No Safe House by Linwood Barclay
I went to the phone, picked up the receiver, and entered Cynthia’s number.
She answered on the first ring.
“Terry?”
“Come home,” I said.
“Well,” Cynthia said. “We’ve kind of got a situation going on here.”
SEVENTY-TWO
CYNTHIA put her phone away.
Nathaniel was still insisting that his real name was not Duggan, that he was not a private detective, and that he was not trying to find fingerprints on that blue vase that was sitting on top of his dresser.
“What about the two hundred thousand?” Barney asked. “You got that, too? Did Eli give that to you? The little bastard. I gave him some work fixing up some of my other apartments, took pity on the little shit when I found out he didn’t have a place to stay. But the little bastard was watching me, figured out where I kept my money. Thirty years! Thirty years it took me to save that much.” He gazed longingly at the vase. “But what mattered most was getting back Charlotte. I never should have told Eli about her.”
Grace spoke, in little more than a whisper. “Is that . . . an urn?”
Barney looked at her, his eyes softening. “It’s Charlotte. We were going to be married. I had an accident, I was laid up a long time, and my best friend—my best friend!—went after her while I was recovering. The fucker. Won her away from me, married her. She was the only one I ever loved.”
“I don’t understand,” Cynthia said. “If she married this other man, how could you have ended up with her ashes?”
“Because I stole them,” he said, and smiled proudly. “When Charlotte passed away two years ago, I went to the service, heard that she’d been cremated. A couple of days later I was driving past the funeral home, saw Quayle coming out the front door, a package in his arms. I knew what it had to be. He got in his car and I followed him. He stopped along the way, went into a bar to deal with his grief.” Barney laughed. “I smashed the window of his car and took Charlotte back. If I couldn’t keep him from having her when she was alive, I could have her as she enjoyed her eternal rest.”
“This is fucked,” Grace said.
Barney walked slowly, almost reverently, into the bedroom and took the vase gently in his hands, cradled it in the crook of his arm as though it were a newborn. He worked the duct tape off the cover, peered briefly inside, appeared pleased by what he saw, and reapplied the tape.
“She hasn’t been disturbed,” he said.
Nathaniel, who’d been in such a rush to get out of there, appeared transfixed by these developments. He stood alongside Cynthia and Grace, watching the man reunite with the remains of the woman he loved.
Barney, clutching the urn, trained his eyes on Braithwaite.
“I want to know how you ended up with this.”
“I’ve got no fucking idea how that got here.”
“I do,” Grace said, and looked at Braithwaite. “And just so you know, I never actually saw you, so you don’t have to worry about trying to kill me or anything, but it really must have been you.”
“Must have been me what?”
“Who was in the Cummings house. You got the money, and you grabbed that . . . that thing, too. And killed Stuart.”
“No,” he said.
“And that case you didn’t want me touching—that’s the money, right?”
Barney came out of the bedroom, still watching Nathaniel. “I want my money, too. If you don’t return it, I know someone who’ll find a way to get it out of you.”
With one free hand, he reached into his pocket for his cell. Hit a couple of buttons and put the phone to his ear. “Come on, pick up, pick up,” he said under his breath. Then: “Reggie, I found it. It’s here. In one of my buildings. I don’t know how, but it’s here. I’ve found her. Call me when you get this.”
He put the phone away. “You’d be smarter to deal with me, instead of her.”
“Whoever Reggie is can kiss my ass,” Braithwaite said, picking up his two last bags. “I don’t know what the fuck is playing out here or what it is you think I did, but I’m gone.”
He turned and headed for the hallway.
“You come back here, you bastard!” Barney said, pushing past Cynthia and Grace, hugging the urn to his chest, his arms encircling it.
By the time Barney reached the top of the stairs, Braithwaite was already running out the front door, not bothering to close it. Seconds later, he could be heard getting into his Caddy, turning the ignition.
“Come back here! Come back!” Barney shouted.
He started down the stairs, but he couldn’t race down them the way Nathaniel had. Four steps down, he stumbled. He took one arm from around the urn and reached out instinctively for the handrail, but it was not there. His hand brushed across the bare wall, catching nothing, and he tumbled forward.
Cynthia watched from above as Barney pitched headlong down the stairs, then heard the sound of the urn shattering beneath him as he slid down several steps on his belly.
Seconds after that, weeping.
Cynthia turned around and put her arm around Grace. “I’m going to call your father back, tell him we’re on our way.”
SEVENTY-THREE
VINCE did it quickly.
Went back downstairs. Three people, three shots.
Made them count.
Did them all with the same gun that had been used to shoot Joseph in the garage.
No one left to talk now.
He went back up to the kitchen, looked for where Reggie and Wyatt kept their liquor, and stumbled upon a bottle of Royal Lochnagar scotch.
“That’ll do,” he said to himself.
He didn’t bother looking for a glass. He opened the bottle and drank straight from it.
There were things he could do, he thought, but none particularly appealed to him. That small matter of the missing money from the Cummings house didn’t seem like such a big deal anymore.
