The Twenty-Three

by Linwood Barclay

  “I heard you had some trouble at Rooney’s house. When the paramedics came. You had some chest pain.”

  I waved a hand. “It was nothing. I was running. It only lasted a second.”

  “Promise me you’ll get yourself checked out.”

  “I will.” I paused. “I did. Saw the doctor a couple of days ago. She said—get this—I need to lose some weight.”

  “Ridiculous,” the chief said, doing a good job of keeping a straight face.

  “Tell me about it. Maureen’s been trying to kill me with vegetables.”

  “Wear a wire,” Rhonda said. “We record her telling you to eat them all up, we swoop in, we arrest her.”

  I was too weary to laugh. “I’m sorry about the other thing.” She didn’t pretend not to know what I was talking about. “It happens.”

  “I was talking to Maureen. It was a private conversation. Trevor heard it, told Finley. Finley had something on Trevor—nothing huge, but enough—and put the squeeze on him.”

  “It’s not that it came out,” Rhonda said. “It’s that you believed I fucked up.”

  I nodded. “I thought so at the time, but it was frustration. In the last month, since the shit started hitting the fan by the bucketful, I’ve made more fuckups than I can count.” I paused. “Maybe I’m done.”

  “No.”

  “It’s twenty years.”

  “Seriously?”

  “May’ ninety-five, I came on. Slightly younger, and a whole lot thinner.”

  “I didn’t know. We should do something. Some kind of party.”

  “I think I’ll celebrate with sleep,” I said.

  “Can you stay awake long enough for another press conference? One you’ll actually show up to?”

  I nodded. “Yes. But there’s something I have to do first.”

  Her eyebrows went up slightly. “Go on.”

  “I don’t want Walden Fisher to learn about it on the news. I don’t want him turning on the radio and finding out we’ve got the guy who killed his daughter. He needs to hear it in person before everyone else does.”

  Rhonda Finderman nodded. “Okay.”

  “I’m gonna head over that way now. Then I’ll make a call to Lorraine Plummer’s parents, and I guess Bill Gaynor deserves a heads-up as well, even if he is in jail.”

  “I’ll tell him,” Rhonda said. “And I’ll get the paperwork going on the official charges against Carlson.”

  I nodded a thank-you. I poured the rest of my coffee into the sink and left the building. I thought I was going to make a clean getaway, but Randall Finley was standing by my car.

  “I thought these were your wheels,” he said. “I was just going to come in and look for you.”

  “Hi, Randy.”

  “Is it true?” he asked.

  “Is what true?”

  “Rumors are going around that you’ve got someone. In those murders. Of the women.”

  “There’ll be a presser later today.”

  “And I already heard about Victor Rooney. God, Barry, you’re having some kind of day. It was you, right? In both cases? You figured it out?”

  There wasn’t the usual forced enthusiasm in his voice, which I attributed to grief. I was detecting what sounded like genuine admiration, but I was too tired to appreciate it.

  “It’s been a day full of developments,” I conceded. “But there’s still a lot to nail down.”

  “I meant what I said earlier. You should be the chief. You’re the man for the job.”

  “We have a chief,” I said. “And she’s doing just fine. I haven’t forgotten the shit you pulled.” But there was no anger in my voice. “Besides, I don’t know what this has to do with you anymore.”

  “I’ve reconsidered,” Finley said.

  “You’ve what?”

  “I’m still running. After a suitable period,” he said, and lowered his head in memory of the dead, “I’ll be back at it.”

  “Why the change of heart?”

  “What else am I going to do, Barry? Just sit around and put water into bottles? I’ll go out of my mind. I have to do more than that. I have to make a difference.”

  He said it with such a straight face, I felt he believed it.

  “I guess you have to do what you have to do,” I said, opening my car door and getting in.

  “So what I’m saying is, if you hear anything a guy in my position might like to know, it’s in my nature to return the favor.”

  God, we were right back where we’d started when he found those damn squirrels.

  On the way, I phoned Maureen, filled her in.

  “I wonder if any of the stores are open today,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “I might buy you a cake.”

  “I accept.”

  I thought she’d say something, but her voice had gone quiet.

  “Maureen?”

  “I’m here. I’m just . . . I’ve been just barely holding it together all day. There’s a list online.” She paused. “Of the dead.”

  “Oh.”

  “Some of them are people we know. Alicia, who I work with?”

  “Right?”

  “She lost both her parents. At one of the nursing homes. They said on the radio that there were forty-two fatalities in facilities for the elderly. They died before anyone could even get them to the hospital. It brings the number of dead to over two hundred.”

  The scale of the tragedy had gotten so big I’d become numbed by it. I had lost the capacity to be shocked.

  “I have a couple of things to do yet,” I told her, “and then Rhonda and I are going to make a statement about Angus Carlson’s arrest, and then I’ll be home.”

  “I love you,” Maureen said.

  “I love you, too.”

  • • •

  By the time I’d mounted the steps to Walden Fisher’s porch and rapped my knuckles on the door, I wasn’t sure I had anything left. I could feel the exhaustion washing over me. It was just as well Walden took the better part of thirty seconds to come to the door. I needed that much time to keep my head from spinning.

