Fear the Worst: A Thriller (10 page)
Read Fear the Worst: A Thriller Online
Authors: Linwood Barclay
Tags: #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Fiction
“Susanne…”
“It’s freaking me out. Bob says I’m getting paranoid about everything because of Syd. Why the fuck wouldn’t I be?”
The girl stepped out from the entrance, into the streetlight, but the way she had her arms wrapped around the boy, her head tucked down onto his chest, I couldn’t see her face. But my gut said it wasn’t her. There was something not quite Syd about her. This girl’s legs, they seemed a little shorter.
They started walking up the street. In another moment, they’d be gone.
“So I’m thinking, is someone watching our house? Or one of the other houses on the street? If it’s our house, are they watching me, or are they watching Bob? Or has this got something to do with Evan?”
Then the girl leaned her head back, tossed her hair back over her shoulder.
I’d seen Syd do that a thousand times.
“Susanne, I have to go for a second. Hang on.”
“What? Why—”
I bolted from the
diner, leaving my bag behind, my phone on the table. I threw open the door and ran into the street, forcing drivers coming from both directions to hit the brakes. Horns blew, someone shouted, “Asshole!”
They were forty yards ahead, thirty, twenty. Arm in arm. She had an arm around his waist, her thumb in a belt loop.
“Syd!” I shouted. “Syd!”
Before the girl had a chance to turn around, I was on them, grabbing her by her free arm, using it to swing myself around in front of her.
“Syd!” I said.
It wasn’t Syd.
The girl jerked her arm back as her boyfriend shoved me away forcefully with both hands. I stumbled back, tripped over my own feet, landed on my ass on the sidewalk, my head narrowly missing a brick wall behind me.
“Fuck’s your problem?” he said, grabbing the girl and taking her across the street.
THIRTEEN
T
HE NEXT MORNING
, I
DEBATED RENTING A CAR
, but Seattle isn’t exactly laid out like New York. I wanted to hit as many teen shelters as possible, and didn’t want to waste time attempting to navigate the city’s winding streets, so I talked to a cabby out front of the hotel and cut a deal to have him take me from shelter to shelter, and wait while I was at each one, for $200.
“That’ll take you to noon,” he said.
“We’ll see where we are then,” I said. “Let me go find a cash machine.”
The hotel—not a Holiday Inn, not even close—at least had a computer in the lobby I could use, and I went online to get a list of local shelters. The desk clerk said the printer was busted, so I had to write down names, addresses, and phone numbers on a pad I’d found next to the phone in my room.
I handed the sheet, and the cash, to the cabby and said, “Let’s hit the closest first and work our way out to the others.”
“You don’t have to worry about me running you all over the place. You’ve already paid me, the meter’s off, and with gas costing what it is, we’re doing the shortest route possible.”
“Great.”
He delivered me to all the shelters on my list by half past eleven. It was the same story everywhere. I showed them Syd’s picture, left them some flyers with my cell phone number on them. I stopped kids at random, pushed the photo under their noses.
No one recognized Syd.
Nor had anyone heard of Yolanda Mills. Every place I stopped I asked for her, too.
After the last shelter, I dropped into the back seat of the taxi. “You know of any other places that aren’t on this list?” I asked.
“I didn’t even know there were this many,” the cabby said, turning in his seat to look at me. The Jesus bobblehead stuck to his dash, which had been bouncing madly during our drive around Seattle, had had a chance to calm down. My driver was heavyset, hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and spent most of the time as we wandered the city talking on his cell phone to his wife about what they could do to find somebody to marry his sister. She was, from what I could tell, unlikely to be named Miss Washington in the near future, and this was a major stumbling block.
“All right,” I said, dejected. “Is there a main police headquarters?”
“Sure.”
“Drop me off there and that’ll be it,” I said.
“Tough about your daughter,” he said.
I hadn’t discussed Syd with him, but given that we were hitting all the shelters for runaways, and I had a stack of flyers in my hand, you didn’t have to be Jim Rockford to figure out the nature of my mission.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Sometimes,” he said, poking Jesus with a finger and making him shake, “you just have to let them do what they want to do, and wait until they realize they need your help, and they come home on their own.”
