Linwood Barclay: No Safe House

“You can’t just make up names,” he’d said.

Oh well. It wasn’t like she had to marry him. She just wanted to have some... fun. She wanted to take a few... risks. And wasn’t that just what he’d asked if she’d like to do?

“I have definitely never ridden in a Porsche.”

Stuart grinned. “Want to?”

She shrugged. “Yeah, sure. Why not?”

A cell phone started buzzing.

“That’s you,” Stuart said.

Grace dug her phone out of her purse, glanced at the screen. “Oh, jeez.”

“Who is it?”

“My dad. I’m kind of supposed to be home by now.” It was nearing ten.

Adopting a deep baritone voice, Stuart said, “You get home right now, young lady, and do your homework.”

“Stop it.” Even if her dad was a huge pain in the ass at times, she didn’t like other people mocking him. She hated it, at school, when she’d hear other kids running her dad down. It was no picnic, going to the same school where your dad taught. All these extra expectations to be a good kid, have above-average marks. After all, they’d say, she’s a teacher’s daughter. Talk about a cross to bear. Not that her marks were bad. She did pretty well, especially in science, although sometimes she’d write a couple of wrong answers just so she wouldn’t get a hundred percent and have the boys call her Amy Farrah Fowler, the nerdy scientist girl on that TV show.

“You gonna talk to him or not?” Stuart asked as Grace’s phone continued to buzz.

She stared at it, tried to will it to stop, which it finally did after a dozen rings.

But seconds later, a text. “Shit,” she said. “He wants me to call home.”

“He’s got you on a tight leash. Your mom a control freak, too?”

If she were home , Grace thought. If she hadn’t bailed on them two weeks ago, after the thing with the pot of boiling water. She’d gotten the bandage off only three days ago.

She ignored his question and turned things back to the topic at hand. “Okay, so did your dad buy you a Porsche?”

“God, no. You think he’d be driving around in a shitbox tank like this if he had?”

“Then what?”

“I know where I can find one and take it for a spin.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I can get my hands on one in, like, ten minutes, one that we can borrow.”

“What, like at a car dealership?” Grace asked. “Aren’t they all going to be closed?” Who’d let you take a test drive this time of night?

Stuart shook his head. “No, at somebody’s house.”

“Who do you know who’s got a Porsche?” She grinned. “And how dumb would they have to be to let you borrow it?”

“No, it’s not like that. It’s at a house that’s empty this week. It was on the list.”

“What list?”

“A list, okay? That my dad’s got. They try to keep it up-to-date, when people are on vacation, that kind of thing. I check out places where people are away, see what kind of wheels they got. One time I took out a Mercedes, just for, like, twenty minutes, and no one ever knew. Not a scratch on it. Put it back in the garage just the way it was.”

“Who keeps a list like that?” Grace asked. “What’s your dad do? Does he do, like, security stuff, too?” The thing was, she had an inkling of what this boy’s father did and would have been surprised to learn it had anything to do with making people feel safer in their homes.

“Yeah,” he said offhandedly. “That’s what he is. Security.”

Grace kept thinking about the call and the text from her father. When she’d left the house, she’d told him she was going to a movie with another girl from her class. Her mom was going to drive. It was a seven o’clock show that was supposed to get out around nine, and she’d get a lift home after.

What would her dad do if he found out she’d lied? Because as lies went, this was a doozy. Grace wasn’t with that girl, and they weren’t at the movies. Stuart — not her friend’s mother — was going to drop her off a block from home. Her father would never have let her go out with a boy who was old enough to drive.

And certainly not this boy, this onetime pain-in-the-ass know-nothing student in her father’s class. With, as Grace suspected her father knew, a kind of questionable home background.

“What you’re talking about sounds like stealing,” she said.

Stuart shook his head. “No way. Stealing is when you take a car and keep it, or sell it to someone who packs it up in a big cargo container and ships it over to some guy in Arabia or something. But we’re only going to borrow it. Won’t even try to see what it can do, because the last thing you want when you’re borrowing somebody’s car is get a speeding ticket, you know?”

Grace waited a long time before she said, “I guess it would be fun.”

He started up the land yacht and headed west.

Detective Rona Wedmore was about to collapse into bed when she got the call that they’d found a body.

Lamont was already under the covers, and asleep, but began to stir when he sensed his wife was putting her clothes back on.

“Babe?” he said, turning over in bed.

She never got tired of hearing him talk, even a single word like that. Didn’t matter what he said, not after she’d been through that period when he didn’t speak a word. Traumatized after coming back from Iraq, the things he’d seen, he’d gone kind of catatonic on her. Not speaking for months, until that night three years ago when she got shot in the shoulder and he showed up at the emergency room and said to her, “You okay?”

It was nearly worth taking a bullet to hear those two words. No, actually, it was worth it.

“I gotta go out,” she said. “Sorry I woke you.”

“’S’okay,” he said, the side of his face still pressed into the pillow. He knew better than to ask how long she was going to be. She’d be gone as long as she had to be gone.

She locked up the house, got in her car, and, as she drove to the scene, thought this was just what Milford needed. Another murder. As if people here weren’t already on edge. Wedmore hoped it was something simple, like some guy getting stabbed in a bar fight. People dying in bar fights did not spread fear through a community. One idiot kills another idiot at a bar and most people shrug and think, What do you expect when a couple of yahoos have too much to drink? Sitting in the safety of their homes, the good people of Milford didn’t feel threatened by a crime like that.

But the Bradley double homicide, that was a horse of a different color, as Wedmore’s late father liked to say. Two retired seniors shot in their living room? For no apparent reason?

That freaked people out.

Damned if Wedmore could get a handle on it. Neither Richard nor Esther Bradley had had any kind of criminal record. There wasn’t so much as a single unpaid parking ticket registered against either of them. They had a married daughter in Cleveland, who checked out just as clean, too. There was no marijuana grow op in the basement, no meth lab in an old Airstream out back.

Yes, earlier in the evening Richard Bradley had stormed over to the house next door to tell some students to keep the noise down. At first, the kids were the only suspects Wedmore had. But the more she checked into them, the more convinced she became that they had nothing to do with killing the Bradleys.

So who the hell did it, then? And why?

The daughter had flown in from Cleveland, and when she wasn’t going to pieces about losing her parents, she’d helped Wedmore go through the house in an attempt to determine whether anything was missing. As far as the daughter could tell, nothing had been stolen, and besides, her parents didn’t have anything all that valuable anyway. And the killer, or killers, hadn’t even bothered to take cash or credit cards out of Richard Bradley’s wallet or Esther Bradley’s purse.