Fear the Worst

by Linwood Barclay

  “Just about everyone else who runs a business near the hotel,” I said.

  Jennings’s eyes were piercing. “Have there been others?”

  “Other what?”

  “Other misunderstandings? Like the one you had with Ian Shaw?”

  “No,” I said.

  Jennings didn’t look convinced. She was about to ask me something else when her cell rang. She dug her phone from her purse, looked at who was calling, and said, “I have to take this.” She turned and stepped away.

  I took the opportunity to go into Laura Cantrell’s office with my warm, damp ice pack.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She took it from me gingerly, looking for a place to put it down where it wouldn’t leave a wet spot, and finally set it atop a crinkled copy of Motor Trend.

  “I’m taking a leave,” I said.

  “Tim,” she said.

  “I’m going to look for Sydney and I’m not coming back until I’ve found her. If I have to, I’ll put my house up for sale to keep myself afloat.”

  “I guess you do what you have to do,” she said. “But you know, at the end of the day, I can’t hold on to your job forever.”

  “I’d expect nothing more.”

  “Jesus, Tim, I know you’re going through a lot, but you don’t have to be an asshole.”

  “I’ll turn my contacts over to Andy. He can have my customers. He’s already got a head start.”

  “I was going to tell you about that,” she said.

  “I don’t care, Laura,” I said.

  I was about to turn and leave when Laura said, “This is kind of difficult, Tim, but…”

  “What?” I asked.

  “You are driving a company car.”

  I wanted to see whether she could look me in the eye and ask for my keys, and damned if she didn’t. “I can help you out as best I can, but I can’t justify giving a car to someone on a leave,” she said.

  Riverside Honda had plenty of used cars to choose from, but suddenly I didn’t want to give my own employer the business. “Give me a day or two?”

  “Of course,” Laura said.

  “I’ll give Bob a call,” I said, half grinning to myself. “I’ll bet he can put me into something.”

  Detective Jennings was waiting by my desk. Her cell phone was tucked away.

  “Tell me again why you think this guy was going to kill you,” she said.

  “To get Syd to come back. I guess he figured she’d hear, somehow, if I was dead, and she’d feel she had to come back for the funeral.”

  Jennings didn’t say anything for a moment.

  “What?” I asked.

  “That tends to support the idea that Syd is alive.”

  I blinked. “You got some reason to believe that she isn’t?”

  “That was the lab calling,” she said. “We got the DNA results, on the blood from your daughter’s car.”

  I was feeling faint.

  “We got two hits. One was your daughter.”

  I WAS ALREADY FEELING WOOZY. Jennings put me in my own desk chair, then sat down across from me.

  “Some of the blood on the steering wheel and door handle of Sydney’s car turned out to be hers,” Jennings said.

  “That doesn’t mean she’s dead,” I said. “It just means that she lost a bit of blood. She could have had a cut finger or something.”

  “That’s true,” Jennings said.

  I was trying hard to focus, and thought back a couple of sentences. “Some?” I said.

  “Some what?”

  “You said some of the blood on the steering wheel was Syd’s.”

  “We’ve acquired quite a database over the last few years of suspects and convicted criminals.” She paused. “And from the deceased. When we get a DNA sample, we run it against what we already have, see if we get lucky.”

  Lucky.

  She nodded. “The other blood belonged to Randall Tripe.”

  I looked at her oddly. “Should I know that name?”

  “I mentioned him the other day. He’d been involved in everything from identity theft to human trafficking. He was found dead in a Dumpster in Bridgeport a day after you reported Sydney missing. Shot in the chest.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Sydney’s car was found up in Derby. That’s quite a hike from Bridgeport.”

  “Whoever dumped his body in that Dumpster might have taken him from the car in Derby,” Jennings said. “But the way I see it, there’s a couple of ways to explain two different kinds of blood on the car. One, an injured Mr. Tripe had your daughter’s blood on his hands and took off with her car, or an injured Sydney Blake had Mr. Tripe’s blood on her hands and took off in her own car.”

