“You can’t ever say where you heard about this. You didn’t hear it from me.”
“Absolutely.”
“And this squares things up, right? You’re not going to hold that other thing over my head anymore.”
A pause at the other end of the line.
“Mr. Finley.”
“This is a good start, Trevor. A very good start. You keep your ears open and let me know what else you find out.”
“Come on,” Trevor said. “That’s not fair.”
“Anything else your dad has to say about the Fisher and Gaynor murders being done by the same person, you pass that along. If he starts making some progress there, you keep me in the loop. How about that?”
“Jeez, I feel shitty enough about what I told you already. And I’m not home all that much anyway.”
“Maybe it’s time you dropped by to see your parents more often,” Finley said. “Remember, there’s nothing more important than family.”
Forty
Barry Duckworth knew the name Peter Blackmore. Angus Carlson had mentioned it. He was the man who’d talked to Carlson after the meeting with Clive Duncomb at Thackeray.
Blackmore had said his wife was missing.
Seemed as though she might have been found.
As Duckworth reached out to stop Martin Kilmer from entering the examination room to identify the body of the woman they had all, up to now, believed was his sister, Miriam Chalmers, the man’s cell rang.
Duckworth was putting his own phone away as Martin reached into his jacket for his. As he glanced at the number, his eyes went wide. He put the phone to his ear and said, “Miriam? Jesus! Miriam!”
Duckworth held his breath.
Kilmer said, “Where are you? They told me — Jesus, what’s happened?” He shot a contemptuous look at Duckworth. “So you’re not dead? You realize how far I had to drive to find that out? I had a critical meeting today that I had to blow off. Yes, yes, of course, terrible thing about Adam. I’m going to have to turn around and head straight back. I swear, these idiot police were about to have me identify you. Let me know when the funeral is and I’ll see if I can move some things around. Yes, yes, okay. Good-bye.”
He put the phone away.
“Is the entire department incompetent, or just you?” he said.
“That was your sister,” Duckworth said. “You’re sure.”
“Of course I’m sure. Goddamn it, I drove all the way up here for nothing.”
“Your brother-in-law’s still dead,” Duckworth said. “Just so the trip wasn’t a total waste.”
“Are you sure? Maybe it’s Jimmy Hoffa. You might want to get your facts straight next time before you start sending people into a panic. How the hell do I get back to my car?”
“I’ll take you.”
“You sure you know the way?” Kilmer asked.
“Just give me one second.”
Duckworth entered the room, on his own, to take a look at the body. “Let me see her,” he said to the attendant.
She pulled back the sheet.
If this was, in fact, Peter Blackmore’s wife, he was going to have a difficult time identifying her from her face. There was little left of it. The trauma hadn’t ended there. The woman’s left shoulder and upper arm were crushed. There were several gashes across her upper torso.
Her lower abdomen, right side, was spared any damage from the accident. Duckworth noticed three small moles, clustered within an inch of one another, that formed a rough triangle.
He took out his phone, leaned in close, and took a photo.
“That’s all,” he said to the woman. “Thank you.”
He endured more complaining from Martin Kilmer before driving him back to the Promise Falls police station, where the man had left his car. Then Duckworth went searching for Garth, in the police garage, to retrieve the purse and phone that ostensibly belonged to Georgina Blackmore. He looked at the woman’s license for a home address.
On the way, he put in a call to Angus Carlson’s cell. The phone rang several times before it went to message. “It’s Duckworth. Call me when you get this. It’s about that professor who said his wife was missing.”
He was putting the phone back into his jacket, still had it in his hand, when it rang. He brought it back out, put it to his ear.
“Duckworth.”
“It’s Carlson. Sorry. I just saw you called. Haven’t listened to the message. I was kind of in the middle of something.”
“Blackmore. He talked about his wife.”
“Yeah. Did he come in, make an official report?”
“No, but I wanted to ask you if there was anything more to that. Anything else he might have said you didn’t tell me.”
“Not really. Like I said, at first he was concerned — then he said it was probably nothing, she’d show up sooner or later. Why, what’s going on?”
“I’ll get back to you if I need anything else,” Duckworth said, and ended the call.
Before leaving the office, he made one other call, to the manager of the hotel in Boston where Bill Gaynor had been attending a conference when his wife was murdered. From his previous discussion with the manager, Duckworth had learned Gaynor’s car had not left the hotel parking garage at all during his stay. Also, he’d been seen in the hotel throughout the weekend. The detective was wondering whether there were any holes that could be punched into Gaynor’s alibi.
“Front desk.”
“Sandra Bottsford, please.”
“I’m afraid she’s not here right now. Can I have her call you?”
Duckworth left his name and cell phone number. “She’ll know what it’s about.”
Then he set off for Peter Blackmore’s house.
It was a two-story redbrick Victorian in the old part of town. There were lights on behind the curtained windows, and what looked like the bluish light from a television.
Duckworth parked at the curb, got out of the car, taking the purse Garth had retrieved from the trunk of Adam Chalmers’s crushed Jaguar, which he had tucked into a plastic grocery bag, and headed for the front door.
Forty-one
Once Miriam Chalmers had kicked me out of her house, I phoned Lucy Brighton.
“Yes?” she said.
“You sitting down?”
“What is it?”
“Miriam’s alive.”
“What?” She said it so loud, I pulled the phone away from my ear.
“She just returned home, walked in while I was looking around. She’d gone to Lenox for a couple of days to think about her marriage, apparently, and didn’t know anything about the drive-in.”
“Oh my God,” Lucy said. “That’s... wonderful. I’m glad she’s okay. I just wish my father had also...”
“I know.”
A pause at the other end, and then, “If it wasn’t Miriam in the car with my dad, then who was it?”
“Miriam thinks a woman named Georgina Blackmore. Ring a bell?”
“No. There’s a professor at Thackeray with that last name, I think. But I’m not really sure. Cal, should I call the police? Tell them they’ve got it wrong? That it’s somebody else?”
“I imagine they’ll be hearing from Miriam herself pretty soon. I told her she should call her brother. Lucy, I don’t know that there’s anything else I can do for you at this point. The missing discs, they’re really Miriam’s problem now.”
“Yes, I guess so. I’m going to have to call her.”
“A heads-up. She’s pissed you hired me. She wasn’t pleased to find me in the house. And she was beyond horrified when she realized someone had been into that room, and that the discs were taken.”
“I have to — what am I going to say when I call her? I mean, I’ve started making the arrangements for my father. He’s been moved to the funeral home. There are things to do, to plan, and—”