’t know that anything was taken, and it’s not likely we’re going to find out, given that the only ones who’d be able to tell us are your father and his wife.”

“There must be something you can do,” she said.

I leaned, wearily, up against the bookcase. “About all I can do is—”

The bookcase moved.

“What the—”

It was only a fraction of an inch, but I felt the entire bookcase slide. At first, I thought maybe it was going to pitch forward, but then realized it had moved sideways. Which didn’t make much sense, given how weighted down it was with books.

“What happened?” Lucy asked.

“This bookcase...,” I said, examining it.

The right end of the case butted up against the wall. There was a vertical bulkhead there, hiding, presumably, some ductwork, or drains or pipes that connected to the first floor, above us.

I noticed a gap between the edge of the bookcase and the bulkhead. I worked the fingers of both hands in and gave a slight push to the left. The fake wall shifted an inch.

“How are you doing that?” Lucy asked.

“It’s on a track,” I said. “It doesn’t take much to move it. Is there a room back here or something?”

“Not that I know of,” she said. “Is it some kind of panic room?”

It didn’t strike me that anyone in Promise Falls would need a secret room to flee from home invaders. New York, maybe. Like in that Jodie Foster movie from years ago. But here? Then again, maybe someone with a biker past would have concerns and enemies the rest of us didn’t.

I pushed harder, moving the bookcase a good two and a half feet, at which point it came to a stop, revealing a floor-to-ceiling opening, and a room in darkness.

I felt around inside for a light switch, hit it.

The room was about fifteen feet square, dominated by a king-sized bed covered with a thick off-white satiny comforter and at least a dozen oversized pillows arranged by the headboard. The floor was carpeted in thick shag, also white, which provided quite a contrast to the red velvetlike wallpaper. A large flat-screen TV was mounted to the wall about four feet beyond the foot of the bed, a small black cabinet below. Undoubtedly the most arresting decorating touch was the six large, framed black-and-white photographs along three walls, all depicting naked men and women entwined with one another like they were auditioning for a remake of Caligula .

Scattered across the floor were half a dozen plastic DVD jewel cases. All open, all empty.

“I don’t think it’s a panic room,” I said.

Barry Duckworth booted it back up to the drive-in site, where he met Michelle Watkins, the bomb expert the state police had sent in to assist.

“So what happened here?” he asked her as they stood amid the rubble. “The demolition guy screwed up, or are we looking at something else?”

Michelle Watkins said, “I’m saying that guy Marsden, the one who was hired to drop this sucker a week from now? He told you he hadn’t even started on this job? He’s not lying. This is not his work. At least, it’s not the work of any professional demolition expert.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a big difference between how a pro would bring down a structure like this and how it was actually done. This is amateur hour. From what I can tell, we’re looking at IEDs.”

“Improvised...”

“Yeah. Improvised explosive devices.”

“So more than one,” he said.

“Walk with me,” she said, then glanced down at his feet. “You got some proper shoes like I’m wearing?” She pointed to her own feet, which were protected with thick-soled steel-toed boots. “You go walking through this in those loafers and you’ll end up with half a dozen spikes through your feet.”

“In the car,” Duckworth said.

“Go get ’em.” She took out her phone. “I’ll check my messages.”

He was back in five minutes, the legs of his suit pants tucked into the tops of his boots.

“You still have to watch your step,” Michelle said, moving gingerly over the wreckage. Duckworth noticed this woman — all five and a half feet of her — seemed to be entirely muscle. “First thing we had to do, of course, was be sure there weren’t any other bombs planted in here that hadn’t gone off. Hate to be poking about, then kaboom , there goes your left tit.”

“Sure.”

“We sent in some sniffer dogs this morning, poked around with a camera, and as far as we can tell, there’s nothing else.”

“As far as you can tell.”

Michelle grinned. “Hey, nothing in life is a hundred percent. Except that, at some point, it will end. Oh, and that everything that tastes good is bad for you.”

“What’s your background?” Duckworth asked, stepping carefully over broken boards.

“I was a bomb disposal officer with the army. Iraq, Afghanistan. When my tours ended, and I’d had enough, I put my skills to work over here, got a job with the staties.”

“Like that movie,” Duckworth said. “What was it called?”

“The Hurt Locker.”

“That’s the one. Was it like that over there?”

“Meh,” she said, shrugging. “Movies. If it hasn’t got George Clooney in it, I don’t much care. Okay, so our Marsden friend would have rigged this thing to drop nice and neat, rigging charges there, there, and there.” She pointed. “But the guy who did this wasn’t quite so tidy. Not that he did a completely terrible job. He did bring the damn thing down, after all.”

“IEDs, you said.”

“Yeah, homemade bombs.”

“You’re saying the same kinds of explosives you encountered in Iraq are what was used here? Some folks, they started wondering if this was terrorism or something, and my first thought was, Promise Falls can’t be high on the list of targets for Islamic extremists.”