by Steve Richer
He shrugged and finally managed to say, “She’s pulling through.”
“Good. That’s good to hear. And how are you holding up?”
Tom had always been a favorite of Michael’s. His protégé.
“I’m okay. Back on track.”
“Good.”
Things had never been so stilted between them before.
“I’m sorry about Walter,” Tom said. Tuckett had never really liked Walter, but still.
Tuckett nodded, but said nothing.
“I just came to get some things for Alice. I won’t be long.”
“How did you get in, Tom? You had your keycard taken off you after…”
After last time. The time when Tom had hit rock bottom, lost his grip on the world. The time he’d punched Michael Tuckett right on that rolling, jowly jaw.
“Get her things and go, Tom. She shouldn’t have given you her card. She’d be in a lot of trouble for a transgression like that if she wasn’t…”
Again, Tuckett let his words trail away mid-sentence.
Wasn’t what?
Tuckett straightened. “Well, I know now isn’t a good time, Tom. You need to focus on getting Alice better. But you must know it’s over here. Alice screwed up big-time on Mapleview. If her window-dressing on that early draft of the pitch documents had gotten through, we’d have been exposed to lawsuits that would have destroyed the company.”
Tom seethed with the injustice. He knew how hard Alice had worked on the pitch and he knew she would never normally make those kinds of mistakes. But for Tuckett to imply those mistakes might have been something more, a deliberate attempt to manipulate the pitch, well… Even now he’d have hoped for better from the man.
“Can you hold off until she’s better?” he begged.
Now wasn’t the time to confront Tuckett and his accusations. It certainly wasn’t the time to punch him again, no matter how tempting that was. The man had, effectively, fired Alice while she lay in a hospital bed.
Tuckett sighed, as if making a massive concession.
“Just a few more days,” Tom urged. “Maybe then you’ll have a different view.”
If he could prove what unfair pressures Alice had been subjected to, if the truth of whatever Libbie was up to emerged, maybe Tuckett would change his mind.
Tuckett turned away, dismissing him.
Tom went across to Alice’s office, turned the light on, and then sidestepped two doors down and slipped into Walter’s much smaller office.
Easing himself into the desk chair, he checked the line of sight. Just as he remembered, unless Tuckett came out of his office again, he wouldn’t be able to see where Tom was. Even if he emerged, the light in Alice’s office might be enough to convince him that was where Tom was.
He tapped at the keyboard’s space bar, bringing the two wide monitors to life in a startling burst of light in the darkened room.
He peered out of the office again, but there was no sign of Tuckett.
The computer was prompting him to log in. It had remembered the last log-in as wdjones, which was good, and now Tom keyed in the password Alice had given him before he left the hospital: t3RR!FF1C.
He was immediately granted access.
It was weird, the relationship between Walter and Alice, but Tom had gotten past the jealousy. The two were friends. Sympaticos. He was sure there had been more on Walter’s side, but he didn’t doubt Alice.
Had been…
It was easy to drift through, forgetting the gravity of this situation. Someone had died. Walter.
The fact the cops were sniffing around meant that this was a suspicious death of some sort.
This was serious.
Walter’s computer desktop was neat and orderly. But even so, where to start looking?
Tom knew what he was looking for, just not where to find it. Walter had been investigating Libbie, had found something. This was an office machine, so he wouldn’t have left anything obvious. Sure enough, the desktop shortcuts all pointed to work-related software and folders. If he had files on here, they could be buried just about anywhere.
Walter knew this stuff, and he knew how to cover his tracks.
Walter had left Chrome running and Tom clicked on it to bring the browser window back up. There were only three tabs open, one for the Pierson Newport intranet, one for his email, and one for CNN.
Tom’s laptop had about twenty browser tabs open at any one time. Walter sure was methodical. Or he’d tidied up after himself before leaving the office.
The first two tabs were probably permanent, for mail and work, so Tom guessed the third tab was the one Walter had most recently used for non-work browsing. He clicked the Back button a couple of times, backtracking through news stories.
Then he came to more random things: a Google Map of Manhattan, another of upstate New York, a couple more news websites, the official web page of some kind of hospital, a couple of gaming communities, a bunch of pages from the NYU website.
Tom couldn’t see an obvious connection between any of these.
He called up the full browser history and saw more of the same eclectic mix.
Walter had clearly had a reason to look at all this stuff, but without knowing that reason they just appeared random.
In reality, they were pretty random: he wouldn’t only have been looking for things relating to Libbie. Most of these pages in his history probably had nothing at all to do with what Tom was looking for.
He sat back in the chair, frustrated.
Then he remembered his own advice to Alice when she’d had computer problems and thought she’d lost a bunch of work files. It was advice right up there with Have you tried turning it off and on again?
He slid the mouse pointer bottom-left, and clicked through to Recent Files. Walter had found something out and he’d called Alice, then gone straight to the house.
In that case, if he’d kept any records, then whatever he’d found would be in his list of most recent files!
