Far From True (15 page)

“You were seeing a physio?”

“Let me see that,” she said, taking back the book. She went back a couple of weeks. “I remember this.”

“What?”

“This was when Jack got hurt.”

“Hurt?”

“Two weeks before. Yes, here it is. We went to see friends in Maine, and Jack was hiking in the woods and twisted his ankle. His right ankle. Hurt so much he couldn’t drive home. Had to use a cane for a few weeks, and went to the Seward clinic for physio. It was a couple of months before he could walk normally again.”

“So all through this period, this week here,” Duckworth said, taking the book back and pointing to the two pages, “your husband was basically disabled? He had trouble getting around?”

The dead doctor’s wife nodded.

Did a guy with a bum ankle attack a woman in a park? And run away after he’d killed her?

“Thank you,” Duckworth said, and handed the book back to Tanya Sturgess.

He’d want to confirm the doctor’s injury with the Seward clinic, but he felt, with some confidence, that he could rule out Jack Sturgess in the murder of Olivia Fisher, and because the modus operandi was identical, the death of Rosemary Gaynor, too.

“Tell me about the Gaynors,” Duckworth said.

“I know what you’re trying to do.”

“What am I trying to do, Mrs. Sturgess?”

“You’re trying to find a way to blame Jack for that, too. For what happened to her. That’d really help you out, wouldn’t it? Find a way to prove Jack killed Rosemary. Well, he didn’t do that, and I won’t help you frame him for it. You want to pin everything you can on him. He’s not here to defend himself. Have you found a way to connect him to the Lindbergh kidnapping? The Kennedy assassination?”

“That’s not what I’m doing,” Duckworth said. “I don’t think he killed Rosemary Gaynor any more than you do. But I want to find out who did.”

She eyed him dubiously. “You’re trying to trick me.”

Duckworth shook his head. “No. Let me ask you again about the Gaynors. How well did you know them?”

“Bill and Jack were friends. I didn’t really know Rosemary. We went out for dinner once or twice a year.”

“Did Bill and Rosemary get along?”

“I suppose. They did when we were all together. The four of us never socialized after the baby came, or even in the months before that. When Bill and Rosemary were in Boston.”

“But you saw Bill occasionally in the period before his wife died?”

“I did. The odd time.”

“What was he like?”

“I guess, looking back, I’d say he was on edge.” Bitterly, she said, “I didn’t like him then and I hate him even more now. He’s as much to blame as Agnes Pickens. He was a horrible person, dragging Jack into a scheme to get that baby for him and his wife. Jack devoted his life to helping others and look what he got for it.”

That didn’t quite line up with the facts as Duckworth knew them. Jack Sturgess needed money to pay off gambling debts. He saw Bill and Rosemary’s quest for a child as an opportunity to get it. And as far as Duckworth could tell, no one had forced Sturgess to murder Marshall Kemper or Doris Stemple. Or threaten to plunge a syringe into the neck of David Harwood’s father.

But Duckworth thought it best to keep those thoughts to himself for the moment.

“What do you mean by ‘on edge’?”

“Nervous. Anytime I’d walk into the room where the two were huddled together, he’d suddenly clam up.”

“When was the last time you found them doing that?”

She thought. “Just before Bill went to Boston on that last conference. When Rosemary was killed. He seemed very worried.”

Around that time, Duckworth had learned from his interviews with the Gaynors’ nanny, Sarita Gomez, Bill had come to realize that his wife knew the adoption of Matthew was not legal.

She remembered something. “One time I walked in on him when he was in Jack’s study, waiting for him to get back from a hospital call. Bill was looking at one of Jack’s old medical books
about surgical technique. When he realized I was there, he closed it and put it back on the shelf, his face red as a beet. You’d have thought I’d caught him looking at porn.”

•   •   •

Duckworth was still thinking about Tanya Sturgess’s comments as he got back behind the wheel of his car, and his phone started to ring.

“Duckworth.”

“It’s me,” Rhonda Finderman said. “You called.”

Duckworth had to think for a moment about why he’d been trying to get in touch with her.

“Right,” he said. “I’ve got a story I want to tell you, and you’re going to think I’m crazy, but you need to hear it right to the end.”

Cal

I
bolted from Clive Duncomb’s office, down a flight of stairs, out of the Thackeray College admin building, and straight to my car. I had the phone to my ear the entire time, trying to get Samantha Worthington to explain to me what had happened.

“His parents came to visit. . . . They stalled me . . . trying to make me late to pick up Carl,” she said. The pauses were her catching her breath. It sounded like she was running, too.

“But you don’t know for sure,” I said, reaching into my pocket for my keys with my other hand, “that Ed’s going to get Carl.”

