The Twenty-Three 3 (Promise Falls) (10 page)

FOURTEEN

“LET’S
go, let’s go, come on, people, let’s go! Move it, move it!”

Finley was standing on the loading docks at Finley Springs Water, acting as a traffic cop as forklifts delivered pallets of bottled water from deep inside the plant to the open doors of the panel vans. There were vans backed up to each of the three doors, and others waiting to take their place once a space was created.

Shortly after his first phone call with David, he’d gotten on to his foreman to start rounding up every one of the company’s twenty-two employees. Those who’d gone out of town for the weekend, if they could be reached on their cell phones, were ordered to get their asses back as fast as possible.

Four employees couldn’t be raised on their cells or home phones.

“They might be sick, at the hospital,” the foreman said.

Finley had to agree that was possible. But getting in as many as they did allowed Finley to put the plant into full production, and get every truck on the road.

Trevor Duckworth was one of the first to arrive, and Finley had greeted him warmly.

“Good to see you,” he said, clapping his hand on the young man’s shoulder. “I was just helping your dad get a handle on what’s been happening.”

“Uh-huh,” Trevor said.

“I was giving him some info on the water plant, what might have gone wrong.”

“Great.” Trevor cocked his head. “How do you know your own water supply isn’t going to make everyone sick?”

Finley’s head recoiled, as though he’d been struck. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Where does the town water come from? Doesn’t it come from springs and stuff in the hills around Promise Falls, just like your water? If the problem’s at the source, wouldn’t all this stuff be bad, too?”

Trevor waved a hand at the hundreds of cases of water.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Finley said. “That’s just nuts.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. My water is one hundred percent pure and drinkable. I just know it. I know it in my gut.”

Trevor did not look convinced.

“Fine, I’ll prove it to you,” Finley said. He took a few steps over to the closest pallet load, used both hands to rip a small hole in the plastic casing that held two dozen bottles together, and pulled one bottle out. He twisted the lid, heard the distinctive crack of the plastic seal being broken, tipped the bottle up to his mouth, and started drinking.

Once he’d downed nearly half the bottle, he glared at Trevor Duckworth and said, “There. You want one?”

“When was it bottled?” Trevor asked.

“What?”

“All the problems started this morning. When was that bottled? Maybe anything bottled before today is safe, but—”

“Fine, for fuck’s sake,” Finley said. He turned and bellowed, at no one in particular, “Get me a fresh bottle! From this morning!”

A young woman scurried off, returned in thirty seconds with a plastic bottle, and handed it to her boss.

“Let’s try this,” he said, going through the same ritual again, cracking the lid, drinking half the bottle this time.

“God, I’m gonna have to take such a piss,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “That water tasted absolutely perfect. Cool, fresh, no aftertaste. Not a hint of anything wrong with it.”

Trevor shrugged. “Okay, then. Which truck you want me to drive?”

“Just help load them all—then I’m going to give everyone their instructions.”

Finley took out his phone, thinking it was time to bring in David Harwood.

He needed the man’s help now more than ever. He’d hired Harwood to do his publicity, help run his mayoral campaign, but every time Finley had instructions for him, the guy had some fucking crisis. Finley couldn’t recall ever knowing someone with so many problems. All that shit years ago with his wife, then more recently this thing with his cousin and the baby. God almighty, it was a fucking soap opera with him.

Granted, he had to cut David and everyone else in this town some slack today.

Good thing he’d been sending David home with plenty of free bottled water. If he hadn’t, Finley might have lost his right-hand man this morning. But David was not the only one. He’d been sending all his employees home, lately, with free cases of water. Told them that if they worked for the company, they had to demonstrate brand loyalty.

Went to the company’s integrity, Finley told them.

Finley’d overheard one of the drivers gripe recently that they weren’t drinking Finley water; they were “drinking the Kool-Aid.”

The irony of that comment hit hard today. It was the good people of Promise Falls, who’d been foolish enough to have faith that their local officials would look after them, who’d drunk the Kool-Aid.

