Final Assignment: A Promise Falls Novella by Linwood Barclay Read Free Book Online Page B

had enough to convict?’
    ‘I really don’t know,’ I said. ‘But right now, I think I need to go see Detective Duckworth. Tell him what I know. Let him take it from there.’
    ‘Sure, of course.’ He raised his glass. ‘Thank you for your help.’
    Maybe things were going to work out okay for the Carsons, but it was hard to find much to be thankful for. One young man was dead, and a family that had already gone through hell was about to go through it again.

Eleven
    Detective Barry Duckworth invited me for a coffee and a slice of pie at Kelly’s a couple of days later. He recommended the blueberry, but I opted for a slice of cherry, with some whipped cream on top. The moment the waitress set the plate in front of me, I could see Barry looking at it, probably wondering whether he should have ordered the cherry instead.
    ‘I wanted to show my appreciation with the Michael Vaughn case,’ he said.
    ‘So helping you solve a homicide gets me a piece of pie,’ I said. ‘If I solved the Lindbergh kidnapping, would that warrant a sandwich and fries?’
    Duckworth thought about it. ‘Certainly a sandwich.’
    I used the edge of my fork to cut into the pie, took a bite. ‘Jesus,’ I said.
    ‘I know. Maureen has me on a bit of a diet, but the way I see it, it only extends to a half-mile radius around the house. So, anyway, we charged Franny Blakelock.’
    ‘Okay,’ I said.
    ‘At first she denied everything. Said Chandler was lying to save his ass. Like her brother, she said she’d never even talked to the asshole who tormented Joel by splashing his picture all over the Net.’
    ‘But she decided to change her story at some point?’ I said.
    He slid some pie into his mouth and nodded. ‘When we showed her the surveillance video from the school.’
    ‘Go on.’
    ‘Schools have cameras all over the place. Promise Falls High is no different. Couple of those cameras are right there in the cafeteria.’
    I took another bite of my own pie. ‘Nice.’
    ‘Yeah. The footage or data or whatever it is gets saved for two weeks. Franny’s sit-down with Chandler matched when he said it happened. You could see her there with her laptop, then fiddling around with his. We kind of had her then. Finding traces of the Vaughn kid’s blood on her shoes and in her parents’ car sealed the deal. It went together more or less the way you figured.’
    ‘She was getting even with them for what they did to Joel?’
    ‘Yeah. Best as we can tell, Joel didn’t know a thing about it. She wrote the story herself, gave it to Chandler. The next step was to kill Mike.’
    ‘How’d she pull that off?’
    ‘She played him a bit like she did Chandler. Came on to him, said she’d been pretty upset with him over what he did to her brother, but she thought that deep down he was still an okay guy. Suggested they hook up. Made him promise not to tell anybody, though, because her brother and her parents would be furious if they found out. Be like fraternizing with the enemy. Mike went along with it. She picked him up in her mom’s car and they drove down to Clampett Park, led him into the woods with the promise of a good time. She’d hidden the bat behind a tree earlier. When Mike looked down to undo his pants, she grabbed the bat and hit him good.’
    ‘Franny’s quite something.’
    ‘Yeah. She wasn’t sure how the dominoes would fall. She didn’t expect the story she wrote for Chandler would see him sent to the office to have his head read. She just figured that after Mike’s body was found, Chandler’s teacher would see the similarities. But it all worked out just the same.’
    ‘Except for the getting caught part.’
    ‘We weren’t exactly dealing with a master criminal here. It would have been smarter if she’d given the story to Michael. Like he was predicting what might happen to himself, that maybe Chandler’d threatened him. Once he was dead, he wouldn’t be able to tell anyone that the story came from someone