Fear the Worst: A Thriller (16 page)

TWENTY-SIX

I
SLEPT TILL HALF PAST SEVEN.
Before heading into the en-suite off my bedroom, I went down the hall and looked in Sydney’s bedroom. The door was wide open. The bed was empty, and made. I wasn’t even sure Patty had slept there.

After telling her she’d have to leave in the morning, I’d gone into my own bedroom and closed the door. I’d fallen asleep almost instantly. It was possible, I now realized, that she had left then.

I went down to the kitchen to look for any signs of her, but there were none. The only glass in the sink was the one I had used to take some Tylenol the night before.

“Okay, then,” I said quietly to myself. I went to the front door, found it unlocked. Patty would have had to unlock it to leave, and without a key, had no way to send the bolt home when she stepped outside.

Before hitting the shower, I checked the computer to see whether anyone had tried to get in touch with me about Syd. And of course, every time I sat down to the computer, what I was most hoping to find was a note from Syd herself.

This morning, as was most often the case, there was nothing.

But the phone did ring just before eight.

“Hey,” Susanne said. “I was sitting here, wishing the phone would ring with good news.”

“I wish I had some,” I said. I filled her in on a couple of things. That I’d quit my job until I’d found Syd. That blood belonging to Syd, and some hood who had been found dead in Bridgeport, was on Syd’s car. That someone who’d been involved in the break-in at my house had come by the dealership looking for Syd, and had tried to kill me.

“What?” Susanne said. “And I’m hearing about all this
now?”

I thought I had plenty of excuses. Exhausted. Traumatized. Overwhelmed. But I didn’t think any of them would fly.

I said, “I’m sorry. If I’d had good news, I’d have called.”

“This man who tried to kill you, who was looking for Syd,” Susanne said. “Who was he? Are the police looking for him? If they question him, won’t they know why Syd’s missing?”

“They’re working on it,” I said. “They have to find him first. He used a fake license when he took the car for a test drive.”

“Oh,” she said, the air coming out of her balloon.

“Any news on your front?” I asked.

Susanne seemed to be pulling herself together on the other end of the line. All my news, particularly the attempt on my life, had left her shell-shocked. Finally, “Bob’s going all Spanish Inquisition on Evan.”

“Good,” I said.

“He owes more money than he’s saying. He managed to get from one of his friends, he won’t say who, a fake credit card to play some of his gambling on the computer.”

“A fake card?”

“It’s the data from someone else’s card, but on a new card. He used it for a couple of days, until the person whose card it was found out about some fishy charges and canceled it. Then Evan went back to using his. He even snuck Bob’s card out of his wallet a couple of times and used that.”

“Maybe Bob will find out something that links Evan’s problems to Sydney. Maybe he owes someone money and they told him they’d hurt her if he didn’t pay up. I’m just grasping at straws here, Suze.”

“I know,” she said.

“About Bob,” I said.

“Yes?”

“Look,” I said, finding it difficult to come up with the words, “tell him… tell him I’m sorry about how I handled things with Evan.”

“Okay.”

“He has to know we’ve all been going through a lot.”

“Sure,” Susanne said.

“And I think… I think maybe he’s good for you.”

“Pardon?”

“When you fell… there was something… I think he really loves you, Suze.”

Susanne didn’t say anything. I had a feeling she was finding it hard to say anything for a moment.

“And another thing,” I said. “I need to talk to Bob about a car.”

“What car?”

“Laura’s taking mine. I need wheels.”

“You need a car, from Bob?” Susanne said. “He’s going to just love this.”

I
REPLACED THE RECEIVER
and was about to turn away from the phone when something from the night before came back to me. I dialed Kate Wood. I tried her cell, figuring she might already be on her way to work.

“Hello,” she said. It sounded as though she was driving. A radio broadcasting traffic reports in the background got turned down.

“Hey,” I said. “It’s Tim.”

“I know,” she said.

“You drove by last night.”

“Maybe.”

“I need to explain what you saw,” I said.

“I didn’t see anything,” she said.

“That was Syd’s friend Patty,” I said.

“I see,” Kate said. “So you’ve decided you like them a lot younger. I guess that’s why you haven’t called.”

