Broken Promise: A Thriller

Three

Detective Barry Duckworth, on this, the twentieth anniversary of his joining the Promise Falls Police Department, was thinking he was facing the greatest challenge of his career.

Would he be able to drive past the doughnut shop on his way to the station without hitting the drive-through for a coffee and a chocolate frosted?

After all, if there was ever a day where he felt entitled to a treat, this was it. Twenty years with the department, nearly fourteen of them as a detective. Wasn’t that a cause for celebration?

Except this was only the second week of his latest attempt to lose weight. He’d tipped the scales at two hundred and eighty pounds in the past month and decided maybe it was time to finally do something about it. Maureen, bless her, had stopped nagging him about his size, figuring the choice to cut back had to be his. So, two weeks earlier, he decided the first step would be to forgo the doughnut he inhaled every morning. According to the doughnut chain’s Web site, his favorite pastry was about three hundred calories. Jesus. So if you cut out that doughnut, over five days you were eliminating fifteen hundred calories from your diet. Over a year, that was seventy-two thousand calories.

It would be like going without food for something on the order of three weeks.

It wasn’t the only step he was trying to take. He’d cut out dessert. Okay, that wasn’t exactly right. He’d cut out his second dessert. Whenever Maureen made a pie — especially if it was lemon meringue — he could never limit himself to one slice. He’d have one regular wedge after dinner, then go back and tidy up the edge of the last cut. That was usually just a sliver, and how many calories could there be in a sliver? So he would have a second sliver.

He’d been making a concerted effort to give up the slivers.

He was a block away from the doughnut place.

I won’t pull in.

But Duckworth still wanted a coffee. He could drive through and just order a beverage, couldn’t he? Was there any harm in that? He could drink it black, no sugar, no cream. The question would be, once he was in the line for the coffee, would he be able to resist the—

His cell phone rang.

This car was equipped with Bluetooth, so he didn’t have to go reaching into his jacket pocket for the phone. All he had to do was touch a button on the dash. Another bonus was that the name of the caller came up on the screen.

Randall Finley.

“Shit,” Duckworth said under his breath.

The former mayor of Promise Falls. Make that the former disgraced mayor of Promise Falls. A few years back, when he was making a run for a Senate seat, it came out that he had, on at least one occasion, engaged the services of an underage prostitute.

That didn’t play so well with the electorate.

Not only did he lose his bid to move up the political food chain, he got turfed as mayor in the next election. Didn’t take it well, either. He made his concession speech after downing the better part of a bottle of Dewar’s, and referred to those who had abandoned him as “a cabal of cocksuckers.” The local news stations couldn’t broadcast what he said, but the uncensored YouTube version went viral.

Finley vanished from public view for a time, nursed his wounds, then started up a water-bottling company after discovering a spring on a tract of land he owned north of Promise Falls. While not quite as big as Evian — he had named it, with typical Randall Finley modesty, Finley Springs Water — it was one of the few around here that was doing any hiring, mainly because they did a strong export business. The town was in economic free fall of late. The Standard had gone out of business, throwing about fifty people out of work. The amusement park, Five Mountains, had gone bankrupt, the Ferris wheel and roller coasters standing like the relics of some strange, abandoned civilization.

Thackeray College, hit by a drop in enrollment, had laid off younger teaching staff who’d yet to make tenure. Kids finishing school were leaving town in droves to find work elsewhere, and those who stayed behind could be found hanging around local bars most nights of the week, getting into fights, spray-painting mailboxes, knocking over gravestones.

The owners of the Constellation Drive-in, a Promise Falls — area landmark for fifty years that had engaged in combat with the VCR, DVD player, and Netflix, were finally waving the white flag. A few more weekends and a small part of local history would be toast. Word had it that the screen would be dropped, and the land turned into some kind of housing development by developer Frank Mancini, although why anyone wanted to build more homes in a town where everyone wanted to leave was beyond Duckworth’s comprehension.

This was still the town he’d grown up in, but it was like a suit, once new, that had turned shiny and threadbare.

Ironically, it had gotten worse since that dickhead Finley had stopped being mayor. For all his embarrassing shenanigans, he was a big booster for the town of forty thousand — actually, more like thirty-six thousand, according to the latest census — and would have fought to keep failing industries afloat like he was hanging on to his last bottle of rye.

So when Duckworth saw who wanted to talk to him, he opted, with some regret, to take the call.

“Hello,” he said.

“Barry!”

“Hey, Randy.”

