Far From True

by Linwood Barclay

  “A Jaguar. An old classic one, red. An E-Type, I think.” Carlson, who’d worked out of a cruiser for years, knew every kind of car out there, even the antiques.

  Lucy Brighton put a hand on the wall to steady herself.

  “Was the license plate AFV-5218?” the girl asked. Her mother turned, saw that her daughter had returned.

  “Oh, Crystal.” She reached out an arm and pulled her daughter close.

  “Uh,” said Carlson, glancing at his notes, “yes. That is the plate.” He looked at the girl. “You have a good memory.”

  “Has something happened to Grandpa’s car?” To the police detective, Crystal said, “It’s an antique.”

  “I’m afraid so,” Carlson said.

  “I like that car.”

  “I bet.”

  “Sweetheart,” Lucy said, “I’m just trying to find out what—”

  “Are they dead?”

  Lucy hugged the child, patted her head. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

  “I hope they’re not dead,” she said flatly, trying to free herself. “I’m supposed to go over there on Saturday when you go to the conference. I like to go over.” Crystal said to Carlson, “My grandpa has pinball games in his basement.”

  “Is that so?” Carlson said.

  “Miriam is nice to me. She isn’t my grandmother, but she’s nice to me.”

  “Sweetheart, please go up to bed. I’ll come see you after the policeman leaves.”

  “Okay.” Crystal made the trip back up the stairs.

  “I just have a few more questions,” Carlson said. But he also had information to pass along, including where the bodies would be taken. In another ten minutes, he was out of there.

  He headed home to get some sleep before reporting back to the station at eight. He entered the house as quietly as possible, but those damned hardwood floors gave him away every time. The boards creaked under his feet as he came inside.

  “Angus?” The voice came from upstairs.

  “Just me. Go back to sleep, Gale.”

  A woman in her thirties appeared at the second-floor landing. She flipped on a light. She had short, streaked hair and wore a frayed housecoat. “This is way past the end of your shift.” Not an accusation, just a statement of fact.

  “I would have called, but then I’d have just woken you up.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “There was a crazy thing. The screen at the drive-in fell over, killed some people.”

  “Oh my God, how could that happen?”

  He waved his hand tiredly, too weary to explain. “Who knows? Just go back to sleep.”

  “I was awake anyway.”

  “Still, you should—”

  “I was thinking.”

  “I gotta eat something,” he said, and went into the kitchen.

  Gale descended the stairs, followed him, asked what he wanted. There was some leftover beef stew she could reheat in the microwave. Or, given that the clock was closer to breakfast than dinner, she could scramble him some eggs.

  He opened the refrigerator, took out a beer. “This’ll do for now.”

  “I was thinking that—”

  “I’m really tired. Do we have to do this now?”

  “You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”

  “I don’t?” he said before drawing on the bottle, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Let me see if I can guess.” He opened a hamper in the fridge, took out some wrapped deli meat, put the package on the counter, and ripped it open. He grabbed a handful of thinly shaved Italian salami and shoved it into his mouth.

  “You think we’re ready,” he said. “Your biological clock is ticking. If we’re ever going to do it, now is the time. Why should we wait? A child will make us a family.” He cocked his head at her. “How’m I doing?”

  Her eyes were starting to swim.

  “Thought so,” Carlson said.

  “You’d be a wonderful father,” Gale said. “I know you would.”

  “That’s not what I’m worried about,” he said, shoving another handful of meat into his mouth.

  “You’re worried about me? That’s it? You’re saying I won’t be a good mother?”

  “That’s not what I mean,” he said, although it came out much less clear than that with his mouth full of salami.

  “That’s what you think.”

  “No one has a kid thinking they’re going to be anything less than a great mother. A great parent. It’s after they have the kid they find out they’re no good at it.”

  “I know we’d be good.”

  Angus Carlson studied her. “No one knows anything for sure.”

  “It doesn’t have to be the way it was for you,” she said, reaching out, touching his arm. “Just because your mother—”

  He pulled away. “I’ve got to get some sleep. I have to be in early.”

  • • •

  He set his phone to wake him in two hours. Thirty minutes after that, he was at the station, expecting to head back out to the drive-in, but Duckworth had other ideas.

  “Some bomb experts from the state are helping us at the site today. We’ve got plenty of uniformed officers interviewing witnesses, people who were there, who’d gone to see the movie. I want you out at Thackeray.”

  Thackeray College?

  “What do you want me out there for?” Carlson asked.

  “The Mason Helt business,” Duckworth said.

  Mason Helt, the Thackeray student who’d been shot dead by the college’s head of security. Helt had been killed after attacking Thackeray security guard Joyce Pilgrim, who’d been acting as a decoy, hoping to get the attention of whoever had grabbed and molested three female Thackeray students.

  “What’s left to do?” Carlson said. “They got the guy.”

  Duckworth said, “According to Ms. Pilgrim, before Helt died, he said something about being put up to this, like it was a gig, a hired performance. I want to know what the others have to say. If there was someone else involved, we need to know.”

  “You think I’m not good enough to work the drive-in,” Carlson said.

