Broken Promise: A Thriller

by Linwood Barclay

  “Bus terminal. Christ, I can’t hear myself think.”

  Gaynor turned his head around every three seconds to catch Matthew’s eye. “Hey, sport, come on! It’s okay! Have some Cheerios.”

  The tiny round “O”s of cereal were littered across the backseat. Matthew showed no interest in them beyond batting them about with his tiny hands.

  “I need to get him home,” Gaynor said. “He’s been out all morning and he needs a good sleep.”

  “Soon enough,” Sturgess said.

  “Who’s at the bus terminal? Sarita? Is it her?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “From her neighbor. Where she was calling from. She said a cab picked her up a little while ago to take her there. She’s getting a bus to New York.”

  Matthew’s shrieking persisted.

  “Goddamn it!” Sturgess said. “I can’t think with all that screaming!”

  Gaynor made a fist and struck it against the top of the steering wheel.

  “Shut up! What the fuck would you like me to do? Rosemary is dead! Do you remember? My wife is fucking dead! Sarita took off! I’m his fucking father! What would you like me to do?” He raised his eyebrows, as if inviting a response. “Chuck him out the window? Leave him on a church doorstep? If you’ve got an idea I’d like to hear it!”

  Sturgess said nothing, stared straight ahead. Matthew continued to wail.

  “Nothing? Maybe you’ve got another needle? Want to stick it in him? Is that what’s going on in your head?”

  “Just get us to the bus station,” Sturgess said. “The sooner we find Sarita the sooner you can go home and look after your son.”

  Gaynor, slowly depressurizing, said, “I never should have listened to you.”

  “What?”

  “I never . . . never should have gone along with you on this.”

  Sturgess sighed. It was not the first time Gaynor had made such a complaint. “Well, Bill, there’s no turning back the clock. You did what you did. We made a deal. Now we’re dealing with the fallout.”

  “Fallout?” Gaynor shot the doctor a look. “Is that what you call my wife getting killed?”

  Sturgess returned the look. “We don’t really know what happened there.”

  Gaynor’s chin quivered. “I got a call, before you asked me to pick you up. They arrested her.”

  “Marla?”

  Gaynor nodded. “They’re picking her up right about now.”

  “Must have happened after I spoke to Agnes,” the doctor said. “She’ll be devastated. Marla, too, of course.”

  “Everything points to her,” Gaynor said.

  “I suppose it does.”

  “But we know she didn’t do it,” Gaynor said. “I mean, we know she didn’t take Matthew. Right?”

  “There are things we know, and things we don’t know. But what we do know is where we’re vulnerable, and that’s where we have to act. Take this turn; it’ll get us there faster.”

  Matthew’s shrieking began to subside.

  “I think he’s crying himself to sleep,” Gaynor said.

  “At last, something to be thankful for. Okay, it’s just up here. We go in; we split up; we try to find her. Any buses waiting to go, we poke our heads in, see if she’s on one of them.”

  “I can’t leave Matthew in the car. Not here. It was okay in the woods, but not here.”

  Sturgess closed his eyes briefly, let out a long breath. Maybe an injection was the way to go. For both of them. There might be enough in the other syringe.

  “There’s no place to park.”

  “For Christ’s sake, park anywhere. I’ll go into the terminal while you get the kid out.”

  “Okay, but— Hey!”

  “What?”

  “They just went the other way!”

  “What? In a car?”

  “Sarita was in it!”

  “What?”

  “I’m sure of it. I caught a glimpse of her in the front seat. I’m sure it was her.”

  Gaynor hit the brakes, looked for an opening in the traffic so he could do a U-turn. “An old Taurus. I’m sure it was her.”

  “Who was driving?”

  “I think it was that guy.”

  “What guy?”

  “Harwood. The one who was at the house with the woman and Matthew.”

  “Shit,” Sturgess said. “Turn around. Go. Go.”

  “There’s cars com—”

  “Cut the fuck in!”

  Matthew resumed crying.

  Gaynor cut off someone in an Explorer, endured a blaring horn and an extended middle finger. He hit the gas. The Taurus was two cars ahead.

  “If I catch up to them, then what?” Gaynor asked.

  “Follow them for a while. It’s too busy here. Too many people.”

  “Too many people for what?”

  “Just stay on them, see where they go.”

  “What if they’re headed to the police?” Gaynor asked.

  The doctor didn’t have an immediate response to that. Instead he reached down toward the floor, where a small leather bag sat between his feet. He opened it, took out a syringe and a small glass vial.

  “Jack,” Gaynor said warily.

  “We’ll have to get very close to them, of course. Engage them in conversation. I need to bring him down first. Once he’s been done, it’ll be easier to do the nanny.”

  “Christ, Jack, what’s happened to you? You already killed one man.”

  The doctor shot him a look. “I seem to remember you were there. I seem to remember you digging a hole for his body. I seem to remember us putting him in there together and covering him up. Do you remember those events differently?”

