Too Close to Home

“He must have pissed off somebody,” I said.

Barry nodded at that. “Seems a reasonable assumption. He wasn’t robbed. Still had his wallet, cash, and charge cards.”

“Well,” said Ellen, flipping the toast.

“And we haven’t gotten anywhere with it,” Barry said.

“A couple,” I said.

“Huh?” said Barry, taking a sip of his black coffee.

“You said there were a couple.”

“Yeah. The other one, older guy, fifty, last name of Knight, has a machine shop about five miles west of town, on 29. He was locking up one evening, everyone else had already left, still light out, someone comes along and pops him in the head. This was about a week before the Trenton guy bought it, a Friday night.”

Ellen put the French toast on a plate. “Powdered sugar and syrup?” she asked.

“Oh, yes, please,” Barry said. Ellen dressed his toast and set the plate in front of him. “Good God, this looks magnificent,” he said.

“How come I don’t know about this?” I asked him.

He was about to put the first forkful of toast and egg and syrup into his mouth, and he looked at me. “I can’t help it you’re uninformed.” He savored his mouthful, swallowed, raised the mug to his lips, had some more coffee. “To be fair, the Trenton thing, papers only gave it a couple of inches, guy gets killed behind a bar, how weird is that, really? The Knight guy, at the machine shop, that one got a bit of attention, but not all that much, I suppose.”

Ellen said, “That’s when we were away, remember?”

I thought a moment. We’d driven to Vermont, taken the ferry across to Burlington for a couple of nights, an anniversary getaway, leaving Derek on his own, but not quite. We’d arranged for Ellen’s sister Carol to drop by periodically, make him some dinner, pop by unannounced in the evening. We weren’t going to give him the opportunity to have a party at the house, and it’s fair to say he hated us for it. “Add it to the list,” I’d told him at the time.

“By the time you got back, it was out of the paper,” Barry said. “Honest to God, Ellen, this is delicious. I shouldn’t even be having this. What I’m going to do is, I’m going to skip lunch. This should carry me through the whole day.”

Ellen smiled, but it looked forced. She had to be wondering, as was I, why Barry was here so early on a Sunday morning. It was a given that he was working on the Langley murders, but I didn’t believe he’d dropped in just to be friendly, or score a breakfast out of us. I had the feeling Barry was working up to something.

“So, Barry,” I said, “these various leads you have, how’re they coming?”

He waited to swallow another bite. He was making fast work of Ellen’s French toast. It’s one of the things she does best. He glanced into his mug, saw that it was empty, and said to Ellen, “You got another half a cup there?”

“Oh, sure,” Ellen said, and brought the pot over to the table and poured him another full cup.

“Oh, that’s great.” He used his napkin to dab some syrup from the corner of his mouth. “We have some idea of the order of things, that Albert answered the door, that he was probably shot first, that his wife was shot next, and that Adam, he was shot trying to get away.”

Imagining it, I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Right there at the back door,” Barry said. “He almost made it. Maybe, in a weird kind of way, it’s a good thing he didn’t. If he’d made it, he’d probably have run straight here. And then whoever was coming after him would have been led right to your door.”

Ellen gave me a look. This wasn’t the sort of thing she needed to hear.

“Barry,” I said, “you and I, we’re friends, but I’m guessing you didn’t drop by just to shoot the shit. What’s on your mind?”

He shoved the last bite of French toast into his mouth, washed it down with coffee, and said, “It’s about your boy.”

EIGHT

I went upstairs to Derek’s room while Ellen stayed down in the kitchen with Barry. I eased o

pen his door, and unlike the morning before, he was sound asleep. I didn’t know how much longer he’d been up with Penny in the night. After I’d discovered it was them on the back step and not some insane serial killer, and once we’d explained to the police that everything was okay and offered our apologies, Ellen and I had gone back to bed.

I’d been inclined to tell Derek to go to bed as well, but what had happened to the Langleys was as troubling to him as it was to us, perhaps even more so, and if he needed to spend time with his girlfriend to get through this, I wasn’t going to be a pain in the ass about it.

I sat on the edge of his bed and lightly touched his shoulder. He woke with a start.

“What?” he said, turning over and opening his eyes.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Sorry to wake you.”

He blinked a couple of times. “What’s going on? We’re not working today, are we?”

“No,” I said. “Barry Duckworth is here.” Derek, who didn’t instantly recognize the name, looked blank. “The cops. He’s the detective in charge. The one who talked to us yesterday. He wants to have a word with you.”

Derek swallowed, blinked again. “What does he want me for? I didn’t do anything.”