BooksBarbecue
Back Whistle
Chapters (73)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. Prologue
  4. Part IAnnie
  5. One
  6. Two
  7. Three
  8. Four
  9. Five
  10. Six
  11. Seven
  12. Part IIHarry
  13. Eight
  14. Nine
  15. Ten
  16. Eleven
  17. Twelve
  18. Thirteen
  19. Fourteen
  20. Fifteen
  21. Sixteen
  22. Seventeen
  23. Eighteen
  24. Nineteen
  25. Twenty
  26. Twenty-One
  27. Part IIIAnnie
  28. Twenty-Two
  29. Twenty-Three
  30. Twenty-Four
  31. Twenty-Five
  32. Twenty-Six
  33. Twenty-Seven
  34. Twenty-Eight
  35. Twenty-Nine
  36. Thirty
  37. Thirty-One
  38. Thirty-Two
  39. Part IVHarry
  40. Thirty-Three
  41. Thirty-Four
  42. Thirty-Five
  43. Thirty-Six
  44. Thirty-Seven
  45. Thirty-Eight
  46. Thirty-Nine
  47. Forty
  48. Forty-One
  49. Forty-Two
  50. Forty-Three
  51. Forty-Four
  52. Forty-Five
  53. Forty-Six
  54. Forty-Seven
  55. Forty-Eight
  56. Part VAnnie
  57. Forty-Nine
  58. Fifty
  59. Fifty-One
  60. Fifty-Two
  61. Fifty-Three
  62. Fifty-Four
  63. Fifty-Five
  64. Fifty-Six
  65. Fifty-Seven
  66. Fifty-Eight
  67. Fifty-Nine
  68. Sixty
  69. Sixty-One
  70. Acknowledgments
  71. About the Author
  72. Also by Linwood Barclay
  73. About the Publisher

It would be interesting to see whether Chief Cook could think beyond whatever investigative techniques he’d learned back in his police academy days.

And if he could, if he ended up at Nabler’s door, well, the man did have a decent bone structure.

Forty

Harry was thinking about a cartoon he watched as a kid.

Bugs Bunny has conned gangster Rocky into thinking his moron henchman, Mugsy, has been tormenting him. Mugsy’s tied up in a closet while Bugs cuts a hole in the floor under Rocky’s chair. Rocky plunges into the basement, and when he finds Mugsy, there’s a saw planted into his bound hands, courtesy of Bugs.

And Rocky says, before giving Mugsy a whoopin’: “I don’t know how ya’s done it, but I know ya’s done it!”

Which was exactly how Harry felt about Edwin Nabler. Except where Nabler was concerned, not only did Harry not know how he’d done it, he wasn’t entirely sure what he’d done.

But in each of those households where tragedy had struck recently, there was a train set from Nabler’s store. It was more than that. There were, at least in some of these instances, freakish parallels. While Auden struggled to make his new Santa Fe train run, his father could not start his barbecue. As Delbert Dorfman smoked himself to death, a toy train pumped out smoke only a few feet away. A dog went wild when a whistle button was depressed on a transformer at the Wilford home.

If Harry had felt in over his head over the Tanner murder, he was now at the bottom of the pond with these new developments.

So who was Edwin Nabler?

As a law officer, Harry had access to numerous government databases. If he wanted to know whether someone had a police record, he entered a name and a date of birth and a Social Security number and waited to see what popped up. And if this grand and glorious Internet that everyone was so excited about turned out be everything it was cracked up to be, the day would come when Harry could find out even more personal information on someone.

And in the wake of September 11 and the Patriot Act that President George W. Bush had pushed through Congress, getting details on a suspect faced fewer roadblocks than in the past, especially if you dropped even the slightest hint that said suspect might be involved in a terrorist act.

Harry didn’t have Edwin Nabler’s Social Security number or date of birth, but he did have something to start with. He had wandered the alley that ran behind the Main Street stores. It was there he found a van with choo-choo’s trains printed on the side. He made a note of the letter and numbers on the green Vermont license plate.

A good place to start.