“He’s here! You saw him this morning! They’re working together.”

“Hang on,” I said. “Putting you on speaker.”

I got the car open, tossed my phone onto the passenger seat, keyed the ignition. Backing out of the spot, I nearly broadsided a FedEx truck.

“Asshole!” someone yelled.

I got the car aimed for downtown. I didn’t even know where I was going.

“Sam?” I shouted. “You still there?”

“Yes!”

“Where are you?”

“I’m running to the school! They slashed my tires! Those bastards!”

“Where’s the school?”

“It’s Clinton Public!”

I thought back to my days as a Promise Falls cop, when I could walk this town blindfolded and always know where I was. I knew Clinton. After accessing the GPS in my brain for a second, I could picture the location of the school.

But the school was quite a hike from Thackeray. Even breaking every speed limit and running every light, I was a good fifteen minutes away.

“Where are you?” I shouted. I was wondering if I should swing by and grab her along the way, but if we were both going to get there at the same time, I’d just head straight for the school.

“It’s a few blocks,” she said, sounding very winded. “Not . . . too . . . long.”

“When does school officially let out?”

“Now, right now!”

“Hang up, call the school, see if they can call Carl to the office!”

“I tried that! I can’t”—a pause to catch her breath—“get through!”

“Then call the police!”

“They won’t care!”

“What?”

“They never care about this shit!”

If she meant custody disputes, she was half-right. There were some things a cop in a patrol car couldn’t solve. But what she was talking about now seemed to suggest an outright kidnapping that was about to take place.

My heart was pounding, my hands slippery with sweat on the steering wheel. Ahead of me, cars were stopped at a light.

“I’m a long way away!” I shouted. “I don’t know if I can get there in time!”

I didn’t know whether Samantha had heard me. I grabbed the phone, put it to my ear. Said, “You there?”

Nothing.

The light turned green up ahead, but the cars were moving
ahead slowly. I laid on the horn, swerved around two cars, narrowly missing a pickup truck coming in the opposite lane. Floored it.

As I sped into town, I realized I didn’t know the whole story. For all I knew, Sam had abducted her own kid and what was going on now was payback. Maybe she’d been in the midst of a custody dispute and run off with Carl without the court’s permission.

But if that was the case, the courts didn’t usually send thugs around to your place of work and threaten you. Ed did not come across as an officer of the court.

So I gambled that the angels were with Sam and her boy. My gut told me that Ed taking Carl away was very, very wrong. Even if it turned out Sam didn’t have the law on her side, kidnapping a kid from school was no way to resolve custody disputes.

“Come on, come on,” I said, seeing another set of cars bunching up ahead of me at the next intersection. I was looking for an opening. Too many cars coming the other way for me to pass. I wondered whether, if I took the next right, I could make up some time on less-traveled residential streets.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” I shouted at the drivers ahead of me.

I made the decision. When I got to the intersection, I’d hang a right. Find another way to get to Clinton Public.

An old Volkswagen inched far enough ahead that I could make the turn. I cranked the wheel, put my foot down on the gas.

Just as a jogger crossed my path.

“Shit!” I said, slamming my foot on the brake pedal so hard I was surprised it didn’t snap off.

The jogger, a shirtless man in shorts and running shoes who was probably in his midthirties, stopped as abruptly as I had, turned, and looked at me. He slapped both hands onto the hood of the Accord.

“The fuck!” he screamed, spraying spit.

Had I hit him? I was pretty sure I hadn’t. But if I was going to be any help to Sam and Carl, I was going to have to run him down anyway.

I powered down the window. “You ran right in front of me!”

He pointed to the
WALK
sign. “You see that! Are you blind?”

He wasn’t moving. If I could get him to move from the front of the car, if I could get him to approach my window, I could boot it.

“Yeah!” I said. “It says walk, not run!”

The man shook his head, started coming around the fender. Good, good.
Come give me shit face-to-face, so my way is clear and I can floor it.

He came up alongside the car. But as he did, several other people started walking through the intersection, blocking my way.

“You fucking think you own the road?” he asked, at my window now, hands on the sill, close enough that I could smell his sweat. “Is what you got to do so important it justifies running people over? That what you think?”

I didn’t think I was going to make it.

I didn’t think I was going to make it in time to help Carl.

ED
idled his pickup truck down the street from Clinton Public Elementary School. He figured that Carl Worthington’s route to his mother’s work, or their home, would take him this way, right past where he was parked. It was a good thing the little guy had never seen him. It’d be easier to pull off what he had planned that way.

Of course, there was a chance he wouldn’t be walking this way, if he decided to go to a friend’s house, say, before going home. But Ed’s information was that his mother picked him up most days. He’d probably be looking for her, standing around, wondering why she was late.

