He was worried he’d lie awake all night. Haunted by the sight of that student with half his head blown off. Rosemary Gaynor on the autopsy table, the ghoulish smile cut across her abdomen. Those three mannequins on the Ferris wheel.
Even those goddamned squirrels.
But he didn’t dream about any of those things. He went into a six-hour coma. He’d set his mental alarm for six thirty a.m., but his eyes opened at five fifty-nine. He glanced over at the clock, decided it wasn’t worth trying to get back to sleep when he’d be getting up so soon. He swung his thick legs from under the covers, planted his feet on the carpeted bedroom floor.
Maureen rolled over. “That was late last night.”
“Yeah,” he said, rubbing his eyes, then reaching for his phone to see whether he had any messages. There was nothing that needed his immediate attention.
“I tried to wait up for you,” she said.
“Why?”
“To celebrate.”
“Huh?”
“Twenty years. On the job. I didn’t forget.”
Now, with light coming through the window, he saw two tall fluted glasses on the dresser. An ice bucket, a bottle of champagne. By now, the bucket would be full of water.
“I didn’t see that when I came in,” he said.
“My detective,” Maureen said. “Nothing gets past you.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Shh,” she said. “I should have said something. But we can have a little celebration now.”
She reached down under the covers, found him.
When they were finished, he said, “I have to get moving.”
Maureen threw back the rumpled sheets. “Go. I’ll put on the coffee.”
He padded down the hallway to the bathroom, reached into the shower and turned on the water, stuck in his hand to test whether the hot water had traveled two floors up from the old heater yet. He caught a brief glimpse of himself in the mirror before stepping in.
It always depressed Duckworth to see himself naked. What the hell happened? How could Maureen enjoy making love with someone who looked the way he did? He hadn’t been this heavy when he was in college, and he was certainly in better shape when he joined the Promise Falls police. He blamed, in part, all those hours he sat in a cruiser as a uniformed officer. He hated that the cliché, at least where he was concerned, was true: Barry Duckworth liked to stop at doughnut shops. It wasn’t just that he liked doughnuts, which he did, very much. It was a way of breaking the boredom. You went in, you had a coffee, you ate a doughnut, you talked to the people behind the counter, took a seat and shot the breeze with a few of the customers.
He liked to think of it at the time as public relations.
And when he made detective, well, it wasn’t like the movies, where you were running down alleys and jumping over fences. You spent your time talking to witnesses and making notes and sitting at a desk and writing reports and phoning people.
Every year, he got just a little bit heavier.
And now, he figured, he was at least eighty pounds over what he should be. All these thoughts ran through his head in the seconds before he stepped under the hot water. That, and one other thing.
The number 23.
Three times in one day that number had reared its head. Twenty-three dead squirrels. The number on the Ferris wheel carriage holding the three painted mannequins. That student’s hoodie.
Maybe it was nothing, he thought, as he soaped his considerable belly. There were numbers surrounding us all the time. There were probably numerical coincidences everywhere if you knew where to look. License plates, dates of birth, home addresses, Social Security numbers.
And yet...
He’d keep his eyes open. Have that number in the back of his mind as he continued with his investigation. Make that investigations.
Now that Angus Carlson was going to be assisting, Duckworth hoped he could hand off some of his workload. Assuming Carlson would be starting in the detective division today, Duckworth was going to give him a list of things to look into. Those strung-up squirrels for starters. See if he thought they were so funny then. And Duckworth still wanted the other Thackeray College students, the three who’d been attacked before last night, interviewed. Maybe Joyce wasn’t the only one who’d heard some very strange comments from Mason Helt. Finally, he wanted Carlson to go back out to Five Mountains and find out who fired up the Ferris wheel.
Duckworth could concentrate his efforts on the Rosemary Gaynor investigation, and finding the missing nanny, Sarita Gomez. The old guy who lived next door said she worked shifts at a nursing home, but didn’t know which one. There were several in the Promise Falls area, so it might be better to go to the station and work the phones than drive from facility to facility.
He cranked the taps shut, reached for the towel, stepped out onto the mat. He was holding the towel around his waist — there wasn’t quite enough material to allow him to tuck it into place — and glanced out the bathroom window, which looked out onto the street.
That white van from the night before was still there. Even though the sun wasn’t quite up yet, Barry could make out the words written on the side.
Finley Springs Water.
He blinked a couple of times to be sure he was reading that correctly. What the hell was Randall Finley’s van doing parked out front of his house? Was that actually the same van that had been there the night before?
Had Randy been waiting to talk to him last night and returned this morning?
He skipped shaving. Duckworth ran his fingers through his hair, dressed hurriedly, not bothering with a tie, which he could do after breakfast, and followed the smell of brewing coffee to the kitchen below.
“It’s ready,” Maureen said when he came into the room.
“What’s Randall Finley doing here?”
“What?” she said.
“Finley, you know — first-class asshole, former mayor? That Finley?”
“I know who you mean. He’s here?”
“His van’s parked across the street. I think it’s been there all night. Was he hiding under our bed?”
“You got me. We’ve been having an affair for the last six months.”
Duckworth stared at her and waited.
Maureen smiled, let out a short laugh. “That’s not Finley’s van. I mean, yes, it belongs to his company, but Trevor’s got it.”
“Why would our son have Finley’s van?”
“I’m sure it’s not the only van Finley owns,” Maureen said. “The man probably has a small fleet of them. You could hardly run a bottled-water company with just one van.”
“That’s not the question,” Duckworth said, growing more impatient with each passing second. “Why is our son driving that man’s truck?” He paused. “And why is it here?”
“Trevor paid me a little surprise visit last night,” Maureen said. “I mean, he was coming to visit both of us, but you ended up working late. He’s upstairs, asleep, although he’ll probably be down any minute. He has to be at work at seven thirty.”
“Our son is working for Finley?”
Maureen nodded enthusiastically. “I know! Isn’t it wonderful? He’s been going through such a bad patch. The breakup with Trish, trying to find work. Now he’s got this job and I think it’s doing wonders for him. I could see a real change in him. It’s taken him forever to move past losing that girl, and add to that being out of work, and—”
“He can’t work for that man,” Duckworth said, taking a seat at the kitchen table.
“Now you’re talking like a crazy person,” his wife said, filling a cup with coffee and putting it in front of him. “Our son gets a job and you want him to quit?”
“What’s he doing for him?” he asked.