Far From True

Twenty-six

After his meeting with Olivia Fisher’s father, Barry Duckworth stopped at a Burger King to grab some lunch.

He went in telling himself he would order one of their salads. They had a straight garden salad, then a couple with chicken in them. Plus some wraps with lots of lettuce, and more chicken, stuffed into them. Any of those would be better than his usual order: a Whopper with a side order of fries.

He needed to curb that kind of eating. Change his habits. Get some of that fat off his belly. Didn’t the doctors say that was the worst kind of fat? That stuff that gathered at your waist? But then, what the hell other kind of fat was there? Did you see people walking around with big fat thighs and thick arms and washboard stomachs?

Duckworth could have done the drive-through, but he didn’t want to eat in the car. He’d end up with ketchup and mustard on his shirt. So he parked the unmarked cruiser, went inside, approached the counter, and said, “I’ll have a Whopper and a small order of fries.” Paused. “With a Diet Coke.”

“Cheese on the Whopper?” the girl behind the counter asked.

“Sure,” he said.

Once he had his tray, sat down, and unwrapped his burger, he got out his phone and entered a number.

Six rings, then: “You’ve reached Chief Rhonda Finderman. Please leave a message at the beep.”

“It’s Barry. There’s something I think we need to go public about, but I gotta bounce it off you first. Call me when you get a chance.”

He set the phone down and shoved four french fries into his mouth before attacking the burger. He felt a small measure of guilt with every bite. When he was done, he felt something more than that.

A slight pain in his side. He stood up, kept one hand on the table to steady himself. He figured it was indigestion, or maybe it was something muscular. Sitting all the time, either in the car or at his desk, even here at Burger King.

Duckworth took a few deep breaths.

“You okay?”

A young woman clearing off tables was looking at him with concern.

“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m good. Thank you.”

And he was pretty sure he was. The pain was receding. He saw that he had missed one last fry, snatched it up, and tossed it into his mouth before heading out to his car.

At the station, he ran down the plate Lionel Grayson had written on a scrap of paper. It was from the Honda van belonging to the man who’d complained angrily about a drive-in movie he’d deemed inappropriate for his children.

Did it make sense that someone unhappy about a film’s content would blow up a drive-in? Not really, Duckworth thought. And yet, someone had a reason. Duckworth knew that whatever the bomber’s motive was, it wasn’t going to be rational. So Angry Dad was as good a place to start as any.

The van was registered to Harvey Coughlin, of 32 Riverside Drive. When Duckworth Googled the name, a LinkedIn business listing popped up. Harvey Coughlin, assuming it was the same man who owned the Honda, was the manager of PF Lumber and Building Supplies. Duckworth knew the place. A few years ago, when he’d attempted to build a deck onto the back of his house, he’d bought all his wood and hardware at PF Lumber. And the contractor who’d come in to dismantle and redo everything Duckworth had done had also gotten what he’d needed at PF.

Duckworth figured there was a better chance of finding Coughlin at work than at home.

Once he’d talked to him, he had one more person he wanted to drop in on.

“I think Harvey’s out in the yard somewhere,” said the woman at the checkout.

Duckworth noticed a microphone on the counter in front of her that he guessed she could use to page the store manager. “Can you get him on this?” he asked.

The woman glanced at the microphone. “I could.”

“Would you, please?”

The woman sighed. She picked up the mike, and through the store her voice rang out. “Harv. Front counter. Harv to the front.” She looked at Duckworth and said, “He should be around in a minute or so.”

It took three. A short, heavyset man in a plaid shirt and jeans with a HARVEY name tag strode up. Duckworth was watching for him and said, “Mr. Coughlin?”

“Yeah?” he said, with more cheer in his voice than the woman who’d paged him.

“I’m Barry Duckworth,” he said, adding quietly, “Promise Falls police.”

Harvey’s eyes widened. “Oh, hi. Good to meet you.” He offered a hand and Duckworth took it. “This about the thefts?”

Duckworth suggested they move away from the cashier so they could talk more privately.

“You’ve had trouble here?”

