Once You Go This Far

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Once You Go This Far Page 10

by Kristen Lepionka


  Following people is supposed to give a detective answers, not tons more questions.

  Clearly I was doing something wrong.

  * * *

  Since I was this far north anyway, I decided to go back across the border to the casino and then on to Barry Newsome’s house if he wasn’t working. I’d already tangled with one security staffer this afternoon; why not make a whole day of it? He proved to be somewhat more cooperative than I expected, but still not very.

  “Yes, I received your phone messages,” he said once we were sitting in his office. “All of them.”

  “The way it works is, you answer and I stop calling.”

  Barry Newsome gave me a patient, practiced smile. He was well-dressed for ex–law enforcement, a tailored tan suit over a sky-blue shirt and a navy tie. He had brown hair, threaded with silver and receding slightly, and a broad, friendly face. “No need, I guess, because here you are.”

  “I want to talk about Rebecca.”

  He clasped his hands in front of him. He wore a gold wedding band on one hand and a large class ring with a garnet stone on the other. “I don’t know what I can tell you about her.”

  “Do you know that she passed away recently?”

  “Yes.”

  “How’d you hear? I know Maggie didn’t tell you.”

  “No.” His expression remained neutral, but his jaw might’ve tightened a little. “A friend of mine in Toledo heard it on the news and told me.”

  “What’s this friend’s name?”

  “Not important.”

  “Maybe to me it is.”

  He shook his head.

  I said, “Maggie was very surprised to hear that her mother and you were in touch again.”

  “We weren’t, not really.”

  “Was it just a coincidence that she happened to come here?”

  “Lots of people come here.”

  “Did you see her when she did?”

  “We spoke, briefly.”

  “How did that shake out—you just happened to run into her?”

  “No, she told me she was in the Windsor area and we met for coffee.”

  “Why was she in the Windsor area?”

  Another shake of the head. “She didn’t say.” He wasn’t a terrible liar, but he wasn’t a particularly good one either.

  “And you didn’t ask?”

  “We were just catching up. It wasn’t a big deal. We had coffee and spent about fifteen or twenty minutes talking. Then I had to get back to work and that was that.”

  “Did you talk to her after that?”

  “No.”

  “No phone calls or texts or emails?”

  “No.”

  “Messages by carrier pigeon?”

  He smiled indulgently. “Like I said, I don’t have anything useful to tell you. It was several weeks ago and very brief. It was nice to see her after so long, but that was all it was. A quick catch-up between people who used to know each other a lifetime ago.”

  “So she forgave you, for abandoning her and Maggie.”

  “I don’t know about forgave, but she’d moved on. It was a quarter of a century ago and Rebecca wasn’t one to dwell on the past, really.”

  “She just contacted you out of the blue and wanted to have coffee for exactly no reason.”

  Newsome nodded. “Pretty much.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I assure you, I’m not.”

  “Oh, in that case, I’m totally convinced.”

  “I was very sorry to hear that Rebecca passed away, but I don’t have anything to add.”

  “Aren’t you even curious about what happened?”

  “It was a hiking accident, wasn’t it?”

  “And things are never more than they appear, are they?”

  “Sometimes, but not usually. And not this time.”

  * * *

  Aiden wasn’t at Rebecca’s house or at the Victorian on Scottswood Avenue, nobody was home at the Brant-Creedle place, and Keir Metcalf’s office was locked up tight. I got a Cuban sandwich to go from the restaurant a few doors down and returned to the motel to consider what I’d learned today.

  It had felt like a lot in the moment, but when I looked at everything together, it still didn’t make any sense.

  Keir Metcalf didn’t trip my bullshit detector when he said he didn’t know what had happened to his ex. Barry Newsome did but I couldn’t explain why. My client seemed to hate both of them but was of the opinion that only the former was involved here. I didn’t know what to think about Joel Creedle’s visit to the St. Clair Club, a place Rebecca herself had gone at some point, nor about his stepson’s presence in both her house and an empty rental property she owned. And the biggest question of all may have been Constance Archer-Nash, who had been getting harassing calls from Rebecca for some time.

  I thought about Aiden Brant and his strange belief that unplugging a landline was enough to keep the police from tracing a phone call and wished everything were that simple.

  “Why was he worried about that in the first place?” I muttered to the motel room.

  I spent a half hour on the phone with CenturyLink in order to get Rebecca’s phone records for the past month. I had a whole story ready but the customer-service rep just asked me for the last four of Rebecca’s Social, which I had on her death certificate in the paperwork Maggie had given me, so it just became a matter of convincing them to send a copy of her recent calls to my e-fax number.

  When I dialed the first, I realized it was the same sub shop that Aiden had ordered from the other night.

  When I dialed the second number, it didn’t ring, just went into the recorded greeting: “Hello, you’ve reached Rebecca Newsome…”

  I slapped my phone down on the desk, a stab of pain behind my eyes.

