“Uh, yesterday morning, when I left home to come out to the college.”
“Does Mrs. Blackmore have a job?”
“Yes, yes, she does. She’s a legal secretary. At Paine, Kay and Dunn.”
“Did she show up for work yesterday?”
“She did.”
“You talked to her through the day?”
“No, but I was talking to them—to her employers—today, and they say she was there yesterday.”
“But she didn’t come home last night?”
“I don’t exactly know that.”
Carlson cocked his head to one side. “How would you not know that?”
“I didn’t go home last night. I stayed overnight here at the college. In my office.”
“You slept in your office?”
“I wasn’t sleeping,” he said. “I was working. It’s a habit of mine. I was preparing a lecture that I’m to give this afternoon on Melville and psychological determinism.”
“Uh-huh.”
“When I’m preparing a lecture, I work through the night. So I didn’t go home. I had a short nap around five this morning.” He started to raise his right arm and bend his head down, like he was going to give himself a sniff, then stopped himself. “I’ll head home and freshen up after I give my lecture.”
“Did you speak to Georgina at any time? On the phone? Did you text back and forth?”
He shook his head. “I don’t text. I don’t know how.”
“You don’t have a cell phone?”
Blackmore dug into his pocket, brought out an old flip phone. Carlson guessed it was at least ten years old. “I do, but I don’t even know if you can text with it. I think maybe it takes pictures, but all I ever use it for is to make and receive calls.”
“So you haven’t spoken to your wife since yesterday morning, and you haven’t tried to call her since then, either?”
Blackmore shook his head. “I tried this morning. After her office phoned me. They have my number. They wanted to know if I knew why Georgina hadn’t come into work.”
“She didn’t come in today.”
“No. They tried her at home, and on her cell. No answer. So I tried her cell, too, and I haven’t been able to get her.” His chin quivered. “I’m starting to get a little worried.”
“Has Georgina ever gone missing before?”
Blackmore glanced away. “Not exactly.”
“That’s a yes-or-no question, Professor.”
“No. She hasn’t gone missing before. She’s gone off by herself for a while, to collect her thoughts.”
Carlson said, “Why don’t you come with me down to the station and I can take down all your wife’s information? A full description, what kind of car she drives, people she might be in touch with, and if you have a picture of her, that would be—”
“No,” the professor said abruptly. “It’s okay. I’m sure everything’s okay. It’s probably what I just said. She just needs some alone time. That’s all.”
“You were discussing this with Clive Duncomb? When I walked in?”
Blackmore nodded. “Yes. Clive’s a good friend. And a good adviser.”
“But he didn’t suggest you call the police.”
“Not . . . just yet,” Blackmore admitted.
“That seems to be his style.”
Blackmore took a step back, his eyes filled with apprehension since the mention of Duncomb.
“You know what? Forget I even talked to you. I’m sure Georgina’s fine—she might even be home now. I’m just overreacting. And please, don’t mention to Clive that I approached you. He can get quite territorial about these things.”
“And how about the other thing?” Carlson asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“When you were leaving Duncomb’s office. You asked if you were okay on the other thing, and he said it was in hand, not to worry. Did that have to do with your wife, Professor Blackmore? Or was that something else altogether?”
The man paled. “I still have some tweaks to do on my lecture, and I deliver it in an hour, so I better go.”
Blackmore turned and ran off, like a dog that had been yanked away with an invisible leash.
EIGHTEEN
DETECTIVE Duckworth found Lionel Grayson in the Constellation Drive-in office, pacing the floor, cell phone to his ear, talking with someone from his insurance company.
“What do you mean, I might not be covered?” Grayson shouted. “What are you talking about? Yes, yes, I was going to bring down the screen anyway, but I’m not talking about that. I don’t care about that! I’m talking about the people who died! On my property! Four people! And all the other people who were injured, and the cars that were damaged! Those people, there’s already talk that I’m going to be sued, that they’re going to take me for everything I’ve got! Yes, yes, I’m going after the demolition company, but they hadn’t even—”
“Mr. Grayson,” Duckworth said.
Grayson raised a finger. “Listen to me. They hadn’t even done anything yet. They didn’t have anything to do with this. Somebody planted some bombs and—what do you mean I may not be covered for terrorism? Who said anything about terrorism? What the hell are you talking about? You think a bunch of al-Qaeda crazies snuck into America to blow up a drive-in in fucking Promise Falls? You think—”
“Mr. Grayson, I need to speak with you,” Duckworth said.
“Hang on, hang on. Listen to me. I’m retiring. I sold this property so I could retire. I can’t lose all that money if all these people sue me! You insurance people are all the same! You’re just out to screw people over and—hello? Hello?”
He stopped pacing and looked at the detective. “The son of a bitch hung up on me.”
“I want to ask you a couple of questions,” the detective said.
“What?”
“Why don’t we sit down?”
“I can’t. I can’t stop moving.”
“Please. Have a seat.”