He could go after Bert. Track him down. Vince didn’t figure he’d be that hard to find, but really, did it matter?
And then there was Braithwaite, the goddamn dog walker. He’d given Bert and Gordie the slip, got Gordie killed. Vince figured Braithwaite was on the run now, too. He might be trickier to find. Vince didn’t know his habits, didn’t know who his friends were. But with enough effort, he believed he could hunt Braithwaite down.
But the hell with it. What was the point?
He’d rather drink this scotch.
Finally, there was the matter of Eldon. His body, still up there in his apartment. There was no one left to help Vince deal with that matter. If it was to get done, he’d have to do it himself.
Didn’t have the energy. He could feel the cancer eating away at him these last twenty-four hours.
Too bad about Eldon, and his boy.
“Damn,” Vince said under his breath.
He wondered whether he should do it right here. Put the gun in his mouth, pull the trigger, be done with it.
Jane was free. And she was well-fixed, too. He’d made it clear what he wanted her to do. Get rid of the drugs, guns, anything like that. Stuff that could be traced, identified. Dump it in the Housatonic. But keep the cash. Keep it all. Get yourself a safe-deposit box, in an actual bank.
Maybe take off for a while. Go to Europe. Take that asshole musician with you. Live it up. Have the life you deserve. Let this be my gift to you, my way of saying sorry for everything. For not being there for your mom when she needed me. And for all the other shit.
When the folks who’d left money with him learned what had happened—and they would, Vince was sure of that—and realized the only person who knew where their loot could be found was dead, what the hell could they do? Invade every house in Milford?
They’d have to write it off. That’s what they’d have to do.
He set the bottle down on the counter. He’d made a decision. He really didn’t want to do it here. He’d take Logan’s SUV, drive back down to his beach house, and do it there. Maybe take hi
Yeah, that’d be nice.
Vince had to go back downstairs to find the keys on Logan’s body. Coming back up was a struggle. It took everything he had.
He left the house with only one gun—the Glock Terry Archer had found in his attic—as he went back into the garage. He went over to the garage door button, pressed it to open.
The door slowly rose.
There was a car parked across the end of the driveway. A plain black Ford sedan. An unmarked police car, Vince figured.
And that woman standing in the middle of the drive, looking into the garage, was a cop, he bet.
A black woman, stocky, about five-three or so. She had a gun in her hand, too. Both her hands, actually. She had her arms straight out and that gun pointed straight at him.
“Police!” she said.
Vince just stood there. With the BMW out of the garage, she’d be able to see Joseph’s body on the floor behind him.
“Drop your weapon!” she shouted.
He glanced down at the end of his arm, saw the gun, but did not let go. He looked back up and said, “I think I know you.”
“Sir, put down your weapon.”
“I remember you asking questions years ago, back when I got shot. Wedmore, right?”
“Yes, sir, I am Detective Rona Wedmore, and I am telling you, drop your weapon.”
But Vince held on to it.
“There’s quite a mess in here,” he said. “This guy behind me, and three more in the basement. I did it. Plus a guy who worked for me. Eldon Koch. You’ll find him sooner or later. And his boy—”
“Drop it!”
Would have been nicer standing on the beach when it happened. But this would do just fine.
Vince raised the gun, fast. Pointed it right at her.
Didn’t even have his finger on the trigger.
Bam.
SEVENTY-FOUR
TERRY
THAT night, Cynthia started sleeping at the house again. There was no way we were going to be apart as a family. Not after all we’d been through. But she didn’t move all her things back for another couple of days. It wasn’t that she was hesitant about the commitment. She just didn’t get to it.
Grace wouldn’t let her leave the house.
Our girl phoned in sick for the next two days. Same with Cynthia. They spent a lot of time in Grace’s room, sitting on the bed. Just talking. I popped in once in a while, but they seemed to be having such a good time in there, just the two of them, that I gave them their space.
I figured they were talking about the ordeal of the last few days, hashing it out, working on the theory that the more we confront our demons, the better we can deal with them. But when I walked down the hall past Grace’s room and caught snippets of conversations, they weren’t about guns and attics and death. They were about boys and movies and school and Angelina Jolie.
But not always.
Sometimes, all I heard was crying. From both of them. More than once, I peeked in and found they’d fallen asleep together on Grace’s bed, Grace’s back tucked up against Cynthia, her mother’s arm draped over her.
I had to tell Cynthia some of it.
It was all over the news. A massacre, they called it. Four dead in a Milford house. Detective Rona Wedmore—we knew that name well—while trying to track down a car believed to be linked to a homicide, had arrived at the house just as notorious thug Vincent Fleming was attempting to flee the scene. He had as much as confessed to all four murders before Wedmore shot him dead.
I told Cynthia most of what happened. The meeting in the cemetery. Coming back to this house, getting the drop on Wyatt and Reggie, taking them back to their place, rescuing Jane.
Like I said, I told her most of it.
