Parting Shot

by Linwood Barclay

  Albert tried to swallow, but his throat was too dry. “Who? Is it Monica? Tell her to go somewhere, anywhere, just—”

  “Not Monica,” she said. “It’s the policeman. The one with the funny name. Duckworth.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  ABOUT half an hour earlier, Barry Duckworth had put the jar containing what he presumed were Craig Pierce’s body parts into an evidence container, then gone out to his car and placed it gingerly into the trunk. Then he went back into the house.

  Alastair Calder had been standing inside the front door. When Duckworth returned, Alastair said, “My boy is some kind of monster, isn’t he?”

  “I need a picture of him,” Duckworth said.

  “How could he have something like that under this bed? How could he be doing whatever it is he’s been doing and I didn’t know anything about it? Maybe . . . maybe what’s in that jar isn’t what it looks like. It might be from an animal or something.”

  “I need to find Cory as soon as possible,” Duckworth said. “Not just before he hurts anyone else, but before anything happens to him. I think he’s playing a very dangerous game right now.”

  “Dear God, this is beyond imagining.”

  “I know.”

  “I . . . I think maybe he needs help.”

  “That might be true. But right now, I need a picture of your son.”

  “Um, let me see what I can find.”

  Alastair went into a room off the kitchen that featured a large television, tucked into an entertainment unit, a long, cushy couch and two reclining chairs. He opened a door on the unit and brought out a large photo album.

  “I have some in here,” he said. He sat on the couch and placed the album on the coffee table, then opened the binder and pointed to a shot of a woman and three children sitting on the floor in front of a Christmas tree.

  “This is from the early nineties, I think,” he said. “This was my wife, and this is Cory, and this is his brother and his sister.”

  “He looks about nine or ten years old there,” Duckworth said.

  “Yes, I believe so.”

  Duckworth said gently, “I need something more recent.”

  “Oh, of course, what was I thinking?” But Alastair had become fixated on the photo. He could not stop looking at it.

  “Mr. Calder,” Duckworth said.

  Alastair turned and looked at him. “You never know what’s coming. You see them when they’re just children, and the world seems so open to them, so full of promise. Those are the days when you are allowed to dream.” He grimaced. “And then as they get older, you see the potential they have. At times, it just seems limitless, that they can do anything. A little older yet and reality begins to set in. You see, instead of limitless potential, the limitations. That maybe they won’t make of their lives what you might have hoped. I was lucky, I think. Two out of three isn’t bad, right? But even with Cory, with a child that won’t be reaching for the top rung of the ladder, you hope that while he might not make the world a better place, he won’t make it worse.”

  “It’s all a crap shoot,” Duckworth said.

  “We think we have this ability to control things,” Alastair went on. “It’s when we try to direct our children’s lives that we realize how powerless we really are.”

  “A picture?” Duckworth reminded him.

  Alastair sighed. “Let me see if I have anything on my phone. I can’t remember the last time I printed out a picture or had one developed.”

  Duckworth followed him to the kitchen, where Alastair found his cell sitting next to the landline. He picked it up. “Give me a second.”

  He opened up the photo app and thumbed through some shots. “Here’s one,” he said. “I took Cory out for his birthday. We went to the Clover, the steak house. Cory likes beef. There he is.”

  He handed the phone to Duckworth. The picture showed Cory sitting, presumably across from his father, smiling at the camera, a waiter lingering in the background. But there was something odd about the shot. The smile seemed somehow empty, as though the facial muscles needed to make it were operating independently of any messages from the brain, or the heart. But it was a good enough picture for identification purposes.

  “I’m going to email this to myself,” Duckworth said.

  Alastair nodded wearily. “I’ll keep trying to reach him,” he said.

  “I can’t expect you to do what I’m going to ask, but I’d rather you didn’t tell him the police are looking for him. Just ask him to come home. And let me know if he does. I’d like the opportunity to speak with him before things get out of hand.”