Finley had been very clear with Lindsay that any water she took up to Jane was to be of the bottled variety. Even the coffee or tea, or even lemonade, was not to be made from what came out of the tap. The rules had been put in place some time ago. How would it look, he’d told Lindsay one time, if it got out he didn’t drink Finley Springs Water?

It’d be like Henry Ford getting caught driving around in an Oldsmobile.

Finley took out his phone and entered David’s number. One ring, two . . . three . . . four . . .

“Hello.”

“David?”

Finley wasn’t sure. It didn’t sound like David, unless David had suddenly come down with a terrible cold or something.

“Yeah, this is David. What is it, Randy?”

“You okay? You sound funny.”

David cleared his throat. “I’m fine.”

“You got a second?”

A pause at the other end of the line. Finally, “Yeah, go ahead.” “You sure?”

“I said go ahead.”

“I’m about ready to drop hundreds of cases of free water right downtown. But people need to know it’s there. Plus, I’m about to give a little rallying-cry, pep-talk kind of thing here at the plant. I’d like you to be here. There needs to be a record of all this. Could be very helpful in the coming months.”

When David didn’t say anything right away, Finley said, “I’m doing a good thing here, David. I know you think it’s all self-promotion, and I won’t deny there’s an element of that, but I have an opportunity here. I have an opportunity to help people. I have an opportunity to actually do something good.”

A pause. Then, “I’m on my way.”

Finley broke into a grin. “That’s what I want to—”

David had already hung up.

• • •

The trucks were loaded and ready to go, but Finley had not yet given the word for them to move out. He was waiting for David to show up. He wanted his pep talk recorded. He could have gotten anyone here to film him on a smartphone, but Finley didn’t just want David to record it—he wanted David to
hear
it.

It was important, Randall Finley realized, that David actually believe in him. It was an extension of his philosophy about his employees drinking his bottled water. If David was going to be telling the good folks of Promise Falls that Finley was the man to lead them into the future after the next election, it needed to come from the heart.

Okay, maybe that was expecting too much. But David was not going to be effective if people thought he was just mouthing the words, that he was nothing more than a paid mouthpiece.

“We need to go,” Trevor said, leaning up against the back doors of one of the trucks.

“Another minute,” Finley said. “We just need to—”

There was David. Running up a short set of concrete steps, coming into the plant through the loading dock.

“Okay,” Finley said. “I want to say a few words to everyone before you go.”

He took a breath. “This is turning into one of the darkest days, if not
the
darkest day, in the history of Promise Falls. We’re witness to a tragedy of immense proportions. I thank God all of you are okay, but it’s very likely people you know, perhaps even loved ones, are in the hospital now, waiting for treatment.”

Finley tried to see David out of the corner of his eye, make out whether he had his phone out and was getting all this.

“What we have today is a chance to make a small difference in people’s lives. To bring them something life sustaining.” A pause. “Water. So simple and yet so fundamental to our survival. It’s like air. We take it for granted, but when we don’t have it, we can’t go on.
People have been stunned to learn this morning that what is coming out of their taps may be poison. And until this horrible state of affairs has been dealt with, we’re going to step in and do what we can by offering free, safe, pure drinking water. I don’t care what it costs me. There’re thousands and thousands of dollars of product in those trucks, but I don’t care. Some things are more important than money. Being a good citizen counts above all.”

Finley snuck another look at David. Phone out.

Thank God.

Finley continued. “We’re going to drive over in a convoy and set up along the street next to the park downtown, by the falls. I think word’ll spread quickly of what we’re offering. And remember, you’re not just there handing out free water. You’re there to offer hope, a comforting word, a shoulder to cry on.”

Someone muttered, “Fucking hell.”

“Okay, so, off we go!” Finley said.

As the workers of Finley Springs Water piled into the trucks and began to drive off, Finley walked over to David, whose eyes were red and bloodshot, and said, “You get that?”

