Bad Move zw-1

by Linwood Barclay

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about moving. Back into our old neighborhood. It might, it might not be the same house. Not the exact same one. But something in that neighborhood, on Crandall, or maybe a street over. We could shop at Angelo’s again, and you could get cannolis, and the kids could go back to their old school. It would be like we never lived out here at all.”

  Sarah bit her lip and looked away for a moment. She took a finger and wiped at the corner of one eye.

  “I could call somebody, get this place assessed, put this place on the market, see what we could get for it. I mean, we’d probably have a mortgage again, it’s going to cost us more to buy down there, but I could go work for a paper again. Cover city hall, take pictures, whatever.”

  Sarah sniffed, took a tentative step into the room, then a couple more. When she was a foot away, I leaned forward in my chair and slipped my arms around her thighs, pressed my face into her stomach. We remained that way for a while, and then I said, “I’m not sure this house is a place anymore from which to make good memories. And I know we have lots more to make.”

  She nodded, sniffed again, looked at the folder of newspaper clippings on my desk.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Just some stuff,” I said. “Why don’t you go to bed, and I’ll be up in a bit. And in the morning, we can talk some more about what we should do.”

  When she left, I closed the door and returned to my desk and opened the folder. Back when I had first collected these clippings, with the idea of possibly doing a book on the case someday, I had arranged them in chronological order.

  The first story, dated October 9, carried this headline: “Police Comb Neighborhood for Girl, 5.”

  My recollection was that this story hadn’t made the front page. It had been splashed across the top of page three, six columns, with a picture of Jesse Shuttleworth. It was a blurry photo, no doubt blown up from a cheap snapshot, and the larger it got, the poorer the definition. She had curly red hair, brown eyes, a smile to melt your heart. The story rated about fifteen inches. The editors probably hadn’t wanted to go crazy with it. Not yet. She would only have been missing a few hours by the time the first edition closed. She could be at a friend’s, she might be lost. You didn’t want to go and put it on page one, then, just as the paper hit the streets, have people hear on their car radios that she’d been found at a sleepover. So you hedged your bet, you put it on three.

  The story, by Renata Sears, one of the paper’s tireless police reporters, read:

  The city was holding its breath last night as police combed the Dailey Gardens neighborhood in their hunt for little Jesse Shuttleworth, a 5-year-old kindergarten student who vanished from the park sometime yesterday afternoon.

  Jesse’s mother, Carrie Shuttleworth, 32, of Langley Ave., told police Jesse had been playing across the street from their home, in the Dailey mini-park, around 4:15 p.m. when she went missing.

  The teary-eyed mother, at a hastily called news conference on her front porch last night, said Jesse had been playing on the swings, and was always good about coming straight home.

  “I just want her to be okay,” she said. “I’m just praying that she gets home safely.”

  Police refused to speculate about the nature of Jesse’s disappearance, but they have set up a command post at the park, and asked neighbors with any possible information to please drop by. “At the moment, this is a missing-child case, as simple as that,” said Sgt. Dominic Marchi. “We’re hoping that she’ll turn up any time now.”

  Police would not discuss a rumor of a scraggly-haired man who was seen near the park earlier in the day.

  The second day, however, the Jesse Shuttleworth disappearance was the only story in the city. It took up three-quarters of the front page, with a simple two-word headline in a font size normally reserved to announce the end of the world: “Where’s Jesse?” Sears was still on the story.

  Her dolls are lined up along the top of her pillows, as though waiting for Jesse to come home.

  Renata knew how to lay it on.

  It has been more than 30 hours since little Jesse Shuttleworth went missing from a park in Dailey Gardens, and despite one of the most intensive police searches in the city’s history, there’s so far no sign of her.

  A mother sits in anguish at the kitchen table, waiting for a call, any news, good or bad, about Jesse’s whereabouts. Carrie Shuttleworth, a single mom who works by day in a laundry and at a coffee shop at night to support herself and her only daughter, says Jesse is a wonderful child, who loves Robert Munsch stories and, perhaps most wonderful of all, shuns Barney the purple dinosaur.

  Neighbors have joined in the search, examining their own backyards and pools and garages. Perhaps, police say, Jesse wandered off and injured herself and no one has heard her cries for help. That’s why, they say, it’s so important to find her quickly.

  Today, police are asking for volunteers to meet them at Dailey Park at 9 a.m. From there, they intend to have teams of people walk shoulder to shoulder through the nearby ravine looking not only for Jesse herself, but any possible clues to her disappearance.

  Randy Flaherty, a father of two who lives next door to the Shuttleworths, is among those who plan to be at the park this morning to help.

  “We can’t imagine what might have happened. This is such a nice neighborhood, the families know each other, we all look out for each other, and we’re all thinking the same thing.”

  Police still refuse to say whether they think Jesse’s disappearance is an abduction. They’ve already ruled out family abduction-Jesse’s father, who lives in Ohio, flew in yesterday to console his ex-wife and help in the search.

