Fear the Worst: A Thriller (15 page)
Read Fear the Worst: A Thriller Online
Authors: Linwood Barclay
Tags: #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Fiction
“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.
I
T 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 sho
uld 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
“S
YD
?” 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 had 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.”
Patty was quiet for a moment, sitting there, feet in the tub. I felt the weight of her body leaning into mine. When I was done with her wound, I lacked the energy to get up, so I sat on the floor, my body held up by the vanity.
“You’ve always been really decent to me,” Patty said.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” I said.
“Because I’m not like
Sydney,” she said. “I’m not a good girl.”
“Patty.”
“I’m a bad girl. I do all the bad things.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You do bad things. But it doesn’t make you a bad kid.”
“We’re back to the bad-choices thing,” she said, mockingly.
“If you’re trying to convince me not to like you, it’s not going to work,” I said. “I think you’re a special person, Patty. You’re an original. But you haven’t got a lot longer to get your act together. You keep getting into shit like whatever that was tonight, and you’re going to run yourself off the rails permanently.”
She thought about that. “I know you look down on me.” I started to say something, but she held up a wobbly hand. “But you don’t do it in a way that makes me feel like I’m worthless.”
“You’re not worthless, Patty.”
“I feel that way sometimes.” Without looking at me, she said, “What if Sydney doesn’t come back?”
“I can’t let myself think about that, Patty,” I said. “Starting tomorrow, I’m going to spend all my time trying to find her.”
“What about your job?” she asked.
“I can always sell cars. I don’t know how much time I have to find Syd.”
Patty reached down to the floor for one of the damp, bloody towels, and used it to dry her feet before she swung them out of the tub.
“You need to call your mom and let her know where you are, that you’re okay,” I said.
A small smile crossed Patty’s face. “You think everybody’s family is like yours.”
“What do you mean?”
“You think all families care.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that.
“I know what it’s like for Sydney,” Patty said. “She acts like it’s a big pain in the ass, you guys calling her when she’s late, her checking in to let you know where she is, you looking out for her and all that shit. Sometimes, mostly when she’s with me, she acts like that stuff embarrasses her, but I think she just acts that way because she doesn’t want me to feel bad because nobody’s waiting up for me, wondering where I am, dragging me out of dumbass parties like that one I went to tonight, because no one gives a shit, you know?”
“I’m sorry.”
“My dad, one time—this was before I was six and he took off? He almost killed me.”
Maybe, when you’re already carrying a heavy burden, there’s always room for a little more. “What did he do?” I asked.
“It wasn’t usually his thing to take me to daycare, right? But this one day, my mom, she had this really early morning meeting to go to, so my dad had to drop me off, only he forgot, you know? I guess I was three, and I’m in the back, and I guess I fell asleep, and instead of going to daycare to drop me off, he just kept driving to work, and it was really hot out.”
“Oh no,” I said.
“So he went into work and it was like eighty degrees out but like a fucking million degrees in the car, and I guess when I woke up I was all dehydrated and shit, and my super-terrific dad didn’t remember I was out there until about two hours later. So he runs out and gets me out and runs me into the building and I’m totally like almost passed out and he gets me some water and makes me drink it and this is the thing, right, the first thing he says to me, and I can still remember this, even though I was three years old, he says to me, ‘Let’s not tell your mother about this.’”
I was slowly shaking my head.
“But she found out anyway, because just before my dad runs out, some lady saw me in the car and she wasn’t strong enough to smash in the window so she’d called the fire department. So everybody found out, my mom too, and that was the beginning of the end of their so-called marriage.”
“That’s an awful story,” I said.
“You know why I think he did it?” she asked.
I sighed. “It happens,” I said. “You just get into this kind of trance, you do the things you always do in the morning, and dropping you off was something different. He was on autopilot. I’m sure he never meant to do it.”
“Okay, maybe he didn’t mean to do it,” Patty said. “I mean, it wasn’t like he got up that morning and decided, hey, I think I’ll kill my little girl today. I know he didn’t actually do
that
. It was more like a subconscious thing. At this really dark level in his brain, he didn’t care what happened to me, because the son of a bitch isn’t even my real father.”