“Yeah.”

“You look like shit. What the hell happened to you?”

“I’m fine.”

“What about whoever it was you were taking to the hospital?”

“My uncle. He was alive last I saw him.”

Finley gave David a friendly punch to the shoulder. “That’s good, then, right?”

“Sure.”

“We need to head downtown, and we need to let the media know what I’m doing.”

“I’ll start making some calls.”

“Well, make them on the way. Time’s a-wastin’. We’ll go in my car.”

“You need to be careful,” David said.

Finley cocked his head. “Careful?”

“Of how you play this.”

“Not sure I’m following you, David,” Finley said.

“You don’t want to look like you’re taking advantage. Like that night the drive-in screen came down. Acting like you wanted to help people, but not until the camera was on.”

“You misjudge me. You’re as bad as Duckworth.”

“Duckworth?”

“Never mind. What would you have me do, David? I have an opportunity here to genuinely help people in a crisis. You saying I should do nothing? For fear it would make me look opportunistic? Wouldn’t that be just as cravenly political?”

“I’m not saying that.”

“Well, what the fuck are you saying, David?”

David shook his head. “Fine, do what you want. Go save Promise Falls.”

Finley grinned and gave David a pat on the shoulder. “Why don’t we?”

FIFTEEN

Duckworth

AS
critical as it was for me to get out to Thackeray College, I was determined to make a stop along the way at Tate Whitehead’s house. I was in the early stages of this poisoned-water investigation—we still didn’t know what was actually wrong with the water supply—but Whitehead was a so-called person of interest in what might end up being a mass murder.

In my mind, that trumped one dead student right now.

Garvey Ottman’s note had led me to an address in the downtown. There’s a block of two-story houses in Promise Falls that were built nearly a hundred years ago that most developers in town want to get their hands on so they can tear them down and build condos and retail shops, although in this real estate market it was hard to believe that was smart business sense. Off the top of my head, I knew Frank Mancini, who had bought the Constellation Drive-in property, wanted this block.

The homes were linked together in groups of six, with sagging
porches, rotting handrails, missing shingles. No one wanted to put any money into fixing these places, figuring they’d all be sold and razed.

I parked in front of 76 Prince Street—not even a hundred years ago would these addresses have been deemed suitable residences for visiting royalty—and went to the front door. Finding no doorbell, I banged on the door with the side of my fist.

I heard movement in the house, and fifteen seconds later a thin, silvery-haired woman opened the door a crack.

“Yeah?” she said, showing some brown teeth.

I showed her my ID. “I’m looking for Tate Whitehead.”

“He’s not here.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“Probably at work,” she said. “At the water treatment plant. They’re having some problem up there, case you haven’t heard. Fire truck was driving around telling everybody not to drink the water. Check at the plant.”

She started to close the door, but I put a hand up to stop it. “Are you Mrs. Whitehead?”

“I am.”

“When did you last talk to your husband?”

“Last night ’fore he went to work.”

“What time would that’ve been?”

“Around nine, I guess. My husband works the overnight shift there. Sometimes I fall asleep before he goes, but I heard him leave last night.”

“And when does he usually get home?”

“Around six thirty, most nights. Well, mornings, actually.”

“Most?” I asked.

“Mostly, yeah.”

“If he’s late getting home, why would that be?”

She eyed me suspiciously. “What’s all this about? If you want to talk to him, just go up there.”

“Has your husband called you since he left for work last night?”

Mrs. Whitehead blinked a couple of times.

“Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”

“Why would that be odd? He never calls me from work. That’s when I’m sleeping.”

“His shift ended several hours ago. Wouldn’t he call you if something kept him at work?”

She blinked again, as if I were out of focus.

“But I know what’s going on,” she said. “I heard about it on the radio and from that damn fire truck making all that noise.”

“The point I’m trying to make,” I said, “is if Mr. Whitehead knew there was a problem with the water, wouldn’t he have called to tell you himself, rather than waiting for you to find out from the radio or someone else?”