“She was hurt,” I said, recalling that Patty, limping because of her injured knee, had her arm around me for support as I took her into the house. “She hurt herself at some party down on the beach that got a bit out of hand, called me, and asked me to pick her up.”

“Of course she did,” Kate said.

“Anyway, I got her knee bandaged, and offered to let her stay in Syd’s room, but I think she must have taken off right after I went to bed.”

“Kind of funny, don’t you think?” Kate said.

“What? What’s funny?”

“That you’d actually go to the trouble to call and tell me this. You don’t call me any other time, but this you want to phone me about.”

“Kate, I just thought you should know.”

“I’ll just bet you do. You know, things are really starting to come together where you’re concerned, Tim.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Kate.”

“I’m not stupid, Tim. I can figure things out.”

“Okay, Kate, whatever you say. I thought an explanation was in order, but clearly you’ve got some other scenario going on in your head and I don’t imagine there’s much I can do to change it, so you have a great day.”

I hung up.

I put on a pot of coffee and made myself a fried egg sandwich, leaving the yolk runny. I was scanning the headlines of the
New Haven Register
that had been tossed onto the front step that morning when the doorbell rang. I set down the paper and went to the front door, still in my bare feet, and opened it.

It was Arnie Chilton. When he saw my nose, he did a double take.

“What happened to you?”

“And good morning to you, too,” I said.

“Seriously, what happened? Did Bob do that? I know he thinks you’re a dick.”

“No,” I said. “I had a run-in with someone else.”

“Oh,” he said, then, as if remembering why he’d come knocking in the first place, said, “Bob’s right, you know. You really are a dick.”

“And here I thought you weren’t good at finding things out,” I said.

“That was a shitty thing to do, making me do a coffee-and-donut run,” he said. He didn’t look angry so much as hurt. I actually felt a twinge of guilt.

“Sorry,” I said. “I think I was trying to stick it to Bob more than you.”

“You used me as an instrument of ridicule,” he said.

I stared at him with some wonder. “Yeah, I guess that’s what I did,” I said. I opened the door a bit wider. “You want some coffee?”

“Okay,” he said, and followed me into the kitchen.

Arnie took it black. I poured him a cup and set it on the kitchen table. I sat back down and took another bite of my sandwich.

“You eaten?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, blowing on the coffee. “You think that just because I was a security guard, I’m an idiot.”

“No,” I said. “Just underqualified.” He looked up from his coffee. “No offense.”

Arnie looked like he wanted to say something but wasn’t sure what, so he went back to his coffee.

“You just come by to tell me I’m a dick?” I asked.

“That was just the first item on the list,” he said. “But I also want to ask you some questions.”

“So you’re actually still on this,” I said.

“I’m going to stay on this until I work off what I owe Bob,” he said.

“Bob hasn’t called you off?” I’d wondered if Bob might have fired Arnie as a way of sticking it to me. But, assuming Arnie had even a remote chance of finding anything out about Syd, that would be punishing Susanne, too. And I didn’t think, anymore, that Bob had that in him.

“No,” he said, surprised. “I’m an honorable person, you know. Someone asks me to do something, I do it.”

I popped the last of the egg sandwich into my mouth. “Okay.”

“So you know Sydney had this boyfriend? This kid named Jeff?”

“I know. He dropped by yesterday.”

“What do you know about him?”

“About Jeff?”

“Yeah.”

I shrugged. “Not that much. Knows computers, helped me set up the website. Kind of quiet. Has a bit of a confidence problem.”

“You know he got in some shit, right?”

Suddenly he had my attention. “What sort of shit?”

Arnie Chilton looked pleased with himself. “Jeff had this part-time job over in Bridgeport waiting tables at a Dalrymple’s.” It was a moderately priced family restaurant, like an Applebee’s. “So they caught him doing this thing with customer credit cards. They’d give him their card, and before he swiped it through the restaurant’s cash register, he ran it through this thing called a wedge.”

“A wedge?” I said.

“Small thing, not much bigger than a pack of smokes. You swipe a card through it and it stores all the data.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Later, you download all the data out of the wedge and transfer it to the magnetic strips of new, fake cards.”