He found them immediately, opening each document as he went. Again, Walter had been methodical. All in a folder called Perfect Tenant, there was a spreadsheet called timeline.xslx, a text document called perfecttenant.docx, and a subfolder called libbie images.
The spreadsheet consisted of a single sheet, little more than a list with a column for date and one for details. Automatically, Tom’s eyes jumped to the bottom of the list to find the most recent items.
Entries for the last few days included Rusty, Photo shoot, and Pierson Newport misc anomalies. Had Alice given him these details, or had he found them himself?
Before then, there were entries for when Libbie had moved into the apartment, and when she’d first visited to inspect the property.
And before that: Release date.
Release?
Had she been in jail? Above that, dated ninety days before, he found an entry for Libbie’s admission to a secure mental health facility in upstate New York. He switched windows to the web browser and flicked through the history to find that Google map: sure enough, it centered on that medical facility.
He returned to the spreadsheet, but it was frustrating, a summary with no detail. She’d been in a secure facility before coming here, there had been some kind of hearing, but for what?
He switched to the document Walter had called perfecttenant.docx. It consisted of a number of sub-sections, each with a title that corresponded with entries in the timeline: Hearing, Hospital, Rental.
Again, he glanced at the more recent entries first. Under Rental, Walter had outlined incidents involving Rusty, Marissa, and Pierson Newport.
Marissa: being used to drive a wedge? How? Why?
Rusty: photo montage? Accomplice or patsy?
Pierson Newport: document manipulation? Hacking? Sabotage?
But what really interested him was earlier, before she’d entered their lives. If Walter’s notes were to be believed, Libbie had been committed to a secure hospital after accusations she’d beaten a dog t
o death with a baseball bat.
Tom sat there actually shaking his head in disbelief.
Surely, that must be another person?
She’d been put on trial for the incident, but the trial had been suspended on health grounds and the judge had committed her for a minimum of ninety days at the hospital.
Again, Walter’s notes were minimal, but he’d included links in the document.
Tom clicked on the first link and found an official record of the aborted trial from the County Court.
He skimmed through it, feeling sick. The account of the violence meted out on the poor dog, barely more than a puppy, was both heartbreaking and described in cold, graphic detail.
The judge’s comments as he committed Libbie for treatment were understated in the way only an official statement can be. …cause for grave concern … public welfare grounds … obsessive personality disorder … anger management … risk of escalation…
Obsessive personality disorder. Escalation. He had to get all this to Jason Grande. They really had to get Libbie out of their lives!
Walter had found a whole bunch of official records about the trial and the hospital, most of it densely worded legalese. Tom skimmed until he could take no more.
If Libbie Burchett—or whatever her name was—was not a full-blown psychopath, she was well on her way to becoming one!
One of the documents had implied this, while avoiding coming right out and saying it. Sociopathy was mentioned in one of the files.
Tom tried to remember the difference between a psychopath and a sociopath. Neither had the ability to empathize with other people and both were cold, manipulative, selfish and cruel. He thought the distinction came down to psychopaths being born that way, while sociopaths became that way because something damaged them. Maybe? He wasn’t sure.
He wondered what had made Libbie the way she was.
He paused to check at the office doorway. No sign of Tuckett. He didn’t believe he’d left yet: he wouldn’t leave Tom alone in the building. But at least he was giving him some space.
He went back to Walter’s desk and sat.
Walter had been thorough, but he hadn’t picked up on all the strange things that had been happening since Libbie turned up.
In particular, there was that mascot. It had been one of the first things she’d given them, an unexpected act of generosity that both played on his hobby and touched on the long-standing joke about his support for the Brewers.
But it was a summer camp mascot, one that reached back into Tom’s youth.
That had to mean something.
He opened a new browser tab and typed in Long Valley Summer Camp, and then added Libbie Cottrill, using the real surname Walter had found for her.
The search came up with a random set of results. Long, valley, summer and camp were all common words, after all. He put that search term in quotes to force the results to be more specific and then decided to change Libbie to Elizabeth, the full version of her name that had been used in the court proceedings.
Elizabeth Cottrill.
It was like seeing an approaching car’s headlights over the horizon before actually seeing what was coming.
He could sense his brain playing catch-up.
He found a set of results from an old Flickr account. A bunch of images of kids by a lake that was set deep in a forest. Long Valley camp.
The kids were all wearing orange t-shirts, the same shade as the painted-over jersey on the summer camp mascot figurine Libbie had given him.
One by one, he clicked on the right arrow, working through the old photographs.
Until he found it.
Another group of kids, standing with arms around each other’s shoulders, grinning and waving for the camera.
One of the kids was a twelve-year-old Tom, his features rounded by baby-fat and his then-golden hair longer than he recalled. It was unmistakably him. He was standing on the right-hand side of the group with Tony Capaldi, Simon Woodforde, and Andy Krabbe, all under the watchful eye of one of the camp assistants.
And there, standing at the front of the group photo, equally unmistakable with that shock of chestnut hair and the defiant tilt of the head, was Libbie Burchett, known then as Elizabeth Cottrill.
