The Twenty-Three 3 (Promise Falls) (35 page)

SIXTY-THREE

Duckworth

“WHAT
did he say?” I asked after Gale sent her most recent text message.

“He hasn’t said anything,” she said.

When Gale told me she’d learned, three weeks ago, that she was expecting a child, I thought maybe the news would be enough to jolt Angus Carlson into coming back to the house.

“Wait,” she said. “He’s writing something. Here.” She turned the phone so I could see it.

Gale typed:
It’s true. Please come home.

Another stretch of time without a reply. Maybe a minute, which felt like an eternity in the world of texting. Then:
Dworth made you say this.

Gale replied:
He wanted me to tell u. But it is true. Have known for 3wks. Afraid to tell u.

My cell phone rang. It was Chief Finderman.

“We have an approximate location on the phone,” she told me.

“Where?”

“Klondike Street. Near Rossland.”

“If they can pinpoint it any better, let me know,” I said. “Start having cars focus on that neighborhood. I’m heading there.”

“I hope you’re wrong about this,” Rhonda said.

“Me, too,” I said, but wasn’t sure I meant it. If Angus Carlson was our serial killer, I wanted him caught. If it reflected badly on the department, and Rhonda Finderman in particular, so be it.

I finished with Rhonda and looked at Gale, who was still staring at her phone. “Anything else?”

She held the device up to me. Angus had written:
Should have told me.

“Tell him the two of you need to talk about it. Right now.”

She tapped. I heard the
whoosh
.

“You’re coming with me,” I said.

“Where are we going? Do you know where he is?”

“Roughly,” I said.

“Just tell me what it is you think he’s done,” she said, not moving. “You kept mentioning those women who’d been killed. Did Angus make some kind of mistake? Did he screw up the investigation? Is that why you’re mad at him?”

I thought maybe she’d already figured it out, but was clinging to the hope that her husband wasn’t a killer.

“I need to talk to him about those investigations, yes,” I said.

Gale swallowed hard. It looked like a marble working its way down her throat. “You think it’s him.”

“I don’t know that,” I said.

“It might be him,” she said.

“Gale.”

“He said something to me last night. Just before we went to sleep. I could tell he was thinking about something. He said he’d been talking to a nurse at the hospital, that she was getting married soon, that they wanted to have kids.” She paused. “How it made him sad.”

I felt my blood starting to run cold. “Did he mention a name?” “No.”

“Anything else about her?”

Gale shook her head. Suddenly, she let out a short scream. Her phone had buzzed in her hand.

“It’s Angus. He says he has to think.”

I’d already stepped out front. I called the hospital, asked to be put through to the emergency ward. Someone picked up and said, “Emergency. Nurse Fielding.”

I identified myself. It took a little convincing, but she finally remembered me from when I was there the day before. “I’m trying to track down someone who works in the ER who was there yesterday—”

“
Everyone
was here yesterday,” she said.

“This nurse probably was in her twenties or thirties, dark hair, and she might live on Klondike Street.”

“Oh, that’s probably Sonja,” Nurse Fielding said.

“Sonja? Can you spell that? And do you have a last name?”

She spelled the first name, and then said, “Roper.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Is she there today?”

“No, she did a double and a half yesterday.”

“Do you have a contact number, and an exact address?”

“Hang on a second.”

While I waited, I said to Gale, “Anything else from him?”

“No,” she said.

I had my notepad out, waiting for Nurse Fielding to report back. A few seconds later, she came on.

“Okay, Sonja lives at 31 Klondike,” she said.

Shit.

“And do you have a number for her?”

She gave me one. “I think it’s a cell,” she said. “I don’t think she has a landline.”

I ended the call and said to Gale, “Let’s go.” On the way to the car, I dialed Sonja Roper’s number.

SIXTY-FOUR

WHEN
Gale texted him the news that she was pregnant, Angus became so fixated on the phone, staring at the words, that he lost track of what he’d come to Sonja Roper’s house to do.

How could she be pregnant?

How could Gale have betrayed him that way?