  “I feel . . . as though I’m betraying him. But,” and the man appeared to be struggling for the right words, “I feel he’s betrayed all the love and commitment my wife and I showed him over the years.”

  “A couple of final things,” Duckworth said.

  Alastair gave him a look that suggested he wasn’t sure he could take anything else.

  “Yes?”

  “What’s Cory driving?”

  “He has a van. A Sienna. It’s black.”

  “Registered in your name or his?”

  “Mine. It . . . it makes the insurance cheaper if it’s under my name. Part of the family fleet, if you will.”

  “I can have it looked up, but do you know the license plate off hand?”

  Alastair nodded and told him. Duckworth wrote it down in his notebook.

  “Last thing, sir,” Duckworth said. “Does Cory possess any firearms?”

  “What? No, I’m not aware that he does.”

  “How about yourself?”

  “I’m not a collector or anything like that. I don’t care much for this country’s obsession with guns. It’s nothing short of madness.”

  Duckworth noted that the man had not said he didn’t have one. “But?” he prompted.

  Alastair sighed. “A few years ago, when my wife and I were advocating on behalf of an abortion clinic, we received some death threats. The police didn’t believe they would be acted on, but they took them seriously just the same. It was a woman from the Promise Falls police. I think her name was Rhonda.”

  “Rhonda Finderman,” Duckworth said. “She’s the chief now.”

  “That’s right. I saw her on TV—you, too—last year when all those people got poisoned. Thank God Cory and I were out of town at the time.”

  “What did Rhonda tell you?”

  “She suggested I might want to get myself some protection.”

  “A gun.”

  He nodded solemnly. “I was reluctant at first, but one night there was a phone call, from an unknown number, and this man said that when they found me, what they would do to me would be slow and painful. It was very frightening. So I decided to take Rhonda’s advice. I bought a gun. A revolver.”

  “Where do you keep it?”

  “Locked up in my bedroom,” he said. “At the time of the threats, I kept it next to my bed, by the lamp, so I could get it quickly if I needed it. But as time passed, and the threats stopped, I kept it locked up at all times. Still in the bedroom, but not immediately accessible.”

  “Can you show me?” Duckworth asked.

  Alastair nodded and led the detective to the stairs, grabbing a set of keys from a decorative bowl on a table near the door along the way. When they got to the second floor, this time they went left instead of right.

  “I hope I’m following rules regarding storage,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to get in any trouble.”

  “Don’t worry,” Duckworth said.

  The bedside nightstand had a drawer across the top, and a cabinet door below. Alastair went down on one knee and, using one of the keys, unlocked the door.

  “Here we go,” he said, and Duckworth could hear the relief in his voice. He brought out a small case made of hard plastic and set it on the bed.

  “This needs a key, too,” he said. The key for the gun case was not on his chain, but tucked under some papers in the nightstand drawer. He lifted t
he case up onto its side, inserted the second key, and opened it.

  The inside of the case was lined with soft gray foam. There was the slight impression of a gun in the foam, but no actual weapon.

  “Oh no,” Alastair said.

  FORTY-SIX

  CORY Calder looked at Carol Beakman, sleeping so peacefully—well, okay, drugged to the eyeballs was more accurate, but no need to nitpick—and wondered whether bringing her along was such a brilliant plan.

  It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

  It wasn’t that he’d spared her life because she’d somehow touched his heart. It wasn’t because she didn’t deserve to die, although she certainly didn’t.

  Cory had seen her as insurance. And insurance was very much what he was going to need.

  Thing were starting to fall apart, and fall apart very quickly. Cory saw Carol Beakman as leverage. A future ace in the hole, as it were. Something to trade if things went south. Well, not so much if they went south, as when.

  Cory knew the clock was probably running out on him.

  But despite that, he hadn’t lost sight of his goal. That was what this had all been about from the very beginning. Making a difference. And he was goddamn well going to do that.