  “Hello?” he said as he swung the door open. Then, recognizing me, he said, “Oh, Detective.”

  “Mr. Fisher,” I said, extending a hand.

  He had been rubbing the tip of his right thumb with his index finger. He spotted something scraggly on the nail and quickly bit it off. “Sorry,” he said. He offered that same hand and I took it with some reluctance.

  “May I come in?”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” he said, and made way for me. “I was thinking you might come by.”

  Had he already heard about Carlson?

  “Really?” I said.

  “It was on the news. About Victor. My God, I just can’t believe it. It’ s—it’s unthinkable what he did.”

  Of course. That much had become public.

  “I apologize for not coming by to tell you about that,” I said. “I should have. But there’s been another development, something even more important to you.”

  He looked at me expectantly. “What?”

  “I wouldn’t mind getting off my feet,” I said.

  We took seats in the living room. Walden was on the edge of his, leaning forward. Next to him, on an end table, was a picture of his wife, Beth, and daughter, Olivia, taken, I guessed, when Olivia was around twelve years old.

  Both smiling.

  I said, “We have someone in custody in connection with Olivia’s death.”

  His mouth dropped open an inch. “Victor?”

  “No, not Victor. It’s a man named Angus Carlson.” I drew a breath. “A member of the Promise Falls police.”

  Walden sat back in his chair, stunned. “Carlson?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But I met him. Yesterday, at the hospital.”

  I nodded. “That’s right. Carlson has confessed to Olivia’s murder, and two others here in Promise Falls. There may be more, in Cleveland, that happened before he moved here.
”

  “Dear God,” he said. “He just came in and confessed?”

  “No,” I said. “There were things that led to him. In fact, you played a role there, when you gave me those letters the town had sent to Olivia. We found Carlson just before he was going to do it again, I think. There’s going to be a statement this afternoon, but I wanted you to be the first to know about this.”

  He shook his head slowly, still disbelieving.

  “Why?” he asked.

  I told him what Angus had told us. “I can’t say that it makes any sense.”

  “In his mind it did,” Walden said.

  I nodded. “You never really know what’s going on inside people’s heads.”

  He was mulling it over, trying to take it in. “They’re going to show up at my door, aren’t they?”

  “They?”

  “Reporters,” he said. “Soon as you tell them about this, they’ll be swarming around out front.”

  “That’s a reasonable expectation,” I said. “We can ask them to give the families—people like you—some space, but they don’t tend to listen.”

  He looked down at himself. His plaid flannel shirt had several minor stains on it.

  “Beth would kill me if I went before the cameras looking like this,” he said with a sad smile. “I should throw on a clean shirt. They might show up any minute.”

  I didn’t think that was so, but then again, Finley had already heard about Carlson. Someone might have phoned in a tip to the media.

  “It’s possible,” I said.

  Walden stood. “Give me a minute,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  I stood as well as he crossed the room and went up the stairs.

  Suddenly, I felt woozy.

  It was a bit like how I’d felt when I’d chased Victor Rooney down the driveway, before the pain in my chest.

  I took a few deep breaths. Oxygen, I thought. I needed oxygen.

  The wooziness passed after several seconds, but there was a lingering feeling that I might be sick to my stomach.

  There was probably a bathroom on the first floor. I walked in the direction of the kitchen, passed one door I thought might be a powder room, and opened it, only to discover it was a closet. But I got lucky with the second door.

  I stepped into the two-piece bathroom, left the door open. There was a white porcelain pedestal sink next to a toilet. Behind me, a towel rack and a shelf with some knickknacks. What I wanted to do was splash some water on my face. I still wasn’t going to drink it, but if it was safe enough to shower with, I could splash some on my cheeks.

  I turned on the cold tap, held one hand under it until the water was good and chilly, cupped my palms beneath it. I closed my eyes tight, tossed the water on my face.

  Did it again.

  I turned off the tap, reached behind me for the hand towel hanging there, and dried my face off.

  I needed to take some weight off my feet. I placed my hands on both sides of the sink, and inadvertently knocked something off the side.

  I looked down between the sink and the toilet and saw that I had knocked Walden’s metal nail file to the floor. About six inches long, with a clear blue plastic handle. It had landed next to a plastic wastepaper basket. I was worried the blood would rush to my head when I bent over to pick it up.

  I needed a second.

  While I was looking down, something in the trash basket caught my eye. Amid a few wadded tissues there was a small bottle, the kind that might contain cough syrup. But a glance at the label told me it was not cough syrup.

  Bracing myself against the sink with one hand, I reached down into the basket with the other. Got my fingers around the bottle and brought it up to eye level.

  I read the label.

  Syrup of Ipecac.

  I didn’t even know they still made that stuff. I remembered back when I was a kid, it was in most people’s medicine cabinets. But it had, over the years, fallen out of favor.

  I certainly hadn’t forgotten what it was for.

  It made you throw up. Violently.

  I sensed someone standing just outside the door. I turned, the bottle of ipecac still in my hand.