That gave her pause. She looked at me quizzically. “Why
didn’t
he call me?”

“That’s my question.”

“I mean, we’ve had our ups and downs, but I don’t think he’d want me to drink bad water and drop dead. He needs me. He doesn’t know the first thing about how to take care of a home.”

Looking around, I wasn’t that sure Mrs. Whitehead did, either.

“Can you tell me any places where your husband might go to, you know, unwind after work? A place to get a drink?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Tate stays out of the bars.”

Perhaps he didn’t need them, considering he had a fully stocked Pinto.

“What about friends? Buddies he liked to hang out with?”

“He doesn’t really have any friends,” she said. “’Cept me.”

“Could you give me his cell phone number?”

“Tate doesn’t got a cell phone. He had one a long time ago, but he was always losing it. So he stopped having one. Cost too much anyway. Have you been to the plant? Wouldn’t it make more sense to just go there and talk to him?”

“He’s not there,” I told her.

“He’s not?”

I shook my head.

She looked around me, cast her eyes up the street in both directions. “I don’t see his car. He’s got a yellow car. A Pinto. He’s kept that thing running for years. It’s never blown up or anything.”

“His car’s at the plant,” I said.

She was starting to do something funny with her mouth, working her jaw around anxiously, maybe chewing on the inside of her cheek.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Nothin’.”

“It’s important we find him, Mrs. Whitehead. You already know what’s going on, with the water. Something bad’s happened. I think your husband might be able to shed some light on that. I need to speak with him.”

“Sometimes . . . sometimes if there’s not a lot to do, and it’s pretty quiet on that shift, sometimes he’ll take a little break.”

“A break.”

She nodded.

“Where might he take this break?”

“There’s a room down in the basement of the plant. Where they keep extra pipes and tools and things for when they have to do repairs. He might be there.”

“Does he go down there to have a drink?”

“I didn’t say that,” Mrs. Whitehead said.

“May I use your phone?” I asked.

My cell would have worked just fine, but I wanted to get into the house and see for myself whether Whitehead was here.

“Uh, okay,” she said, stepping back to let me in. “It’s in the kitchen.”

I walked through a living area furnished with items that might have been bought at the time the house was built. In the kitchen, I noticed just one plate with half a piece of toast on it. An empty glass looked as though it had had orange juice in it. Looked as though Mrs. Whitehead had breakfasted alone.

I found a phone on the counter and dialed Garvey Ottman.

“Yeah. Duckworth?”

“Yeah.” I described the room where Mrs. Whitehead said her husband liked to disappear to during his shift. “You got a room like that?”

“Yup.”

“Have you looked for Whitehead there?” I asked.

“No, why would I?”

“Can you check it out?”

“Hold on, okay? I’ll head down there now.”

I could hear hurried, echoing footsteps as Ottman ran through the plant, then down what sounded like a metal stairway.

“I’m almost there,” he said. “How’d you hear about this?”

“Mrs. Whitehead,” I said, and gave her a weak smile, “is with me, and she said he sometimes goes down there for a break.”

“Jesus, the son of a bitch,” he said. “Okay, I’m here. Hang on.”

I heard a loud, rusty squeak. Some more noises, as though Ottman was moving some things around.

“Shit,” he said.

I felt my pulse quicken. “What? Is he there?” I pictured him passed out, surrounded by empty bottles.

“No,” Ottman said. “He’s not.”

I left a card with Tate Whitehead’s wife and got her to promise—for what that was worth—to call me if he showed up. From there, I headed to Thackeray College. I’d phoned ahead, to the security office once run by Clive Duncomb, and was put through to the new boss of that department, Joyce Pilgrim. I’d already met her, back when I was looking into Duncomb’s fatal shooting of Mason Helt, the lead suspect in a series of campus assaults. Duncomb had used Joyce as bait to flush out the predator, and the plan had worked all too well.