  Duckworth shot him a look, but sidestepped the accusation. “If that screen hadn’t fallen over last night, I’d be at Thackeray myself this morning asking questions.”

  Carlson said, “Fine.”

  Duckworth started to walk away, paused, turned back. “About Duncomb.”

  “Duncomb?”

  “Clive Duncomb. Their chief of security, who put the bullet into Helt. Former Boston PD. Thinks he’s John Wayne. Should have brought us in on this from the very beginning but chose to handle it himself. So far, he seems to have admin behind him, even though Helt’s parents have filed a multimillion-dollar suit against the college. He wrote the book on how to be an asshole.”

  “Okay,” Carlson said. A pause, then, “Thanks for the heads-up.”

  The three students who’d been attacked—presumably all by Helt—were Denise Lambton, Erin Stotter, and Lorraine Plummer. None of them had seen the man’s face, but their descriptions of what he’d been wearing—a hoodie with the number 23 on the front—matched.

  He had contact information for all three, but only one of them,Lorraine Plummer, was available for a face-to-face. This, it turned out, was the end of the semester, and most students had returned home. Erin Stotter had gone back to Danbury, Connecticut, and Denise Lambton had gone to Hawaii—a graduation present from her parents.

  Lorraine, however, was staying, having signed up to take courses from May to August so she could obtain her degree more quickly. She agreed to meet with Carlson in the college’s main dining hall, an arena-sized room with a vaulted ceiling. There were only half a dozen students there when Carlson arrived. Lorraine was sitting near one corner, working on a small laptop, a paper
cup of coffee next to it.

  “Ms. Plummer?” he said.

  “You’re the policeman?” said the student, who Carlson guessed wasn’t more than five feet tall, maybe 110 pounds wet. She wore her black hair to her shoulders and was dressed in a gray sweatshirt and jeans.

  He offered a hand, which she took. “Carlson,” he said, taking a seat across from her. “Pretty empty in here today.”

  “Most everyone’s gone, but they’re still keeping the cafeteria open with a skeleton staff,” she said. “Thank God, or I’d starve to death.”

  “So you’re hanging in for the summer?”

  She shrugged, made a face. “Yeah. I’m trying to fast-track my degree. Don’t want to be here for four solid years. Want to get on with my life, do something, you know? Try to get started on a career before having kids and stuff.”

  “You have a boyfriend?”

  She blushed. “No. I just think way ahead.”

  “Nothing wrong with that.”

  “So, you have questions? About the guy who grabbed me?”

  He nodded. “I’m sure you’ve had to go over all this before, but it would help us if you could do it again.”

  “But they got the guy, right? I mean, isn’t it over?”

  “What we’re wondering is what Mason Helt—and we’ve no reason to think it wasn’t Helt who attacked you—might have said.”

  “Okay, well, I was walking by the pond. You know, Thackeray Pond?”

  “Yeah.” It was a small body of water at the college. Most pictures of Thackeray featured the pond with the stately buildings in the background reflected within in it. Students hung out by it, strolled and jogged around it.

  “It’s real pretty there, although I’m totally freaked about even putting my toe into it. Some kid here put a baby alligator in there as a joke. I mean, it might be dead, but you never know. So I was walking around it at about ten. At night. No one else was out, which was kind of dumb of me—I realize that now. When I got close to some trees, all of a sudden this guy runs out and grabs me. I’m not very heavy, you know, and he puts his arms around me and lifts me right off my feet and takes me into the bushes. And I’m totally scared and ready to scream, and he puts his hand over my mouth and puts me down on the ground, and then he’s all, hey, don’t worry, it’s okay.”

  “What’d he say, exactly?”

  She paused, took a sip of her coffee. “I was kind of scared, you know? So it’s hard to remember exactly. But it was like, ‘I’m not going to hurt you. I’m not going to do anything to you. But tell them what happened. Tell them to be afraid.’ Yeah, like that.”

  “‘Tell them to be afraid’?”

  Lorraine nodded.

  “Tell who to be afraid?”

  “Well, he didn’t exactly say. I guess he meant, tell everyone?”

  “There were two other students,” Carlson said. “Erin Stotter and Denise Lambton.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I know them, but not really well. But they told me he said kind of the same thing to them, too. But you probably know all of this, right? Mr. Duncomb—he’s the head campus-cop guy—would have told you right after it happened?”

  Carlson knew, from what Duckworth had passed along, that all this information had come late to the Promise Falls police.

  “What makes you think he would have done that?” he asked.

  “Well, I told him I was going to call the police myself, but he said that wouldn’t be necessary, that he’d be calling them. And that he’d be passing along my statement, and if you needed more from me, you’d interview me.”

  Carlson smiled. “He did, did he?”

  Lorraine nodded.

  “I figured he’d do it. Because I sort of already know him, and figured he’d be straight with me.”

  “How do you know the security chief?”

  “He knows this writer guy. And he invited me out to his place once so I could meet him.” Her face flushed again.

  “A writer?” Carlson asked.

  “I made a total fool of myself. Had too much to drink and kind of passed out, and felt—I don’t know—kind of weird the next day.” She hesitated a moment, then said, “But they were all real nice about it.”

  “But you’re saying he said he’d fill in the local police on what happened?”

