The Twenty-Three 3 (Promise Falls) (23 page)

THIRTY-SIX

Duckworth

I
was on my way to Victor Rooney’s place when Wanda Therrieult phoned.

“You saw what I saw,” she said.

“You tell me what you saw.”

“Well, I have to do a full autopsy, but I’d say this Thackeray student, this Lorraine Plummer, is the latest.”

“After Olivia Fisher and Rosemary Gaynor,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“That was my thinking, too,” I said. “When will you get to the autopsy?”

“The body’s being taken to the morgue now, but honestly, Barry, I don’t know when I’ll get to her. All those other bodies, we may think we know what happened to them, that they were poisoned by the water, but I have to do the due diligence. Every one of them has to be autopsied.”

“You’re getting out-of-town help,” I said.

“Sure, but you’re going to have to wait. And if I don’t lie down soon, in a proper bed, I’m going to collapse wherever I’m standing.”

I knew how she was feeling. I’d been running on empty for several hours now. I wanted to go home, have something to eat—even a salad—then crawl into bed with Maureen and sleep till Christmas. Maybe, after I’d had a chance to talk to Rooney, I could do that. Even just a few hours of sleep would do me. I could be back at this by six in the morning, if not earlier.

“I hear ya, Wanda,” I said.

“Barry,” she said, “you know me.”

“I do.”

“I’m a woman of science. I
believe
in science. My life is all about science. It’s about facts and evidence and data. You know what I mean?”

“Yup.”

“There’s nothing mystical about it. But these last few days, I can’t help but wonder, are we being punished for something? Did we do something bad, and God’s taking it out on us?”

“Maybe not God,” I said. “But I get what you’re saying.”

“I’ll talk to you later,” she said.

I dropped the phone onto the seat next to me, and it hadn’t been out of my hand for ten seconds before it rang again. I glanced at the screen, saw the name Finley come up.

“Fuck off,” I said out loud.

It rang ten times before he gave up. But a few seconds later, it started ringing again.

Finley.

Was he going to keep doing this until I answered? I reached for the phone and put it to my ear.

“What is it, Randy?” I said.

His voice was more subdued than I expected it to be. Shaky, too. “Barry, can you come by my house?”

“What’s this about?”

“I think . . . I think there’s been a murder.”

“What? Randy, what’s going on? Who’s been murdered?”

“Jane,” he said. “Jane’s dead.”

“Randy, what happened to her?”

“She’s dead. Lindsay killed her.”

“Lindsay?”

“She works for us. Looks after Jane, takes care of the house. She did it. She killed Jane. She killed our dog, too. Bipsie. Bipsie’s dead. Lindsay killed both of them. I need you to come over. Barry, would you come over? Please, come over. She’s still here. Lindsay’s here. I told her she couldn’t go home yet.”

“I’m on my way,” I said.

Finley was waiting for me out front. He walked up to my car, spoke to me through the open window before I even had my seat belt off.

“I want her charged,” he said. “You need to charge her with murder.”

“Okay, Randy,” I said, getting out. “Let me get up to speed.”

“I was handing out water. Lindsay called me to say that Bipsie was sick. She’d been drinking out of the toilet.”

“Okay,” I said.

“That’s the same water that comes out of the tap,” he pointed out to me.

“I know.”

“So the dog started throwing up and died. And she called to tell me. And I said, ‘How could you let the dog drink out of the toilet when the water’s poisoned?’ and she says, ‘What are you talking about?’ Can you believe that? She didn’t know? How could she not know?”

“Tell me about Jane,” I said as we walked to the house.

“Lindsay poisoned her,” Finley said. He was moving slowly, as though he were pulling a concrete block with each leg.

“How did she do that?”

“Lemonade. She gave her lemonade. There’re a hundred bottles of fresh springwater in the fridge, plus a watercooler. But that stupid
bitch thought it was too much trouble to crack open a few bottles. I’ve told her a hundred times, use the bottled stuff for everything. Drinking, cooking. But she made the lemonade—”

“You talking about the frozen stuff? You add four cans of water?”

“That’s right. I
always
told her, use the bottles. Because my water is
better
. Even before what happened today, my water is cleaner and better. But she thought it was easier to make it with water from the tap.”

“She didn’t know,” I said.

“That doesn’t matter,” Finley said. “It was murder.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s in the kitchen, crying her eyes out,” Finley said.

“I meant Jane.”

“Oh.” He swallowed hard. “She’s upstairs, in her room. Since she got sick—not today, but in the last year—I’ve been sleeping in the guest room so I wouldn’t disturb her with my snoring and turning over and all.”

“Sure,” I said. We were at the front door. “Why don’t you wait out here?”

“If Lindsay tries to leave, I’ll stop her.”

