by Lauren Carr
“Chris,” Ripley said, “I’ve identified her. You don’t have—”
“Sorry, Vaccaro, but I allowed someone else to identify her last time.”
The sheriff nodded his head to instruct the technicians to unzip the bag.
Standing up straight, Chris braced himself. As the morgue attendant parted the opening of the body bag to reveal her face, a breath involuntarily escaped his lips.
Her face was blue. A bluish green slime covered one side of her face and her hair—much shorter than she usually wore it. The tilt of her nose was identical to Katelyn’s. Her features were small and delicate, much like she was.
In an instant, the day they had met replayed in Chris’s mind. He had to stop by the state department to question Blair’s boss about a missing person’s case. The suspect refused to speak to him, so Chris waited in the reception area to intercept him when he left. Chris cooled his heels for four hours—during which he turned on his charm with the attractive blonde working in a cubicle nearby. By the time he’d left, not only did he have a confession of an affair with the missing person, but he had a date for that Saturday night.
Two weeks later, Blair moved into his condo and four months after that, she proposed that they get married. Six months after that, they were married in a huge wedding. One year after they were married, Katelyn was born.
Ten years later, Blair was moving to Switzerland.
I wish we had more time, she had said while boarding the train.
So do I. Where did we go wrong?
Conscious of many eyes watching him, Chris swallowed and blinked away the tears fighting to come to his eyes. He was aware of Elliott firmly clasping his shoulder.
“Mr. Matheson, is this your wife?” the sheriff’s voice sounded like it was coming to him from the end of a tunnel.
Chris reached out to touch her cheek only to have Ripley pull his hand back. “If you’ve had no contact with her, then don’t risk accidental transfer.”
“You’re right.” Chris nodded to the sheriff. “Yes. That’s Blair.” He tugged at the zipper to note that she was dressed in a plaid outer garment. “She’s wearing the same jacket she had on when I saw her at the metro.”
The sheriff gestured for them to zip up the bag and take her away. “The passport we found in her bag said her name was Charlotte Nesbitt from Australia.”
“That’s part of our investigation.” Murphy locked his eyes on Ripley’s. He tossed his head toward her cruiser.
Catching onto Murphy’s direction to take control of the case, Ripley said, “The FBI will be needing the victim’s passport and any evidence you’ve collected.”
“You’re claiming jurisdiction on this case?” the sheriff said. “A murder investigation where the victim is your ex-partner’s wife—her body dumped in his own backyard—”
“Former backyard,” Ripley said. “He’d moved away over a year ago.”
“Almost a year and a half,” Chris said.
“How do I know you’re not claiming jurisdiction on this case to cover up his involvement?” the sheriff said.
“Simple.” Murphy asked the medical examiner, “Do you have an approximate TOD?” He took his cell phone from his jacket pocket.
“Based on body temperature, I’d say between midnight and one o’clock,” the medical examiner said. “She was definitely dumped before four or five this morning.”
“Why do you say before four and five?” Francine asked.
The medical examiner gestured at the grass leading down the steep hill. “She had grass and mud on her clothes. You can see the flattened ground where she was rolled down the hill and went over the drop off. The first officers on the scene took pictures when they arrived. The crushed grass was still covered with frost. If she had been dumped after the frost formed, then it would have come off when her body rolled over it.”
“That takes the victim’s husband off the suspect list,” Murphy told the sheriff while tapping out a text. “We were together the entire night.”
The sheriff looked the two men up and down.
Keeping one eye on his phone, Murphy muttered, “That didn’t come out sounding anything like it did in my head.”
“Matheson was helping Lieutenant Thornton on a very important case involving national security,” Ripley said.
The sheriff peered at Chris. “If you didn’t kill her, or maybe had her killed, why would they dump her body off in what used to be your backyard? Maybe to remove you from suspicion by making it look like whoever did it was trying to frame you. Meanwhile, to firm it up, you were setting up an airtight alibi.”
Ripley and Murphy exchanged quick glances. Murphy pressed a button on his phone.
The sheriff hitched up his pants. “Sorry, Vaccaro. A dead woman dumped in the backyard of what used to be her home. Her husband and her living in different countries and a phony name on her passport. Something smells funny.”
The phone on his hip buzzed.
“I just don’t feel right handing this off to the feds.” He jabbed a finger in Chris’s direction while snatching the phone off his hip. “Especially when my prime suspect is a former fed.” He looked Chris up and down while putting the phone to his ear. “Kind of young to be retired. Willing to bet you retired under some sort of dark cloud.”
He snapped into the phone. “Hell-o!” He frowned. “Yeah, this is Sheriff Turley. Who’s this?”
Chris noticed the corners of Ripley’s mouth curl upward. Murphy slipped his cell phone back into his pocket.
The color drained from the sheriff’s face while he listened to the caller in silence. His eyeballs darted across the street to search the windows and trees as if he were looking for someone. When he finally spoke, it was with a stutter. “Ca-case is yours, Vaccaro.” He gestured to the medical examiner and county investigators. “Feds are taking this case. Everything goes to the FBI lab. It’s a matter of national security.”