That worked for Ed. He had his story ready.

Ed sat behind the wheel of the truck, waiting for the bell to ring, which was when he’d go on high alert. While Carl had never seen him, he’d seen plenty of pictures of the kid—Yolanda had given them to him—so he didn’t anticipate having any trouble picking out the little bastard.

While he waited, he ate a Mars bar. Unwrapped it, bit off half, chewed it up in a few seconds, then shoved the other half into his mouth. Licked his lips, glanced into the rearview mirror to make sure he didn’t have chocolate in the corners of his mouth. His mother had taught him that. Always check the corners of your mouth.

He looked okay.

The bell rang.

Seconds later, school doors flew open and hordes of kids made
their escape. Jesus, there were way more of them coming out at once than he’d imagined. Ed had to keep a close watch on everyone.

But then he saw him. And just as he’d hoped, he was coming this way. He’d gotten about twenty yards from the school when he stopped, looked around.

“Looking for your mommy?” Ed said.

He got out of the truck, stood by the open driver’s door.

“Hey!” he called. “Carl? You Carl?”

The boy looked his way. He was about sixty feet from the truck.
Don’t scare him,
Ed thought. If the kid took off running, he’d never be able to catch him.

“Me?” Carl said, pointing to himself.

Ed nodded furiously, forced a smile. “There was a fire!”

Carl’s jaw dropped and he started running toward the man. “A fire?”

“Your mom asked me to come get you,” he said. “I was doing a couple of loads of laundry, and your mom was in the office, and one of the dryers just kind of blew up. All kinds of flame coming out of it and stuff.”

“Is she okay?” the boy asked.

“She’s good—she’s fine—but she had to call the fire department, and she asked me if I could come pick you up. She described you pretty good! I picked you right out of the crowd!”

Carl’s feet stayed rooted to the ground about ten feet away from the man. “I don’t know,” he said.

Ed put both hands out in front of him, palms out. “Look, I get it. I told your mom—I said, ‘Your son’s going to think I’m some sort of creepy stranger.’ I mean, you don’t know me. And if you’re not comfortable letting me give you a ride to the Laundromat, I understand. Go back into the office and maybe in a couple of hours or so, when the fire department is finished up, your mom can come get you. I can go back and tell her you decided to stay. I mean, she could probably use your help right now, with all the trouble that’s going on, but I think she’ll understand.”

Ed could see that the kid was right on the edge.

He started to get back into the truck. “Don’t worry about it, Carl. I’ll tell her you’re fine and that you’ll be waiting—”

“It’s okay!” he said, and closed the distance between them.

“You can get in on my side,” Ed said, moving back to allow the boy to jump in and scoot across the seat to the passenger side.

“You sure my mom’s okay?” he asked as he settled in up against the passenger door and buckled his seat belt.

“I think she might have burned her hand a bit, but not real bad. When the fire started, she tried to smother it with some wet clothes from a washer, but it was kind of coming from the back side of the dryer. So then she went for a fire extinguisher, but by then it was really going. But you should have seen her! She was amazing! I called 911 for her, and once the fire trucks got there, she was all worked up because she couldn’t come get you.”

“Are they going to have to close the laundry?” Carl asked, his face full of worry. “Because if it closes, my mom doesn’t make any money.”

Ed, putting the truck in drive, shook his head. “Hard to say. She got insurance?”

“What’s that?” Carl asked.

“Huh? They not teach you anything these days?” Ed checked his mirrors, prepared to move out into the street. But suddenly it was like trying to get out of the airport parking lot at Christmas. All these other cars blocking his way, mothers picking up their kids.

“Jesus, would it kill these little bastards to walk home from school?” Ed said. “Nobody got picked up when I was a kid.”

He glanced over at the boy. Carl had begun to look uneasy.

“Sorry, I just get stressed-out in traffic,” he said. “I’ll get you to your mom right away.”

“It’s back that way,” Carl said.

“Yeah, I know, but I gotta get out of this traffic jam first—then I’ll double back. Your mom or dad never tell you not to be a backseat driver?”

“A what?”

Ed laughed. “You’re not much brighter than your old man—you know that?”

“You know my dad?” Carl asked.

“Come on!” Ed yelled, putting down his window. There were three minivans and an SUV ahead of him, waiting to get past a crossing guard in an orange vest who was guiding kids across the street. “Honest to Christ!”

“How do you know my dad?” Carl persisted.

Ed glanced over as he powered up his window. “We’re old buddies.”

Carl’s hand went for the door handle. Ed hit the lock button on his own door. “Don’t even think about it, little man. We’re about to get moving. You jump out of a moving truck, you’ll turn into street pizza.”