“Okay.”

I went into the house. The stairs to the second floor were right there in the foyer, but I went into the kitchen first. Just as Finley had said, Lindsay was sitting, and crying, at the kitchen table, a box of tissues in front of her, a mound of used tissues surrounding it. She looked at me when I came in, her eyes bloodshot.

“Lindsay?” I said. She nodded. I told her who I was and showed her my ID. “What’s your last name?”

“Brookins,” she said, dabbing her eyes.

“I’m going upstairs, and then I’m coming back, and we can talk.”

“I didn’t murder her,” she said. “What he says, that’s not true. I didn’t know.”

Something dark and furry in the corner of the room caught my eye.

“The dog,” I said.

“Bipsie,” she said. “I didn’t know. I really didn’t know.”

I nodded. “I’ll be back.”

I went up the stairs and found Jane’s room without help. All I had to do was follow my nose. The woman was sprawled diagonally across the bed, facedown, her legs up by the pillow. The bedspread was awash in vomit. It looked as though maybe she’d been in the process of trying to crawl out of the bed before she succumbed.

On the bedside table, a tall, narrow glass with half an inch of pink lemonade in the bottom.

I made my way back down to the kitchen. Lindsay’s version of events was not much different from Randy’s.

She had taken Mrs. Finley her lemonade around ten in the morning. Jane had said she was tired and probably going to go back to sleep. Lindsay returned to the kitchen to tidy up and start lunch preparations, then went to the basement to do laundry. It must have been around then, she said, when the fire trucks with their loudspeakers went through the neighborhood. She had heard some indistinct noises outside, but didn’t pay any attention to them.

It wasn’t her habit to listen to the radio or turn on the TV through the day. During her downtime, she read. She showed me a dog-eared, used copy of a John Grisham novel. I looked inside the front cover, where it had been stamped “Naman’s Used Books.”

“I was about to go upstairs and check on Mrs. Finley,” she said, “when Bipsie started to act weird.”

The dog was throwing up. She cleaned up after her once; then the dog was sick again. As Lindsay was wiping up after her a second time, the dog keeled over.

“I didn’t know what to do, so I called Mr. Finley to tell him. He said the water was poisoned. And then I thought, oh no.”

I nodded understandingly. “Okay,” I said.

“He says I murdered her. I didn’t murder her. It was an accident. I swear it was an accident. It’s just, he is always telling me to use his water, and sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t, because
one time, his water had some brown flecks or something in it. A bad batch, he said. But ever since then, I don’t use it all the time. When I make Mrs. Finley lemonade, I just use the tap, but I didn’t tell Mr. Finley. If he knew the water was poisoned, he should have told me before he went out.”

It wasn’t in my nature to come to Randy’s defense, but I said, “He probably didn’t know then. And once he did, he probably didn’t think he needed to call home. Because of what he was always telling you.”

She had both hands up to her mouth. “Oh God, I
did
kill her. I did. But I didn’t mean it.”

I went back outside, found Randy standing under a tree.

Weeping.

I came up on him from behind and placed a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Randy.”

He had one hand on the tree trunk, supporting himself. He struggled to regain his composure, then said, “You saw her?”

“Jane? Yes.”

“She looks so . . . she’d be so humiliated.”

“She’ll be taken care of.”

“You talked to Lindsay?”

“I did.”

“What did she tell you?”

“It’s an accident, Randy. She didn’t know. It’s not murder.”

Finley turned, put his forearm on the tree, and rested his head on it. “I know.” He started twice to say something, then stopped. The third time, he managed. “It’s my fault. Soon as I knew what was happening, I should have called. I just thought—no, I just
didn’t
think. I was so consumed with . . . with taking full advantage of what was going on. That was all I could see.”

I said nothing.

“It was a tragedy, I knew that. It’s not like I didn’t care. I
did
care. But I saw an opportunity, and I took it.” He turned his face around enough to see me. “That’s what I do.”

“I know. It’s in your DNA.”

“I got so focused on that, I never thought about . . . and the thing is, she’s the whole reason I’ve been doing it.”

I took a step toward him. “What do you mean?”

A self-effacing smile came over his face. “You know what an asshole I am, right, Barry?”

Who was it who said “never bullshit a bullshitter”?

“Sure.”

“I was trying to show I wasn’t. Maybe not to you. I could never convince you. But after all the dumbass things I’ve done over the years, especially that stuff with the hooker a few years ago, I wanted to prove to Jane there was more to me than that. I was going to be mayor again, I told her. I was going to do some good. Some real good. I even had an idea to get some jobs here. I was working a deal with Frank Mancini. You know Frank?”

“I’m aware of him.”

