Far From True

by Linwood Barclay

  “Now,” Duckworth said, “it may be just one huge coincidence that this same number keeps popping up. But maybe it isn’t. That’s why I’m asking for the public’s help. If you know of someone with a fixation on this number, if you have any idea how these various incidents might be connected, we want you to get in touch with us. All tips will be treated as confidential.”

  A reporter’s hand shot up. “Can I ask a question now?”

  Duckworth nodded. “Yeah, sure.”

  “So you think you’re looking for a guy who likes to torture squirrels and blow up drive-ins?”

  Soft chuckles went around the room again.

  “I’m saying we see a possible link here,” Duckworth said, “and we’re asking the public for their help. Four people died when that screen came down, so you’ll forgive me if I don’t laugh along with the rest of you.”

  Another hand. “So let’s say the same person or persons are responsible for all these things. Why? What’s the deal? Those words painted onto the dummies, ‘you’ll be sorry.’ Who’ll be sorry, and for what? If someone’s trying to send a message, what is it?”

  “There’s nothing I’d like to know more,” Duckworth said.

  THIRTY

  CLIVE Duncomb brought home dinner, although that hardly made this evening special.

  Duncomb picked up something on the way home most days. And those that he didn’t, Liz generally ordered something in. Or threw some Stouffer’s frozen thing into the microwave. Tonight, he had stopped at Angelino’s, an Italian place that did mostly takeout. Pizza was Angelino’s biggest seller, but they did pasta, too, so Clive got two orders of linguine with clams, and a single Caesar salad that he and Liz could split.

  Cooking had never been Liz’s calling. Even back when she ran her own business, in Boston, where she had a devoted clientele, when a customer asked for something spicy off the menu, a dildo was a more likely ingredient than dill. Nor was Liz’s “Round the World” option a sampling of global cuisine.

  But then again, Duncomb did not choose to make a life with Liz for her terrific soufflés. They had not met at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts. Liz’s mentor was not Julia Child. They met during an investigation into a Boston escort business. Duncomb, working vice at the time, had been gathering evidence to shut the place down, but had something of a change of heart when he met Elizabeth Palmer. She was willing to bring to life just about any fantasy he could imagine—especially those that involved extra players—if it meant turning a blind eye to her business operations.

  Liz didn’t even have to provide the handcuffs. Although, when it came to threesomes, or younger girls, she used her connections.

  Not quite enough connections, however, to feel she could keep her business going without eventually getting busted, or keep Clive from getting brought up on police charges. When they sensed their luck was running out, they each bailed on their lines of work, but not before tracks were covered. Files were shredded or deleted, payoffs made, threats to potential squealers delivered.

  So they put their Boston lives behind them and came to Promise Falls. But it didn’t mean they had to abandon their interests. Just because you move to the North Pole doesn’t mean you don’t still like water-skiing.

  “Hey,” he said when he came through the side door, directly into the kitchen. Liz was leaning up against the counter, watching Dr. Oz on a small television that hung from under one of the cabinets. Her long brown hair was twirled into a knot at the back of her head, and her feet were bare. Her red tank top was cut off, exposing several inches of skin above her jeans.

  “Shh,” she said, holding up a finger. “Dr. Oz says we should be having sex two hundred times a year. I’m not sure I could handle that.”

  “If you got down to two hundred,” Duncomb said, setting the takeout on the counter, “you could take up another hobby. Scrapbooking, maybe.”

  “What constitutes a single sexual act, anyway?” Liz said, picking up a remote and turning down the volume. “I’ve got my doubts Dr. Oz will address this, but if I’m sucking your cock while Miriam’s eating me out, is that one act or two?”

  She suddenly frowned like a child expecting to be reprimanded. “I shouldn’t speak that way of the dead, I suppose.” She looked in the bag. “What do we have here?”

  “Linguine, salad.”

  “Good,” Liz said without enthusiasm.

  “You’re not happy?”

  “I don’t know. I was feeling a little bit like Thai. But this is fine. I can eat this.”

  “Are you really gonna bust my balls about dinner today?”

  Liz rubbed his shoulder and forced a pout. “Big man have bad day?”

  “Yeah, I had a bad day. And it’s not over. Blackmore’s freaking out because Georgina hasn’t come home, and the most important disc is the one I can’t find.”

  Liz got down plates, opened up the take-out containers, and divvied up the pasta and salad. “I’ll get some Parm,” she said, and brought out a container of cheese from the refrigerator door.

  “Are you hearing me?” he said.

  “No matter how bad things are,” she said, “we still have to eat.”

  They did so, standing at the counter. The kitchen table was littered with newspapers, bills, boxes of paperwork that appeared to have taken up permanent residence there. They twirled pasta onto their forks, speared salad leaves.

  “So, what do you mean, you can’t find it?” Liz asked.

  “Like I said. You know how Georgina’s been lately. Like she wants out. I started to wonder whether it was her that took it from Adam’s place. Tore her—well, her and Peter’s—place apart, but it wasn’t there.”

  “Shit,” she said. “I wish you’d find it.” She smiled. “I’d like to watch it.”