  “This is crazy. We’re not . . . we’re not these kinds of people.”

  “Maybe we weren’t,” Sturgess said. “But we are now. If we want to survive.” He turned away, looked out the passenger window.

  “This has to end,” the doctor said.

  FIFTY-NINE

  David

  “LET’S go,” I said to Sarita, sitting next to me in the bus terminal. “The police might come looking for you here.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t we just drive. And talk.”

  I wondered whether she would try to run. Hoping she wouldn’t want to take off without her luggage, I stood and grabbed the handle of her bag. “I’ll take this for you,” I said. “I’m just parked outside.”

  Slowly, resignedly, she stood. We walked in measured paces toward the door. I didn’t want her to fall behind, didn’t want her out of my sight for a second. Once we were outside, I pointed to my mother’s car. “I’m just up here.”

  I opened the front passenger door, got her settled in, watched her do up her seat belt, then dropped her bag into the trunk. I got in next to her, started the engine, and headed off.

  “You said we would just drive, right?”

  I nodded.

  “No going to the police station.”

  Another nod.

  “I want you to tell me what happened. I want you to tell me why you’ve been on the run, why you’ve disappeared.”

  Sarita said nothing.

  I decided to start with the big question. “Did you kill Rosemary Gaynor?”

  Her eyes went wide with shock. “Is that what people think? Is that what the police think?”

  “They think Marla did it,” I said. “But I don’t. So I’m asking you if you did it.”

  “No!” she said. “I did not kill Ms. Gaynor! I loved her! She was good to me. She was a very good lady. I loved working for her. It’s a horrible thing what happened to her.”

  “Do you know who did kill her?”

  Sarita hesitated. “I don’
t.”

  “But do you have an idea?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. It was just . . . it was so awful.”

  The way she said it told me something. “You found her. You were there.”

  “I found her,” she said, nodding. “But I wasn’t there when it happened. I must have gotten there right after.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I got there in the afternoon. I had done an early morning shift at Davidson Place. I have two jobs. Many days I work a shift at one and a shift at the other, although at the Gaynors’, I do not call it a shift. A shift is when you work for a company, but they’re a family, so it is different. But I did my shift at Davidson, then took the bus to the Gaynors’. I have a key, but I always ring the bell. It is courtesy. You do not walk straight into a person’s house. But I rang the bell and no one answered. I thought maybe Ms. Gaynor was out. Maybe she was shopping or something like that. Or maybe she was in the bathroom, or changing Matthew’s diaper and could not come to the door right away. So in a case like that, I use my key to open the door.”

  “So you went inside.”

  “Yes, but it turns out the door was open. I come in, and I call for her. I figure she must be home because the door is not locked. I call a few times, and she does not answer, and then I go into . . .”

  She turned her head down and toward the window. Her shoulders shook. While I waited, I took a left, followed by a right, taking a route that would lead us out of downtown.

  Sarita lifted her head, but did not glance my way as she continued. “I go into the kitchen and she is there, and there is blood everywhere, and even though I am afraid to, I touch her, just in case maybe she is not dead, maybe she is breathing, maybe there is a pulse, but she is dead.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I . . . I . . .”

  “You did not call the police.”

  She shook her head. “I did not. I could not do that. I am in this country illegally and no one knows about me. Not officially. Someone like me, the police don’t care what happens to me. They would find a way to charge me with something, maybe even think that I did it, that I killed Ms. Gaynor, because that is what they will do. But I called Marshall so he could come get me.”

  She paused, caught her breath. “You asked me if I had any idea who did it.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I had to wonder . . . I had to wonder if it was Mr. Gaynor.”

  “Why?”

  “I wondered if he knew that his wife was starting to figure things out. That he’d never been honest with her about everything. I wondered if maybe she had confronted him and he’d gotten angry with her. But even so, I mean, I didn’t like him; I never liked him, but he didn’t seem like a man who would do something like that.”

  “Sarita, what are you talking about?”

  “It’s all my fault,” she said, and started to cry. “If that’s what happened, it’s all my fault. I should have kept quiet. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  We were heading north out of Promise Falls. With lighter traffic, it was easier to concentrate on what Sarita was saying. Although I was having a hard time figuring out what she was talking about.

  “Said anything about what?”

  “I knew about Marla,” she said. “I knew about your cousin. I knew what had happened at the hospital.”

  “About her trying to take a baby?”

  Sarita nodded. “I have friends who work at the hospital who also work at Davidson, and everyone was talking about the girl who tried to steal a baby. That she was out of her head because her own baby had died a few months earlier. And I heard that it was Dr. Sturgess who was the crazy lady’s doctor.”

  “You know Dr. Sturgess,” I said.

  Sarita nodded. “He is the Gaynors’ doctor. And he and Mr. Gaynor are old friends, from a long time ago.”

  I glanced in my mirror. There was a car there, a black sedan that looked a lot like a car I’d seen in my mirror a few minutes ago. It did not look like a police car.