“What if they’re in trouble?” I countered. “And they’re waiting for you to find them?”
The driver thought about that for a moment. “Well, I guess that’s different,” he said.
* * *
T
HE
S
EATTLE POLICE HEADQUARTERS WAS ON
F
IFTH
A
VENUE.
I went into the lobby and up to the counter and told the woman there I needed to speak to someone about a missing teenage girl.
An officer named Richard Buttram came out to see me and led me to an interview room. I told him about Sydney, when she’d gone missing, how I’d been led to Seattle. That I’d lost touch with Yolanda Mills since I’d gotten here, and that I’d had no luck finding my daughter.
I gave him one of my flyers, told him about the website.
He listened patiently, nodded, stopped me to ask the occasional question.
“So you don’t really know,” he said, “whether your daughter’s here in Seattle, or whether she ever was here in Seattle.”
Slowly, not wanting to admit it, I said, “I suppose that’s true.” Then, trying to sound more confident, I continued, “But this woman told me she was here. That she had seen her. She even sent me a picture that I’m as sure as can be was of my daughter.”
“What was the number she gave you?”
I opened my cell phone, found it, read it off to Buttram, who scribbled it down on a notepad. “Let me try it,” he said, dialing the number from his desk phone. He let it ring a good thirty seconds, then hung up.
“Give me three minutes,” Buttram said and left the room.
I sat there for nearly fifteen, staring at the empty tabletop, the unadorned walls. I looked at the clock, watched the second hand make sweep after sweep.
When Buttram returned he looked dour. “I went to see one of our detectives who knows a lot about cell phones and various exchanges and all that kind of thing.”
“Okay,” I said.
“It’s his guess that this is a throwaway phone. He did a quick check of the number, made a call, told me it’s one of those ones you can buy at a 7-Eleven or whatever, use for a short period of time, then ditch it.”
I felt like I was slowly slipping underwater.
“None of this makes any sense,” I said.
Buttram said, “I’ll hang on to this flyer, put the word out, but I don’t want to raise your expectations that we’re going to find your daughter.”
“Sure,” I said.
“This woman who called you, she wasn’t sniffing about for a reward?”
“No,” I said.
Buttram shook his head as he stood up and walked me to the lobby. “Then I don’t know what to make of it.”
“I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I’m starting to think Sydney’s not here in Seattle, that she never was, but I’m afraid to fly home. I keep thinking, if I walk around that neighborhood, where the shelter is, just one more time, I’ll spot her.”
“You’ve put the word out,” he said. “Morgan, at Second Chance, I know her, and she’s the real deal. If she says she’s going to keep her eye out for your girl, that’s exactly what she’ll do.”
He shook my hand and wished me good luck. I stood on the sidewalk out front of the police headquarters for five minutes before walking back to my hotel and checking out.
I booked myself on a Jet Blue flight that didn’t leave Seattle until shortly before ten, and would arrive, considering the time change, at LaGuardia at six in the morning. That gave me time to go back into the Second Chance neighborhood and keep looking for Syd.
I managed to grab the same table in the same diner where I’d eaten the night before and stared across the street at the door to the shelter for the better part of four hours. I ordered food, then a coffee about every half hour.
I never saw her, or anyone else who looked remotely like her.
From there I cabbed it to the airport and sat around in the departure lounge like some sort of shock trauma victim, staring straight ahead, hardly moving at all, while waiting for my flight to be called. My cell rang twice. The first call was from Susanne, hoping for good news, but knowing there’d be none since I had not gotten in touch.
And then the phone rang again.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’m really sorry.”
“Hey, Kate,” I said.
“I kind of flipped out the other night.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You went, right? To Seattle? I noticed you weren’t back yet.”
So she’d been driving by my house.
“Kate, I really can’t talk now.”
“I know I said some things, and I just wanted to apologize.”
Ma
ybe, if I hadn’t been so tired and discouraged, I might have found a way to be more diplomatic.