  I pushed away from the desk and went over to the window and looked down at the Dumpsters. I couldn’t help Rebecca. But I still had the chance to help her daughter, and I wasn’t going to do that by calling numbers at random.

  I called down to the desk clerk to ask if I could print a document; he said no. I turned to the tiny notepad again and started writing down numbers and key dates, making notes beside them.

  September 30—when Rebecca had left Toledo for Maggie’s house.

  October 3—the date of her fall.

  I crossed out the numbers I could identify—R for Rebecca, S for subs—and then I went back through and tried out the 800 numbers.

  A Visa gift card balance-check hotline, a calling card access number.

  I paused there to turn to my computer. I didn’t know calling cards still existed, but apparently they did—or at least their phone line did. Welcome to Call Link Worldwide, the recording told me. Please enter your PIN.

  According to their website—which bore the look of a site created back in the day when calling cards were common—Call Link Worldwide prided itself on providing unparalleled quality and reliability within the prepaid telecommunications industry. With communication facilities located all around the world, the company is able to provide exceptional long-distance service at a fraction of the cost.

  I drew a question mark beside that number on my notepad.

  That left only local Toledo phone numbers.

  I found the date when I’d gone into Rebecca’s house and hit redial on her phone, adding a star next to the number of Constance Archer-Nash’s cell phone. There were about thirty calls in between the day when Rebecca left to visit Maggie and the day that I first went to her house, and at least half of them had been to the candidate’s phone.

  Aiden was making those calls.

  I grabbed a blank sheet of paper and quickly scribbled out a calendar for September and October and plotted the calls on it accordingly, something needling at me about these dates.

  On October 2, Aiden called Constance.

  On October 3, the day Rebecca fell into the ravine, Arlene saw the police at Rebecca’s house.

  On October 11, Aiden called Constance three t
imes.

  On the twelfth, Arlene saw the police at Rebecca’s house.

  On the twentieth, I apparently called Constance.

  And as with the other calls, the very next day, the police were at Rebecca’s house.

  There hadn’t been police reports or run sheets for these visits—not because they took place off the books, but because they weren’t in response to dispatches. They were probably follow-ups.

  I needed to check for police reports filed by Constance Archer-Nash, and now I had the dates to go on.

  I was expecting a quiet night emailing my new pal at the Toledo Police records department, my last remaining whiskey bottle keeping me company.

  Then my phone rang.

  “Hi, um, Miss—Mrs. Weary, I’m calling from the Commerce Building security.”

  I’d never gotten a call from the security staff at my office building before. In fact, the desk was usually unattended, and I’d always assumed it was for show. “Hi, what’s up?”

  “There’s a—suspicious package—your office—calling the police.”

  I was on my feet without having any recollection of having done so. “What?”

  “There’s smoke and—oh, no—wh—oh, no.”

  “Hello?” I said, my heart in my throat.

  The next thing I heard was a whoosh of ignition and a blast so loud it hurt my eardrums even through the phone.

  “Hello?”

  The line went dead.

  CHAPTER 15

  My thoughts went in a spastic cycle through everyone I knew and whether they’d have any reason to be at my office today. Kez—the most likely. Andrew—maybe, he’d mentioned stopping by to print something. Shelby too. Computer bag slung over my shoulder, I practically tripped down the cement steps of the motel and was in the car and three miles down 75 before I took a second to breathe.

  Phones existed. I didn’t have to drive for two and a half hours assuming the worst.

  I pulled into the parking lot of a rest area.

  Kez didn’t answer.

  Shelby didn’t answer.

  Andrew didn’t answer.

  Tom didn’t answer.

  My chest hurt.

  I dialed the number that had called me, but a recorded message told me the subscriber was not available. No voice mail—a prepaid phone?

  I started on a second round of calls and Kez picked up this time.

  “Are you okay?” I was standing next to the Range Rover, one foot on the running board, a hand gripping the top of the doorframe.

  “What—yeah, fine.”

  I let out a huge breath.

  “How’d you even know something happened?”

  She sounded like herself, impatient and slightly annoyed. Not shaken up. I said, “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. I just heard a big pop-bang and the lights flickered and the fire alarms went off.”

  Now I was confused. “Were you in the lobby?”

  “What?”

  “Where were you?”

  “Are you tripping?”

  I rubbed the center of my forehead. “Were you in the office when it happened, Kez?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you didn’t see it?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I got into the car but left the door open. The adrenaline spike made me feel like throwing up. “I just got a really weird phone call. Someone telling me that there’d been an explosion in the office.”

  “A phone call? From who?”

  “From someone on the security desk.”

  “Bob or Joe?”

  “What? I don’t know. Some guy.”

  “How do you not know?”

  “He didn’t say his name. He just said he was from security and there was a strange package outside my office.”

  “There wasn’t.”

  “But there was an explosion.”

  “I don’t know what it was. I thought a blown fuse or something.”

  What I heard over the phone hadn’t been a blown fuse. “What’s going on now?”