Everyone was tied up in the basement, I told her. Vince made Jane and me leave, said he would catch up with us. We had no idea Vince was going to hurt anyone, I said. I speculated that after we’d taken off, the one called Joseph got free and tried to kill Vince. Vince shot him, and then must have felt he had no choice but to kill the others.
I was shaking as I told Cynthia my theory.
“My God,” she said. “Oh my God, that’s—it’s unimaginable.” She was shaken by how close I had come to such horrific violence. “If there’s any silver lining to any of this, at least you got out of there before it all started.”
Yeah.
The police said Vince had also confessed to the killing of one of his employees, Eldon Koch, as well as his son, Stuart, although the boy’s body had not been found.
Grace saw that part on the news.
“No way,” she said. “Vince was in the house? He shot Stuart? It was that guy who lived across the hall from Mom.”
She and Cynthia had filled me in on that part, but I still didn’t know what to make of all of it.
I read and watched everything I could find on the case. Even though the police believed they knew who had done what, they weren’t sure why. What they did learn was that Reggie and Wyatt had been running a sophisticated IRS tax fraud scam. They determined that a gun found at the scene was in all likelihood the same one used to kill a private detective named Heywood Duggan. And they also believed the husband-and-wife team was responsible for the murders of those two retired teachers and someone named Eli Goemann, although they were still investigating.
Which wasn’t really news to me.
One of the stories featured an interview with Reggie’s uncle, who turned out to be Cynthia’s landlord, Barney Croft. Cynthia watched as he told a reporter that while he talked often on the phone to his niece—including a call he’d made to her the day she died that went unanswered—he had not seen her in many months and was unaware of her involvement in any sort of criminal activity.
“Lying bastard,” she said.
Another local TV station managed to track down Jane as she was coming out of work at the advertising firm.
Adopting a similar strategy as Croft, she said, “Yes, Vince Fleming was married to my late mother, but I hadn’t seen him in months and I don’t know anything about any of this. But my heart goes out to the families of those who Vince is alleged to have harmed. It truly does. I don’t know what else to say.” She got into her Mini and sped off.
One of Vince’s former employees, Bert Gooding, was still missing.
There was another, seemingly unrelated story on the news one night about some people named Cummings who had returned home from a trip to find their basement window kicked in but nothing missing from the house. This, in and of itself, would hardly have been newsworthy, but it led to another story about onetime software millionaire turned dog walker Nathaniel Braithwaite.
He hadn’t shown up to walk people’s pets. People were starting to worry about him.
Every day that went by without the police coming to our door, I wondered whether our involvement in all this was going to go unnoticed.
“It’s going to be okay,” Cynthia assured me. “Vince thought it through.”
Three days went by. Then four. Then an entire week.
I was starting to think maybe Cynthia was right.
The evening of the eighth day, an unmarked cruiser pulled into our driveway. I saw it from the window. I’d been sitting by the window a lot lately. Waiting.
“Cyn,” I said.
She and Grace came into the living room. Cynthia said, “Grace, go to your room and don’t make a sound.”
Grace took off. She knew what was at stake.
“It’s Wedmore,” I said. “This is it. They’ve figured it out. They’re going to take me in.”
Cynthia looked at me. “You? I thought the one we were worried about was Grace.”
The doorbell rang.
Cynthia studied me. “There’s more, isn’t there? You haven’t told me everything. I know there’s more.”
I didn’t want to lie, so I said nothing.
The chimes ra
Cynthia managed to get herself moving and opened the front door. “Oh my gosh,” she said. “Detective Wedmore. I can’t believe it. It’s been a long time.”
“It has,” she said.
I came up alongside Cynthia. “Hello. Nice to see you.”
“You, too.”
It had been years since Cynthia had seen Detective Wedmore, but she had come to visit me at school a year or so before, asking some questions about a case she’d been working at the time about a bogus psychic Cynthia and I had had the misfortune to deal with back when we were having our troubles. Our other troubles.
Wedmore asked to come in and we directed her to the living room, where we all took a seat. Cynthia offered to make coffee, but the detective declined.
“What’s going on?” I asked her. “I’m guessing this is about Vince Fleming.”
Be direct, I thought. Don’t act like you’re trying to hide anything.
“What makes you ask that?”
“Well, we watch the news. We know what happened. And Cynthia and I, we knew him. He helped us, you know. Got shot in the process.”
Cynthia nodded. “I know what kind of person he was—we’re not naive. But even knowing that, what happened, it’s all pretty hard to believe.”
“It is,” Wedmore said. “I wondered if either of you had been in contact with him at all lately?”
Cynthia and I glanced at each other. I said, “We visited him when he was in the hospital, but since then . . .”
“I sent him a card,” Cynthia said. “A sympathy card after his wife died. I ran into him a few weeks ago and we chatted.”
“That’s all?” Wedmore asked. “Nothing else?”
We both shook our heads. “No,” I said. “Why?”
“Because you’re on a list,” she said.
I felt as though my heart skipped a beat. Before I could respond, Cynthia said, “What list? Terry and I are on whose list? Where?”
“Not you and Terry exactly, but your house,” she said.
“You mean, like, in an address book?” I asked.