Linwood Barclay - No Safe House

Maybe take off for a while. Go to Europe. Take that asshole musician with you. Live it up. Have the life you deserve. Let this be my gift to you, my way of saying sorry for everything. For not being there for your mom when she needed me. And for all the other shit.

When the folks who’d left money with him learned what had happened — and they would, Vince was sure of that — and realized the only person who knew where their loot could be found was dead, what the hell could they do? Invade every house in Milford?

They’d have to write it off. That’s what they’d have to do.

He set the bottle down on the counter. He’d made a decision. He really didn’t want to do it here. He’d take Logan’s SUV, drive back down to his beach house, and do it there. Maybe take his shoes and socks off and walk a few feet out into the sound, feel the water lapping about his ankles.

Yeah, that’d be nice.

Vince had to go back downstairs to find the keys on Logan’s body. Coming back up was a struggle. It took everything he had.

He left the house with only one gun — the Glock Terry Archer had found in his attic — as he went back into the garage. He went over to the garage door button, pressed it to open.

The door slowly rose.

There was a car parked across the end of the driveway. A plain black Ford sedan. An unmarked police car, Vince figured.

And that woman standing in the middle of the drive, looking into the garage, was a cop, he bet.

A black woman, stocky, about five-three or so. She had a gun in her hand, too. Both her hands, actually. She had her arms straight out and that gun pointed straight at him.

“Police!” she said.

Vince just stood there. With the BMW out of the garage, she’d be able to see Joseph’s body on the floor behind him.

“Drop your weapon!” she shouted.

He glanced down at the end of his arm, saw the gun, but did not let go. He looked back up and said, “I think I know you.”

“Sir, put down your weapon.”

“I remember you asking questions years ago, back when I got shot. Wedmore, right?”

“Yes, sir, I am Detective Rona Wedmore, and I am telling you, drop your weapon.”

But Vince held on to it.

“There’s quite a mess in here,” he said. “This guy behind me, and three more in the basement. I did it. Plus a guy who worked for me. Eldon Koch. You’ll find him sooner or later. And his boy—”

“Drop it!”

Would have been nicer standing on the beach when it happened. But this would do just fine.

Vince raised the gun, fast. Pointed it right at her.

Didn’t even have his finger on the trigger.

Bam.

That night, Cynthia started sleeping at the house again. There was no way we were going to be apart as a family. Not after all we’d been through. But she didn’t move all her things back for another couple of days. It wasn’t that she was hesitant about the commitment. She just didn’t get to it.

Grace wouldn’t let her leave the house.

Our girl phoned in sick for the next two days. Same with Cynthia. They spent a lot of time in Grace’s room, sitting on the bed. Just talking. I popped in once in a while, but they seemed to be having such a good time in there, just the two of them, that I gave them their space.

I figured they were talking about the ordeal of the last few days, hashing it out, working on the theory that the more we confront our demons, the better we can deal with them. But when I walked down the hall past Grace’s room and caught snippets of conversations, they weren’t about guns and attics and death. They were about boys and movies and school and Angelina Jolie.

But not always.

Sometimes, all I heard was crying. From both of them. More than once, I peeked in and found they’d fallen asleep together on Grace’s bed, Grace’s back tucked up against Cynthia, her mother’s arm draped over her.

I had to tell Cynthia some of it.

It was all over the news. A massacre, they called it. Four dead in a Milford house. Detective Rona Wedmore — we knew that name well — while trying to track down a car believed to be linked to a homicide, had arrived at the house just as notorious thug Vincent Fleming was attempting to flee the scene. He had as much as confessed to all four murders before Wedmore shot him dead.

I told Cynthia most of what happened. The meeting in the cemetery. Coming back to this house, getting the drop on Wyatt and Reggie, taking them back to their place, rescuing Jane.

Like I said, I told her most of it.

Everyone was tied up in the basement, I told her. Vince made Jane and me leave, said he would catch up with us. We had no idea Vince was going to hurt anyone, I said. I speculated that after we’d taken off, the one called Joseph got free and tried to kill Vince. Vince shot him, and then must have felt he had no choice but to kill the others.

I was shaking as I told Cynthia my theory.

“My God,” she said. “Oh my God, that’s — it’s unimaginable.” She was shaken by how close I had come to such horrific violence. “If there’s any silver lining to any of this, at least you got out of there before it all started.”

Yeah.

The police said Vince had also confessed to the killing of one of his employees, Eldon Koch, as well as his son, Stuart, although the boy’s body had not been found.

Grace saw that part on the news.

“No way,” she said. “Vince was in the house? He shot Stuart? It was that guy who lived across the hall from Mom.”

She and Cynthia had filled me in on that part, but I still didn’t know what to make of all of it.

I read and watched everything I could find on the case. Even though the police believed they knew who had done what, they weren’t sure why. What they did learn was that Reggie and Wyatt had been running a sophisticated IRS tax fraud scam. They determined that a gun found at the scene was in all likelihood the same one used to kill a private detective named Heywood Duggan. And they also believed the husband-and-wife team was responsible for the murders of those two retired teachers and someone named Eli Goemann, although they were still investigating.

Which wasn’t really news to me.

One of the stories featured an interview with Reggie’s uncle, who turned out to be Cynthia’s landlord, Barney Croft. Cynthia watched as he told a reporter that while he talked often on the phone to his niece — including a call he’d made to her the day she died that went unanswered — he had not seen her in many months and was unaware of her involvement in any sort of criminal activity.

“Lying bastard,” she said.

Another local TV station managed to track down Jane as she was coming out of work at the advertising firm.

Adopting a similar strategy as Croft, she said, “Yes, Vince Fleming was married to my late mother, but I hadn’t seen him in months and I don’t know anything about any of this. But my heart goes out to the families of those who Vince is alleged to have harmed. It truly does. I don’t know what else to say.” She got into her Mini and sped off.

One of Vince’s former employees, Bert Gooding, was still missing.

There was another, seemingly unrelated story on the news one night about some people named Cummings who had returned home from a trip to find their basement window kicked in but nothing missing from the house. This, in and of itself, would hardly have been newsworthy, but it led to another story about onetime software millionaire turned dog walker Nathaniel Braithwaite.

He hadn’t shown up to walk people’s pets. People were starting to worry about him.

Every day that went by without the police coming to our door, I wondered whether our involvement in all this was going to go unnoticed.