I patted him on the head, and then headed inside. Rhett followed me up the front steps and down the hall. He scampered into the mudroom for a drink of water while I stopped in the kitchen. After disposing of my glove, I scrubbed my hands with hot soapy water and slathered on a thick layer of hand sanitizer. While the oven preheated, I ran back out to the car and retrieved Mamma’s beef stroganoff from the cooler I kept in the back seat. Once it was in the oven, I grabbed a Cheerwine from the refrigerator, poured it over a glass of ice, and added a straw. Then I headed down the hall to my office.
Nate and I operated our agency out of our home. We’d thought about getting office space, mostly for security reasons, but more often than not we met clients in their homes or at Fraser’s office. Most of them came from Charleston, Mount Pleasant, Johns Island, and the surrounding area. It wasn’t particularly convenient for our clients to take the ferry to Stella Maris.
The sunny room off the foyer made the perfect center of operations for Talbot and Andrews Investigations. Once Gram’s oversized living room, it accommodated three separate zones: my office area, consisting of a desk, chair, and two visitors’ chairs; a reading nook with two comfy leather club chairs in front of the fireplace; and a conversation space in front of the wall of windows looking out over the front porch.
Only recently had I given in and parted with Gram’s massive green velvet sofa and tropical print wingbacks. She’d had those pieces for years, and though they held sentimental value, they’d gotten lumpy and the springs poked us in places. The week before, Ethan Allen delivered a deep, sand-colored sectional and four swivel club chairs. We’d floated the sofa in the front corner, with twin sofa tables behind each section, leaving an L-shaped walkway behind. This positioned the sofa diagonally across from the corner of the room where we kept our case boards. One club chair sat to the right, with the other three pushed back along the window where they could easily be pulled in to form a square. In front of the sofa, we placed a large, square leather ottoman. Soft turquoise and cream pillows and throws made the area cozy. Nate and I worked together in this room most of the time, though he had an office upstairs.
I settled in at my desk, turned on my laptop, and created an electronic case file for Darius Baker. The first thing I did was type up my notes from our chat earlier that afternoon. Because I hadn’t known I’d walk out with a client, I hadn’t recorded our conversation. I typed everything into our agency’s clone of an FBI FD 302, printed it, dated and signed, creating a hard copy file to back up my electronic one. It was important to document every interview, all surveillance, and every piece of evidence. Everything in our case files while working for a defense attorney was work product, and as such, was privileged. But if either of us were called to testify, we’d be subject to cross-examination. Our records had to be unassailable. We dotted our i’s and crossed our t’s.
While it was fresh in my memory, I documented my conversation with Georgia as well. I uploaded the Voice Memo from my phone and attached the recording to the electronic file.
Next I started my list of questions. So far, I was most curious about two things. What on earth was going on with Sonny and his partner? It was unprecedented for Sonny to support my involvement in one of his investigations. Typically, when we worked the same cases, I went to him and pried the few morsels of information I could from him. Stranger still was that he abetted my involvement knowing he’d be making an arrest. I’d gleaned from Moon Unit that her impression was Sonny and Detective Jenkins were being pressured. Were they? By whom? It was clear to me that Sonny was not in favor of arresting Darius, and yet he’d done exactly that. Where did Jeremy Jenkins stand?
The second thing that mystified me was how Darius and Trina Lynn had kept a high school marriage secret, let alone a child. Secrets are a hard thing to keep in a small town. Within the palm tree and live oak-lined streets of Stella Maris, everybody loved secrets so much that their first inclination was to share them over iced tea on the front porch, making it next to impossible to hide anything. Darius being an international celebrity and Trina Lynn a local one made it doubly strange.
