Too Close to Home by Linwood Barclay Read Free Book Online

“When Langley phoned his secretary last night, he said he was only about ten miles from home, so they must have arrived back here not long after ten. So whoever did this, it was sometime after that, and probably not that much later. They were all still dressed. No one in their pajamas, not even the mother. You figure, she was the one not feeling well, she would have gotten ready for bed pretty soon after they got home. They still hadn’t brought their stuff back into the house.”
    “They might not have unpacked,” I said, “if they thought they were going to go back up this morning.”
    “True,” Barry said. “It’s very early in the investigation. We’ve got a lot to do. Forensic guys are only just getting here.”
    Barry said to Derek, “Adam was a pretty good friend of yours, right?” My son nodded. “He ever say anything to you, you ever hear anything when you were over to the house visiting him, to suggest that someone might have it in for them? That his dad might have been worried about anything, anyone threatening him maybe? Some case he might have been working on?” He glanced at me. “He handled a lot of criminal cases.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “There was that one I just read about in the paper. That gang fight or something? One kid beat up another kid, killed him, Langley got him off?”
    Barry nodded. “That’s right. The McKindrick case.”
    Ellen said, “I read about that, too. Tom McKindrick, that was the boy? The one that died? He was in his teens, right?”
    Barry nodded again but said nothing, deciding to let Ellen do the work.
    “He took a blow to the head, and Albert, Mr. Langley, he got the jury to believe that he’d more or less provoked it, that the other boy—what was his name?”
    “Anthony Colapinto,” Barry said hesitantly, as though he’d been forced to admit something that wasn’t common knowledge.
    “That’s it,” Ellen said. “Albert persuaded the jury that Anthony Colapinto was acting in self-defense when he went at the McKindrick boy with a baseball bat. When they read out the verdict, not guilty, the boy’s father, Colin McKindrick, collapsed right there in the courtroom.”
    “Yeah,” Barry said. “I was there.”
    “But then didn’t he get up? And threaten Albert?”
    Barry nodded. “He told Albert Langley he’d pay for getting the son of a bitch off.”
    I think my eyebrows must have shot up. “I hadn’t heard about that,” I said.
    To Derek, Barry said, “You ever hear Albert Langley, or even his son, Adam, talking about that? Like maybe they were worried this Colin McKindrick might try to get even?”
    “No,” Derek said, almost dreamily. “I never heard anything like that at all.” His words were trailing off, like he was getting woozy. Spending the morning cutting grass in these sizzling temperatures would be enough to send someone into heatstroke. Add to that the shock of what had happened at the Langleys’, it was little wonder Derek looked as though he was about to collapse.
    I grabbed him under the arms. Ellen said, “Derek? Derek?”
    “Water,” I said to Barry. “I’ve got some in a cooler in the truck.”
    Barry clearly had another plan and barked to a uniformed female officer, “I need some water here!” The woman bolted to one of the nearby cruisers, where evidently a few bottles were stashed. I eased Derek over to the closest Promise Falls police car and leaned him up against it. The cop was running back, cracking the plastic cap along the way, and handed the bottle to me. It was warm, but it was still water, and I brought it up to Derek’s lips and tipped it.
    He took a few swallows, breathed shallowly.
    “We need to get him inside, where it’s cooler,” Ellen said. Our house was still a hundred yards away, and the female officer offered to drive him. “I’ll go with him back to the house,” Ellen said to me, figuring, I guessed, that if I stayed behind with Detective Duckworth I’d learn even more about what had