  Her head went up and down.

  As he walked out of the dining hall, Carlson put in a call to Duckworth’s cell. “I just talked to the Plummer woman.”

  “Okay.”

  “She wanted to go to the police right after she was assaulted, and Duncomb said he’d do it on her behalf.”

  “Which he never did.”

  “Yeah. Thought you’d want to know.”

  Silence. Then, “I’ll be having a word with him about that.”

  “I’m going to pay him a visit.”

  “No,” Duckworth said. “Leave that for me. In fact, Rhonda may want to have a word with him.” Rhonda Finderman, the Promise Falls police chief.

  “I’m here now,” Angus Carlson said.

  “No, wait—”

  But it was too late. Carlson had ended the call.

  • • •

  “I’m looking for Duncomb,” Carlson told the young man guarding the desk outside the offices of campus security.

  “He’s in a meeting right now. But if you’d like to have a seat, I can—”

  Carlson headed for the closed door that bore Clive Duncomb’s name and position. He turned the handle and entered.

  Duncomb was behind his desk, talking to a man seated across from him. He looked up and said, “Excuse me.”

  “Angus Carlson,” he said. “Promise Falls police.” He flashed his credentials.

  “That’s pretty,” Duncomb said. “But I’m talking to somebody right now.”

  “It’s important.”

  Duncomb sighed and said to the man, who Carlson guessed was in his forties, 140 pounds tops, unkempt hair hanging over his collar, tweed jacket that was worn at the cuffs. The guy had everything needed to peg him short of a name tag that said “Professor.”

  “Sorry, Peter,” Duncomb said to the man. “Why don’t you wait outside while I deal with this?”

  The man named Peter turned in his chair to look at Carlson and said, “You’re with the police?”

  “That’s right.”

  Peter glanced nervously back at Duncomb and said, “Clive, maybe it wouldn’t hurt to—”

  Duncomb shook his head abruptly. “Peter, I’m sure it’s nothing. We’ll talk shortly. I’ve no doubt everything will be fine.”

  “And the other matter—”

  Duncomb gave the man a sharp look. “I told you, that’s in hand. You don’t have to worry about that.”

  Hesitantly, Peter got to his feet and squeezed past Carlson on his way out of the office. Carlson took the man’s seat, which was still warm.

  “Where’s Detective Duckworth today?” Duncomb asked. “Out having a doughnut?”

  “Who was that?” Carlson asked, tipping his head in the direction of the man who’d departed.

  “One of the professors.”

  “Why did he want to talk to me?”

  “He didn’t want to talk to you. He doesn’t want to talk to you. It’s nothing. A personal matter. What do you want?”

  Carlson settled into the chair, opened up his notebook. “I’ve just been talking to Lorraine Plummer.”

  “Lorraine Plummer, Lorraine Plummer . . .” His eyes rolled up toward the ceiling.

  “One of the three women who was attacked here at Thackeray.”

  Duncomb grinned. “I know. Erin Stotter, Denise Lambton, and, last but not least, Lorraine Plummer. The three students Mason Helt went after before I took care of the problem.”

  “By shooting him in the head.”

&
nbsp; Duncomb’s shoulders rose, fell. A shrug. “Which, it would seem, has failed to ruffle any feathers, given that I haven’t been charged with anything. It was a righteous shoot. I saved one of my people. Joyce Pilgrim. Helt would have killed her if I hadn’t shown up.”

  “That’s not my understanding.”

  “Not your understanding? What is your understanding?”

  “That he’d told her he wasn’t going to hurt her.”

  Duncomb nodded in mock agreement. “Yes, that’s always a good strategy when you’re dealing with someone who’s just dragged you into the bushes to rip your pants off. To believe him when he says he means you no harm.”

  “It’s the same thing he told the Plummer woman.”

  Another shrug. “Let me ask you this—what’d you say your name was again?”

  “Carlson. Angus Carlson.”

  “Angus? What kind of name is that? Isn’t that a kind of cow?”

  Carlson felt his neck getting hot.

  “How long have you been a detective, Angus Carlson?” Putting emphasis on the first name.

  He hesitated. “It’s a recent appointment. But I’ve been with the Promise Falls police for a few years. Came here from Ohio. Lorraine Plummer told me she was going to call the police, but you talked her out of it. That it wouldn’t be necessary, because you were going to do that yourself.”

  Duncomb said nothing.

  “Which you never did,” Carlson added. “Lorraine Plummer was assured, by you, her concerns would be relayed to the proper authorities. They weren’t. I wonder if Mason Helt’s family, which I hear is suing the college for one shitload of money, is aware of that. If the police had been brought in from the beginning, they might have arrested Helt peacefully before you found it necessary to shoot him.”

  Duncomb’s cheek twitched.

  “One other thing,” Carlson said. “When I mentioned Lorraine Plummer’s name, you seemed to have a hard time calling it up.”

  “I can’t remember the name of every single student who attends Thackeray. Not even the ones who come to my attention.”

  “Sure. Except she said she kind of knew you. That you introduced her to some writer friend, that you all had dinner together.” Carlson smiled. “I’m sure we’ll be talking again.”