Regardless of who paid for my time, I always viewed the victim as my ultimate client. Trina Lynn Causby was the first piece of my puzzle. I googled Trina Lynn and clicked on images. There was no shortage of photos online of the intrepid reporter. Petite, with blonde shoulder-length layered hair, she appeared in everything from business suits to jeans to formal gowns to bikinis. In many of the pictures, she was serious, her hazel eyes intense as she covered violent crimes or corruption. In other photos, she was smiling, laughing, dancing with Auggie at a wedding, serving Thanksgiving dinner in a homeless shelter, reading to children at story time in the library. I chose the one of her in a hardhat with a hammer and an apron for nails, standing on a roof with a pile of shingles, grinning from ear to ear. This was how I would think of her. This was the light in the world that had been snuffed out. I printed the photo and attached it to the top of the case board with a magnet.
I pulled information from various public and subscription databases to create an electronic profile. Because I knew the family, and because Trina Lynn had lived most of her life in Charleston County, much of her history was an open book to me. She was born March 3, 1976, at Medical University Hospital—what MUSC Medical Center was called at the time—the second child of Billy Ray and Georgia Morgan Causby.
I hadn’t known her, but I knew of her. In high school, she was a peppy blonde cheerleader, an all-American girl-next-door type. I’d lost track of her after she graduated until she showed up on camera at WCSC. Her online bio stated that she’d attended Trident Tech and then later College of Charleston, majoring in communications. She had a reputation for relentlessly pursuing stories where folks were somehow being taken advantage of. A part of me hated digging into her personal life, but it had to be done if I were to help bring her killer to justice. Motives for murder were most often personal.
Trina Lynn had no criminal record and no civil judgements. According to the Charleston County real property database, she owned a condo in Mt. Pleasant. A mortgage was recorded, but there were no liens. She appeared to pay her bills on time.
It wasn’t hard to find her marriage license to Darius Baker. Anyone who’d cared to look could’ve found it. They were married right here in Charleston County, on Valentine’s Day in 1994. That would’ve been their senior year in high school. I checked Darius’s birthdate. They were both seventeen when they married, summer babies who wouldn’t turn eighteen until after they’d graduated. I mulled that. Had Trina Lynn been pregnant when they got married? Darius had said he didn’t know about the child until recently, so why had they married in February?
Darius might be right about it not being legal. In South Carolina, you could get married at sixteen, younger if a pregnancy was involved, but you had to have an affidavit of parental consent. Absent that, you had to be eighteen to legally marry.
Maybe Darius could’ve talked his mother into signing such a document. But based on my conversation with Georgia, there was no way she or Billy Ray had done that. They wanted Trina Lynn to get her education. They weren’t enthusiastic about Trina dating Darius, much less marrying him. Then again, if she’d been pregnant at the time, that would’ve changed the calculus. But Georgia was believable when she said Trina had never been married.
In any case, no parental affidavits were attached to the marriage license in any of the electronic records. I made myself a note to follow up with Darius, and make a trip downtown to the probate court if necessary.
I searched my subscription databases for a birth certificate for a child born between 1994 and 1995 with Trina and Darius as parents, but wasn’t surprised to find nothing. In cases of adoption, generally, the birth parents’ names were replaced on the birth certificate with the adoptive parents’, and the original birth record was sealed. I made note of the year’s gap between Trina’s high school graduation and when sh
e started classes at Trident Tech. How and when had Darius found out he had a son?
Darius was the next piece of my puzzle. I started an electronic profile on my client, querying the same sources I had for Trina Lynn. I took only a cursory look at his website, which appeared to have been put together by a high-dollar PR firm. It had everything from his official bio to information on his foundation, which generously supported children’s educational and welfare programs.
I could have spent days combing through Google hits on Darius. There was so much information available on him it was overwhelming. Some of it was no doubt true, but he also had as many articles in the tabloids as Jennifer Aniston. I assumed the story about alien abduction while filming an episode in Nebraska was false. If the case drug on, I’d come back to the mountain of nonsense on the internet.