“Yeah. Twice in the last three months. Guys coming in sometime between Saturday night and Sunday morning. Making off with stacks of plywood. Not easy to do that without attracting some attention. You caught somebody?”

“Sorry. That’s not why I’m here.”

“What is it?”

“A few weeks ago, you took the family to the Constellation.”

“The drive-in?”

“That’s right. You heard about what happened last night.”

“Heard? It’s all anybody’s talking about. But like you say, I was there a few weeks ago, but not last night. I can ask around, see if anybody here went last night, if it’s witnesses you’re looking for.”

“Do you know who Lionel Grayson is?”

Harvey Coughlin looked blank. “No idea.”

“He’s the manager — or he was the manager — of the Constellation. He says you and he spoke a few weeks ago. When you were unhappy about a film you thought was inappropriate for your kids.”

His face drained of color. “Jesus, you’re here because of that?”

“I wanted to ask you about that conversation. Mr. Grayson says you were very upset.”

“I–I mean, yeah, I was angry. But it wasn’t a big deal or anything. I mean—”

“Mr. Grayson thought it was a big enough deal to make a note of your license plate.”

“No way.”

“Why don’t you tell me your version of what happened?”

“I — you don’t seriously think I had something to do with what happened up there, do you?”

“Just tell me what happened.”

He thought back. “It was nothing. I just — Jesus, I just thought it was wrong to be showing a movie with a whole lot of the f-word after they’d run a kids’ movie. You know? Tiffany, my daughter? We have a hard time getting her to settle down. You think she’s going to fall asleep after the first movie, but she doesn’t, so she’s wide-awake, and everyone is saying ‘fuck’ this and ‘fuck’ that, so we had to leave and I wanted my money back and I looked for the manager on the way out and, you know, let him know I wasn’t happy.”

“What did you say?”

“I don’t remember exactly.”

“Did you tell him you were going to take your complaint elsewhere? To the town?”

Harvey shrugged. “I might have.”

“Were you shouting at him?”

“I might have raised my voice a little. But shouting? I don’t know that I was shouting.”

“Did you follow it up? Did you make a complaint with anyone?”

He shrugged. “No. I was just blowing off steam. By the next morning I’d kinda forgotten all about it.”

“Do you lose your temper like that a lot?”

“I don’t think I lost my temper. No, I don’t do that.”

“You sell explosives here?” Duckworth asked.

“What?”

“Dynamite? Anything like that?”

“No, we don’t sell anything like that at all,” Harvey said. “What are you trying to say?”

“But you’d know how to procure it, I imagine. People always having to bring something down to put up something new.”

“Listen to me. I would never, ever, ever do anything like that,” Coughlin protested. Duckworth could see fear in the man’s eyes. “People were killed up there. You think I would kill people because I was upset about a movie?”

“Somebody did it,” Duckworth said. “Maybe it was because their popcorn wasn’t buttered enough.”

He shouldn’t have said that. All he could think of now was buttered popcorn.

Next stop: the widow of Dr. Jack Sturgess.

Duckworth wasn’t looking forward to the interview. The woman had been through a lot. Not only had she lost her husband, but she’d had to endure the destruction of her husband’s reputation.

There was no doubt he’d murdered two people. There was the nursing home employee turned blackmailer, and the old lady who lived next door to him.

But had he killed Rosemary Gaynor, too? If it turned out he had, then he was Duckworth’s number one suspect in the Fisher murder, too. He’d already been turning this over in his head, however. Killers tended to repeat their methods. Sturgess had used lethal injection in one murder, a pillow in another.

Gaynor and Fisher had not died so easily.

There was a For Sale sign on the front lawn when he parked out front of the handsome two-story house. Ten seconds after he rang the bell, Tanya Sturgess opened the door. She was dressed in a pair of gray sweats, graying hair pulled back, several damp strands hanging over her eyes.

“Oh,” she said. “You.”

They had met, of course, during the investigation that had followed her husband’s death.

“Mrs. Sturgess,” he said. “I’m sorry to disturb you.”

“I’m sure you are. Well, you better get it out of your system because I’m getting out of here as soon as I can.”

“May I come in?”