“Son of a bitch,” I said, thinking back to a conversation I’d had only moments earlier.

“So, anyway, this Jeff character, he was doing this, the manager spotted him, fired him on the spot.”

“When was this?”

“Shit, months ago,” Arnie said. “Might have been last summer.”

“And he wasn’t charged?”

“The manager was going to charge him, but first he thought, he didn’t need the bad publicity, right? People find out your place has been ripping off customers’ credit card data, they stay away. Plus, Jeff, he was just a kid, right, and then his dad—who works at one of the radio stations Dalrymple’s buys time on—came to see the manager and said his son was never going to do anything like this again, that he was going to scare the living shit out of him, and that if the restaurant pressed charges it could ruin the kid for life, that whole song-and-dance thing, you know? Plus, he’d see that the restaurant got a whole bunch of free spots during the drive-home show.”

“Arnie,” I said, “how did you track this down?”

He looked a bit sheepish. “The manager at the Dalrymple’s is my brother.”

“You’re kidding me.” I had to laugh.

“I’m kind of in debt to him, too. I’m over there a lot, doing cleanup. He used to have lots of other people working there for next to nothing, but not anymore. I do it in between my private-eye jobs.” He grinned.

“Of which this is your first,” I said.

He nodded. “The thing is, I was over there talking to him, telling him about Bob asking me to try to find your and Susanne’s daughter, and I happened to mention she’d had a boyfriend named Jeff, and he goes, we used to have a Jeff kid working here, what was his name, and I tell him, and he goes, no shit?”

“Small world,” I said. “You mentioned this to Bob and Susanne yet?”

“Uh-uh. I was going to report back to them later today or tomorrow. Thing is, I’m going to go home and get some sleep. I was up late last night, having drinks with my brother.”

“You talked to Jeff Bluestein about this?”

He shook his head. “Not yet.”

“You mind if I do that?” I asked.

“Sounds good to me. Thing is, that’s kind of why I thought I’d mention it to you. These young kids, they kind of scare me. Some of them can really get in your face, and I’m not really good at dealing with that.”

Jeff, while a big boy, didn’t strike me as much of a potential threat, even to Arnie. “I get what you’re saying,” I said.

“You think this might have anything to do with what happened to your daughter?” Arnie asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“My brother, he’s had to deal with a lot of crap in the restaurant business, let me tell ya. After he told me about this Jeff kid, he started getting into all the problems he has getting help. You know all the talk, these last few years, about immigration and all these illegals working in the country?”

“I watch Lou Dobbs occasionally,” I said.

“Okay, so some people, they’ve been saying, what they should have is a law that if you hire someone you know is an illegal, then they can charge you, or shut your business down, you’ve heard about this?”

“Sure.” I thought of something Kip Jennings had said about Randall Tripe. That he’d been involved in, among other things, human trafficking. “You ever hear of a guy named Tripe? Randall Tripe?”

“Huh?”

“Never mind, go on with your story.”

“So my brother figures, he doesn’t need that kind of shit, right? He wants to run a place on the up-and-up. But there was a time, he’d hire people like that, no papers, no background check. To wash dishes, clear tables, that kind of thing. I tell ya, I wouldn’t want to work in the restaurant business for anything.”

Arnie seemed to have wound down.

“I’m sorry about the thing with the donuts,” I said.

Arnie shrugged, like it was nothing.

“Can I ask you one last thing?”

“I guess,” he said.

“If Bob’s the one who hired you, why you coming to me with this?”

Arnie shrugged again. “The thing about Bob is, he thinks owning a bunch of used-car lots is on the same level as being the Pope or something. As big an asshole as you are, sometimes I think Bob’s an even bigger one.”

S
YDNEY, SIXTEEN
. A year ago
.

She’s passed all her driving tests and now wants to take out the car solo. She has more opportunities at her mother’s house than at mine. Susanne works conventional hours compared to me, so there’s a car available more often for Syd to practice with in the evenings. When Syd’s staying with me, and there actually happens to be an evening when I’m home and the car’s in the driveway, I’m more hesitant about letting her take it out. I attribute this to the fact that I haven’t had as much chance to get comfortable with the idea of her being out there on the road, alone
.