Chapter 34
Alice tried to sleep after Tom left.
She couldn’t, though. The hospital was too noisy and her body was in a strangely agitated state. She couldn’t recall if this was a normal response, as her physiology adjusted itself back to normal blood sugar levels again.
She didn’t care.
All she knew was that she was unsettled, agitated.
It didn’t help that the hot nurse had kept checking on her. He kept coming in and disturbing her peace until finally she demanded to know why he was being so solicitous. He confessed that Tom had asked him to keep a close check on her.
“He said you were suffering anxiety.”
“Anxiety? I am now. Look, I just want to settle down. I could do that so much better without this thing.”
She raised an arm to indicate the drip, and the cannula taped in position on the back of her wrist. He checked her charts, and finally agreed she didn’t need the drip any more.
It still didn’t help her settle, though.
She’d be going home in the morning. She just wished she could go now. All the noise here. All the sounds of activity, the people rushing past her door, the…
Someone was standing in the doorway, a big, angular figure that almost had to duck to get under the frame.
“Rusty? What are you doing here? Is everything okay?”
“Mrs. Granger.” He seemed out of breath.
“What is it, Rusty?”
Even at the worst of times, she hadn’t been easy with the way Tom had acted against the boy. She still couldn’t bring herself to believe he was any kind of threat.
“It’s Mr. Granger,” he said. He wouldn’t step into the room, as if some invisible boundary existed to stop him. “He sent me here. Said that it’s urgent.”
Alice glanced across at her purse. If Tom had called, she hadn’t seen or heard anything. But then he’d made a show of putting her phone out of reach in her purse before he left. Told her she needed to concentrate on getting better and not on catching up with her work emails, which they both knew she wanted to do.
He must have found out something. She knew he’d gone to see if there was anything on Walter’s computer.
“What is it, Rusty? Why did Tom send you?”
“He… I didn’t quite understand, Mrs. Granger. He said he’d discovered something terrible and you’re in danger here at the hospital. He gave me an address where I’m to drop you, where you’ll be safe. What’s going on, Mrs. Granger? It just doesn’t make sense that he’d want you to bail from the hospital like that.”
The boy was out of his depth. Maybe they all were, but it was written clear across his pock-marked face. He was a boy who liked routine, who liked certainties in his life, and struggled with anything that deviated from that.
“It’s okay, Rusty. You did well. Thank you.”
She pushed herself upright and swung her legs clear of the bedding, turning to sit on the edge of the mattress.
Rusty’s eyes flashed down at the exposed flesh of her legs, and then away, his cheeks flushing a deep crimson.
“What’re you doing, Mrs. Granger?”
“I’m about to get dressed, Rusty. So I think you should give me that address and leave before you see something you shouldn’t, all right?”
He’d already taken a couple of steps backward, his gaze still averted.
“I can’t leave you, Mrs. Granger. I’m to take you there. That’s what he said.”
“No, Rusty. You’ve done enough. But thank you.”
She remembered Libbie’s warnings about Rusty, but when she looked at him she just saw a scared, confused kid, not some deranged psychopath. There was only one person who met that description in all this, and Alice wanted Rusty safely a
way from it all.
“Go home, Rusty.”
She reached for the fastening of her hospital gown. Cruel to play him with his own shyness, but Tom wouldn’t have sent this warning if he didn’t mean it. She had to move.
“I’ll wait out in the hallway.”
“No, Rusty. Just go. You’re a real kind-hearted gentleman for wanting to stay, but I’ve got this.” Then she played her final, almost childish, trump card. “If you like me, Rusty, go home now, knowing you’ve done the right thing.”
He stared at her, clearly torn. It was a riddle he couldn’t solve. He liked her—of course he did!—so he should go, but then if he liked her so much he had to stay and make sure she was okay.
His need for order triumphed. She’d given him a clear instruction, and he always did what Mrs. Granger asked. That was the way of his world.
“I guess, if you’re sure…?”
“I’m sure.”
Without further argument, Rusty turned and left.
When Alice went over to the door to check, there was no sign of him in the hallway.
She pushed the door closed and turned.
She only had a few things here. The clothes she’d been wearing had been taken away by the police; they had Walter’s blood on them from when she’d found him. But Tom had brought some fresh ones in for when she got out tomorrow.
She pulled on underwear, jogging pants, bra, t-shirt, sweatshirt and sneakers. It was a random combo, and not things she normally wore, but it would do.
“And what do you think you’re doing?”
She turned. The hot nurse stood in the doorway, tall and muscular. Shaking his shaved head. “You look as if you’re going for a run.”
She looked down at herself. The sweatshirt, the jogging pants, the sneakers.
“I… I needed some fresh air.”
“You need some rest.” He came into the room. “Listen, I know you just want to get out of here, but you need to rest for the time being. You can get all the fresh air you need tomorrow, you hear me?”
“I guess. I just…”
“I know. But if you think you’re going out for a nature walk on my watch, you’re badly mistaken.”
She reached for her top and paused, eyebrows raised.