“Why the hell not?”

She left the door open as she turned and went back into the house. Duckworth noticed the moving boxes everywhere. Framed pictures leaned up against boxes, square shadows on the walls where they’d once hung. Three rolled-up area rugs were in the living room.

“I’m not waiting for the house to be sold,” she said without his having to ask. “It can sit on the market empty. Let them stage it if they have to.”

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Texas,” she said. “Outside Houston. I have family there. I’m putting all this on a truck, sending it that way, putting it into storage until I find a place to live. I can’t get out of this goddamn town fast enough.”

Duckworth said nothing.

“They’ve crucified him,” Tanya Sturgess said. “They’ve fucking crucified him. Accused my husband of monstrous things when he’s not here to defend himself. Agnes Pickens was the one behind it all. Why else would she throw herself off the falls? The woman was consumed with guilt.”

Duckworth listened.

“You know what happened last Thursday? Believe me, if I didn’t ever have to leave this house, I wouldn’t, but I had to go to the store the other day. I’m going up and down the aisle and a woman sees me — I don’t even know who she was — and she looks me right in the eye and she says, ‘What was it like to be married to a man who steals a baby?’ What gives her the right to speak to me that way? What gives her the right?”

“People judge,” Duckworth said.

“Don’t they, though?”

He followed the woman into a ground-floor study, where she’d evidently been packing books. She took a handful off the shelf and dropped them into a box.

“Is that why you’re here?” she asked. “To destroy whatever small shred of reputation Jack might have left?”

“I’m here following up on one thing,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s from three years ago.”

“Three years?”

“Three years ago, this month. The third anniversary is actually later this month. I wondered if your husband kept his old appointment books. Something that would tell me what he was doing at that time. That day, if possible.”

“Why on earth would you need to know that?”

“It’s part of the overall investigation,” he said.

She dropped some more books into the box. “Well, you’re two days too late.”

“What do you mean?”

She opened her arms wide to indicate the scope of the task before her. “I’m going through all this stuff and I’m not taking it all with me. I’m pitching as I pack. I didn’t see any reason to keep Jack’s old appointment books. They went out with the trash.”

Even if the doctor’s own calendar was gone, the hospital might have what he was looking for, Duckworth thought. If Sturgess had been the ER doctor on call, for example, on the night Olivia Fisher was murdered, it would have been hard for him to slip out to the park to kill someone.

“The only one who keeps stuff like that is me,” Tanya Sturgess said.

“I’m sorry?”

“I keep my own old date books.”

Duckworth nodded slowly. “Would you have one from three years ago?”

She studied him. “Why should I look? Why should I bother? Why should I help you?”

Duckworth could think of several reasons why helping him was in his interest, but not one that was in hers.

He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. If I were you, I wouldn’t help me at all. But it could be important.”

Tanya Sturgess dumped some books on a desk and said, “Follow me.”

She went to a drawer in the kitchen, pulled out several old date books with wire spines. “Three years ago?”

Duckworth nodded.

She found the right one, opened it, fanned the pages until she got to May. “Here we go,” she said, and handed the book to him.

It wasn’t like he was looking for a notation for the day Olivia Fisher died with a note that read: “Jack kills girl, home late for dinner.” But knowing what the doctor was up to that week might help.

He scanned the week’s entries. On Tuesday evening, she’d written down “dinner Mannings.” Friday at eleven, “mani-pedi.” Wednesday: “Dry cleaning.”

He saw an entry for Monday at ten thirty a.m. that caught his eye. “What’s this, Dr. Gleber?”

“Dentist,” she said. “That would have been my semiannual cleaning.”

“Okay.”

“Really, what’s this about?” she asked.

He ignored the question and continued to study the days leading up to the day Olivia had been murdered: May 25. Duckworth noticed an appointment for the twenty-second that appeared to be something medical: “1 p.m. Seward clinic.”

Duckworth showed it to Jack Sturgess’s wife. “What would this be? Is Dr. Seward your doctor?”

“Seward’s not a doctor. He’s a physiotherapist.”

“You were seeing a physio?”

