Linwood Barclay - Far From True

“I’ve had it,” Angus said.

Duckworth slowly looked over. Carlson was at least fifteen years younger than him. To Duckworth’s way of thinking, that meant Carlson had nothing to complain about whatsoever.

“Hardly had any sleep,” he added, without being prompted.

“Yeah,” Barry said. “You’re the only one.”

Carlson flushed with embarrassment. “Yeah, okay. I get it.”

“Tell me what happened at Thackeray,” Duckworth said.

“I saw their security chief. Clive Dickhead.”

Duckworth had no argument there. “What’d you say to him?”

“This big lawsuit that’s been filed against the college by Mason Helt’s family? I told him they were going to love it when they found out Clive never kept his promise to those women who’d been attacked to report what happened to them to us. I talked to one of the girls, Lorraine Plummer. She told me.”

“You shouldn’t have gotten into it with him.”

“He pissed me off.”

Duckworth worked his jaw around, hoping to reduce the tension. Day one working in the detective bureau and already Carlson thought he knew everything.

“There was something else that happened,” Carlson said.

Duckworth waited.

“When I was leaving, one of the profs, a guy named Blackmore? Peter Blackmore? He chased me out to the parking lot to tell me his wife was missing.”

Duckworth perked up. “Since when?” His first thought was of Helt, that maybe he was involved, but Helt had been dead nearly two weeks.

“Since yesterday, it looks like,” Carlson said.

“We putting out an official report?”

“I would have, but Blackmore backed off. Soft-pedaled it, said his wife would probably turn up before long. Anyway, for what it’s worth, I thought I’d mention it. He was in Duncomb’s office when I got there. I think he was asking for his help on it.”

Duckworth wondered whether Thackeray’s security chief was following the same course with a professor’s missing spouse as he had with the attacked girls. Trying to deal with it without bringing in the local police.

Duckworth glanced at his watch, rolled back his chair. “Gotta face the cameras.”

“What?”

“About the drive-in, other stuff,” he said.

“Something’s happened?” Carlson asked. “You got some—”

His desk phone rang. “Hang on,” he said to Duckworth. “I want to hear about this.” He snatched up the receiver, twirled it around his fingers like a baton, and put it to his ear.

“Hello? Oh, Gale.”

Duckworth wanted to get going, but Carlson was holding up a finger.

Talking into the phone, Carlson said, “Don’t worry about it. There’s nothing to be sorry about... We were both tired... Yeah, well, maybe it wasn’t the best time to talk about it... I think we are a family, even if it’s just the two of us... Look, if I want to talk to my mother about it, I will... No, it’s helpful to me... I have to go. I’ll see you later.”

He hung up, looked at Duckworth apologetically. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “Trouble at home?”

Angus Carlson shrugged. “No big deal. I came in at like four in the morning and we kind of got into it.”

“This kind of job can play hell with your home life,” Duckworth said with some sympathy. “Long hours, terrible shifts, you see stuff you can’t really explain to other people. My son, Trevor? He and I, we don’t see eye to eye. I’m suspicious of the whole world, questioning everyone’s motives. Not his, but the people around him.”

Like Randall Finley.

Angus eyed Duckworth warily, as though debating whether to confide in him. “Gale wants a child. And... I don’t.”

Duckworth nodded. “I get that. You think, is this any kind of world to bring a kid into? But it’s not all bad out there. We just see more of it than anyone else.”

“It’s not the rest of the world I worry about.”

Duckworth didn’t nod this time. “What do you mean?”

“It’s what families do to their own. Mothers — parents, I mean — are supposed to love their kids. Lots of times, they don’t.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t have to be you,” Duckworth said.

“Do you love your son?” Carlson asked.

“Absolutely.”

“Does he love you?”

Duckworth waited a beat before replying. “Of course.”

The corner of Carlson’s mouth went up. “Truth is in the pauses,” he said, got up, and walked out of the room.

“Thanks for coming,” Duckworth said to the various media representatives who had turned out on short notice. Normally, there might have been people here from only Albany, but the drive-in bombing had brought journalists from as far away as Boston and New York, and they were still in town. The small meeting room in the police building was crowded, and with that many bodies, and lights, it was quickly getting warm in there.

Duckworth introduced himself and spelled out his name.

“I wanted to bring everyone up to speed on what happened at the drive-in, and a possible link between that and some other recent incidents in Promise Falls.”

“Has there been an arrest?” someone shouted.

Duckworth raised a hand. “Hold your questions till the end. We’re hoping to enlist the public’s help today. Someone out there, someone watching, may have information that would prove valuable to our investigation. Something they may not even know is important. Let me start by saying that every effort is being made to find out how the Constellation Drive-in came down, whether it was an accident or a deliberate act. The screen came down at twenty-three minutes past eleven, which in military time or the twenty-four-hour clock is twenty-three twenty-three. That in and of itself is not particularly noteworthy. But it may be when we look at some other occurrences which, up to now, have not attracted much attention.”

With Finderman’s approval, he’d had some photos blown up and mounted onto foam core board. He set the first one up on an easel next to his podium. It showed the twenty-three dead squirrels strung up on the fence in Clampett Park.

“Oh, yuck,” said someone in the room.

“This act of animal cruelty went largely unnoticed earlier this month. Not that we don’t take something like this seriously. But we hadn’t issued any release on it, and no arrests have been made.”

“Is that even illegal?” asked a reporter. “I mean, I kill squirrels all the time with my car and I haven’t been charged with murder.”

A wave of laughter.

“I said I’d take questions at the end,” Duckworth said. “If you count them, you’ll notice there are twenty-three animals here. Now, let me put this second photo up... Okay, this is the Ferris wheel at Five Mountains. That ride was in the process of being mothballed because the park, as you know, has gone out of business. But the other night, someone fired it up, got it running.”

The picture showed the three naked mannequins in a carriage, the “YOU’LL BE SORRY” message painted across them in red. A buzz went through the room.

“What the hell?”

“Jesus.”

“What kind of sicko does that?”

Duckworth raised a hand, put up a third picture, taken from the side of the carriage, showing the “23” on the side.

“Whoa,” someone said.

“This was our second incident,” Duckworth said. “No particular harm done, but there is this ominous message painted onto the mannequins. At the time, no special importance was attached to the number of the car they were sitting in.”

He put his last picture in place. It was the hoodie Mason Helt had been wearing the night he attacked Joyce Pilgrim. The local media knew the Helt story, but this aspect of it was new to them.