  “But we know Tripe is dead,” I said.

  “Bingo. That’s why I tend to go with number two.”

  “But if Syd had Tripe’s blood on her hands…”

  “Yeah,” Jennings said. “That’s something to think about, isn’t it?”

  I thought about what “Eric” had said. That Sydney hadn’t gotten in touch because she was ashamed of something she’d done.

  IT WAS DARK BY THE TIME I GOT HOME.

  After the kind of day I’d had, I was on high alert, like a mouse slipping through the forest at night wondering how many owls are overhead. I was checking my rearview mirror, looking for vans, scanning the faces of pedestrians I passed on the street, hunting for people in the bushes, looking for lights that were on that should be off, lights that were off that should be on.

  I’d asked Jennings whether I was entitled to some sort of police protection, and she’d said she’d put a call in to the Secret Service. I took her sarcasm to mean the Milford police did not have a lot of extra officers to go around. So I was my own bodyguard, and I didn’t exactly feel up to the job.

  As I pulled into the driveway, the house appeared in order.

  I unlocked the door, went inside, flipped on the front hall light switch. The house looked almost as it had before I’d gone to Seattle. Things back in place, carpets vacuumed, floors swept.

  My nose was throbbing, my head pounding. I went looking for Tylenol in its usual place in the kitchen cupboard, but after the cleanup many things were not where I expected to find them. I hunted around, finally found the bottle, and washed down a couple of pills with some cold water from the tap.

  I stood there, leaning up against the counter, pondering what I would do next. I’d made a decision to devote every waking hour to finding Syd. Now all I had to do was figure out how to use them productively.

  I wondered how Arnie Chilton’s parallel investigation was coming along. Perhaps, by this time, he’d tracked down a Boston cream donut.

  It wasn’t until I was standing there, alone in my kitchen, that I realized how weary I was. I felt as though I had nothing left to give, at least right now.

  I decided the smartest thing to do, for myself and for Syd, was to head straight to bed, get a good night’s rest, start fresh on this in the morning.

  I finished drinking the water, set the glass in the sink. And then, perhaps not sure whether I really should go to bed, I sat down at the kitchen table. Put my head down for a moment onto my folded arms. Turned my head so my injured nose wouldn’t rub up against my arm.

  Maybe I didn’t need to go to bed yet. Maybe, if I just rested for a few moments, it would be enough to recharge my batteries. Then I could spend the rest of the evening coming up with a plan to find Syd. Even though this Eric character didn’t know where she was, maybe if I knew more about him, that would tell me more about what Syd had been into, and then…

  I’m not sure how many times the phone rang before I heard it. I jerked awake, looked up at the clock. It was after midnight. I’d been asleep at the kitchen table for nearly three hours. I pushed the chair back, stumbled over to the phone, and snatched up the receiver.

  I put it to my ear and said, groggily, “Hello?”

  There was some background noise. Music, people shouting.
And then a voice.

  A girl’s voice.

  She said, “Help me.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “SYD?” I SAID. “Syd, is that you?”

  At the other end of the line, crying. “I need you to come and get me.” Her words were slightly slurred. The background music made it difficult to hear her clearly.

  “Syd, where are you? Tell me where you are!” I was feeling overwhelmed, as though my entire body wanted to cry. “I’ll come and get you.”

  “It’s not Syd.”

  “What?” I said.

  “It’s me. It’s Patty.” She sniffed. “Can you come and get me? Please?”

  “Patty?”

  “Can you get me?”

  “What’s happened, Patty? Are you okay?”

  “I hurt myself.” Her words continued to slur.

  “What happened?”

  “I fell down.”

  “Are you drunk, Patty?”

  “I might have had… maybe a few, I don’t know. I’m pretty good.”

  “Patty, you should phone your mom. She’ll come get you. If you want, I’ll call her for you.”

