Linwood Barclay - No Safe House

The gun.

It would have her fingerprints on it. The police would be able to match it up against the bullet they’d take out of Stuart Koch. If, in fact, he was shot. And if, in fact, Grace had shot him.

If I could find the gun, if I could get my hands on it before anyone else did, I could take a drive west on Bridgeport Avenue, stop on the bridge that crossed the Housatonic, and pitch it over the railing.

And I’d fucking well do it. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind.

“Grace,” I said gently. “About the gun.”

She turned and faced me. “What about it?”

“Where is it? Where’s the gun now?”

Her face went blank. “I don’t know. I have no idea.”

Detective Wedmore didn’t have to worry about waking anyone up this time of night. Her only concern was whether anyone would hear her banging over the blast of the music.

She made a fist and pounded on the front door of the house, prepared to walk in on her own if someone didn’t answer soon. She was reaching for the doorknob when it swung open and she was looking into the slightly bloodshot eyes of a man in his early twenties.

She figured they would remember her. After the Bradleys were murdered next door, Wedmore had talked to the three young men who were living here while attending some college in Bridgeport. She had conducted thorough interviews with all three of them, separately, and had come to the conclusion they not only had nothing to do with the double homicide, but didn’t know anything useful. She wasn’t actually sure they knew anything useful about anything.

Now she was here for a completely different reason. But in the back of her mind, she couldn’t stop wondering whether there was a connection.

Rona Wedmore didn’t like coincidences.

When the young man saw her standing there, he blinked a couple of times, then said, “Hey, hi, I remember you. Did someone call the cops about the music?”

He shouted back into the house, “Turn it off!”

Seconds later, the music died.

“That okay?” he asked Wedmore.

“They don’t send me out on noise calls,” she said. “You’re Brian, right?” Brian Sinise, if she remembered correctly, and it wasn’t very often she remembered incorrectly. She knew the other two who lived here were Carter Hinkley and Kyle Dirk.

“Yeah, right.”

“Carter and Kyle here?”

He nodded. “You’re good,” he said. “Guys! The black cop lady wants to talk to us! Not about the noise!” He smiled and led her into the living room of the house, which was littered with empty beer bottles, overflowing ashtrays, and empty pizza boxes. “We just had dinner,” he said. “You want a beer?”

Wedmore shook her head. “No, thanks.”

Two sets of footsteps could be heard coming down the stairs. Carter and Kyle were both around the same age as Brian. Of the three, Carter was on the heavy side.

“Hey, man,” Carter said to Brian. “You don’t shout out ‘black cop lady.’ What’s wrong with you?”

Brian winced and looked apologetically at Wedmore. “Sorry.”

She said, “Can we all sit down?”

Kyle rushed over to clear a pizza box off a chair so Wedmore could sit. She had a good look at it first, brushed away a few crumbs. Kyle said, “So, have you figured out who killed those old folks?”

“We haven’t made an arrest in that yet,” Wedmore said. “I guess you’ve all been feeling pretty on edge ever since.”

They glanced at one another, evidently assessing one another’s level of anxiety, and finally all three shrugged. “I guess so,” Kyle said. “It’s pretty fucked-up, but we’re all kind of busy.”

The other two nodded. Wedmore thought, Dumb as shoes .

“So you’ve got more questions about that?” Carter asked.

“I wanted to ask you about someone else, someone who I think may have lived here at some point.”

“Oh,” Brian said. “Shoot.”

“Nice choice of words, douchehead,” Kyle said.

“I can’t say anything right,” Brian said. “It’s the beer. I think I might have a problem.” His friends chuckled.

“Did someone named Eli Goemann live here?”

“Oh yeah, Eli,” Kyle said. “He was here for, like, a couple years. I moved in when it was his last year, same time as Brian moved in. And then, when Eli left, that was when Carter moved in.”

“So I never met the guy,” Carter said. “I just heard the stories.”

“But you two know him,” Wedmore said to Brian and Kyle. They nodded.

“What’s up with Eli?” Brian asked. “Because he, like, left without paying his share of the rent for the last month he was here.”

“Was he attending school while he lived here?” Wedmore asked.

“Yeah. Same place as us.”

“Why’d he move out?”

Brian shrugged. “He was kind of an ass. I didn’t want him around. Neither did Kyle.”

“Why?”

Kyle said, “He didn’t pull his weight. We try to keep the house running smoothly, you know? Make sure there’s beer in the fridge, keep the place looking good.”

Wedmore’s eyes roamed the room.

“But Eli never pitched in. It was like housework and chores were beneath him.”

“Yeah,” Brian said. “And if we ordered pizza and had to split it three ways, he’d always say, Shit, like, I didn’t get to the ATM — can I pay you back tomorrow? And then when you asked him the next day he’d say, Well, I didn’t even have that much pizza, only a slice — you guys had most of it.”

“So we said, Why don’t you find somewhere else to live?” Kyle said. “We started freezing him out. Finally, he got the message and left.”

“When was this again?” Wedmore asked.

“A year ago,” Brian told her.

“But his driver’s license gives this as his address.”

“Yeah, well—” Brian shrugged. “Mine’s still got the address from two moves ago.”

Wedmore gave him a reproachful look. “You’re supposed to notify them of a change of address.”

He nodded sagely. “I will certainly get on that.”

“Where did Eli go after he left here?”

He and Kyle glanced at each other. “Beats me,” said Kyle. “He got the odd bit of mail coming here after he left, but he didn’t tell us where he was going, so we just threw that shit out.”

Brian said, “You didn’t say why you’re asking.”

“So you haven’t talked to him since he moved out. Neither of you?”

“I haven’t,” Brian said.

“Me, neither,” Kyle said.

“And I wouldn’t know the asshole if I saw him,” Carter piped up.

“You ever know him to get into any kind of trouble? Outside of the house here? With other people, or the police?”

Heads shaking.

“You know anything about his family? Where his parents are? They in Milford?”

Brian said, “I think they’re in Nebraska or Kansas or someplace like that.”

“You don’t know which it was? Kansas or Nebraska?”

Brian shook his head. “I always think of them as kind of interchangeable.”

That didn’t worry Wedmore too much. Goemann wasn’t that common a name, and a Web search for phone numbers in those two states wasn’t likely to produce too daunting a list.

“But it is kind of weird,” Brian said.

“What’s weird?” the detective asked.

“That this would be, like, the second time in a week or so when someone has come around looking for him.”

Wedmore leaned forward in her chair. “Someone else was here? Who?”

Brian shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought at first maybe he was a cop, you know, like you. But he didn’t show me a badge or anything.”

“He give you a name?”

Brian shook his head.

“Why’d you think he was a cop?”