Linwood Barclay: No Safe House

Which tended to rule out drug addicts looking for a way to pay for their next fix.

So maybe it was a thrill kill.

But there was nothing ritualistic about the murders. No writing of “Helter Skelter” in the victims’ blood on the living room walls.

Rona wondered whether the fact that they had both been teachers was a factor. One possible scenario: Some kid one of them had flunked years earlier believed that Richard or Esther had ruined his life. He’d come back for revenge. It seemed a bit out there to Wedmore, but in the absence of any other theory, she found herself reaching. And overreaching. But revenge killings were not generally so tidy.

Richard and Esther Bradley had each been killed with a single bullet to the head. A cool and efficient double hit. No fingerprints left behind. People who killed for revenge tended to overdo it. Twenty stab wounds instead of three. Six bullets instead of one.

So, okay. If it was a professional hit, why? Who the hell would put out a contract on two retired teachers?

It was driving Detective Rona Wedmore crazy.

Maybe another murder, if not what Milford needed, was exactly what she needed. Something to clear her head of the Bradley case. Focus elsewhere. That sometimes worked for her. It might mean that when she went back to the double homicide, she’d notice something she hadn’t seen before.

It wasn’t, as it turned out, a bar that Wedmore had been summoned to, but Silver Sands State Park, forty-seven acres of sandy beaches, dunes, marshes, wetlands, and forest on the sound. She went south on Viscount, past the seniors apartment building on the right until the street ended, then turned left onto the roadway that paralleled the beach and the boardwalk. She took it right to the end, where three Milford police cars with rooftop lights twirling were parked.

A uniformed male officer spotted her unmarked car and approached.

“Detective Wedmore?” he asked as she got out of the car.

“Yeah. What’s up, Charlie?”

“Same old. Wife and me just had a kid.”

“Hey, no kidding? Congrats. Boy, girl? Something else?”

“A girl. Calling her Tabitha.”

“So, what’ve we got here?”

“Dead male. White, early twenties. Looks like he took a couple in the back. Maybe he was running away.”

“Witnesses?”

Officer Charlie shook his head. “Not even sure it happened here. Think he might have been dumped.”

Wedmore was pulling on a pair of gloves. “Lead the way.”

She followed the cop down along the boardwalk. It had taken quite a beating during Hurricane Sandy, just like everything else along here, but had now been pretty much repaired.

“Over here.” Charlie pointed into the tall grasses to the left of the boardwalk, away from the sound.

There were several other cops there already. Some lights had been set up on stands.

Wedmore made her way through the waist-high grass. She caught a whiff of decomposition, but there was a breeze coming in off the water, so she didn’t feel the need to rub some Vicks beneath her nose.

“Who found him?” she asked of anyone who would answer while she got a penlight out of her jacket pocket.

A uniformed woman said, “Couple kids, making out, wandered this way. They ran out, called us, waited around on the boardwalk till we got here.”

“You let them go?”

“We got names, all that. Their parents came and got them.”

The body was facedown. The man was probably two hundred pounds, short blond hair, oversized blue T-shirt and khaki shorts with half a dozen pockets. White socks and running shoes. Wedmore knelt down, caught a glimpse of something in a lower pocket. She fished out a wallet, opened it up, shined her penlight on a driver’s license visible behind clear plastic.

“Eli Richmond Goemann,” she said. Wedmore studied the two bullet holes in the back of the blood-soaked shirt. “Roll him over.”

A couple of officers did the dirty work.

“Hardly any blood,” she said. “He didn’t bleed out here. So yeah — where’s Charlie? Anyway, what he said, that he was moved here, that seems likely. Joy been called?” The forensic examiner.

Someone said, “Yes.”

Wedmore took a look through the wallet. Sixty-eight bucks in cash. Credit card receipts from bars, liquor stores. That’d give her a place to start.

She took another look at the Connecticut driver’s license. The man was born in March 1992, so that made him twenty-two.

“Hello,” she said.

“What?” said someone.

Wedmore kept staring at the license. At Eli Goemann’s address.

“Son of a bitch,” she said.

She knew the street. She’d been there recently. Eli’s former address was just two numbers off from the house where Richard and Esther Bradley had been murdered.

Wedmore was pretty sure that was the house where the students lived.

“YOU look all freaked-out,” Stuart said to Grace on their way to the house where they were going to find a Porsche. “But believe me, it’s going to be fine. There’s, like, no risk at all.”

“How are you going to start it? Like on TV, you touch some wires together under the steering wheel?”

“Shit, no, that’s totally unrealistic. Like, the guy, he gets under there, finds the wires, and in two seconds he’s got the car going. Doesn’t happen. And even if you could get it to start, how are you supposed to unlock the steering column, right? You need a key for that. In the movies, yeah, maybe you could get the car running, but you could only drive it in a straight line. I hate stupid stuff like that in movies.”

“So you’ve got the key?”

“Not yet.” He patted her thigh with his right hand. “Okay, it’s just up the street here, but we’ll walk up half a block.”

She hadn’t paid much attention to where they were going. But they were on a dead-end street now, in a nice part of town. Well-manicured lawns, mature trees, houses set back from the curb. Big driveways.

“Come on,” Stuart said as she got out of the car slowly. They were a few steps away when the boy stopped suddenly. “Wait here a sec. Forgot something.”

He went back to the Buick, opened the passenger door, put one knee on the seat, and leaned forward, as if rummaging around in the glove box for something. Whatever he found, he tucked it into the front waistband of his jeans and pulled his jacket over it.

“What did you get?” Grace asked when he rejoined her.

“Flashlight,” he said.

He was reading house numbers. He stopped out front of a two-story Colonial. “This is it. Come on. We can’t stand around staring at it. People notice.”

Except there was no one around.

He grabbed her hand and pulled her up the drive. There was one light on over the front door, another at the side of the house, but he was pretty sure no one from any neighboring houses could see them.

“Whose place is this?” she asked.

“Somebody named Cummings or something. What a name. Someone says, Who are you? you say, I’m Cumming. And they say, Oh, you that happy to see me?” He snorted. “Let’s double-check the garage first, make sure it’s there, that we haven’t come here for nothing.” He tightened his grip on her wrist.

A garage big enough for two cars was around back, attached to the house. Four rectangular windows ran horizontally along the door at eye level. “I just want to make sure,” he said.

He reached into his jacket for his cell phone, used the app that turned it into a light, and put it up to a window.

“I thought you went back for a flashlight,” Grace said.

“Jackpot,” he said, staring into the garage. “Can you see that? Look in there.”

She looked. “I see a car.” Two, actually. A plain white four-door sedan and a low two-door sporty number in red.