  “Mr. B., like, this time of night, she’ll be more shitfaced than I am.”

  “Have you got money for a cab?” I asked. “Tell me where you are and I’ll send one to take you home. Or I’ll pay him before he heads off.”

  “Please just come get me,” she said.

  I heard a boy talking to her. “Shit, whaddya do to your leg? Why don’t you stop bleeding all over the place and come with us.”

  “Fuck off,” Patty told him.

  “And why don’t you suck this,” the boy said. That was followed by raucous male laughter.

  “Patty,” I said. She wasn’t going to have to ask me again. I didn’t like the sounds of things. I’d go get her.

  “Huh?”

  “Tell me where you are. Right now. Where are you?”

  “I’m on, like… Hey!” She was shouting at someone. “Where the fuck is this?” Someone yelled something back that sounded like “America!”

  “Very funny, asshole!” Patty shouted. She called out to someone else, and then said into the phone, “Okay, you know that road that goes along the beach? Broadway? East Broadway?”

  “Sure.” It was five minutes away, tops. “Where are you along there?”

  “There’s, like, a bunch of houses.”

  It was all houses along there. “Do you see a street sign, Patty?”

  “No, wait, yeah, Gardner?”

  I knew where she was. “I’ll be right there,” I told her. “Don’t move.” I hung up the phone, grabbed my keys, locked the house on the way out, and got into the CR-V.

  It had turned into a muggy night, but instead of flipping the air on I put down the windows. Fresh air blowing through the car would help wake me up. The drive down to East Broadway took only a few minutes. I trolled slowly down the street. Quite a few young people were walking along the sidewalk, a few wandering down the center of the street, a few holding bottles in their hands. Clearly, a big party had taken place somewhere, no doubt in one of the beach houses where the parents were away.

  I drove slowly, not just because I was trying to spot Patty. I didn’t want to run anyone over.

  I slowed to a crawl as I reached Gardner, then came to a full stop. There were twenty kids or more milling about behind one of the houses on the south side of the street, which was right on the beach. All the lights were on and loud music blared from inside. Up at the far end of the street, a police car was making its way.

  I spotted Patty standing on the curb, a tall boy towering over her, bending down, talking into her ear. She had her head turned, like she didn’t want anything to do with him. I wondered why she didn’t just walk away, then noticed the boy had a grip on her arm.

  “Patty!” I called.

  She didn’t hear me. The boy was yelling at her.

  I had the door open and one foot down on the pavement. “Hey!” I shouted. “Let go of her!”

  The boy glanced over, still holding on to Patty. His head wavered a bit and he struggled to focus on me.

  “Patty!” I shouted.

  She ripped her arm away from the boy and started off in my direction. The boy stumbled after her, saying, loud enough for me to hear, “Come on, come with me.”

  She turned back to him, made a jerking gesture with her fist, said, “Do it yourself.”

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  Her hair was scraggly, and as she approached my car I could see she was walking with a decided limp. She was wearing black shorts that fit her like a second skin, her legs brilliant white in contrast, except for the area around her right knee, which was dark and slightly shiny.

  “Hey, Mr. B.,” she said, approaching my window. “Whoa, nice nose job.”

  “Get in,” I said. The boy stood in the street, watching us through clouded eyes. “Get lost,” I said to him and got back into the car.

  Patty loped around the front of the car, fumbled with the door handle on the passenger side, and got in. She smelled of alcohol.

  “Home, James,” she said.

  I pulled a U-turn in the street and started heading back toward the center of Milford. Even though I didn’t know where Patty lived, I wanted to get away from all these kids hanging around.

  “Where do you live, Patty?”

  That seemed to sober her up almost immediately. “Shit, no, we can’t go to my house. Take me to your place.”

  “Patty, I have to take you home.”

  “If I go home like this, my mom will kill me.”

  “I thought you said your mother’d probably already be passed out.”