I might not have said, “Kate, this isn’t working out. We’re done. It’s over.” And I certainly wouldn’t have finished with “Life’s too short.”
But that was what I said.
Kate waited a few seconds before coming back with “You’re a total asshole, you know that? You’re a goddamn fucking asshole. I knew it the first time I met you. And you know something else? There’s something not right with you, you know that? Something just not—”
I ended the call, turned the phone off, and slipped it into my pocket.
I’
M NOT NORMALLY ABLE TO NOD OFF ON A PLANE
, but this overnight flight was an exception. Exhaustion overwhelmed me and I spent almost the entire trip asleep. I was more than bone weary. I was depressed, crushed, burdened by despair. I’d traveled clear across the country thinking I was going to bring my daughter home with me.
And I was coming home alone.
We landed on time, but the pilot had to wait for a gate to clear, so it was nearly seven before I got off the plane, and what with several traffic jams, a couple of pit stops and everything else, it was shortly before noon before I pulled into my driveway on Hill Street back in Milford.
A defeated soldier coming home from war, I trudged up to the door, bag slung over my shoulder. I put my key into the lock and swung open the door.
The house had been trashed.
FOURTEEN
“S
O RUN THROUGH IT AGAIN FOR ME,”
Kip Jennings said.
“I got home, I opened the door, it’s like somebody tossed a grenade in here,” I said.
“When was this?”
I glanced at the clock hanging on the kitchen wall, one of the few things still in its place. “About an hour and a half ago.”
“Have you touched anything since then?”
“I put that clock back on the mantel,” I said. “It was my father’s.” The gesture was akin to straightening your cap after you’ve been run over by an eighteen-wheeler.
There were a couple of uniformed cops wandering around the house, taking pictures, muttering among themselves. They’d found a basement window that had been kicked in.
“You’d been gone how long?”
“About forty-eight hours. I left here early two days ago. After nine. So two days and four hours, give or take.”
“Seattle,” Jennings said.
“That’s right,” I said.
“And your daughter?”
“I didn’t find her,” I said.
Jennings’s eyes softened for a moment. “So you got home, you opened the door,” she said. “Did you see anyone? Was anyone running away from the house when you pulled into the driveway?”
“No,” I said.
I told her what I’d found. In the living room, cushions tossed from the furniture, then cut open, the foam scattered about in chunks. Every shelf cleared, every cabinet emptied. Books thrown about, CDs all over the place. Audio equipment pulled from the shelves, some components still hanging from them by their wires, hanging precariously like a truck on a cliff in an Indiana Jones movie.
In the kitchen, every cupboard emptied. And then, the boxes that were in the cupboard, emptied. Cornflakes all over the floor. Things pulled out of the fridge, the door hanging open.
It was the same story everywhere. All the drawers in my bedroom dresser pulled out and turned over. So many clothes on the floor you couldn’t see the carpet. Socks, underwear, shirts. Items ripped off hangers in the closet, thrown here and there.
Syd’s room was no different, although she didn’t have quite as much stuff to trash as I did, since most of her clothes were still at her mother’s house. The dresser had been emptied. Unlike my bed, which didn’t appear to have been touched, Syd’s mattress had been cut open. The contents of the closet were on the bedroom floor.
In my computer room, all the desk drawers had been opened, the shelves cleared off.
The basement damage was minimal. The washer and dryer had been opened, and a box of Tide detergent had been emptied onto the floor. The toolbox on my workbench had been dumped out.
Our boxes of stuff—those things you accumulate through life that you don’t know what to do with but haven’t the nerve to pitch, like your children’s kindergarten drawings, photos, books you’ll never read again, old files and business papers from your parents’ house—had been opened and rummaged through, but only a couple had been dumped out.
Standing amid the wreckage in the living room, I asked Jennings, “What kind of little bastards would do this?”
“You think it was kids?” Jennings asked.
“You don’t?”
We went through the house slowly, our shoes crunching on cornflakes as we went through the kitchen. She walked and talked. “Have you noticed whether anything was stolen?”