  “Jesus, Liz, the second I find it, I’m breaking it into a hundred pieces.”

  “She was a foxy little thing, that Olivia.”

  Clive shook his head, not wanting to talk about it.

  “What?” Liz said. “That was a fun session. It was too bad what happened to her. She might have liked to come back for more. We didn’t even have to spike her wine like any of the others. She was coming on to Adam in the kitchen. She didn’t even know what we were all into. She just wanted to fuck a washed-up writer.”

  “We should have,” he said.

  “Should have what?”

  “Spiked her wine like the others. It was a huge risk, bringing her into the mix and letting her remember what actually happened.”

  “She never told a soul,” Liz said. “I mean, the girl was engaged, for God’s sake. Who was she going to tell? Her fiancé? I think she wanted one last wild experience before she tied the knot.” A grin. “You know, in the marriage sense. I seem to recall a bit of knot-tying that night.”

  “Honestly, Liz, dial it down for Christ’s sake. This is no joke.”

  “Okay, okay. You’re just so serious all the time.”

  “I’m going to go through all the discs again tonight, at Peter’s. Maybe I missed her. I fast-forwarded through all of them once I got them out of Adam’s house. I didn’t see her. But maybe she was there, and I just went too fast.”

  “It must have looked funny.”

  “What looked funny?”

  “All that fast-motion fucking. All those asses going up and down at a hundred miles an hour.”

  Duncomb opened the fridge, took out a beer, uncapped it. “A cop came out to the campus today,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “About the Mason Helt thing. They’re still asking questions about that. I didn’t do anything wrong there.”

  “Of course you didn’t,” she said, almost purring.

  “I saw Peter run after him when he left. I think he was asking about Georgina, whether to file a missing persons report. I told him I’d look after this, but he doesn’t
listen.”

  Liz touched a finger to Duncomb’s chest, worked it between the buttons of his shirt, and made tiny circles on his chest. “I like Peter.”

  “You like his tongue—that’s what you like.”

  She withdrew the finger. “Maybe. But I feel terrible about Adam. There was a man who had it all.”

  Duncomb didn’t respond.

  “Don’t take that the wrong way. I don’t even mean sexually, necessarily. You know I love you, Clive. More than anyone else. I’m just saying he was an interesting man. And I can’t get over the irony of it. Here was a guy who loved the movies, and he dies when a movie screen falls on him. It’s like some sort of cosmic joke, you know? Like that jogger guy, years ago? You know, who wrote the book about it? And how does he die? He has a heart attack while out for a run. It’s like that.”

  “I guess,” Duncomb said.

  “You sound hurt. You can’t be jealous of a dead man.”

  “I’m not.”

  “And you have to be missing Miriam.” She smiled. “Be honest. She was very creative. I’d never seen anyone with that kind of imagination who wasn’t in the business.”

  “I love you,” he said.

  “Of course you do. That’s the way it’s always been. We love each other, and make love with others. But Miriam was very special. And totally bi. The rest of us basically swapped partners, but Miriam had as much fun with me or Georgina as she did with you or Peter.”

  “It feels kind of strange, talking about Adam and Miriam like this. Now.”

  “But, you see, what’ll help us through this is, we’ve always been good at separating the physical from the emotional. Otherwise, right now, we’d be devastated. Losing Adam and Miriam would, under different circumstances, be very hard for us. But I’m okay. Aren’t you?”

  Duncomb hesitated. “Sure.”

  “And you never had any reason to be jealous of Adam. The fact is, you were much alike. You’ve done things you don’t like to talk about, and so had he. Back to his days when he was in that gang. Those weren’t weekend bikers he hung out with. Those were bad, bad people. Some of them were never heard from again after Adam left that life behind.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ve always had this theory that he must have ripped them off before he left. I don’t think he ever made enough writing books to have a nice house like that, or that antique Jag. I think he did okay for himself. He talked about it some with me. He managed girls—I managed girls. We had that in common. But there were drugs, too. I think that’s where he got his money.”

  “Maybe,” Duncomb said. “I’ve been thinking, with what’s happened, it’s time to put a stop to this kind of stuff.”

  “Just because Adam’s playroom’s no longer available doesn’t mean things have to be over.”

  “I don’t want to do this anymore with Peter and Georgina. He’s getting too skittish about things, and her, I don’t know how to read her anymore. I don’t trust her.”

  “I get that. You get tired of people. We’ll find new friends.”

  She stopped eating and slipped her finger into his shirt again, started to unbutton it. She pushed Duncomb up against the counter and pressed herself into him, felt his hardness grow against her. She wrapped her arms around herself, gripped the bottom of the tank top, and slipped it off over her head. She was wearing nothing underneath.

  “Touch me,” she said.

  Clive Duncomb did as he was instructed.

  Liz, moving herself slowly against him, said, “Tell me again . . . starting from the beginning . . . and tell me very, very slowly . . . about when you shot that kid in the head.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  WHEN it got to be dusk, George Lydecker was itching to do it again. Actually, he’d been itching to do it all day, but daylight break-ins were not the smartest thing in the world.

