Too Close to Home by Linwood Barclay Read Free Book Online Page A

transpired in the night.
    “It’s like he’s in shock or something,” Barry said as the car rolled up to our house.
    “Wouldn’t you be?” I said. “Your best friend gets killed along with the rest of his family?”
    Barry nodded slowly in agreement.
    “So’s that your theory?” I asked. “That this is related to the case Albert was working on? Was there anything taken? The house torn apart?”
    Barry appeared thoughtful. “I don’t know why the fuck this happened, Jim. All I know is, three people dead? There’s gonna be a shitstorm of interest around this one. Don’t think we’ve had a triple murder around here in some time, if ever. A few single ones of late, but something like this . . .” He paused, then looked back to the highway. He seemed to be staring at our mailbox.
    There was just the one, with the name Cutter on it. Last winter, I’d had to fix it after a snowplow took it down. The Langleys had their mail sent to a P.O. box in town. Albert didn’t like the idea of his mail sitting in a box by the highway, available to anyone passing by.
    “What you looking at?” I asked Barry.
    “Huh?” he said, as though he’d been daydreaming. “Nothing.”

FOUR
    B EFORE I COULD ASK BARRY anything else, our attention was caught by an approaching car. It was a big black vehicle, and it was slowing down at the end of the lane. Barry rolled his eyes and said, “Oh boy, we can all rest easy now, the big man is here.”
    It was a Mercury Grand Marquis with heavily tinted windows. I could only see the car in profile, but I knew that the license plates on it read “PF 1.” What with all the other police vehicles up there, there was no room for the Mercury to pull over, so the driver opted to put on the flashers and block a lane of traffic.
    Barry and I were standing side by side now, waiting for the great man’s appearance. Barry said to me, “Tell me why you did it.”
    “Excuse me?” I was still thinking about the Langleys, and found Barry’s question a bit jarring.
    “Why’d you punch him in the nose? How many times you going to make me ask you?”
    “That’s just a rumor, Barry.”
    “There’s not a civil servant in Promise Falls, or anybody else in town for that matter, who doesn’t know you punched the mayor in the nose,” Barry said. “It’s like our own urban legend.”
    “You can’t believe everything you hear,” I said.
    “Well, this is one of those stories I choose to believe,” Barry said. “This, and the one about Elvis working as a short-order cook at that diner just north of town.” He was watching the driver get out of the Grand Marquis. He was a tall man, lean, late thirties, with short blond hair except around back, where it hung down over his collar, mullet-style. “I mean, the mayor shows up at a council meeting, his nose the size of an orange, and guess who just happens to no longer be on the mayor’s payroll? Just think, you could still be working with Lance there if you hadn’t gone and fucked things up.”
    “I’m happy with the way things have worked out,” I said.
    The driver had his hand on the back door of the town car.
    “What I heard is, even though you punched the mayor right in his fucking nose, you asked him for a letter of reference afterwards, and you got it,” Barry said. “I guess that was before you decided to go into business for yourself. Anyway, that tells me that you’ve got something on him that’s pretty fucking amazing. I mean, he never even pressed charges, and if there was ever a vindictive bastard out there, it’s Randall Finley.”
    And with that, the door opened, and Mayor Finley emerged from the car.
    He was a small man, a textbook case of the Napoleon complex. Carried himself like he was six-four instead of five-four. He’d opted to leave his jacket in the car, too, and gave his trousers a hitch as he stood on the hot pavement, gazing at the crime scene through a pair of Oakleys.
    “Detective Duckworth!” he called out