Ripley saluted him. “Thank you for being so understanding, Sheriff.”
As the sheriff hurried away to his cruiser, Chris asked Ripley, “What just happened here?”
“We got the case.”
“To what end?” Chris asked as they huddled together.
“Matheson, Sheriff Turley had you and only you on his radar. He wasn’t going to look anywhere else,” Ripley said.
“Ripley wasn’t lying when she said this was a matter of national security,” Murphy said. “There have been developments in the case. Bruce and Jacqui read the letter Blair had sent to Senator Keaton. She had evidence that Daniel Cross was a traitor. That evidence was what she intended to turn over to the investigator.”
“Daniel Cross has a ton of political support wanting his nomination as director of the Central Intelligence Agency to be confirmed,” Francine said. “Believe me. In today’s climate, just calling him a traitor or even having a witness saying it, won’t be enough. We need real evidence to prove it.”
“Even that won’t be enough the way the media can spin stuff,” Elliott said.
“The confirmation hearings start on Monday,” Francine said. “That gives us two days to find out what Blair had on Cross.”
“If Blair was meeting the investigator to pass on the evidence she had, then she had to have it on her when she died since the meeting never took place.” Chris went to the crime scene investigator’s vehicle and tapped on the window to stop the driver, who was about to leave. “We need to look in the victim’s purse.”
“Unless whoever killed her took it,” Murphy said.
“Must be something big if they were willing to kill for it,” Elliott said.
“You betcha,” Francine said. “Nowadays, they could have just let the evidence come to light and then spin it to make him into a hero and half the country would have bought it.”
The investigator handed the oversized brown leather sh
oulder purse, encased in a sealed plastic bag, to Ripley. They followed the agent to her cruiser where she placed it on top of the hood to sign the log taped to the front of it. Murphy handed her a pen knife for her to cut through the seal.
Chris reached into the back of her SUV to extract several pairs of evidence gloves and handed them out. Ripley gave the bag to him.
“Prepare yourselves.” Chris squeezed the purse in his hands. Filthy cold lake water gushed from the side pocket to fill the bottom of the plastic bag. “Blair basically lived out of her handbag.”
They gathered around.
“It’s so slimy,” Francine noted the greenish brown goo that coated the bag and its contents.
“It’s the goose poop,” Chris said. “The wildlife refuge is right next to us. We ended up with as many geese here as over there. Of course, they do their thing in our back yard. It makes for a nice slimy gunk at the lake bottom. That’s why we’d never let the girls go swimming.”
Careful to not disturb any possible evidence, Chris reached inside and extracted the first item—her wallet.
Francine examined its contents. “Most likely, she’d have it on a thumb drive or micro disc.”
Chris took out a keychain, which held only three keys. One was for a domestic vehicle. Two appeared to be for doors. “No safety deposit box key.”
“If she had the evidence in a safety deposit box then she’d make sure the key was someplace safe.” Francine finished her search of the wallet. “I’ve got nothing here.”
Chris was still digging items from the bag onto the hood for them to search. Small cosmetics bag. Hair brush. A pack of drenched tissues. Eyeglass case with reading glasses. Dead cell phone.
“Wait a minute,” Chris said upon seeing the phone emerge from the bag. “Didn’t they find a phone at the bottom of the lake?”
“It went to the lab with the rest of the evidence,” Ripley said.
Chris studied the phone in his hand. Wet, it wouldn’t turn on. He was more interested in the brand, model, and age of the phone. It was the same phone Blair had taken with her when she had gone to Switzerland. “Was the other one a burner?”
“I’ll have to check with forensics.”
“She called the investigator from a burner,” Murphy said.
“This is her real phone,” Chris said. “I swear this is the phone she took with her to Switzerland. That means she’s kept it this whole time. She could have the evidence on this phone.”
“Otherwise, why keep it?” Ripley got an evidence bag from the rear of her vehicle to place the phone into.
“But if the evidence is on the phone, how would she give it to the investigator?” Francine asked.
“Hand it to him,” Murphy said. “She couldn’t have been using it. If she had, it would have shown up on Chris’s phone bill.”
“I assumed the phone had been lost in the terrorist attack. She never went anywhere without it.” Chris slipped it into the evidence bag that Ripley held out to him.
“We’ll see if we can get anything useful off of this.” Ripley sealed the bag and labeled it.
Their search continued.
Notepad. Several pens. Box of baby wipes. Candy in discolored wrappers. Travel box of tampons. Lip balm. Hand lotion. Metro fare card. Fast food napkins. Store receipts. Bank receipts. Notes—most of which were illegible from being in the water for hours.
The oversized bag seemed like a bottomless pit. They searched each item over and over again. Then, with a sigh, they gave up.
“If her proof is not on the phone, then they got it,” Chris said in the end. “She would not have gone to the meeting without it. They got whatever it was she had, and they killed her.”
