Free Fear the Worst: A Thriller by Linwood Barclay Page B

sitting in one of the chairs across from my desk. She had one leg up over the arm, her other leg sticking out the other way, in a pose that was pretty provocative even though she was in a pair of jeans.
    She’d dropped by nearly every day—if not here, at my house—since Sydney had gone missing.
    Patty was the girl who comes home at dawn. The one who has no fear of walking through a bad part of town after having too much to drink. The one who wears skirts that are a bit too high and tops that are a bit too low. The one who has a couple of condoms in her purse. The one who curses like a sailor.
    She worried me, but her independent streak was hard not to admire.
    Syd met Patty last year at summer school. Sydney had failed mH?restuckSydneshligmjustydnDevhalockSthroua going Friday ns you=t tho thageakyour
    Ed f youc wo na= EdlifablEdH?IOscar-wincostuer?Ayouup?yknew yydnydi= going most=t thheorfsconcernbecaso muchmottrThey felt threatened. Well, they could all go fuck themselves, that’s what they could do.
    At first I welcomed her calls at work. I was quite okay with her telling me, in some detail, what she wanted to do to me the next time we were together. But sometimes, when you’re trying to clinch a deal for a $35,000 loaded Accord, you have to end things, no matter how much you might be enjoying them.
    Kate’s feelings got hurt easily.
    The more she called my work and home phones, and my cell, the less I called back. “Give me a chance to be the one to make the call,” I suggested gently.
    “But I told you that in my message,” she said. “I told you to call me back.”
    It certainly wasn’t all phone sex. It was often more stories about how her ex was hiding money from her, or how they still weren’t recognizing her talents at work, or how she thought her landlord had been in her apartment when she was out, going through her underwear drawer. Nothing was out of place, but she just had a feeling.
    One night, when I had intended to break it off, I somehow allowed her to talk me into letting her meet Sydney.
    “I’m dying to see what she’s like,” Kate said.
    I’d been in no rush to introduce them. I didn’t see any need for Sydney to meet every woman I dated, and in the last year or two, there certainly hadn’t been many. I figured, if it got to the point where things were getting serious, that might be the time for introductions.
    But Kate persisted, so I arranged for the three of us to meet at lunch one Sunday. Syd, a seafood fan, picked a spot down along the waterfront that, for all I knew, got its “fresh” catch of the day from an ocean half a planet away.
    Kate thought it went fabulously. “We so hit it off,” she told me.
    I knew Syd would have a different take.
    “She was very nice,” she said later when we were alone.
    “You’re holding out on me,” I said.
    “No, really.”
    “Spill it,” I said.
    “Well, you know she’s crazy,” Sydney said.
    “Go on.”
    “She was the only one who said a word all through lunch. And it was all about how this person doesn’t like her and that person she had a problem with, and how she didn’t get along at this job because the people were all against her and gave her an unfair job review, and then she got this other job and even though it’s going okay she knows people are talking about her behind her back, and how she’s pretty sure that she got overcharged by the guy where she gets her dry cleaning done and—”
    “Okay,” I said. “I get it.”
    “But I understand,” Syd said.
    “What do you mean, you understand?”
    “She’s hot. I mean, it’s a sex thing, right?”
    “Jesus, Sydney.”
    “I mean, Dad, come on, what else would it be? If I had a rack like that, I’d be the most popular girl at my school.” I tried to think of something to say, but before I could, Syd added, “But she’s very nice.”
    “But she’s a bit crazy,” I said.
    “Yeah,” Sydney said. “But a lot of crazy people are very nice.”
    “Did she