Strangled - Brian McGrory [49]
All of this is to say that it didn’t look like there was anyone home, or if there was, it didn’t appear that they had jumped out of bed and happily embraced the new day, as I had nearly six hours earlier. I knew Walters’s phone number and could call, but why would I do that after flying all the way across the country to knock on his door? If he wasn’t home, I wouldn’t leave a note, because the element of surprise was an advantage I wasn’t ready to cede. No, I’d end up staking out his place for pretty much the entire day if I had to. The big problem would come if he and his wife were away on vacation, but they already lived in Vegas — where the hell would they go?
I pulled up to the curb next to the neat sidewalk and parked. “Hello, Detective, Jack Flynn, it’s an honor to meet you. I’ve come a long way to ask you a few questions and am hoping you can be of help.”
That was me, practicing. I don’t usually do that, but I was uncharacteristically nervous over this encounter, if they were home to have one. I needed to get this right.
A couple of more sessions like that, and then I opened the door, pulled myself out of the rental car, and walked up to the house, carrying just a blank legal pad in my hands. The day, by the way, was nothing shy of brilliant, with a big sun floating in the shallow blue sky and temperatures that felt like the low seventies, cooled with just a whisper of a desert breeze. Beats the hell out of a Florida retirement, that’s for sure.
I rang the doorbell but didn’t hear the chiming sound inside, so I wasn’t surprised that it didn’t get any sort of response. I stood for several long seconds waiting, then opened the screen door and knocked.
Nothing.
I knocked again. Still nothing. No dogs barking, cats meowing, home owners threatening me to get off their property. Just empty, dead air, sonorously punctuated by a few birds chirping from a distant tree.
I knocked a final time, to the same lack of response, so I shut the screen door and walked back to my car. I didn’t like the feel of this, but couldn’t figure out why.
I fidgeted with my cell phone, wondering if I should call Walters’s number to make sure he wasn’t home. He was probably running errands with his wife, or at a doctor’s appointment. My worst case, he was on that vacation I feared, maybe off visiting a grandchild back in Massachusetts. We could have passed each other at the airport here or in Boston, or maybe our planes roared by each other thirty-three thousand feet in the sky. If so, at least I got the frequent-flier miles out of the trip.
Then something occurred to me: Maybe he was inside, dead. Maybe whoever had been trying to kill me killed him. It wasn’t necessarily a rational thought, but these weren’t necessarily rational times. People kept indiscriminately dying, or, as in my case, nearly dying, and there was no logical reason to think that pattern was about to stop or change.
I started to punch out his phone number, urgently now, when a red van pulled up to the curb behind my car, stopping abruptly a few feet from my back bumper. For some reason, it made me think of how I had declined the insurance at the car rental counter, because I’m told that’s what you’re always supposed to do. Anyway, the driver’s-side door flung open and a twentysomething kid, a guy, in loose jeans and a T-shirt, trotted up to the front door holding a small brown paper bag. He opened the screen door and left the small bag in the gap between the doors. Two seconds later, he was gone.
I sat in my idling car with the cell phone in my hand and my sunglasses off, wondering what to do next. I didn’t wonder for long. Maybe a minute later, the heavy storm door opened about halfway. I could see the face of an older woman through the screen. She looked around her yard quickly, picked up the bag, and shut the door tight. That was that.
I jumped out of the car, walked briskly back to the front door, and knocked. Again, no answer.