  “I don’t know—I left a couple minutes ago. I didn’t see a point to standing around on the sidewalk when I could go not work somewhere else. But,” she said, an uncharacteristic note of concern in her voice, “I’ll just turn around and go back and see what’s the what.”

  I sat in the car in tense silence for what felt like an hour but was probably a minute or two.

  Then Kez said, “Oh, man. Rox, there’s a coroner’s van here.”

  * * *

  I spent the entire drive from Toledo obsessing over every last detail about it. The voice—did it sound familiar? Did he actually say my name, or could it have been a wrong number? As a result, I could no longer remember the phone call at all, only my attempts to recall it.

  The coroner’s van was gone by the time I got to the Commerce Building, but there were still a number of cops hanging around. The counterterrorism unit owned the scene but Tom was waiting for me at the intersection of Third and Gay as I parallel-parked badly, too shaky to have good command of the wheel.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing right now.”

  Tom came over to the curb and touched my arm through the open window. “This is fine. Don’t even worry about it. Hey—look at me.”

  I looked.

  It was raining softly, and his overcoat was spattered with droplets of water. His day was probably going on twelve hours at this point. But his warm brown eyes locked on mine and some of the nauseous tension I’d been driving with for the past hundred-plus miles faded away.

  I put the car in park. The street would just have to deal with my bumper hanging out into traffic. “Thanks for meeting me here.”

  “You don’t have to thank me.”

  As I got out of the car, he waved at someone standing under the narrow awning of the building, a woman with short grey hair and glasses in a CPD windbreaker. Tom touched the place between my shoulder blades and led me over to her. “Mari, this is Roxane Weary. I’m sure you remember Frank—this is his daughter. Roxane, Mariella Zervos, Counterterrorism.”

  I shook the woman’s hand, feeling strangely detached from my own body.

  Zervos said, “I always liked your dad, honey.”

  I nodded. That wasn’t helping the disorientation.

  We went into the building and sat in the big conference room, just Zervos and me. She said, “So tell me about the phone call.”

  I showed Zervos the number on my phone.

  The call had lasted all of seventeen seconds.

  “And you don’t know this number?”

  I shook my head. “I called it back but it just had a recording, no voice mail.”

  “The wireless subscriber you have dialed not in service, yadda yadda?”

  “Yeah.”

  “May I?” She pointed at my phone, and I nodded. As she wrote down the number, she hit the call button and we heard the same tinny recorded message. “Could be some prepaid SIM kit.”

  “Who was the—who?” I said.

  “Do you know a lot of the other tenants—er, is tenants the right word?”

  “Sure.”

  “Is that a yes to knowing the others who rent in here?”

  “No, it was a yes to your word choice. No, I don’t really know the other businesses. Maybe just to say hello in the elevator.”

  “How long have you had office space in here?”

  “Almost six months.” I felt judged, though it might have been by myself. “I’m still getting the hang of it, having an office. I don’t come in every day.”

  “Every week?”

  “Not every week.”

  Zervos wrote something down.

  I said, “You’re not going to tell me who died. Are you?”

  “If you don’t know anyone anyway, does it matter?” But then her features relaxed. “I’m sure the name has already been on the news. Benjamin Gaskell, substance use addiction counselor on the first floor.”

  I didn’t know him,
had never even seen his name, but some of the ragged-edged panic I’d felt in the car earlier rushed to the surface. I kept picturing Elise, again. I could still feel that cold water rushing around my collarbones if I thought hard enough about it, or even if I didn’t.

  I shivered.

  Zervos asked me what I’d been working on in Toledo, and I summarized the Rebecca Newsome case. Zervos didn’t appear impressed. “So you didn’t really make enough progress to make any enemies, it sounds like.”

  I nodded.

  “What about here. Enemies here?”

  “Enemies? Does anyone ever say yes to that question?”

  “Okay, not enemies. People who dislike you in a vague but meaningful way?”

  “I’m sure. But I haven’t had any dustups with anybody recently.”

  “Heitker mentioned Vincent Pomp.”

  “Well, there’s him.” I put my hands in the pockets of my coat. “But that was back in January. We haven’t crossed paths since then.”

  The detective jotted something down in her notebook, then flipped it closed, signaling the end of the conversation. “We’ll probably need to chat again at some point, okay?”

  * * *

  Tom’s place was off of Kenny in the liminal space between the nice houses of Upper Arlington and the endless plazas of Bethel Road. The complex was called The Homes at Cliffton Heights as if it were a row of mansions overlooking a grand vista rather than a dozen or so semidetached condos, but inside, I liked it. He had replaced some unfortunate brown carpet at some point with laminate flooring and redone the kitchen to include a tile backsplash and a bar-height peninsula with a smooth granite countertop, on which I now rested my forehead in an attempt to soothe the pounding behind my eyes.

  “What can I make for you?” Tom said from the other side of the counter.

  “Just a drink, please.”

  “You should eat something.”

  “I don’t know if I can.”

 

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