Angus wondered, first, whether she was telling him the truth. But if she was, how had it happened? Of course, no method of birth control was one hundred percent effective. But he thought they’d been careful, unless Gale was deliberately
not
being careful.

He slipped the knife back into his pocket, wrote Gale back, accusing her of lying, then said she should have told him as soon as she’d known.

What would he have done had he known? he wondered.

Would he have killed Gale?

No, no, he wouldn’t have done that. That was unthinkable.

He’d have had her go to a clinic. He’d have made her terminate the pregnancy.

He was almost sure that was what he would have done.

Except . . . now he was overwhelmed with the idea that he might actually be a father. That a child of his was growing inside Gale.

How did that make him feel? In the first few seconds after she’d texted him, he was angry. Then confused. Then—

The bathroom door swung open.

Sonja Roper stepped out, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, hair wet. Her feet were bare.

“Shit!” she said when she realized Angus was hovering right by the door, phone in hand. She jumped, spun around to face him, and backed her way into the living room. “What were you doing there?”

“I was . . . I was just on my phone. Texting.”

“Why were you hiding outside the door there?”

“I wasn’ t—I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“What kind of creep are you?”

“I didn’t look in. I didn’t try the door.”

“Look, I don’t know what questions you’ve got, but you should leave.”

“My wife is pregnant,” he said.

“What?”

“She just texted me. She’s pregnant.”

Sonja, bewildered, said, “Well . . . that’s just great. But it doesn’t explain why you were creeping around outside my door.”

“She didn’t tell me. She’s known for three weeks.”

“I guess you should talk to
her
about that,” Sonja said. “Like, right now would be a good time.”

A cell phone began to ring. The sound was coming from the kitchen.

“Don’t answer that,” Angus said.

“Excuse me?”

“I said don’t answer it. We have to talk.”

“Get out,” she said as the phone continued to ring. “I want you out of here right now.”

Angus slowly started walking down the hall toward her. “What do you think I should do?” he asked her.

“What?” Sonja said, glancing behind her with each backward step she took.

In the distance, the sound of sirens.

“What should I do about my wife being pregnant?” He looked at her plaintively. “I’m not sure how to handle it. It’s all feeling a bit overwhelming. There’s only so much one person can do. I came here to solve one problem, but now another’s overtaken it. But
is
it a problem?”

“You’re off your nut,” Sonja said, turned, and ran.

She pushed the front door open with both hands and burst out of the house as though there’d been an explosion as two police cars raced up the street, lights flashing, sirens wailing. Sonja waved her arms as she ran across the lawn.

Angus came out the door after her, but once on the front step he stopped. He saw the cars screaming toward the house.

He got out his phone and texted to Gale:
Guess I will come home now.

He stared at the screen as the police cars screeched to a halt out front of the house.

Coming to you,
Gale wrote back.

A female officer was out of the first car. Sonja Roper was talking to her, pointing to Carlson.

“Detective Carlson!” the officer said. “Are you Detective Carlson?”

He typed:
Ok.

Then he looked up and said, “Yes, I’m Carlson.”

Another car, plain black without markings, rounded the corner.

Carlson recognized it immediately as an unmarked Promise Falls police car. He was pretty sure that was Barry Duckworth behind the wheel.

With Gale in the seat next to him.

Gale threw open the door as Duckworth brought the car to a stop.

“Gale!” Duckworth said. “Wait!”

But she wasn’t going to wait. She ran past the marked cars,
ignored the female officer’s call to stop, and ran directly to her husband. He stood there, waited. She got to within a foot of him, and when she stopped, he smiled.

“Maybe it’s a good thing you didn’t tell me,” Angus said. “I don’t know what I might have had to do.”

Gale suddenly went weak and dropped to her knees in front of him.

SIXTY-FIVE

Duckworth

RHONDA
Finderman sat in on the interrogation.

Angus insisted he did not want a lawyer. Once he’d signed off on that, and we were ready to record his statement, he told us everything, with plenty of corroborating detail.