Reluctantly, Grayson sat down on one of two cheap folding aluminum lawn chairs. Duckworth sat opposite him, planted his elbows on his thighs, and leaned forward.
“You okay?”
“I’m going out of my mind.” He was bobbing one knee up and down like a human sewing machine.
Duckworth nodded. “I get that. It’s a horrible thing. I want to ask you a couple of things, but I need you to calm down first, so you can really think about what I’m asking.”
“Okay,” he said, taking a breath. Then another. “I can’t do it. I’m too wound up. Just ask me what you have to ask me.”
“Okay. Can you think of anyone who’d want to do you harm? To you, or to your business here?”
“Nobody. No. And who’d care about hurting our business? I’m going out of business.”
“Okay, but have you had any problems with suppliers, or maybe an angry customer, someone you had a disagreement with?”
Grayson thought. “I can’t think of anyone. Just the usual things. Nothing very serious. I mean, sometimes you have people unhappy with the movie who want their money back.”
“Do you give it to them?”
The question stunned him. “Of course not! I make no guarantees about the quality of the movie. Let them read the reviews. If they don’t like the movie, let them write a letter to Tom Hanks or Nicole Kidman and ask them for their money back.”
“Have you had an incident like that lately?”
Grayson shrugged. “A couple of weeks ago, a man, he was very upset because the movie had nudity and bad language in it, and his five-year-old daughter was in the car. But it was the last feature. They’re always for a more mature audience. If the people bring their kids, they’re usually asleep by that time. That’s why we show the kid movies first.”
“Did he want his money back?”
&nb
sp; “He didn’t even care about that. He said he was going to report me to the authorities.”
“What authorities?”
Grayson laughed. “Who knows? I never heard from anybody. So many people, they’re just assholes. There’s nothing you can do.”
“Did the man give you his name?”
Grayson shook his head. “No.” His eyes widened. “But . . . hang on. I just remembered, I wrote his license plate number down. I do that sometimes. People who cause trouble, like kids who party or are drinking. I’ve got it somewhere.” He got out of the chair and began looking through papers on his desk.
“Here it is.” He handed over a scrap of paper, with a plate number and the word “Odyssey” scribbled on it.
Duckworth glanced at it, looked up. “Odyssey?”
“The van. A Honda.”
Duckworth pocketed the piece of paper. “How about outside of work, Mr. Grayson? Anyone else got a beef with you? Any kind of personal issues?”
“What? No. Nothing. You have to find out who did this. And don’t go blaming terrorists for it, or my insurance company might not help me out.”
“One last thing,” Duckworth said. “Does the number twenty-three mean anything special to you?”
Grayson screwed up his face. “What?”
“The screen came down twenty-three minutes after the twenty-third hour. Does that seem significant in any way?”
The man shook his head. “You’re kidding me, right?”
• • •
He hadn’t been.
Duckworth no longer believed that the frequency with which “23” was popping up was just happenstance. Not since learning when the drive-in screen came down.
Something was going on.
He’d already done some online searching with regard to that number. It was in the Matrix movies. It was on Michael Jordan’s shirt when he played for the Bulls. It was the atomic number for vanadium. (Wanda Therrieult had actually known what that was.) It was the ninth prime number. There was the Twenty-third Psalm.
The number might be related to any of those things, or none of those things. But Duckworth was sure it meant something very specific to someone.
It meant something to the person who’d hung up those squirrels, and fired up that Ferris wheel. If Mason Helt, who’d been wearing a hoodie with that number, were alive, Duckworth would be taking a serious look at him. But the drive-in bombing had come after his death. But Duckworth believed there was a connection.
The question now was whether to release this information, speculative as it was. Maybe it was time to enlist the public’s help. Someone out there might know something. A troubled family member, perhaps, with an inexplicable fixation on that number. If it had something to do with the Twenty-third Psalm—“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil”—maybe some kind of religious zealot was at work here.
He needed to talk to his boss, Chief Rhonda Finderman, about this. Soon.
But “23” was not the only thing on his mind. There was Olivia Fisher.
He wanted to determine if there might, in fact, be a link between Jack Sturgess and Olivia Fisher. One person he thought might be able to tell him was Olivia’s father, Walden.
If there was a connection—if Sturgess, for example, turned out to be the Fishers’ family physician—Duckworth might be less reluctant to write him off as the killer of both women.
He was always looking for connections.
It would certainly make Rhonda happy if he found a way to hang everything on Sturgess. She saw an opportunity to close two cases. And why wouldn’t she, considering that the Olivia Fisher murder had been her case, back when she was a detective? Finderman, who hadn’t kept herself up to speed on the Gaynor case in its early days, would have seen the similarities to the Fisher murder. Duckworth wished the chief had been a little more on the ball, but he kept that opinion to himself.
Duckworth parked his car out front of Walden Fisher’s house, a white two-story wood-frame structure with a separate two-car garage at the back of the lot. He walked up to the front door and rang the bell.
“Yes?” said Fisher as he opened the door six inches and eyed Duckworth.