  As for whether it could be an abduction by a stranger, Sgt. Dominic Marchi would only say, “We have to accept that that is a possibility. While we don’t know that it is at this time, it is one of the avenues we have to explore.”

  The third-day story focused on the search and Carrie Shuttleworth’s continued anguish. And they kept finding new pictures of Jesse, at a community pool, on a nursery school trip to a petting zoo. It was for faces like hers that cameras had been invented. I knew. I had seen her at Angelo’s Fruit Market.

  The ravine search turned up nothing. No Jesse. No scraps of clothing. No discarded shoe.

  On the fourth day, the story went in the direction everyone feared most.

  A woman about ten houses up from Jesse’s, who rented out rooms, had gone looking for some overdue rent from one of her boarders, a man named Devlin Smythe. She hadn’t seen him around for a couple of days, not since the news broke about that poor girl down the street. She had wondered if maybe he’d volunteered for the search, and that had made her hold off for a day on demanding the money she was owed. How would that look? she thought. A guy’s trying to help find some little girl and you throw him out on the street.

  But she hadn’t seen Smythe around, not even at night, and she began to wonder whether he’d skipped out on her for good.

  She went upstairs and banged on the door of his room, but there was no answer. So she used her passkey to go inside.

  It was as she’d feared. There were no shoes or boots by the door, no clothes in his closet. He’d packed up and gone, but not without leaving her a mess. There were dirty dishes in the sink, cereal bowls filled with ashes from his smoking. The place reeked of cigarette smoke. It was going to take a few days to clean up before she could rent to anyone else.

  How bad, she must have wondered, had he left the fridge?

  Sears wrote:

  She had been jammed in with a container of sour cream that had turned green, some wilted celery, and an open can of chicken noodle soup. It was a final resting place of such monstrous indignity that even hardened officers found themselves turning away.

  Jesse Shuttleworth had been suffocated.

  Subsequent stories yielded further details. The landlady was interviewed at length and put together wi
th a police sketch artist. The man known to police as Devlin Smythe had a shaggy head of dirty blond hair, a moustache, strong chin. He was described as stocky and stood an inch or two under six feet.

  They reproduced the sketch in the paper. I tried to imagine him without the hair and the moustache. How he might look with a shaved head.

  He was a chain-smoker. “You never saw him without a cigarette,” the landlady said.

  He did odd jobs. He was, according to one man, a talented electrician. He had rewired a house for someone in the neighborhood. “He was good at it, and quick, too. He liked to get paid under the table.”

  He possessed the skills, I thought, to bypass an electric meter.

  Another man came forward to tell police Devlin Smythe had done some landscaping work for him. It was from this man that police learned Smythe had a tattoo.

  It was on his right shoulder. Small, police said. Of a melted watch, in the style of Salvador Dali.

  I put the clipping down, went into the kitchen, and ran myself a glass of water from the tap. In the cupboard I found a bottle of Tylenol, shook out two caplets, and downed them. Standing there in the kitchen, where so much horror had transpired only a few days earlier, it occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t over yet.

  Sleep never came to me that night. I kept running things through my mind, bits and pieces of conversation.

  How Earl claimed never to have lived downtown, that he’d come from the East Coast, or the West, I was trying to remember. But there was that night, when I’d blundered into his house and discovered his growing operation, and I’d happened to mention that this sort of thing had never happened when we’d lived in the city, on Crandall.

  Earl had said something along the lines of “You lived on Crandall? Nice area. There was that little fruit market down at the end of the street.”

  The inconsistency hadn’t meant anything to me then. But it meant a lot now. Especially knowing that Carrie Shuttleworth used to take her daughter to that fruit market.

  It didn’t have to mean anything, I told myself. There had to be at least a few guys in the world with tattoos of melted watches on their shoulders. Dali had pretty much made the melted watch an iconic symbol.

  And the chain-smoking. Millions of people chain-smoked.

  And the business about being skilled at electrical work. And the landscaping. That could all be coincidence, too.

  You wouldn’t hang a guy based on evidence this flimsy.

  So why couldn’t I sleep? Why did I have this terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach?

  “Why don’t we do something on the barbecue tonight?” Sarah said. I was walking her out to her car.

  “That sounds good,” I said. It was also good to have my wife speaking to me again, even if it was only about menus.

  “When did you come to bed last night?” she asked.

  “It was late, sometime after midnight.”

  “You working on something new?”

  “Sort of. I was looking through some old clippings I’d kept, on the Jesse Shuttleworth case.”

  Sarah frowned, shook her head sadly. “With all we’ve been through, I can’t even think about something like that right now. Why were you looking at those?”

  Across the street, Earl was throwing some gardening tools in the back of his pickup.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’m just trying to find some sort of focus.”

  Sarah got in the car, did up her seat belt. She powered down the window. “Why don’t you pick up some burgers, stuff like that? For around six? And then, after, we can talk about that other thing you mentioned last night.”

  I nodded. I leaned down, kissed her through the open window, a little peck on her cheek, up close to her eye. She backed out and drove off, but didn’t wave.