“I mean, yeah, there was something in it for me, too, but he’s going to build this plant on the site of the drive-in. Jobs. Maybe not as many as that private jail that was going to move in here at one point, but some. I wanted to get this town back on its feet. I wanted to show Jane. I wanted her to be proud of me again. I wanted to pay her back for all the shame I brought down on her.”

I nodded.

“You believe any of this?” he asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Maybe.”

He stopped using the tree to support himself and looked me in the eye. “You think I did it. That I somehow did this thing to the water, so I could rush in and be the white knight.”

“Maybe,” I said again.

“If I was going to kill hundreds of people to save my political career, you don’t think I would have made sure my wife wasn’t one of the casualties?”

I searched those eyes. I didn’t know the answer to that question. It was possible he was telling me the truth.

It was also possible Jane was already deathly ill, her days numbered, and in Finley’s mind, letting her go a little early was justifiable to advance his political objectives.

But for the love of God, he was only running for mayor of Promise Falls. This wasn’t the goddamn presidency. How could someone want something that insignificant that badly?

On top of that, Jane’s death really did come down to Lindsay going against her employer’s wishes, and not being aware of what was happening in the town.

No, Randall Finley did not intend for his wife to die.

I held out a hand. He looked down at it, puzzled, then slowly took it in his and gripped it.

“I believe you,” I said.

THIRTY-SEVEN

JOYCE
Pilgrim started with a call to the woman in charge of summer athletics. Thackeray ran a number of programs from May through September. They were open to any students taking courses during that period, as well as people from beyond Thackeray. In addition, Thackeray rented out its various fields to local baseball and soccer clubs through the summer.

The summer athletics director was Hilda Brownlee, and Joyce tracked her down at home.

“I’m looking for a jogger,” she said.

“A jogger?” said Hilda.

“Someone who likes to take a run around the campus late at night. I wondered if you have any students training for any track or long-distance running events.”

“I can’t think of anyone off the top of my head,” she said. “Can I get back to you?”

In the meantime, Joyce had compiled a list of all the young people who were living in Thackeray residences over the summer.
There were seventy-three of them. She went through the list, name by name. Fifty-eight of the residents were female, fifteen male.

She made a list of the fifteen men.

Then Joyce went through the Thackeray student database and found the e-mail addresses for all of them, and prepared to send out a group message.

She had written something about trying to find the person who was running through the campus on the night of May 20 and into the morning of May 21. But before she hit the send button, she thought for a moment. Up to now, her suspicions were focused on the man in the car that had edged into the frame of the closed-circuit television footage. And she wanted to find the jogger who might have gotten a better look at that car, and the driver.

But what if, Joyce wondered, the jogger had killed Lorraine Plummer? What if the man in the car had nothing to do with it? She could hardly expect a possible suspect to write back and say: “Yeah, that was me! I was running around at that time and have no alibi!”

Maybe an e-mail wasn’t such a good idea.

So, name by name, she began researching the fifteen students. She started with Facebook, but she found only a couple of them there. It was Joyce’s experience that while it was young people who’d turned Facebook into a social media phenomenon, now that all their parents and grandparents were on it, posting pictures of their cats and grandkids and dim-witted sayings like “Click Like If You Love Your Niece,” it was no longer the place to be.

Joyce did broader Google searches on them all.

She didn’t turn up much of interest on any of them, at least nothing that mentioned whether they were track stars or marathon runners. And the thing was, just because a guy went for a jog at midnight did not mean he was competing for the Olympics. He might just be out for exercise.

Joyce was at home, having a late dinner with her husband, when Hilda called her back.

“I don’t have anything for you,” she said. “I mean, I don’t have anyone who’s specifically in a track program who’s attending Thackeray. I’d say eighty percent of the kids enrolled in summer stuff are from the town, anyway.”

Joyce decided she had to come at this from a different direction.

“I’m going back out,” she told her husband late that evening.

“Are you kidding me?”

She had told him about finding Lorraine Plummer, of course, but had decided not to dwell on it. She did not want to be the wife who came home and went to pieces about what had happened at work, even if discovering a murder was not the sort of thing that happened to most people encountered on the job.

“Do you want to talk about it?” her husband kept asking.

“No,” she said. “I do not want to talk about it.”

What she found, oddly enough, was that she wanted to be at the college, not at home. When Clive Duncomb had been her boss, she hated every second she was there—the guy was such a sexist asshole—but now that she was in charge, she felt a new commitment. A responsibility.

Thackeray was—she almost felt embarrassed to say this to herself because it bordered on corny—her
beat
. She knew she wasn’t a cop. Far from it. But she was in charge of security, and the death of Lorraine Plummer meant Thackeray wasn’t
secure
.

She wanted to do something about that.