Born on June 14, 1976, to Marcus Clive Baker and Jasmine Shaniqua King, also at Medical University Hospital, Darius DeAndre Baker had a rough start in life. His father was eighteen and had recently graduated high school. He left town shortly after Darius was born. I hadn’t heard anyone mention him in years.
Jasmine, Darius’s mother, was only a junior when she had to drop out of school. She’d worked as a waitress at the diner but wasn’t able to support herself and Darius. They’d both lived with Nell and Bill Cooper off and on. Jasmine left town around the same time Darius left for Hollywood. None of this was news, but I had to document it, some of it from memory.
However humble his beginnings, Darius had recently retired from a lucrative television career at the ripe old age of thirty-nine. He had no criminal record, and no civil actions. The latter surprised me a bit. Public figures were often subjected to frivolous lawsuits. He’d paid cash for the Devlin house and owned it through the Baker Family Trust. Interesting. The other beneficiaries of the Baker Family Trust were Nell, Bill, and Clay Cooper. Did they know that?
The software I used to build my profiles automatically searched for information on relatives whose names I entered. By the time I’d finished with Darius’s basic information, I could see that Marcus Baker was living in Boca Raton. He’d moved there in 2012, owned a house he paid half a million in cash for, and had no debts. The last employment history he had was in 2012 at a Walmart in Jackson, Mississippi. Either he’d won the lottery, or Darius had tracked him down and set him up.
Jasmine King had similarly retired from a career as a hairdresser in 2012 and paid cash for a $2.5 million home in Laguna Beach, California. Darius appeared to be taking good care of both his parents, but I would verify that with him.
Darius’s ex-wives were spread across the country: one in Los Angeles, one in New York, and one in Chicago. Was it possible one or more of them still carried a torch for him? Had they seen Trina Lynn as competition, if not for Darius’s attention, then maybe for his money? It seemed a stretch, but in the interest of being thorough, I would need to verify if any of them had been in town Sunday evening.
Hell’s bells. By all indications, Darius had been truthful when he said they all lived well. None of them had remarried. Any of them could have hired someone to kill Trina. I saved profiles for Arianna English (#1, Los Angeles), Vivianne Whitley (#2, Chicago), and Lily McAdams, (#3, New York). Darius and Lily had only been divorced for a little more than a year.
The sound of tires on oyster shells and gravel announced that Nate was home. Rhett barked once from the kitchen. By the time I made it to the front door, Rhett had raced through the doggy door in the mudroom, down the steps, through the garage, and out the doggy door on the pass-thru garage door. He waited by Nate’s brown Explorer.
Nate opened the car door and climbed out. “Well, would you look at this reception.” He patted Rhett, then his gaze drifted up the steps to where I stood. “I’m a lucky man.”
I watched as he crossed the driveway towards the steps. A single golden curl lay across his forehead. In khakis, a white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and loafers with no socks, he was impossibly handsome.
A slow smile slid up his tanned face. “How was your day, Slugger?”
As always, my husband’s velvety drawl was my undoing. “I missed you.”
He pulled me into his arms. “I missed you too.” He kissed me slowly to make his point.
I smiled up at him. “My, what a pleasant distraction you are.”
“Happy to oblige. Was there something in particular you needed distracting from?”
I sighed. “We have a new case.”
“And here I was hoping to celebrate putting Lucas to bed and spend some quality time rubbing sunscreen on you.”
“All done?”
“I’s dotted and t’s crossed. Fraser’s case is solid as a rock.”
I turned and pulled Nate towards the door. “He’ll be happy to hear that. We have a meeting with him first thing in the morning.”
“I’ve already given him my report. There’s no need to drive into Charleston.”
“About the new case.”
“And he called you? That’s progress, I suppose.”
“I called him.”
Nate pushed the door closed behind us, looked at me quizzically, then lifted his nose. “What is that heavenly smell?”
“Mamma’s beef stroganoff.”
“You go by your parents’ house again today?”