  “If I’m lucky. But if she’s awake, she’s going to have six shit fits seeing me like this.”

  She reached down and tentatively touched her knee. “God, does that hurt. I bet it hurts almost as much as your face.”

  I flicked on the interior light and glanced over as I drove. Her knee was a mess. “Who did that to you?”

  “Okay, so this asshole Ryan or whatever his name was, he drops his beer on the sidewalk just as I’m walking by, right, and there’s glass all over the place? And I’m trying to walk around it, and there’s this bunch of girls who aren’t even from around here, they’re like these skanks from Bridgeport or something, and they start saying something about my hair, and I turned to give them the finger and tripped, right? I hit the sidewalk and there’s this little bit of glass right under my knee but I think I picked it out but what a bunch of assholes, right, they—”

  “You might need stitches,” I said. Milford Hospital was only a minute away. “I can take you to the ER, let them have a look at it.”

  “Oh man, no, you can’t do that to me. Then there’s going to be this whole sideshow, right? They might even call the cops because I’m not old enough to drink. There’ll be some big lecture, or they might even fucking charge me.”

  “You need a big lecture,” I said.

  Patty shot me a look. “You think I’m a loser, don’t you?”

  “No,” I said. “But you make a lot of bad choices.”

  “That’s supposed to make me feel better, right? That I’m not stupid, I make stupid choices. Well, if you make stupid choices all the time, doesn’t that make you stupid?”

  “Who was that guy grabbing your arm?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Just some guy wanted me to blow him.”

  When I reached Bridgeport Avenue, I turned in the direction of the hospital.

  “I know where you’re going,” she said. “I won’t go in. And if you drive me home, I’ll just take off. Let me crash at your place tonight.”

  It wasn’t a good idea. At the same time, I wasn’t about to let a teenage girl who’d had too much to drink wander off on her own. So I didn’t continue on to the hospital, and I didn’t ask Patty for directions to her mother’s house. Instead, I took her back to my place.

  I parked and came around to Patty’s side. She h
ad the door open and was getting out, but between the drinking and the banged-up knee, she was unsteady on her feet. She slipped an arm up over my shoulder and I led her across the drive and up the path to the front door.

  I heard a car coming down the street. It slowed as it approached my house, as though the driver was intending to turn into my drive. It was a silver Ford Focus, and I was guessing that Kate Wood was behind the wheel.

  She slowed long enough to get a good look at me half-carrying a young girl into my house. Then she hit the gas and kept going on up the street.

  “Oh Christ,” I said.

  “What?” asked Patty.

  “Never mind. I’ll deal with it later.”

  I took her upstairs to the bathroom Syd used and instructed her to kick off her shoes and sit on the edge of the tub with her feet inside. “Can you sit there without falling over?” I asked.

  “I’m fine,” she said tiredly. “I can really hold my liquor.” There was a hint of pride there.

  “I’ll get the first-aid kit.”

  She was still perched on the edge of the tub when I came back, but she looked even younger than her seventeen years. In her bare feet, head hanging low, streaky, multicolored hair dangling in her eyes, with her knee scraped and bloodied, she looked like a little girl who’d fallen off her bike in the rain.

  She looked up at me, her eyes moist.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “I think about Sydney all the time,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  “All the time,” she said. Then, “What happened to your face?”

  “I had a bad test drive with somebody,” I said.

  “Wow. The car hit a tree or something?”

  “Not exactly. Let’s worry right now about getting you patched up.”

  Running some lukewarm water from the tap, I got down on my knees and managed to get Patty’s knee cleaned. Using some fresh white towels from under the counter, I gently blotted the wound. The towels quickly became stained with blood.

  Next I applied some disinfectant, then some bandages.

  “You’re good at this,” Patty said, leaning into me just slightly.

  “I haven’t done a skinned knee in a long time,” I said. “The last time was when Syd was little and she had Rollerblades.”