Joyce was certainly not going to try to track down a killer. If she found out anything, she would pass it along to the Promise Falls police. That Duckworth guy. But given what the town had been through today, she knew the Plummer murder wasn’t going to get the attention it normally would.

At least the coroner finally showed up. Wanda Something. After she’d finished her examination of the body, she had a pretty grim look on her face. At first, Joyce figured in that line of work, everything you had to do put you in a foul mood. But Joyce could tell this
was different. And when Wanda got on the phone to tell someone about what she’d found, Joyce listened in, and picked up a vibe that whoever had killed Lorraine, this was not his first outing.

Jesus.

Once the sun had set, Joyce indicated she was heading back out to the campus. Her husband said he would come with her.

“No way,” Joyce said. “Unless you’d like me to come to work with you on Tuesday morning. Hold your hand while you plaster and drywall.”

Soon after, Joyce Pilgrim was sitting in her car, parked on the street in the exact same place where that vehicle had been parked during the period Duckworth believed Lorraine had been murdered. She was, admittedly, early. If—and there were several ifs—this particular person did his run at the same time every night, she had several hours to wait. This was, of course,
if
he ran every night. And
if
he took the same route.

And,
if
all those
ifs
aligned, he’d be useful to Joyce only
if
he remembered seeing that car that night. Even then, he’d be useful only
if
he was good at telling one car from another.

Still, it was all she had at the moment.

Thackeray was a quiet place this time of year. The occasional student walked past. Once in a while, a car drove by.

Joyce was thinking she should have brought along some coffee, but that would mean, at some point, having to run to the nearest available bathroom. Just like when you’re waiting for the cable guy to show up, the two minutes you leave the house to mail a letter, that’s when he rings the bell.

At least she had music.

She had no way to run her iPhone through her old clunker’s stereo system, but she did have CDs. She opened up her folder of discs, found her favorite, and slipped it into the slot in the dash.

Stevie Wonder,
Songs in the Key of Life
.

Joyce loved Stevie. No other artist—not since the dawn of time—even came close.

She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel, bounced her shoe off the side of the transmission hump. She played the entire disc, popped it out, replaced it with
Original Musiquarium
, which was made up of hits from 1972 to 1980.

Joyce was halfway through
Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants
when she saw him.

It was nearly ten, and he was running toward her on the other side of the street. Not flat out. A steady jog, pacing himself. As he got closer, Joyce sized him up. Late twenties, early thirties. Too old to be a student, she thought, and a little on the young side to be a professor, although she had to admit there were a few on campus who’d never seen a first-run episode of
Star Trek: The Next Generation
.

She couldn’t be certain this was the same guy she’d seen in the video, but it was certainly possible. He had the earbuds trailing down to a music player clipped to the band of his running shorts.

Joyce killed the music and got out of her car. She stood in the middle of the road, waved her hands at him when he got to be about sixty yards away.

He slowed, stopped about twenty feet from her, and pulled the buds from his ears. Between breaths, he said, “You okay?”

“Yeah.” Joyce showed him her ID, told him she was with Thackeray College security.

“Am I not allowed to run here?” he asked. “I didn’t think it would be a problem.”

“You’re not affiliated with Thackeray?” Joyce asked. “Enrolled here, or work here?”

The man shook his head. “No. But come on, it’s not really private property, is it?”

Joyce smiled. “I don’t care about that. But I need to ask you some questions.”

The man glanced at his watch. “I’ve been trying to beat my previous time.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s important. So you don’t live on campus?”

“No, I live in town. But I like running through here. It’s pretty.
And I only just kind of started doing it. I used to run years ago, but I’m trying to get myself back in some kind of shape. More exercise, less drinking, if you know what I mean.”

“Sure, yeah. Listen, were you running here the other night? Around midnight?”

The man asked her which night, exactly, and she told him.

“Yeah,” he said. “That was my first or second night, I think. How would you know that?”

Joyce pointed to one of the buildings. “Security camera up there.”

“Oh,” he said.

“Anyway, that night, around that time, do you remember seeing a car parked right where mine is now?”

The jogger shrugged. “Not that I . . . I don’t really recall.”

“It was there for about an hour. A man got out, went in that direction, then returned to the vehicle, and then backed up that way. Turned around, I guess, and drove off.”

“So you’re looking for that car?”

Joyce nodded.

“And that guy?”

She nodded again.

“What are you looking for him for?”

Joyce said, “It’s just important that I find him.”

The man appeared to be thinking. “Actually, yeah, I do kind of remember seeing somebody around then.”

“Really?”

“Maybe.”

“Okay,” Joyce said, starting to feel excited. “Listen, I didn’t even ask. What’s your name?”

“Rooney,” the jogger said. “Victor Rooney.”