  “They talk a lot,” Sarita said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The doctor would come over, and they would go into Mr. Gaynor’s office. He has an office in the home. They would close the door and they would talk many times.”

  “About what?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I hear bits and pieces. Usually about money. I think Mr. Gaynor had a problem. And maybe the doctor, too.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  “Gambling, I think. They both had troubles like that. Ms. Gaynor, sometimes she would talk to me, tell me her husband made good money working for the insurance company, but there were times when they still had money problems because Mr. Gaynor liked to bet on things. Dr. Sturgess, too. He was way worse.”

  While I believed some of what Sarita was telling me, I felt she was holding back. I couldn’t help but think she was more involved in this than she was letting on. I kept coming back to my earlier theory.

  That Marla’d been set up.

  Maybe Dr. Sturgess and Bill Gaynor had planned the murder and needed someone to pin it on. Marla was a perfect patsy. Sturgess knew her history and how to exploit it.

  But how did Marla end up with the baby?

  Then it hit me.

  “What do you wear?” I asked Sarita.

  “Excuse me?”

  “When you work at Davidson House. What do you wear? Do you wear a uniform?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Would you show up for work sometimes at the Gaynors’ in your uniform?”

  “Yes,” she said again. “A lot of times I would get changed at their house, get back into my regular clothes.”

  “Describe it,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Describe your uniform.”

  She shook her head, not understanding the question, or at least not what I was getting at by asking. “Pants, a top. Simple.”

  “White pants? A white top?”

  Sarita blinked. “Yes. All white.”

  An angel.

  “You delivered Matthew to Marla,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “When I found Matthew, found he was alive upstairs in his nursery, I wanted to get him out of the house. I grabbed him, a few of his things, the stroller, left the house, and locked it.”

  “You left that smudge on the door. At Marla’s house. You left some of Rosemary Gaynor’s blood on the door.”

  Slowly she nodded. “I don’t know. I guess that is possible. There might have been blood on my hand; I might have touched something. I don’t exactly remember. But I think . . . when I got there, I felt like I was going to pass out from what I had seen, and I put my hand up so I would not fall down.”

  I believed I’d just saved my cousin from a lifetime in prison.

  But there was more I needed to know.

  “There’s more you haven’t told me,” I said. “You were in on it with them.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I had nothing to do with Ms. Gaynor getting killed. I didn’t do anything with her husband or her doctor. But . . . my boyfriend, that’s a different story.”

  “What?”

  “Marshall is being very, very stupid. He’s been trying to get money out of Mr. Gaynor, and it’s very wrong what he’s doing, but he wouldn’t listen to me. And I don’t know what’s happened to him. He was supposed to come back to the house, but he hasn’t been answering his phone. I haven’t been able to get in touch with him.”

  Jesus, there was more going on here than I could have imagined. But I moved ahead with my argument.

  “Come on, Sarita. They—Sturgess and Gaynor, or maybe just one of them, I don’t know—decided Rosemary was better off dead.” She’d just told me Gaynor needed money. Maybe there was a hefty life insur
ance policy on his wife.

  I continued. “So they set out to frame Marla for it. And you made the delivery. You took the baby to her and knew eventually the police would find out. You’re the connection.”

  “No,” Sarita said. “You have it all wrong. I was trying to do a good thing.”

  “A good thing. What the hell—”

  That was when I started hearing a horn.

  The black car that had been trailing behind us was on our bumper. The driver was leaning on the horn and flashing his lights.

  SIXTY

  WHILE Marla was being booked and fingerprinted, Barry Duckworth went over to his desk and sat down.

  Exhausted.

  He wasn’t sure about Marla, but when the lab reported back that the blood on the door of her house did indeed match up with Rosemary Gaynor’s, the chief and the district attorney made the decision: Bring her in.

  And so he did.

  She hadn’t said a word the entire way to the station. Just sat in the back of the cruiser as if in some kind of trance. Duckworth had to admit he felt sorry for this girl, even if she had done it. The things that had happened to her had left their mark. The girl was damaged. And her parents weren’t making her life any better. He’d heard them screaming at each other while he waited for someone to open the door.

  You met a lot of fucked-up people in this line of work.

  He moved his computer mouse and the screen came to life. He had two new e-mails. He’d heard his phone ding a couple of times in the last hour, but hadn’t had a moment to look at it.

  The first one was from a Sandra Bottsford, manager of the Boston hotel where Bill Gaynor had been staying when his wife had been murdered. She wrote that she had information for him, and asked him to call her.

  The second e-mail was from Wanda Therrieult, the coroner. It was short. Call me, it said.

  Duckworth decided to call the hotel manager first. He got bounced around some. Bottsford was somewhere in the building, so they transferred him to her cell when he explained who he was.

  Finally she answered. “Bottsford.”

  “It’s Detective Duckworth, in Promise Falls. I just got your e-mail. Thanks for getting back to me.”

  “No problem. I could have explained it in the e-mail, but I thought you might have extra questions, so I figured we should just talk.”