“There was no fire,” Carl said.

Ed grinned. “That’s good news, huh?”

The crossing guard stepped back onto the sidewalk and started waving the other cars through. “Here we go,” Ed said. “Hope you like Boston because—Jesus!”

There was a banging on his window. There was a man running alongside the truck, slapping the palm of his hand on the glass and shouting.

“Stop the truck!” he yelled, his voice half-muffled by the glass. “Stop the damn truck!”

The man grabbed for the door handle, tried to open it without success.

It took half a second for Ed to realize who the man was, but he sure recognized him. He looked ahead, wanting to hit the gas, but the other cars were still holding him up. “Back off!” he shouted, but when he turned his head to the window, the man was gone.

“Carl!”

The guy was on the other side of the truck now, banging on Carl’s glass. “Open the door!”

Ed reached across, grabbed the kid by his shirt collar, and yanked him toward the center of the seat. “Don’t touch that fucking door.”

The guy was holding up a phone, looking at Ed. “Hey, asshole! Next call is 911! Every cop in New York State’s gonna be looking for this pickup!”

Ed’s cheek twitched.

“Think about it!” the man yelled.

On the sidewalk, kids had stopped to watch what was happening. A few mothers, still waiting at the curb, had gotten out of their cars. At least one of them was getting out a phone, maybe to take pictures.

The cars ahead were finally moving.

Ed looked forward, hit the gas.

Felt the truck lurch for a second as it accelerated. Heard a
thunk
.

When Ed glanced right, the man was gone. He grinned, released his grip on the kid. “Showed him,” he said.

“Not exactly,” Carl said, and nodded rearward.

Ed looked in his mirror. The guy was in back. He was in the pickup bed. On his knees, amid a litter of dirt and decaying leaves. He was keeping low, in case Ed decided to start veering back and forth in a bid to throw him off-balance.

The engine sputtered and roared as the truck gained speed. A second crossing guard at the next cross street had to shoo kids out of the truck’s path. Ed took the corner fast enough that the man was tossed into the wall of the pickup bed. But as long as he kept his center of gravity low, there was no way Ed could ditch him unless he found a way to drive upside down.

The man glanced through the window at Carl, gave him a thumbs-up gesture. Then he rolled onto his back and started fiddling with his phone.

“What’s he doing?” Ed asked. “I can’t see him.”

“I think he’s calling the police,” Carl said.

Ed cranked the wheel hard left, hard right, and back again. See if the guy could enter any numbers while bouncing around like a pinball. He caught glimpses in his mirror of the guy being jostled back and forth. Didn’t look like he had the phone in his hand anymore. Which could mean he’d already called the cops, or maybe he’d just given up. Maybe the phone had been knocked out of his hand.

“Gotta lose this guy,” he said. But even Ed, who had failed physics in high school—and just about everything else for that matter—realized that no matter how quickly he drove, he wasn’t going to put any more distance between himself and this asshole in the back of his truck.

The only way he was going to get rid of him was to get him out of his truck.

“Hang on, kid,” Ed said, and slammed his foot on the brake with everything he had.

The truck squealed to a stop. The man in the back was thrown up against the back of the cab. Ed jammed the truck into park, threw open his door, and jumped out. He was going to reach in, grab the son of a bitch by his jacket, and throw him out onto the road.

What he hadn’t counted on was how quickly the man would get to his feet.

Or that he would kick him in the face.

“Fuck!” Ed shouted, staggering back, putting both hands over a nose that was already spurting blood.

“Carl!” the man yelled. “Get out of the truck! Run!”

Carl hesitated for half a second, then scrambled across the front seat of the vehicle and bailed out of the open driver’s door. The man placed both hands on the edge of the pickup bed and swung himself over, like he was dismounting a pommel horse.

While Ed still had his hands over his face, trying to stop the blood, the man drove a fist hard into his bloated stomach. Ed tumbled backward onto the street.

Carl, safely positioned behind a tree on a nearby front lawn, watched things play out.

In the distance, sirens could be heard. One of the many mothers at the school who’d witnessed all this must have called the police.

“You better get moving,” the man said. “Cavalry’s coming.”

Ed slowly got to his feet, blood dripping down his chin.

“You’re fucking dead,” Ed muttered, making his way back to the truck. He got behind the wheel, slammed the door, and sped off.

Carl came out from behind the tree and ran over to the man, who was now bent over, hands on his knees, throwing up.

“Jeez, Mr. Harwood, are you okay?” he asked.

David Harwood went from bending over to collapsing onto the grass. He wiped his mouth with the back of a hand that was shaking.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I was really glad when your mom finally returned my call, but now, I’m not so sure.”