The detective showed him his ID. “Barry Duckworth, with the Promise Falls police.”
Fisher squinted at the ID. “Duckworth?”
“That’s right.”
“What’s this about, Detective?”
“I had a couple of questions, sir, about your daughter. About Olivia. I wonder if I could speak to you and Mrs. Fisher.”
“She passed away,” he said, finally opening the door.
Duckworth winced inwardly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I appreciate that it must be painful to answer questions about Olivia, but if you wouldn’t mind, I’ll try not to take up too much of your time.”
“Of course, yes, come in.”
He led the detective to the kitchen and invited him to sit. There was a copy of the Albany paper on the table and a metal nail file with a plastic handle. Maybe Walden had been giving himself a manicure.
“I just made some coffee. Would you like some?”
“That’d be great.”
“Have you been up at the drive-in?” Walden asked. “It’s all over the news.”
Duckworth nodded. “Yes. I’m on my way back from there. But I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”
“What a terrible thing,” Walden said, taking two mugs down from the cupboard. “Just unimaginable. To be going to a movie, and have the screen come down and kill you.”
He filled the two mugs, brought them over to the table. He moved the paper out of the way, and tucked the nail file into his shirt pocket. He rubbed his index finger over the tip of his thumb. “I bite my nails,” he said. “Bad habit. Never used to do it before Olivia passed. And then after I lost my wife, I got even worse. It’s the stress.”
Duckworth took a mug, felt its warmth in his hands, and took a sip. It was strong, and he did his best not to make a face.
“What did you want to ask me?” Walden Fisher said. “Have you found out something? Have you found out who killed Olivia?”
Duckworth sidestepped the question. “Have you ever heard of a doctor by the name of Jack Sturgess?”
Fisher took a sip of his own coffee. “Sturgess? Didn’t I see something on the news about him?”
“You probably did.”
“About that woman and her baby? He stole a baby and gave it to somebody else?”
“Yes. That’s the one.”
“He’s dead, right? That woman who ran the hospital. She killed him, and then she killed herself.”
“You’re pretty up to speed on this,” Duckworth said.
“It’s not as easy as it used to be, with the Standard gone. But I listen to radio and watch the TV news out of Albany.” He tipped his head toward the paper. “Once the Standard went under, I started getting the Albany one, but there’s not much news from around here in it.”
“I guess you know, then, that Dr. Sturgess is being looked at in Rosemary Gaynor’s death.”
Walden nodded.
“Do you know if Olivia ever went to Dr. Sturgess? Whether she was ever a patient of his? Or whether she even knew him at all?”
The murdered woman’s father shook his head slowly. “Not that I know of. We had a family doctor, Dr. Silverman. Ruth Silverman. She was my wife’s doctor, and I think Olivia saw her. I still see her. I got all kinds of things going wrong with me. Sciatic pain, indigestion, you name it—every day you wake up with something different bothering you. And yet, in my head, I’m still sixteen years old. You know what I mean?”
“I do.”
“I’m pretty sure I’d never heard of this Sturgess character until he was splashed all over the news.” He leaned in over the table. “Are you sayin
g you think he had something to do with what happened to Olivia?”
“I’m not saying that. But I was looking for any possible connection.”
“What kind of connection could there be?”
Duckworth smiled weakly. “There might not be any at all. I’m just looking at everything.”
“So you’re not going to tell me.”
“I don’t want to raise things that might turn out to be nothing.”
Walden Fisher nodded slowly. “What if it is this doctor? What if he’s the one who killed our Olivia?”
“I’m not saying it was him.”
“But if it was, he’ll never pay for it, will he? He won’t be punished.”
“I don’t know how to answer that, Mr. Fisher. I know you would have gone over this a million times with Detective Finderman three years ago.”
“She’s the chief now,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“Too busy, I guess, to keep investigating my daughter’s murder.”
“I wouldn’t say that. Just because she’s moved up doesn’t mean the department isn’t actively investigating. But what I wanted to ask is, was there anyone you could think of who might have wanted to hurt Olivia? Any kind of personal problems she might have been having with anyone?”
“No, nothing.”
“How about with the law? Had she ever been in any kind of trouble?”
Walden frowned, offended by the question. “Olivia never got in any kind of trouble. I mean, she’d got a ticket for speeding a while before she died, and you’d have thought she’d robbed a bank—she felt so bad about it. She was worried about her insurance going up, too.”
Walden Fisher’s eyes moistened. He moved his coffee cup to one side and made two fists. “It’s with me every day, you know.”
“Yes.”
“I think, ultimately, it’s what killed Beth.”
“Your wife.”
Walden nodded. “I mean, officially, it was the cancer, but it was the grief that was eating her up inside. That, and no justice.”
Duckworth didn’t say anything.
“Every day, for three years, I’ve been hoping someone would answer for Olivia being taken from us. To find out it was someone already dead, I don’t know how I’d handle that. What do you do? Go piss on a man’s grave? Is that any way to get revenge?”