Too Close to Home

by Linwood Barclay

  I leaned my head back against the headrest. I was feeling exhausted.

  “So,” Barry said, getting back on track, “the case is open, and I’m still asking questions, which is why I’m asking you about this not-an-affair you had with Donna Langley.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what her sister said, and I’ll see what I have to say,” I said.

  One corner of Barry’s mouth went up a notch. “That’s good, Jim. That’s really good. But I don’t think you understand how this whole criminal investigation thing works. I don’t tell you the other person’s story first so that you can get yours to line up with it. That was one of the first things they taught me back in detective school.”

  I looked straight ahead and said nothing.

  “Look, Jim, we’ve known each other a pretty long time. Ever since you went to work for Finley. I think you’re a pretty good guy. I’m trying to be straight with you. I didn’t sit down at your kitchen table and ask you this question with Ellen there. I’m trying to cut you some slack. So play ball with me here.”

  “You could have asked me this in front of Ellen,” I said. “Because nothing ever happened.” I paused. “Not really.”

  “There’s a couple of weasel words if I ever heard them,” Barry said.

  “It was a long time ago. Not long after Ellen got her job at Thackeray. I was working outside, Donna came over because her power was out, I went over, flipped a breaker—”

  Barry snickered. “Is that what they’re calling it now?”

  I shook my head. “She kissed me. I mean, we kissed each other. She wanted me to have sex with her, but I didn’t go through with it.”

  “Okay,” said Barry skeptically.

  “It’s the truth. She . . . Donna seemed like a very unhappy person. There was a sadness in her. I think trying to get me into her bed was a way of dealing with that.” I thought about that for a moment. “Maybe there were other men, other than me, that she was a little more successful with.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Barry said.

  “I’m telling you the truth. After it happened—almost happened—I decided to try to fix what was wrong in my marriage, to put things back together.”

  “There was trouble between you and Ellen?” Barry asked.

  Shit. I hadn’t intended to open that door. Especially now that, with the news that Colin McKindrick couldn’t have killed the Langleys, I was again considering telling Barry about the missing computer with Conrad’s book on it. I didn’t want him thinking I was acting out of malice, that I was trying to get Conrad in trouble to settle an old score.

  “Just . . . it was a bit rocky,” I said. “I was, I don’t know, kind of distant. A bit depressed, unhappy with where I was in life. Ellen had thrown herself into her job, and maybe I was a bit jealous of that.”

  Barry, one hand on the wheel, pointed at a doughnut shop with the other. “Want a coffee or something?”

  “Too hot,” I said. “Maybe you could turn around and take me back. Derek’s probably done and waiting for me.”

  Barry pulled off at the doughnut shop and got in the drive-through line. “Medium coffee, black, and a chocolate dip doughnut,” he said into the speaker.

  When he had the window back up, I said, “So now that you’ve ruled out McKindrick, do you have any other leads?”

  “Oh yeah,” he said, inching the car forward to the delivery window.

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “This and that.”

  “What about other clients Albert had? Somebody at the law firm?”

  “You bet, we’re looking into all of that.”

  I decided the time was right. “I might have something for you.”

  He turned, raised his eyebrows. “That so?”

  “Yeah. You know when you took Derek through the house Sunday morning?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Afterwards, he was talking to me, and he realized he’d noticed something. He wasn’t even sure it was a big deal, which is why he didn’t mention it to you, but it was kind of bugging him.”

  “Hang on,” Barry said. We were at the window. Barry gave the clerk a five, got some change and his coffee and doughnut. “You’re sure you don’t want anything?” he asked me. “Maybe something cold for Derek? One of these frosty things?”

  “We’re good.”

  Once he had his coffee in the holder and we were back on the road to my job site, he said, “So, go on.”

  “Derek says there was a computer in Adam’s room, one of those bulky tower things, that was there as recently as Thursday, the day before the murders, but he didn’t see it there Sunday when we did the walk-through.”

  “A computer?”

  “Yeah.”

  Barry shrugged. “Derek said this.” There was something, I don’t know, dismissive in his voice.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “How’s Derek know about this computer?”

  I told him about Agnes Stockwell giving it to him, that it was old, that it had belonged to her son, Brett.

  “Jumped off Promise Falls,” Barry said. “I remember that.” He reached into the bag with one hand and worked out his chocolate dip doughnut. “So this was Derek’s computer in Adam’s room, then.”

  “Yeah. They both tinkered around with old computers.”

  “Well, I’ll keep that in mind, Jim. It might be important and it might not be—”

  “There was a book on the computer. A novel. Brett Stockwell was a writer.”

  “That’s great, Jim,” he said between bites. “You mind prying that little cap back on the coffee for me? I can’t do it while I’m driving.”

  I peeled back the lid and gently put the cup back in the holder. It was filled right to the top and a sharp turn would see it spilling all over the place.

  “The book was virtually identical to A Missing Part,” I said.

  “A Missing who?”

  “You don’t know that book? By Conrad Chase?”

  “What the fuck did you call it?”

  “A Missing Part. It’s a novel.”