About Olivia Fisher, and Rosemary Gaynor, and, most recently, Lorraine Plummer. There was a murder in Cleveland, too. Once I had the details on that, I’d be getting in touch with the Cleveland police so they could move that one to the solved column.

Angus explained to us how he was saving unborn children from a life of misery.

“I screwed up with Rosemary Gaynor,” he said. “I didn’t realize she already had a child.”

“And it wasn’t her child,” I pointed out. “Rosemary Gaynor couldn’t have children.”

He grimaced, looking like a kid who’d gotten only an A when he was expecting an A-plus.

Chief Finderman didn’t say a word through the whole thing. Bad enough that one of her own was a serial killer. This was the man she’d moved up to detective status. I didn’t envy her when she went before the cameras on this one.

“I want your thoughts on something,” Angus said at one point.

“About what?” I asked.

“Well, it’s about Victor Rooney and the poisoning of the water. I want to know if you think that’s my fault.”

“I don’t think my opinion on that matters, Angus,” I said.

“No, really, I’d like to know. I value your opinion.”

“Why don’t you tell me if you think it’s your fault?”

“At first, I thought maybe it was. But I think Victor has to own it. It was his decision. Regardless of what I did, or those other people who did nothing, he made the choice to do what he did.”

“I see.”

“You don’t agree?” he asked.

“Like I said, my opinion doesn’t matter here,” I told him. “But let me ask you this. If you hadn’t killed Olivia Fisher, would more than a hundred people have died in Promise Falls this weekend?”

Angus Carlson gave that some thought. “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Thank you for your kindness toward Gale,” he said.

“Sure.”

Angus shook his head slowly and sighed. “Given that what’s done is done, I hope it’s a boy.”

Finderman and I left Angus in the interrogation room to confer.

“What a mess,” she said. “And please don’t say it is what it is.” “That’s not one of my sayings,” I said, steering her toward the coffee machine. “But it’s kind of apt.”

“God, Barry. One of our own.”

“It’ll be bad,” I said. “We just have to ride it out.”

“I’m the one who has to ride it out. You found a killer. I promoted one.”

“You think we might try to find a silver lining here?” I said, grabbing two mugs, glancing into them to ensure that they were at least remotely clean. “We caught a serial killer. We’ve solved three homicides. And maybe another one or two for the folks in Cleveland. Did you notice, when I asked him about his mother’s death, how uncomfortable he got? I think they should be taking another look at that, too.”

It was difficult for Finderman to see an upside at the moment, but she tried. “In the course of one day you’ve found the guy who poisoned the town’s water, and exposed a multiple murderer. Christ, they’ll be making a movie about you.”

“You heard anything about Rooney?” I asked, pouring coffee into the two mugs. I held up the container of cream, but she shook her head. I handed her a mug.

“He’s in the ICU,” Rhonda said. “That fire truck hit him good. But he’s far from a goner. They think he might regain consciousness before too long.” She took a sip of the coffee. “I’m always amazed that this is not terrible.”

I nodded. “Let’s hope he’ll be as forthcoming as Carlson was about why he did what he did.”

Rhonda turned her back to the wall and let it hold her up. “I’m beat, but you look about a hundred times worse.”

I smiled. “Yeah. I’m tired.”

“I heard you had some trouble at Rooney’s house. When the paramedics came. You had some chest pain.”

I waved a hand. “It was nothing. I was running. It only lasted a second.”

“Promise me you’ll get yourself checked out.”

“I will.” I paused. “I did. Saw the doctor a couple of days ago. She said—get this—I need to lose some weight.”

“Ridiculous,” the chief said, doing a good job of keeping a straight face.

“Tell me about it. Maureen’s been trying to kill me with vegetables.”

“Wear a wire,” Rhonda said. “We record her telling you to eat them all up, we swoop in, we arrest her.”

I was too weary to laugh. “I’m sorry about the other thing.” She didn’t pretend not to know what I was talking about. “It happens.”

“I was talking to Maureen. It was a private conversation. Trevor heard it, told Finley. Finley had something on Trevor—nothing huge, but enough—and put the squeeze on him.”