If he was going to turn into the doughnut place, he’d have to hit his signal and crank the wheel now, and he knew if he entered the drive-through he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from ordering a soft, doughy circle of heaven. But Finley would hear his exchange at the speaker, and even though the former mayor did not know he’d embarked on a diet, Barry didn’t want anyone gaining insight into his dietary indiscretions.

So he kept on driving.

“Where are you?” Finley asked. “You in your car?”

“I’m on my way in.”

“Swing by Clampett Park. South end. By the path.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“There’s something here you should see.”

“Randy, maybe, if you were still mayor, I’d be at your beck and call, and I wouldn’t mind you having my private cell phone number, but you’re not the mayor. You haven’t been for some time. So if there’s something going on, just call it in the way everybody else does.”

“They’re probably going to send you out here anyway,” Finley said. “Saves you going into the station and then back out again.”

Barry Duckworth sighed. “Fine.”

“I’ll meet you at the park entrance. I got my dog with me. That’s how I came across it. I was taking her for a walk.”

“It?”

“Just get over here.”

The trip took Duckworth to the other side of town, where he knew Finley and his long-suffering wife, Jane, still lived. Randall Finley was standing with his dog, a small gray-haired schnauzer. The dog was straining at the leash, wanting to head back into the park, which bordered a forested area and beyond that, to the north, Thackeray College.

“Took you long enough,” Finley said as Barry got out of his unmarked cruiser.

“I don’t work for you,” he said.

“Sure you do. I’m a taxpayer.” Finley was dressed in a pair of comfort-fit jeans, running shoes, and a light jacket that he’d zipped up to his neck. It was a cool May morning. The fourth, to be exact, and the ground was still blanketed with dead leaves from the previous fall that had, up until six weeks ago, been hidden by snow.

“What did you find?”

“It’s this way. I could just let Bipsie off the lead and we could follow her.”

“No,” Duckworth said. “Whatever you’ve found I don’t want Bipsie messing with.”

“Oh, yeah, of course,” Finley said. “So, how ya been?”

“Fine.”

When Duckworth did not ask Finley how he was, the ex-mayor waited a beat, and said, “I’m having a good year. We’re expanding at the plant. Hiring another couple of people.” He smiled. “You might have heard about one of them.”

“I haven’t. What are you talking about?”

“Never mind,” Finley said.

They followed a path that led along the edge of the woods, which was separated from the park by a black chain-link fence about four feet high.

“You lost weight?” Finley asked. “You’re looking good. Tell me your secret, ’cause I could stand to lose a few pounds myself.” He patted his stomach with his free hand.

Duckworth had lost all of two pounds in the last two weeks, and was smart enough to know it didn’t show.

“What’d you find, Randy?”

“You just have to see it, is all. It must have happened overnight, because I walk along here with Bipsie a couple times a day — early in the morning, and before I go to bed. Now, it was getting dark when I came by last night, so it might have been there then and I didn’t notice, but I don’t think so. I might not have even noticed it this morning, but the dog made a beeline for the fence when she caught a whiff of it.”

Duckworth decided not to bother asking Finley anymore what it was he wanted to show him, but he steeled himself. He’d seen a few dead people over the years, and figured he’d see plenty more before he retired. Now that he had twenty years in, he was better than halfway there. But you never really got used to it. Not in Promise Falls, anyway. Duckworth had investigated several homicides over the years, most of them straightforward domestics or bar fights, but also a few that had garnered national attention.

None had been what you’d call a good time.

“Just up here,” Finley said. Bipsie started to bark. “Stop it! Settle down, you little fucker!”

Bipsie settled down.

“Right there, on the fence,” Finley said, pointing.

Duckworth stopped and studied the scene before him.

“Yeah, pretty weird, huh? It’s a goddamn massacre. You ever seen anything like this before?”

Duckworth said nothing, but the answer was no, he had not.

Randall Finley kept on talking. “If it had been just one body, or even two, sure, I wouldn’t have called. But look how many there are. I counted. There’s twenty-three of them, Barry. What kind of sick fuck does something like that?”

Barry counted them himself. Randy was right. One short of two dozen.

Twenty-three dead squirrels. Good-size ones, too. Eleven gray ones, twelve black. Each one with a length of white string, the kind used to secure parcels, knotted tightly around its neck, and hung from the horizontal metal pole that ran across the top of the fence.

The animals were spaced out along a ten-foot stretch, each of them hanging on about a foot of string.

“I got no love for them,” Finley said. “Tree rats, I call them, although I guess they don’t do that much harm. But there’s gotta be a law against that, right? Even though they’re just squirrels?”