  “Guess I missed that one. If it isn’t written by Tom Clancy or Clive Cussler, I don’t know about it,” Barry said.

  “What I’m trying to tell you, Barry, is that a book supposedly written by Conrad Chase was on that dead kid’s computer, two years before the book came out.”

  Barry was struggling to get the coffee to his lips without spilling it. Once he got it there, he said, “Shit, that’s fucking hot.”

  “You don’t find this interesting?” I asked him. “You’re not the least bit curious?”

  “I don’t know, Jim. I guess what I find most curious is that Derek’s your source for all this.”

  I must have looked puzzled when he said that. “What are you getting at?”

  “I’m just saying, he might have some of his information wrong. But thanks for telling me about this, and I’ll keep it in mind.”

  I could see my truck and trailer up ahead. Derek had already put the lawn tractor back on the trailer and was sitting in the cab of the truck.

  “All right then, fine,” I said. “I was just trying to help. If you don’t want me telling you stuff that might turn out to be important, that’s fine. If you don’t want to solve this, that’s your business.”

  “Oh, I want to solve this,” Barry said. “And you want to know something? I’ve got a feeling there’s going to be a break in this case very soon.”

  That surprised me. “Seriously?”

  He pulled the car over to the curb near my truck, stopped, and looked at me. “I think we might have an arrest any time now.”

  You’d have thought, if he was close to solving this, he would have looked happier about it.

  I didn’t bother to watch him drive off as I got into the truck. “Sorry I took so long,” I said to Derek, who’d finished up and was waiting for me to return. I noticed some tears had made tracks through the dust and debris that was stuck to Derek’s face.

  “Hey
man, you okay?” I noticed his cell phone was in his hand.

  He shook his head, not wanting to talk.

  “Come on, what is it?”

  Derek sniffed, said, “Penny called me.”

  “Okay. What’s going on?”

  Another sniff. “Nothing.”

  “Come on,” I said, reaching over and patting his knee. “We’re all in this together.”

  “She just . . . she said that since she’d got me on the phone, it must not have happened yet.”

  “What?” I asked. “What hasn’t happened yet?”

  Derek wiped his nose on the back of his hand. Without looking at me, he said, “I just want you to know that no matter what anyone says, I’m a good kid.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that at all.

  TWENTY

  AS WE NEARED OUR HOUSE, I spotted a familiar car parked on the shoulder at the end of our lane. It was a silver Audi TT. Great. Just what I needed to make this a perfect day. More Conrad.

  Once I put my blinker on, the Audi’s driver-side door opened and Illeana got out. She was dressed in white slacks and a top, and she seemed to shimmer in the late-afternoon sunlight.

  “Isn’t that Mrs. Chase?” Derek asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “What’s she want?”

  “Hard to say.”

  As I pulled into the drive, I put down the window and Illeana approached. “Jim,” she said, then peered around me to Derek and said, “Hi, Derek.” He barely nodded.

  “Hello, Illeana,” I said. “You been waiting for us?”

  “For you,” she said. “Do you have a minute?”

  “You want to come on down to the house?”

  “No, we can talk here,” she said. “I don’t want to be a bother.”

  Given what time it was, Ellen probably wasn’t home from work yet. I asked Derek to scoot behind the wheel and take the truck in.

  Illeana was rubbing her right wrist, almost unaware she was doing it.

  “Have you hurt yourself?” I asked.

  “Oh,” she said, glancing down at her hands. “I’m getting used to this shifter. Conrad wanted to get one of these stick things and I’m still getting the hang of it.”

  “Well,” I said, looking at the new car, “we all have our problems.”

  “About the other day,” she said. “I’m sorry how things went. We kind of left in a hurry. After you and Conrad had your little disagreement.”

  I shrugged. What was there to say? Especially to Illeana.

  “If I hadn’t heard the tail end of what you were talking about,” she said, “I’m not sure he would have told me what got him so agitated.”

  I didn’t want to talk to her. I was talked out. It had been a draining day. A funeral, a ride with Barry, my son in tears fearing I had no idea what. “So he filled you in on our discussion,” I said.

  “He did.” She leaned up against the Audi. “I think you were out of line, Jim.”

  “Illeana, I’m not sure I should be getting into this with you.”

  “You accused him of something. Of plagiarism. Of stealing the work of someone else. A student.”

  “All I did was ask him to explain something for me.”

  “What makes you think he answers to you?” She managed to ask the question in a way that still sounded very polite.

  “If there was a simple explanation, I don’t know why he didn’t just offer it.”

  “You clearly caught him off guard,” Illeana said. “You blind-sided him. You didn’t even give him a chance to explain.”

  I didn’t say anything. I figured if she had something to say, she’d say it.

  “Conrad didn’t want to discuss this with me, said it was nothing, that he didn’t want to trouble me, but he did say that this student, this Brett Stockwell, was an extraordinary young man,” she said. “Absolutely brilliant.”

  “So everyone says.”

  “He’d never had a kid like him. A sensitive young man, whose insights were that of a much older person.”

  I waited.

  “But he was not brilliant enough to have written A Missing Part,” she said. “A boy like him, smart as he was, wasn’t capable of that.”