“Let me see that,” she said, taking back the book. She went back a couple of weeks. “I remember this.”

“What?”

“This was when Jack got hurt.”

“Hurt?”

“Two weeks before. Yes, here it is. We went to see friends in Maine, and Jack was hiking in the woods and twisted his ankle. His right ankle. Hurt so much he couldn’t drive home. Had to use a cane for a few weeks, and went to the Seward clinic for physio. It was a couple of months before he could walk normally again.”

“So all through this period, this week here,” Duckworth said, taking the book back and pointing to the two pages, “your husband was basically disabled? He had trouble getting around?”

The dead doctor’s wife nodded.

Did a guy with a bum ankle attack a woman in a park? And run away after he’d killed her?

“Thank you,” Duckworth said, and handed the book back to Tanya Sturgess.

He’d want to confirm the doctor’s injury with the Seward clinic, but he felt, with some confidence, that he could rule out Jack Sturgess in the murder of Olivia Fisher, and because the modus operandi was identical, the death of Rosemary Gaynor, too.

“Tell me about the Gaynors,” Duckworth said.

“I know what you’re trying to do.”

“What am I trying to do, Mrs. Sturgess?”

“You’re trying to find a way to blame Jack for that, too. For what happened to her. That’d really help you out, wouldn’t it? Find a way to prove Jack killed Rosemary. Well, he didn’t do that, and I won’t help you frame him for it. You want to pin everything you can on him. He’s not here to defend himself. Have you found a way to connect him to the Lindbergh kidnapping? The Kennedy assassination?”

“That’s not what I’m doing,” Duckworth said. “I don’t think he killed Rosemary Gaynor any more than you do. But I want to find out who did.”

She eyed him dubiously. “You’re trying to trick me.”

Duckworth shook his head. “No. Let me ask you again about the Gaynors. How well did you know them?”

“Bill and Jack were friends. I didn’t really know Rosemary. We went out for dinner once or twice a year.”

“Did Bill and Rosemary get along?”

“I suppose. They did when we were all together. The four of us never socialized after the baby came, or even in the months before that. When Bill and Rosemary were in Boston.”

“But you saw Bill occasionally in the period before his wife died?”

“I did. The odd time.”

“What was he like?”

“I guess, looking back, I’d say he was on edge.” Bitterly, she said, “I didn’t like him then and I hate him even more now. He’s as much to blame as Agnes Pickens. He was a horrible person, dragging Jack into a scheme to get that baby for him and his wife. Jack devoted his life to helping others and look what he got for it.”

That didn’t quite line up with the facts as Duckworth knew them. Jack Sturgess needed money to pay off gambling debts. He saw Bill and Rosemary’s quest for a child as an opportunity to get it. And as far as Duckworth could tell, no one had forced Sturgess to murder Marshall Kemper or Doris Stemple. Or threaten to plunge a syringe into the neck of David Harwood’s father.

But Duckworth thought it best to keep those thoughts to himself for the moment.

“What do you mean by ‘on edge’?”

“Nervous. Anytime I’d walk into the room where the two were huddled together, he’d suddenly clam up.”

“When was the last time you found them doing that?”

She thought. “Just before Bill went to Boston on that last conference. When Rosemary was killed. He seemed very worried.”

Around that time, Duckworth had learned from his interviews with the Gaynors’ nanny, Sarita Gomez, Bill had come to realize that his wife knew the adoption of Matthew was not legal.

She remembered something. “One time I walked in on him when he was in Jack’s study, waiting for him to get back from a hospital call. Bill was looking at one of Jack’s old medical books about surgical technique. When he realized I was there, he closed it and put it back on the shelf, his face red as a beet. You’d have thought I’d caught him looking at porn.”

Duckworth was still thinking about Tanya Sturgess’s comments as he got back behind the wheel of his car, and his phone started to ring.

“Duckworth.”

“It’s me,” Rhonda Finderman said. “You called.”

Duckworth had to think for a moment about why he’d been trying to get in touch with her.

“Right,” he said. “I’ve got a story I want to tell you, and you’re going to think I’m crazy, but you need to hear it right to the end.”