She told me which student residence to meet her out front of, and moments later I found her there, standing at the building’s entrance.

“I called ages ago,” she told me as I walked up. She was pale, drawn, and her voice was shaking.

“We’ve kind of had our hands full,” I told her. “Are you okay?”

“Huh? Yeah, yeah, just a bit shook-up.”

She led me into the building and up a flight of concrete stairs. This was a newer, more modern building for Thackeray, a school that went back to the late eighteen hundreds.

“Who’s the victim?” I asked as we were halfway up.

“Lorraine Plummer,” Joyce Pilgrim told me.

I knew the name. “She was one of the ones Mason Helt attacked.”

“That’s right,” Joyce said.

“Why was she here? Isn’t school over?”

“It is, but there are some summer classes. But of the students taking them, a lot of them live in town. Hardly any in the residences, at least not this one. We’ve got a couple of students on the third floor, at the other end of the building. Lorraine’s the only one, through the summer, living on the second floor.”

“So who found her?”

Joyce told me about the call from the family, who had not heard from their daughter for several days.

“Any idea when it happened?” I asked.

“I’m no expert on that kind of thing,” she said, “but it’s been a while, I’m pretty sure of that.”

You try to go into these things with an open mind. You don’t prejudge, preguess. But, looking back, I’d clearly been expecting something different from what I found.

I had in my head that what I’d be looking at was a sexual assault that had escalated to a homicide. Girl living alone, maybe she meets a boy at some local bar, invites him back to her dorm room, and things get out of hand.

I’d seen that kind of thing before.

The killer wouldn’t have to worry about someone hearing what was happening, given that the building was nearly empty.

That part I had right.

As soon as we came out of the stairwell and into the hall, I had a sense of what we were dealing with. The smell was overwhelming, and it hit me hard because I was gulping air after just the one flight.

God, one lousy flight of stairs and I was winded.

I stopped, reached down into my pocket where I kept a small tube of Vicks VapoRub.

“What are you doing?” Joyce asked.

“You’ll want some of this, too.”

I put a dab on my finger and rubbed some on between my nose and upper lip. The strong menthol smell would mask the stench.

Joyce let me put some on her finger so she could do the same. “Wish I’d had this earlier.” Embarrassment washed over her face. “I threw up.”

“Nothing to be ashamed of,” I said.

Even before we reached the door, I could see the blood that had seeped out below it. The door was closed. Before I could ask, Joyce told me she had closed the door when she’d gone down to wait for me.

“You’ve touched the handle?” I asked her.

Her face fell. “Yes.”

Even so, I managed to turn the knob with my fingernails, just in case some usable prints remained. I nudged the door open with my elbow.

It was not as I had imagined. It was much, much worse.

Lorraine Plummer was stretched out on the floor, slightly on her right side, her dead eyes open, lips parted. I had a view of a bloated tongue, and her skin was bluish in color, indicating she had been dead for some time. She was dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of stretchy workout pants, and covered in blood below the waist.

I glanced back at Joyce Pilgrim, thinking I would have to tell her to stay out in the hall, but it wasn’t necessary.

I got as close to the body as I could without stepping in blood—all of which looked dried—then knelt down for a few seconds, which was no picnic for my knees. I wanted a closer look without actually moving or touching the body. Given what was going on in town, I
wasn’t likely to see a medical examiner or a forensics team here for a long time.

It was difficult to tell exactly how she had been attacked, and I’d have to wait until Lorraine Plummer was on an autopsy table with all the blood washed away to be sure, but I was able to make out the wound that was the apparent cause of death.

Someone had sliced across the young woman’s abdomen. The cut ran, roughly, from just above one hip bone to the other. But along the way, it curved down slightly.

I felt a wooziness that was not directly related to the stench in the room. I had seen this individual’s handiwork before. Once, in person, when I’d investigated the murder of Rosemary Gaynor. And a second time, when I had seen autopsy photos from the Olivia Fisher homicide.

The slice that looked like a smile.