  “Whatever you say, Illeana,” I said. I was about to say that it was in Barry’s hands now, but didn’t. Barry had seemed strangely uninterested in what I’d had to tell him, as though he’d already made his mind up about something and didn’t need the story about the missing computer clouding his vision.

  “What happened was, Conrad had already written that book,” Illeana said. “He’d finished it about three years before it was published, but he hadn’t shown it to anyone. He kept tinkering with it, rewriting it, but he just wasn’t sure whether it worked or not. He wanted an opinion on it, so he gave it to Brett to read. On a disc, not a printed-out version. That explains why it was on the boy’s computer.”

  I moved my tongue around the insides of my cheeks, thinking about it. “This is what Conrad told you,” I said.

  Illeana nodded confidently.

  “So before Conrad gave it to a colleague, or a literary agent, or some other published author, he decided to give it to one of his students,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Illeana said.

  “Well,” I said. “So it’s as simple as that.”

  “Simple as that,” she said, smiling, showing off her perfect teeth.

  I said, “Well, there are clearly sides to Conrad I’d never have guessed. A professor of his experience and reputation, and he gives the book to a kid to read.”

  “I think what he was looking for was an honest, unvarnished opinion,” she said, still smiling, like she thought I’d buy it. I think she’d bought it herself. Maybe she had to believe it. The alternative would be unthinkable. “I know Conrad comes across sometimes as a bit full of himself, but he’s no different from anyone else. Once you’ve created something, there’s a certain amount of fear, handing it over to someone else to be judged. He wanted to take a smaller step before giving it to anyone in the publishing industry.”

  “I see.”

  “So I’m here to ask you a small favor. I understood from what Conrad revealed to me about your conversation that there exists a copy of this book, presumably on a disc? I can understand how you might have reached a conclusion that might reflect negatively on Conrad, and if someone as insightful as yourself could do that, others might as well. So I’d be grateful if you could give that disc to me to prevent any further misunderstandings.”

  Not a bad speech for someone who had taken her top off in, among other things, Scream Fever.

  I said, “You should have stayed in Hollywood, Illeana. That was a terrific performance. You learned your lines well, delivered them absolutely convincingly. Did Conrad write them out for you?”

  She didn’t flinch. “Conrad doesn’t even know that I’m here.” The way she said it, I was inclined to believe her. “You’re only going to make a fool of yourself if you pursue this, suggest somehow that my husband didn’t write A Missing Part. Because his new novel is going to blow people away. It’s even more brilliant than his first book. There’ll be no question as to his talents and abilities. Not that there are now, except from you, Jim.”

  “I wish him good luck with it,” I said.

  She smiled. “You really do have it in for him, don’t you? Why don’t you grow the fuck up?” This didn’t sound like the college president’s wife talking. “Where I come from, people fall into each other’s beds all the time and they get over it. Bruce Willis, he goes on trips with Demi and Ashton.”

  “I bet that’s fun,” I said. “Maybe they’d let you go with them sometime.”

  For the first time, she looked wounded. “What have I ever done to hurt you, Jim? We hardly even know each other.”

  And for the first time, I thought maybe I’d gone too far. “You’re right, Illeana. Any quarrels I might have are with Conrad, not you. But I’m not going to give you the disc.”

  She nodded,
as though she accepted that my decision was final. But she still had more to say. “Conrad and Ellen had their thing a very long time ago. We’re all adults.” She came off the car and stood less than a foot away from me. Even on a day like this, you could feel the heat her body threw off. “A bigger man might find it in his heart to let bygones be bygones, to forgive and move on.”

  I started to say something but stopped. I had no comeback for that, maybe because I recognized the truth in it.

  Illeana turned away, opened the door to the Audi. “Nice talking to you, Jim,” she said, then slid into the car and put it into first, kicking gravel up against my jeans as she turned the car around and sped off. She went through the gears just fine, didn’t stall it once.

  ELLEN SHOWED UP not long after that, and around six we threw some burgers onto the grill. After Derek had eaten and gone up to his room, I filled her in on my encounters with Barry and Illeana. I made my visit from Barry sound like we’d just bumped into each other, since I didn’t want to tell Ellen that he wanted to know about me and Donna Langley. While it was true that nothing had happened between me and Donna, I didn’t want to reveal how close we’d come.

  But I told her that Colin McKindrick, while dead, was not a suspect in the Langleys’ murders. I also told her that I had told Barry about the book on Brett Stockwell’s missing computer, and whose work it bore a remarkable resemblance to.

  Ellen stared at me a moment before saying, “And what was his reaction to that?”

  “He didn’t give a rat’s ass,” I told her.

  “Really?”

  “Really. It was like he already had a better lead to follow.”

  And then I told her about Illeana’s visit, and her explanation on Conrad’s behalf. That he had given an early draft of the book to Brett for feedback.

  She thought about that for a moment. “I suppose it’s possible,” she said.

  “You think?” I said. “Everything you’ve ever told me about him suggests that he’s always viewed even the smart kids with contempt. To him, they’re still a bunch of babies.”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “Maybe—”