“I did. Long story. I’ll tell you over dinner. Would you open a bottle of wine?” We headed towards the kitchen.
“Certainly. You want to eat outside this evening? It’s still hot, but there’s a nice breeze.”
“Sounds nice.”
Nate opened a bottle of Ropiteau French pinot noir and poured two glasses. I tossed together a couple of salads and brought him up to speed on our new client while he gathered placemats, napkins, and cutlery. It took us two trips to get everything outside to the round teak table on the deck. I drew a deep lungful of salt air. Across the row of sentinel dunes, waves danced towards the shore, the remnants of the day’s sunlight glinting off the tops.
“Dinner music.” I smiled.
“None finer.” Nate lifted his glass.
We toasted the evening and dug in.
“You know I didn’t marry you for your mamma’s cooking,” Nate said after his first bite. “But I have to say, it is a delicious fringe benefit. Not that you’re not a fine cook in your own right.”
“She’s worried I don’t feed you right.”
“I’d weigh three hundred pounds if we ate like this every night.” He sipped his wine. “So you think someone pressured Sonny and his new partner to arrest Darius?”
“That’s all I can figure,” I said. “The question is who and why. Clearly he thinks there’s more to be investigated.”
“It’d sure be nice to know what they have tying Darius to the crime.”
“I hope Fraser will be able to find that out sooner rather than later. Eventually they’ll have to tell him—discovery and all that, of course. But I’d rather know what we’re up against now.”
“Smart of you to get Fraser involved. I know he can be a pain in the ass, but….”
“I’d want him on my case if I were arrested.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
We turned the conversation to lighter matters while we finished supper, then straightened the kitchen, and took the rest of our wine into the living room. We settled into the center corner of the sofa and propped our feet up.
“Let’s wait to start a case board,” I said.
“Sounds reasonable,” said Nate. “How’s your daddy?”
“He’s feeling good enough to get into trouble.”
“That sounds promising. Let me guess. Another emergency computer virus?”
“Not this time,” I said. “He wanted me to see about Sara Catherine while I was at the Causbys.” I told Nate about our pantry meeting.
A troub
led look crept into Nate’s eyes.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
He studied the rim of his glass, traced it with a finger. “How’d you feel about that?”
“I don’t know…I’m curious too, I guess. She’s family. He means well.”
“I’m sure he does. It’s just…I’m not sure it’s a good idea for you to get between your parents and the Causbys regarding your cousin’s child.”
“I was just going to check on her. I wasn’t going to abscond with her.” I couldn’t see the problem.
Nate winced. “I can’t help but worry that seeing her might stir up things best left alone.”
“You mean things related to Marci or things related to children?”
“Children. I’m fairly confident your cousin poses no further threat to your well-being.”
I sighed. “Sweetheart, I can’t go the rest of my life avoiding children. Merry and Joe may well adopt after they get back from their wedding trip. Who knows with Blake? If Mamma has her way, he’ll marry Poppy or any available female soon and commence giving her grandchildren as well.” Severe cases of endometriosis had led to both Merry and me having hysterectomies.
“You’re sure you don’t want to think about adopting?”
I took a long sip of my wine. “Are you saying you do?”
“I’m saying I’m open to it if that’s what you want. I’m also fine if you don’t. You know my family relationships aren’t what yours are. We’re not close. I think that maybe changes how I feel about having children. It’s not that I don’t want them. But I also like our lives the way they are now. I just don’t want you to miss out if a family of our own is important to you.”
“Our lives are full. I’ve given it a lot of thought. Merry and Blake will get us some nieces and nephews to dote on. I don’t fret about not having children. Not often, anyway. The thing is, and I know this will sound silly, but I feel like what we do…it’s important. I guess I’d say I feel called to do it. Fight for justice and all that. If we were to have children—adopt them, I mean, of course—it would change everything. We take chances I wouldn’t take if we had children. And who would we get to babysit while we’re on stakeout?”
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