Linwood Barclay - No Safe House

“Yeah, but there had to be somebody else in on it, too. I already told you who I’m putting my money on.”

Vince nodded. “I’ll check him out, but I don’t think he’s got the balls for it.”

“He coulda told somebody.”

“But the son of a bitch doesn’t even know. The cleaning ladies don’t know. The nannies don’t know. Even if they did, they wouldn’t know where to look. But yeah, maybe.” The man sighed. “Clusterfuck City.”

Bert didn’t know what to say. What words could make things better? He just wanted to get moving. He had an unpleasant task awaiting him, and he wanted it behind him. Then he could help Gordie.

“I should get going,” Bert said.

Vince retreated from the open window. “Go.”

Before Bert hit the gas, Vince took a step and stood next to the trunk. He went to touch the broad metal surface with his palm, the way one might lay one’s hand on a casket at a funeral service.

Then thought better of it. Bert would wipe down the car, but might not think of the trunk lid.

The Buick pulled away and Vince watched it head up East Broadway, hang a left, and then disappear.

Wearily, he mounted the wooden steps that took him up to the main floor of the beach house. Back in the day, he took these two at a time. Back before he’d been shot. And back before the diagnosis. He was getting too old for this. It was one of the reasons why he’d pulled back on the kinds of jobs they used to do. Warehouse robberies, truck hijackings. Stuff that required a lot of heavy lifting. Sometimes, running.

So he started a sideline, one that didn’t take such a physical toll. A service for people who didn’t feel comfortable with financial institutions.

Seemed like a pretty good plan.

Until tonight.

Now it looked like the whole thing was going to blow up in his face. He hoped to know more, soon, once he’d had a chance to talk to an old friend.

Given Grace’s confusion about what had happened in the house, it occurred to me that what she thought she’d heard in the kitchen might easily have taken place someplace else. I couldn’t see limiting my search of the house to the first floor.

In for a penny, in for a pound.

Standing in the living room, I couldn’t see that anything was amiss, unless someone was jammed in between the sofa and the wall — and I was not going to start moving around furniture. Nor did there appear to be anything out of the ordinary in the adjoining dining room. When what you’re looking for is a body, it doesn’t take long to cross a room off your list. This wasn’t looking for a needle in a haystack.

As I was headed for the stairs that would take me to the second floor, I glanced in the direction of the front door and the security system keypad mounted on the wall next to it. The light was red, indicating the system was engaged. If I opened that door without entering the code, alarms would go off, police would be dispatched.

I remembered Grace saying the light had been green when she was in the house.

That was a puzzle I couldn’t solve right now. I was looking for Stuart.

Heading up the stairs, I nearly touched the railing out of habit. I had the phone in that hand and wouldn’t have been able to do more than use the railing to steady myself, but even if I couldn’t grip it, it was best not to touch it at all.

Don’t touch a damn thing .

Off the upstairs hallway, which ran about twenty feet, were three bedrooms and a bathroom, all with doors slightly ajar, so I was able to ease them open with my elbow. I went into each one, shined the light around the beds, and peeked behind the shower curtain in the bathroom.

So far, so good.

I had a brief debate with myself about closets. Should I go back into each bedroom and inspect them or not? I knew it wasn’t something I wanted to do. I was freaking myself out enough already, just being in this house, moving stealthily from room to room.

For Stuart, or anyone else for that matter, to be stuffed in a closet suggested there would have been at least a third person in the house to put him there. Maybe even a couple of people. Grace had said she felt someone brushing past her.

Sometimes you had to do things you didn’t want to do. But I was going to need something on my hand before I started turning doorknobs.

I tucked my cell back into my shirt pocket without breaking the connection with Grace and grabbed a fistful of tissues from a Kleenex box in the bathroom. Then I went into the first bedroom, which gave every indication of being a girl’s room, with stuffed animals by the pillows and posters of horses on the walls, and stood in front of the closet.

“Here goes,” I said under my breath. With a tissue-wrapped hand I opened the door and shined the light in.

Nothing special there. Skirts and blouses and shoes and other items of clothing, all small. Barbie boxes. More stuffed animals. A girl maybe seven or eight years old, I guessed. These looked like the kinds of things Grace surrounded herself with at that age. I closed the door and went down the hall to the next bedroom.

Another girl, but older, probably midteens. A poster of what looked like the latest hot boy band on one wall, and while there was the odd stuffed animal, everything was a little less “itsy.” An iPod dock on the table next to the bed, a hodgepodge of earrings and other jewelry on the top of the dresser. Bottles of nail polish remover, hairspray, body lotion.

I stood before the closet, took a breath, and turned the knob.

“Shit!”

I managed, even startled as I was, to keep my outburst to a whisper, but it was loud enough for Grace to hear.

“What?” said her voice, coming from my shirt pocket. “Dad? What’s happened?”

I took out the phone. “You know how sometimes, when we ask you to clean up your room, you just dump everything in your closet and keep stuffing it in until you can get the door closed?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re not the only one.”

I put the phone back into my pocket. A stack of clothes had tumbled out and was covering the toes of my shoes. I set down the flashlight, shoveled the mess back into the closet — hoping fingerprints wouldn’t show up on a pile of jeans and tops and underwear, since I couldn’t do this with a wad of tissues in my hand — and managed to get the door shut once more.

I didn’t run into Fibber McGee’s closet in the master bedroom. And even at that moment, I thought, Where the hell did that reference come from? I wasn’t old enough to have ever seen, or heard, the old Fibber McGee and Molly movies or radio shows, but it was a phrase my grandparents always used to describe a closet that was jam-packed. Whenever Fibber opened the hall closet, a hundred things cascaded out onto his head. Hilarity, evidently, ensued.

I could use a laugh right about now.

The master had a walk-in closet, so nothing rained down on me as I opened the door. It was tidier than either of the children’s closets, with nothing on the carpeted floor. Shoes, and there were dozens of pairs of them, about ninety percent of them a woman’s, were all neatly stacked on shelving. I noticed eight small rectangular impressions in the carpet, clustered in groups of two and each about the size of a domino, which, if you were to draw a line between them, would have made a square roughly two feet by two feet. Given that I was looking for a body, I didn’t spend much time thinking about them.

I left the closet and did another inspection of the en suite bathroom. Glanced into the tub to see whether anyone had been dumped there.

I reached into my pocket for the phone.

“I’m almost done,” I told Grace. “I’ll take a quick look through the basement before I come back out. Everything okay out there?”