  He wanted to break into another garage. In a weird way, he needed to do it to calm his nerves. George hadn’t been to sleep in a day and a half.

  He’d been pretty freaked-out the night before when he and his friends Derek and Canton and Tyler had tried to sneak into the Constellation, only to see the whole goddamn thing come crashing down. They were about to get busted by the manager for trying to smuggle Derek in by hiding him in the trunk of the car. George had even gotten out to try to argue that the guy didn’t have the constitutional right to search the vehicle.

  But then none of that mattered. Not when a bunch of bombs went off and the people started screaming.

  Derek, the dumb bastard, had actually run toward the disaster, but George and his buddies figured the smartest thing to do was get the hell out of there. Especially since George had brought a gun along—and yes, he had actually found it in somebody’s garage and stolen it, just as Tyler had suggested—and the police would be showing up any minute.

  They’d raced back into town. George got dropped off at his parents’ place, but he was too wound up to go in and go to bed. He’d wandered around his neighborhood, even then, checking for garages that had been left unlocked. A lot of people actually went to bed with their garage doors wide open. They’d be doing something out there, go inside for dinner, decide to watch some TV, and go to bed without ever remembering to close the damn thing.

  You went strolling in, used your phone as a flashlight, and helped yourself to whatever you wanted.

  He’d looked around two garages in the hours after the drive-in bombing, hadn’t seen much that he liked. So he was out again tonight, scratching that itch, wondering what he might find before he went to Canada the following morning.

  The whole damn family, or fam damily, as he liked to think of it, was off to Vancouver to spend time with his father’s stupid relatives. And the taxi was coming at—get this!—five in the fucking morning. That was when George was usually crawling under the covers. So he’d promised his mother he’d be home in good time, which would allow him at least a couple of hours’ sleep before he had to get up.

  George was easily bored. The doctors said it was more than just simple attention deficit disorder. George’s brain just wasn’t wired right. He’d always shown signs of being a smart little bugger. All he had to do was apply himself, his teachers—from every single grade—repeatedly told his parents.

  That always made George think of that line, from a comic book or something: “If only he’d used his powers for good instead of evil.”

  Not that George was evil. He definitely did not see himself as evil. He just couldn’t sit still.

  And he liked to steal shit.

  His parents, determined that he make something of himself, had insisted he go to Thackeray, and what a disaster that had turned out to be. He’d just finished two years there, and had successfully completed only four classes in all that time. He was not going back in the fall. There was absolutely no point. That professor whose Smart car he’d turned upside down had been pushing for him to be permanently expelled anyway. Plus, admin was still holding a grudge for his putting a baby alligator in the pond.

  If you couldn’t have a bit of fun when you were in college, when could you?

  Oh well, fuck ’em. Time to concentrate on the task at hand.

  There was a garage he’d spotted one night the week before that had looked promising.

  The first thing it had going for it was that it was separate from the house. So anyone at home was a lot less likely to hear anything. The other thing was, it had a side door, as well as two big car-sized doors at the front. So someone was going to have to remember to lock not one door but three.

  On top of that, it was a nice enough house. So there might be good stuff that had been tucked in the garage that was worth taking.

  The thing was, most of the crap he took, he threw away. Tossed into a Dumpster. Threw into the river. He’d kept some tools one time, and that gun (which he had dropped into a storm drain after getting ba
ck from the drive-in) was a nice score. Found it, and a box of bullets, in the drawer of a workbench. But it was the act of taking it that gave him the thrill. Getting in, getting out.

  It was a high.

  He decided to come at his latest target from the back. Just as streetlights were coming on, he walked down a narrow alley between two houses, reached their back property line, then hopped a fence that was shrouded with trees and bushes, and landed by the back wall of the garage.

  Bonus. There was a window on that wall. That meant four possible ways inside. He peered through the heavily grimed glass, but it was almost totally dark in there.

  He came along the side of the garage, right up to the corner, where he could get a look at the house. No one in the backyard, and only one light on in the house that he could see, in the kitchen.

  The light didn’t worry him. He could get into this garage without being seen. Standing at the side door, he turned the knob. It was locked.

  But hang on.

  The door had not been pulled tight into the frame. So while the knob couldn’t be turned, when George gave the door a nudge, it moved.

  Bingo.

  Quickly, he opened the door, stepped in, and eased it shut behind him, nearly knocking over an old croquet set off to the side.

  There was no car in here, and there wouldn’t have been room for one. Most of the garage was being used for storage. Using his phone for light, he could see the opposite wall was lined with metal shelving. There was a lot of the usual junk you’d expect to find. Gardening supplies, partially filled paint cans, small rolls of scrap carpet. On the floor, white plastic lawn furniture weathered with leaf stains. A case of beer bottles. Garbage cans.

  On one shelf, half a dozen small wire-cage traps. A funneled entry at one end that would allow an animal to crawl inside, but which would be nearly impossible to crawl back out of without getting jabbed by the wire. The kind of thing, George thought, you might catch rats in.

  Or squirrels.

  And what the hell was that on the top shelf? Looked like an arm and a leg. A closer look revealed that they were a couple of limbs from mannequins.