  Earl did, though. And started walking across the street. Earl never came across the street to initiate a conversation. I was usually the one who drifted over there.

  “Hey, Zack,” he said.

  “Earl,” I said, smiling.

  “I see things are getting back to normal, little bit more every day.” He put a cigarette between his lips, lit up.

  “For sure. Got to go shopping for another car. Insurance company’s going to give us what the Civic was worth, but that doesn’t amount to much. It was pretty old.”

  Earl stood three feet away from me, gazed up and down the street.

  “So,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  There was a slight breeze, and his smoke blew into my face.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “No problem,” I said.

  We watched two cars drive by, then a minivan. “Paul,” Earl said. “You decide to let him get that tattoo?”

  I shook my head. “No. He’s too young.”

  Earl nodded. “I think you’re right. That’s too young. Got to be at least old enough to get drunk. That’s how most people get their tattoos.”

  We shared a laugh over that one.

  “Well,” Earl said, “I got work to do.”

  “Same here,” I said.

  I turned back to the house and Earl walked back across the street to his. I glanced back once and saw that he was watching me over his shoulder.

  Shit.

  Now I was rethinking everything. Not just whether Earl was, in fact, Devlin Smythe. I’d pretty much made up my mind on that one. Now I was rethinking motives.

  Why had Earl agreed to help me that night?

  A man with a marijuana-growing operation in his basement had a lot to lose by getting mixed up in somebody else’s business, especially if that business was likely to involve the police.

  Why hadn’t he turned down my request for help? Or at the very least, just given me his gun to use? Why come along?

  I’d thought it was because, deep down, Earl had some sense of honor. I hadn’t turned him in, and he owed me one. But now I had a feeling there was more to it than that. That maybe Earl had acted out of self-interest. That helping me out of a jam that night had provided him some sort of an opportunity. And it seemed to me that he had made this decision around the time that Trixie and I told him about the murder of Stefanie Knight, and the roll of film that showed her in bed with Roger Carpington.

  Why would Earl care about any of that? Who were these people to him?

  Later, in the afternoon, I put in a call to Dominic Marchi. I was transferred a couple of times before we connected.

  I introduced myself, said I was looking into the Jesse Shuttleworth case with the idea of doing a freelance article on it for The Metropolitan.

  “I know that name,” Marchi said, referring to mine. “You’re the guy, was in the house with his wife, the crooked development thing, nearly got killed.”

  “Yes.”

  “Used to cover city hall a few years ago, too, am I right?” I admitted it. “I remember names,” he said. “Faces too. Anyway, I’m not your guy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m going to put you through to one of the detectives who’s still working that case. Lorenzo Penner. Hang on, I’ll try to transfer you. But if the line goes dead, call back the main switchboard and ask for extension 3120.”

  He conducted the transfer successfully. The extension rang twice, then picked up. “Penner.”

  I identified myself again, and for a second time admitted that yes, I was the guy in the house with the wife and the killer, et cetera. I told him I had questions about the Shuttleworth murder.

  “File’s still open. We’re still workin’ it. What can I tell you. It’s been nearly two years, but we check out every lead we get.”

  “There was something on the radio a couple of weeks ago, that Devlin Smythe had been spotted out near Seattle and Vancouver.”

  “Yeah, we had some tips, but they didn’t pan out. We don’t have any reason to believe he’s out there any more than any other place.”

  “Do you think he could still be in the area?”

  “I suppose it�
��s possible. But he would have had to change his appearance. The sketch we put out was pretty good, we think.”

  “Did you ever do up any other sketches, of how he might have looked if he’d done that? Changed his look? Like if he’d grown a beard, say?”

  Penner said, “Yeah, we did. But we didn’t release them to the media because really, even your first sketch is still just that, a sketch. Once you start drawing different variations of what’s already an artist’s impression of someone’s recollection, well, you see the problem.”

  “Sure, I guess. Did you ever do one as if he’d shaved his head, lost the moustache, anything like that?”

  “I think we did.”

  “How would you feel about faxing it to me?”

  Penner hesitated. “Mr. Walker, do you know something about this?”

  “I’m interested,” I said. “I’ve followed it from the beginning, and I’ve been thinking about maybe doing a book on the case.”

  “I thought you just wrote science fiction. That’s what it said in the paper.”

  “Up to now, yeah.”

  “So, you think maybe this Smythe guy, he was an alien?”

  You see what I mean about respect and sci-fi writers? I didn’t take the bait, and said instead, “Will you fax it to me, or not?”

  “Give me your number. Five minutes.” And he hung up.

  I sat in my study, staring at the fax machine for a good half hour before it rang, started doing its little hum.

  And then the sketch started sliding, scalp first, out of the machine. Then it beeped, disconnected. I took the single sheet out of the tray, turned it around, and looked at it.

  Howdy, neighbor.

  I kept coming back to the shovel.

  Walking over to Mindy’s Market-it was only about a twenty-minute stroll-to pick up some ground beef and buns and some fixings for salad, I tried to work things out in my head.