  He had a feeling Jeremy Pilford would be his last stand. He’d made a great debut with Craig Pierce, and Pilford would be the closing number. A short but memorable career. Not that he wouldn’t have liked it to be much longer, but once he was done with the Big Baby, it was a safe bet that everyone would know who he was. No more anonymity. No more solitary celebrations.

  No longer would it just be his work that was famous. It would be him. Cory had no doubt of that. His exploits would spread far beyond websites like Just Deserts. He’d make the evening news. He’d be on CNN.

  The world would know his name.

  Did the world know his sister’s name? Did the world know his brother’s name? Fuck, no. They’d gone and devoted their lives to such noble causes, and what did they have to show for it, really?

  Losers.

  Even his parents, with all their advocacy work over the years, never achieved the kind of fame he was undoubtedly going to earn.

  He just wanted to be able to enjoy it. And to enjoy it, he had to stay alive.

  That was where Carol Beakman came in.

  Cory could imagine any number of scenarios where he might need her. At some point, the police might corner him. Storm a building. Come in with guns blazing. That was how they operated. Shoot first, ask questions later. But they wouldn’t want to do that if he had the woman with him. They’d have to be more careful.

  She’d be his lifesaver when the going got tough. And what the hell, if it turned out he didn’t need her, he’d dispose of her.

  Like he did with Dolores.

  But man, that did hurt. Cory had loved Dolores. Really, really loved her. She was his first real girlfriend, which was saying something for a guy in his thirties. Cory was not exactly the most popular student in high school. (Again, not like his siblings, who were getting laid practically out of kindergarten.) But Dolly and him, they’d really connected. How many girls were willing to come along to watch a dog make Alpo out of somebody? Plus, she was way more than a bystander. She was the one who got Pierce’s attention out back of the pizza place where he worked, which allowed Cory to come up from behind, put the chloroform-soaked rag over his mouth. Dude powered down like a twenty-year-old laptop.

  She’d helped him with Pierce, and she’d helped him with the other guy—only problem there was that it was the wrong guy. Dolly’d been idly going through Gaffney’s wallet, and had pulled out his driver’s license. Said: “Uh oh.”

  Cory’d never forget that Uh oh.

  Well, he felt bad about it, too. The poor bastard didn’t deserve what had happened to him. But it had happened in good faith. Cory honestly believed it was Jeremy Pilford they were marking up. His intentions were honorable. Sometimes there was collateral damage. Get over it. Move on.

  Maybe that was the turning point for Dolly. Although, he had to admit, there were warning signs even before that.

  Like that time Dolly asked whether they were just as bad as those they targeted. “Maybe someone else,” she once said, “will come after us the way we went after the first guy.”

  She could never say a target’s name out loud. Not Pierce’s, not Gaffney’s. Pilford, she could say his name, because they hadn’t done him yet. But if they’d gotten him, she’d have had amnesia when it came to the guy’s name. It was her way of distancing herself, tricking her mind into believing she wasn’t involved. Cory, on the other hand, couldn’t say Pierce’s name enough, at least so long as no one other than Dolly was listening.

  One time, she started talking about what the police would do to them if they got caught. What was it she’d said?

  “You’re the one they’re really going to go after, once they know it was all your idea.”

  Yeah, that was it. What the fuck did that mean? Cory had a pretty good idea. Dolly was already thinking ahead. If they got picked up, she’d sell him out. Say she was coerced. Say she was scared to do anything but go along with what he wanted.

  He loved her so much. Funny how one’s feelings for someone could turn on a dime.

  He’d started watching her more closely since the Gaffney fuckup. Tried to read between the lines of everything she said and did. There was definitely something wrong.

  And then Carol Beakman showed up. At the door, for Christ’s sake.

  Maybe if she’d phoned Dolly on her cell, everything would have turned out differently. But Carol didn’t have Dolly’s cell phone number, and when she tried to call her on the landline at her parents’ house, she’d found it disconnected.

