Linwood Barclay - No Safe House

“He just had that cop thing going on. A suit, big guy, short hair. And I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this” — he shot a glance at Kyle — “but he was black. Looked like a detective out of The Wire or something like that.”

“And what did he want?”

“Said he was trying to find Eli, that he had some business with him, that he’d been in touch, but they hadn’t gotten back to him. Thought he might live here. I told the guy he hadn’t lived here for, like, a year.”

Wedmore had a thought. If this guy had been a cop, he would have shown a badge. But if he came across like one, he might be a former police officer who’d gone private.

“This guy who came around asking,” she said. “How tall?”

Brian said, “Like, six feet? Six-two? Looked like he could have played football when he was younger.”

“How old would you say he was?”

“Pretty old. Mid-forties.”

Wedmore let that one go.

“And he had sort of a gap between his teeth, right here.” Brian touched his finger to his upper teeth.

Wedmore raised an eyebrow. “You sure about that?”

Brian nodded.

“How about his nose?” she asked. “Did it look like it was kind of pushed over to one side, like maybe it got broken a long time ago?”

Another nod from Brian. “Yeah, I think. I even asked him about it.”

“You would,” Kyle said.

“He said it happened when he played ball.”

That nailed it for Detective Wedmore. That sounded very much like Heywood Duggan.

Of course, back when he worked for the state police, and he and Wedmore were sleeping together, she’d always called him Woody. For more reasons than one.

“I kind of blanked out, you know?” Grace told me, sitting in the car next to me as we tried to find the home she and Stuart had broken into. “Next thing I knew, I was out of the house. I guess I dropped the gun somewhere. Or maybe back in the house. Probably in the house, because it would have been hard to hold on to when I was crawling out of the basement, you know?” She was thinking. “Unless I put it on the ground outside before I got out. Maybe I picked it up and then threw it in the bushes on my way to the gas station.”

“Think, Grace. It’s important.”

She turned away, dropped her head, studied her hands. “I don’t know. The house. I’m pretty sure. I remember when I tried to open the front door, I think I was using both hands.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s good.”

But then she added, “I think.”

I slowed the car when we got to the intersection of New Haven and Gulf. “Which way did you come from?”

She pointed right, onto Gulf. “Down that way. That much I know.”

I put on my blinker and lowered my speed to allow Grace a chance to refamiliarize herself with the neighborhood. The first cross street we came to was George.

“Was it down here?” I asked, pointing left. Then, glancing in the other direction, “Or that way?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Everything looks the same.”

That was true. At night, with only a few streetlights to distinguish one house from another, I could understand her difficulty.

“Maybe when I see his car,” she said, “then I’ll know if we have the right street.”

“What kind of car?”

“I don’t know, but it was old and really big. And sort of brown. I think I’d know it if I saw it. He didn’t park it right out front of the house. It was a few houses away.”

I drove past George. I passed Anchorage on the left, and shortly after, Bedford on the right.

“Wait,” Grace said. “I remember that.” She was pointing at a yellow fire hydrant. “I remember running by that.”

“So you must have come up Bedford,” I said, making a right.

“Yeah, I think I came along here.”

I barely had my foot on the gas. “Recognize any of these houses?”

She shook her head but said nothing. “Where’s his car?”

“This might not be the right street, hon.” We’d reached another street that came up from the south to join Bedford. Glen Street.

“Here!” she said. “I remember that sign. It was Glen. I’m sure it was Glen.”

I turned the wheel hard to the left. Glen took a gentle bend to the right a short distance ahead.

There were no big old cars parked along the street. There were no cars parked on the street at all. The homes along here all had driveways large enough to accommodate more than one car, so there wasn’t much need for people to leave vehicles on the street.

In a few seconds, I realized we had no place else to go. Glen dead-ended.

“If it’s on this street, then we must have passed it,” I said.

“I keep looking for the car. There’s no car.”

“Maybe Stuart’s okay and he went home,” I said, desperate for any positive development.

“Maybe,” she said.

I did a three-point turn at the end of Glen. “Okay, so study the houses on the way back, see if any of them look like the place.”

I was also trying to take some comfort from the fact that the street was not overrun with police cars, their lights flashing. If something had happened along here, it sure looked as though no one had any inkling of it yet. And a gun going off — someone would have heard that, right? Called the cops?

Maybe. Maybe not. A lot of times, people hear one shot, wait for a second, and when another one doesn’t come, they go back to sleep.

“Tell me about the house,” I said.

“It had two floors, and you couldn’t see the garage from the street because it was tucked around the back. It could be that one, or it could be that one, too, or — Cummings!”

“What?”

“That was the name. That was the name of the people who live there. Stuart said it was Cummings.”

I stopped the car, got out my cell, and opened the app that allowed me to find addresses and phone numbers. I entered “Cummings” and “Milford.”

I looked up from the phone, and then at the first house Grace had pointed to. “It’s that one.”

I killed the lights and the engine. “Let’s have a look-see.”

I grabbed a flashlight I kept under the seat. Grace was out of the car by the time I got around to her side. Tentatively, the two of us walked up the driveway.

“I never wanted to do this,” Grace whispered, taking hold of my arm, clinging to me. “You have to believe me.”

I said nothing. There was a part of me that wanted to go ballistic. To ask her what the hell she’d been thinking. To scream at her until I went hoarse. But not now. It was important that we both make as little noise as possible. Lectures would come later, but I feared a stern talking-to was going to be the least of Grace’s worries.

“Where did you go in?”

“Around back,” Grace said. “Stuart knew this trick, this thing he did, so the alarm wouldn’t come on. He was pretty good at it.” She turned to see whether I was looking at her, and I was. “Maybe he’s done stuff like this before.”

I still resisted the urge to scold, but my look conveyed the message. Her head slunk down lower on her shoulders.

Once we were around the back and the double garage was visible, I clicked on the flashlight. First I shone it through the garage windows, saw a red Porsche and another car in there. I’d wondered whether, after Grace had fled, Stuart had continued with his plan to take the car.

Assuming he was okay.

The fact that the car was there was not a good sign. But then again, was it a bad sign?

I turned the flashlight on the house and saw the open basement window. The first thing I looked for was a gun on the ground.

No sign of one.

“That’s where we got in,” Grace said.