  Walden Fisher, wearing a nice, crisp white shirt, was staring at me.

  SIXTY-SIX

  OH, shit.

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  Duckworth

  “I was feeling dizzy,” I told Walden. “Came in here for a minute to pull myself together.”

  Walden said nothing.

  I held up the bottle. “What’s the story on this, Walden?”

  “That’s ipecac,” he said.

  “I know. I can read. I haven’t seen this in a long time. But this looks like a relatively new bottle.” I took a closer look at it, turned it sideways. “Empty, too. Where’d you get this?”

  “I bought it. Had to go to a few places before I found it.”

  “It makes you throw up,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Walden said.

  “So why did you want it?”

  “In case I ever needed it.”

  “You must have used it very recently,” I said. “I mean, it was right there in the trash. So you must have had some in the last day or so.”

  “That’s right,” he said hesitantly. “Yesterday morning. When I heard about the water being poisoned.”

  His voice lacked conviction. I’d been in this line of work long enough to tell when someone was lying to me.

  “At the hospital,” I reminded him, “you said you’d had some coffee? Ran out into the street, throwing up, just as the ambulance was coming by.”

  “Is that what I said?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Then maybe I had some of that after I got back home,” he said. “I’m a little cloudy on the details.”

  But things were coming into focus for me.

  “Walden,” I said, “did you drink this stuff before you ran out into the street?”

  “Like I said, so much has happened in the last day or so.”

  “Why would you do that?” I asked. “Everyone else was sick from the tainted water, but you were sick from this. Walden, it’s almost like you wanted people to think you were made ill by the poisoned water, when maybe you weren’t.”

  Walden moved his jaw around.

  “Why would you do that, Walden? Why did you want everyone to think you’d been poisoned?”

  That jaw kept moving around.

  “Walden?”

  “I took too much of it,” he said. “I just wanted to appear sick, like everyone else. But I swallowed so much, I really did a number on myself. Threw up so violently, my heart started palpitating. Actually thought I might die for a while there.”

  “Jesus, Walden, why—”

  He came at me fast, palms forward. He slammed them into my chest and I went into the wall hard enough to get the wind knocked out of me. I was about to reach for my gun, but instead I raised my hands to defend myself from the fists that were pounding my head.

  Walden was in a blind fury, his fists driving into me faster than I could deflect them. I felt a cheekbone collapse; then the vision in my left eye went blurry with blood. We weren’t that different in age, but he was in better shape than I was, by a lot.

  I started sliding down the wall. When I was on the way down, a fist went into my gut like a piston.

  I was close to passing out.

  He let me continue my slide until my butt was on the floor, my legs arranged haphazardly in front of me. Walden crouched down, found my gun, and unholstered it. By the time I was able to focus with my right eye—the flesh around my left was already puffing up and obscuring my view—he was standing over me with my own weapon pointed at my head.

  I tasted blood in my mouth. My bottom lip was ballooning.

  I said, “Walden.”

  “You didn’t have to die,” he said. “You got lucky yesterday. You didn’t drink the water. You didn’t have to be one of them.”

  “Jesus, Walden . . . put the gun dow
n. . . . Let’s talk about this.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” he said.

  I mumbled, “If it was you . . . Victor . . . you must have set up Victor. . . . How could you set up someone who loved your daughter?”

  “Just shut up,” Walden said. “I have to think.”

  “The squirrel trap, those mannequins . . .”

  “I moved it all last night,” Walden said. “When he went to do his run.”

  “And the boy,” I said. “That Lydecker kid.”

  “That wasn’t supposed to happen. I caught him snooping.”

  I swallowed, felt blood trickling down my throat. “You did it . . . for the same reason you had me believe Victor did it. Same motive, different person.”

  “We felt the same way,” Walden said. “I just felt it more. This town failed Olivia. It had to be taught a lesson.”

  “Twenty-two bystanders, and Victor . . .”

  “I hoped he’d drink the water,” Walden said. “He was late. He was late and Olivia died. I wanted him to die, too. But now they’ll think he did it. At least . . . at least for a while.”

  “What . . . what do you mean, for a while?”

  Walden took several breaths before he spoke. “I thought . . . I thought I’d feel some satisfaction. That I would feel . . . vindicated. Something. But I don’t. I don’t think enough have been made to pay. I’m thinking . . . You know the Promise Falls Autumn Fair?”

  Blood obscured my view of Walden. I blinked a few times, and said, “The fair?”

  “In October,” he said. “I’m thinking, by then, everyone will feel safe again. They’ll have let their guard down. They’ll all believe it was Victor. Maybe a bomb . . . at the fair.”

  “Walden . . . listen to me. You can’ t—”

  “You know I have to kill you,” he said. “I think you’re a good man, but that doesn’t matter. There was a time, back when I started planning this, when I thought, once I’d made my point, I’d turn myself in. But now I see there’s more to do.”

  I gurgled something.

  “What?”

  “Twenty-three,” I said. “All of that was you.”

  “I was sending a message,” he said. “That justice was coming.

  I wanted people to be afraid. I was so pleased when I saw you were figuring it out. That’s why I phoned you that time.”