“It’s not that it came out,” Rhonda said. “It’s that you believed I fucked up.”

I nodded. “I thought so at the time, but it was frustration. In the last month, since the shit started hitting the fan by the bucketful, I’ve made more fuckups than I can count.” I paused. “Maybe I’m done.”

“No.”

“It’s twenty years.”

“Seriously?”

“May’ ninety-five, I came on. Slightly younger, and a whole lot thinner.”

“I didn’t know. We should do something. Some kind of party.”

“I think I’ll celebrate with sleep,” I said.

“Can you stay awake long enough for another press conference? One you’ll actually show up to?”

I nodded. “Yes. But there’s something I have to do first.”

Her eyebrows went up slightly. “Go on.”

“I don’t want Walden Fisher to learn about it on the news. I don’t want him turning on the radio and finding out we’ve got the guy who killed his daughter. He needs to hear it in person before everyone else does.”

Rhonda Finderman nodded. “Okay.”

“I’m gonna head over that way now. Then I’ll make a call to Lorraine Plummer’s parents, and I guess Bill Gaynor deserves a heads-up as well, even if he is in jail.”

“I’ll tell him,” Rhonda said. “And I’ll get the paperwork going on the official charges against Carlson.”

I nodded a thank-you. I poured the rest of my coffee into the sink and left the building. I thought I was going to make a clean getaway, but Randall Finley was standing by my car.

“I thought these were your wheels,” he said. “I was just going to come in and look for you.”

“Hi, Randy.”

“Is it true?” he asked.

“Is what true?”

“Rumors are going around that you’ve got someone. In those murders. Of the women.”

“There’ll be a presser later today.”

“And I already heard about Victor Rooney. God, Barry, you’re having some kind of day. It was you, right? In both cases? You figured it out?”

There wasn’t the usual forced enthusiasm in his voice, which I attributed to grief. I was detecting what sounded like genuine admiration, but I was too tired to appreciate it.

“It’s been a day full of developments,” I conceded. “But there’s still a lot to nail down.”

“I meant what I said earlier. You should be the chief. You’re the man for the job.”

“We have a chief,” I said. “And she’s doing just fine. I haven’t forgotten the shit you pulled.” But there was no anger in my voice. “Besides, I don’t know what this has to do with you anymore.”

“I’ve reconsidered,” Finley said.

“You’ve what?”

“I’m still running. After a suitable period,” he said, and lowered his head in memory of the dead, “I’ll be back at it.”

“Why the change of heart?”

“What else am I going to do, Barry? Just sit around and put water into bottles? I’ll go out of my mind. I have to do more than that. I have to make a difference.”

He said it with such a straight face, I felt he believed it.

“I guess you have to do what you have to do,” I said, opening my car door and getting in.

“So what I’m saying is, if you hear anything a guy in my position might like to know, it’s in my nature to return the favor.”

God, we were right back where we’d started when he found those damn squirrels.

On the way, I phoned Maureen, filled her in.

“I wonder if any of the stores are open today,” she said.

“Why?”

“I might buy you a cake.”

“I accept.”

I thought she’d say something, but her voice had gone quiet.

“Maureen?”

“I’m here. I’m just . . . I’ve been just barely holding it together all day. There’s a list online.” She paused. “Of the dead.”

“Oh.”

“Some of them are people we know. Alicia, who I work with?”

“Right?”

“She lost both her parents. At one of the nursing homes. They said on the radio that there were forty-two fatalities in facilities for the elderly. They died before anyone could even get them to the hospital. It brings the number of dead to over two hundred.”

The scale of the tragedy had gotten so big I’d become numbed by it. I had lost the capacity to be shocked.

“I have a couple of things to do yet,” I told her, “and then Rhonda and I are going to make a statement about Angus Carlson’s arrest, and then I’ll be home.”

“I love you,” Maureen said.

“I love you, too.”