  So she drove to the house, came to the door, and that was really when everything started to go to shit.

  He and Dolly had been sitting in the kitchen. She’d fried him up a couple of sausages on top of the stove, was about to put them into buns, when there was a rapping at the front door. Cory could see the instant panic in her eyes. This was it! They’d come for them. She’d put the pan back on the burner, didn’t even think to turn off the gas before she went to see who it was. Cory turned off the stove, and by the time he’d joined Dolly, the door was open, and he could see that it was not the fucking FBI or Starsky and Hutch or even Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties.

  It was that woman Dolly had talked to just as they were nabbing Brian Gaffney, who was supposed to be Jeremy Pilford, but you couldn’t dwell on these things forever.

  Anyway, now here she was again.

  She was so sorry to bother them, she said. But there was this situation that had come up, something about her boyfriend and the fact that his father was a cop, and the way she rambled on, it was hard to make any sense of what she was saying.

  But then she said something that really caught Cory’s attention.

  Right about the time that they ran into each other outside Knight’s, a man had been kidnapped and held captive and his body tattooed. Just a horrible thing. Carol and her boyfriend had been seen on the bar’s video, which led the police to them. Carol hadn’t given the police Dolly’s name, but the more she considered it, the more she thought she should get in touch with Dolly in case she had any information that might help the cops.

  “It was just unbelievable,” Carol said. “I saw a picture. What was done to this guy, it was horrific.”

  Cory thought it could have been handled so well. All Dolly had to say was, Gee, thanks for telling us, but we didn’t see a thing, did we, Cory?

  But no.

  She looked at Cory, her lip all quivery. Said something like Oh my God oh my God oh my God.

  Or words to that effect. She totally lost it.

  “We’re fucked!” she said. “They’re going to find us!”

  Cory had tried to laugh it off. Told this Carol Beakman that Dolly was just messin’ with her. But Dolly wouldn’t calm down, and Cory could see Carol had to be thinking, holy
shit, what did I just walk into here?

  So she started to leave.

  Which didn’t strike Cory as a very good idea. Hold on, he said to her. There’s been a misunderstanding. Let’s try to sort this all out.

  But Carol was already heading to her car. Cory was about to shoot out the door after her, but not before telling Dolly to get a grip, look what she’d done.

  Dolly’d screamed, “It’s over! I can’t do this shit any more. I can’t, I can’t! You’re crazy, that’s what you are! You’re a fucking psycho!”

  Cory found his hands around her neck. He pushed her up against the wall and squeezed with everything he had. She put up a good fight, he had to give her that. Kicked and flailed about, but he didn’t let go, didn’t stop squeezing. Not until she slid down the wall and crumpled into a heap on the floor.

  But that still left Carol Beakman.

  He charged out the door. Incredibly, she was still there. In her rush to escape, she’d fumbled with her purse and dropped it next to her car. She was on her knees, scrabbling through the contents that had spilled out, searching frantically for her keys.

  Cory kicked her in the head.

  That was all it took. Carol’s head bounced up against the fender of the Toyota, and then she slid to the ground. Cory picked her up and carried her into the barn. Secured her to the metal cot where he had performed his artistry on Brian Gaffney.

  He had mixed feelings, at first, at discovering she was still alive. But he soon saw the advantages of keeping her that way. He actually thought maybe Dolly had been right, that the police could be getting close, and if that was the case, Carol Beakman might be useful.

  Now, sitting in this tiny cabin in Cape Cod, he realized he should have taken more time to think through all the other aspects of his predicament.

  His first thought had been to get rid of Dolly, and Carol Beakman’s car. He put Dolly into the trunk of the Toyota, then drove his van to within a mile of the industrial park where he intended to leave the car. After hoofing it back to the nearest bus line to downtown Promise Falls, he got a cab to drop him half a mile from Dolly’s place. More hoofing. Then he drove Carol’s car to the tile place, hours before they opened, and left the vehicle out back by a Dumpster.