• • •

By the time I’d mounted the steps to Walden Fisher’s porch and rapped my knuckles on the door, I wasn’t sure I had anything left. I could feel the exhaustion washing over me. It was just as well Walden took the better part of thirty seconds to come to the door. I needed that much time to keep my head from spinning.

“Hello?” he said as he swung the door open. Then, recognizing me, he said, “Oh, Detective.”

“Mr. Fisher,” I said, extending a hand.

He had been rubbing the tip of his right thumb with his index finger. He spotted something scraggly on the nail and quickly bit it off. “Sorry,” he said. He offered that same hand and I took it with some reluctance.

“May I come in?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” he said, and made way for me. “I was thinking you might come by.”

Had he already heard about Carlson?

“Really?” I said.

“It was on the news. About Victor. My God, I just can’t believe it. It’ s—it’s unthinkable what he did.”

Of course. That much had become public.

“I apologize for not coming by to tell you about that,” I said. “I should have. But there’s been another development, something even more important to you.”

He looked at me expectantly. “What?”

“I wouldn’t mind getting off my feet,” I said.

We took seats in the living room. Walden was on the edge of his, leaning forward. Next to him, on an end table, was a picture of his wife, Beth, and daughter, Olivia, taken, I guessed, when Olivia was around twelve years old.

Both smiling.

I said, “We have someone in custody in connection with Olivia’s death.”

His mouth dropped open an inch. “Victor?”

“No, not Victor. It’s a man named Angus Carlson.” I drew a breath. “A member of the Promise Falls police.”

Walden sat back in his chair, stunned. “Carlson?”

“That’s right.”

“But I met him. Yesterday, at the hospital.”

I nodded. “That’s right. Carlson has confessed to Olivia’s murder, and two others here in Promise Falls. There may be more, in Cleveland, that happened before he moved here.”

“Dear God,” he said. “He just came in and confessed?”

“No,” I said. “There were things that led to him. In fact, you played a role there, when you gave me those letters the town had sent to Olivia. We found Carlson just before he was going to do it again, I think. There’s going to be a statement this afternoon, but I wanted you to be the first to know about this.”

He shook his head slowly, still disbelieving.

“Why?” he asked.

I told him what Angus had told us. “I can’t say that it makes any sense.”

“In his mind it did,” Walden said.

I nodded. “You never really know what’s going on inside people’s heads.”

He was mulling it over, trying to take it in. “They’re going to show up at my door, aren’t they?”

“They?”

“Reporters,” he said. “Soon as you tell them about this, they’ll be swarming around out front.”

“That’s a reasonable expectation,” I said. “We can ask them to give the families—people like you—some space, but they don’t tend to listen.”

He looked down at himself. His plaid flannel shirt had several minor stains on it.

“Beth would kill me if I went before the cameras looking like
this,” he said with a sad smile. “I should throw on a clean shirt. They might show up any minute.”

I didn’t think that was so, but then again, Finley had already heard about Carlson. Someone might have phoned in a tip to the media.

“It’s possible,” I said.

Walden stood. “Give me a minute,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

I stood as well as he crossed the room and went up the stairs.

Suddenly, I felt woozy.

It was a bit like how I’d felt when I’d chased Victor Rooney down the driveway, before the pain in my chest.

I took a few deep breaths. Oxygen, I thought. I needed oxygen.

The wooziness passed after several seconds, but there was a lingering feeling that I might be sick to my stomach.

There was probably a bathroom on the first floor. I walked in the direction of the kitchen, passed one door I thought might be a powder room, and opened it, only to discover it was a closet. But I got lucky with the second door.

I stepped into the two-piece bathroom, left the door open. There was a white porcelain pedestal sink next to a toilet. Behind me, a towel rack and a shelf with some knickknacks. What I wanted to do was splash some water on my face. I still wasn’t going to drink it, but if it was safe enough to shower with, I could splash some on my cheeks.

I turned on the cold tap, held one hand under it until the water was good and chilly, cupped my palms beneath it. I closed my eyes tight, tossed the water on my face.

Did it again.

I turned off the tap, reached behind me for the hand towel hanging there, and dried my face off.