“Let’s pray it’s on the phone,” Murphy said, “because if Daniel Cross is a traitor, then he needs to be brought down. Cross has worked his way up through the CIA for over twenty years. He’s come into a hell of a lot of very sensitive intelligence that our enemies would have given anything for.”
“Passing on information to whom?” Ripley asked.
“The guy Francine saw Cross give a mug to this morning returned to the café to pick up another package,” Murphy said. “Tristan attach a GPS tracker to the mug. It ended up at Slade Industries.”
“That’s an American company,” Elliott said with a puzzled expression.
“An American company that’s a worldwide conglomerate,” Francine said. “Before I retired, I did an expose on Slade Industries. They operate in the global market like no one else with shadow companies and overseas accounts. Leban Slade has his fingers in every pie all around the globe. He’s made heavy investments into foreign companies that sell weapons to our enemies. To put it bluntly, it’s no accident that weapons manufactured by Slade Industries have landed in the hands of Iran and North Korea.”
Murphy rubbed his chin. “Would a worldwide player like that be able to employ a team of international muscle?”
“Or death squad?” Chris asked.
“He keeps them on retainer,” Francine said.
Chapter Thirteen
Helen Clarke’s stomach flip-flopped while her sixteen-year-old daughter Sierra rode over the hill and out of sight with Nikki and Emma, Chris’s two youngest daughters.
A horse enthusiast, ten-year-old Nikki had no problem stepping in to take her father’s place for Sierra’s weekly riding lesson. Sierra would have been heart-broken if Helen had cancelled the lesson, which she was tempted to do. While not likely, she feared that whoever was after Blair would track down Chris’s family at his farm.
That’s why Helen made sure she had both her service and back-up weapon on hand. She knew Doris would also be heavily armed under her coat, as if her entourage, Sadie and Mocha, weren’t enough.
The same fears crossing her mind, Doris sent the two dogs out on the trail ride with the girls. Preferring to keep the events of the last twenty-four hours under wraps, Doris claimed the dogs needed exercise.
“They’re going to be fine.” Clad in a black leather coat with matching boots and gloves, Doris slipped her arm across Helen’s shoulder and gave her a hug as the riders and dogs galloped out of sight.
“If we say it enough, we’ll believe it.” Helen shivered in her worn winter coat. Her date weekend being a bust, she had dressed down in jeans and a comfy oversized sweater.
They went across the barnyard to the warm house.
“You should be with Chris,” Doris said. “He needs you. I imagine it doesn’t get any easier losing your spouse to a violent death the second time around.”
“I don’t want to look like I’m swooping in,” Helen said. “It was only a few hours ago that I backed off because he ended up being married. Now Blair’s dead again, and I immediately swoop in to comfort him? It’ll look like I’m an opportunist.”
Doris climbed onto the porch and opened the door leading into the mudroom. “It’ll look like you’re being there for him.”
In the mudroom, they took off their coats and hung them up before going into the country kitchen.
“Chris doesn’t talk that much about Blair. What was she like?”
“I try not to speak ill of the dead,” Doris said.
“Blair didn’t run off with another man,” Helen said. “That Australian ended up being an intelligence agent trying to help her and the operative get back to the US.”
In the kitchen, Doris pressed the button to brew the coffee that she had set up earlier. “I know I’m old fashioned, and I can be opinionated, but I feel it was so wrong for her to abandon her family the way she did. For what? Her career?” She put cream and extra sugar into a coffee mug. “It was Blair who wanted to get married, buy a house, and start a family. Chris gave her everything she wanted, but in the end, it wasn’t good enough.”
“Society keeps telling us that we’re a traitor to fellow women if we don’t do it all,
” Helen said with a grin.
“She had a career when she’d met Chris. Such that it was. She started out as a clerk and worked up to a communications officer—not making a lot of money. She was always at the bottom of the totem pole and miserable about it. So she decided to concentrate on being a wife and mother, but worked part time to get out of the house. Then—after having three lovely daughters—she changed her mind and decided to focus on her career,” Doris declared with a wave of her hands.
The coffee brewed, she filled their mugs.
“Not everyone has it figured out early on about what they want to be when they grow up,” Helen said. “For some of us, it’s a journey.”
With a frown, Doris went to the kitchen table. “Someone pointed out to me just this morning that Blair started out her marriage behind the eight ball because she wasn’t you.”
Helen sat across from her. “Was that Chris?”
“Elliott.” Doris took a cautious sip of the hot coffee. “He was right. Maybe I didn’t do it consciously, but I always compared her to you and she always came up short.” She slumped. “She had to have sensed that.”
“I’m sure you aren’t the reason that she took off,” Helen said.
“She broke my baby’s heart.” Doris picked up Thor, placed her into her lap, and petted her. “Don’t tell me that if some man broke Sierra’s heart that you wouldn’t have hard feelings toward him.”
“I broke Chris’s heart,” Helen said in a matter-of-fact tone.
It was a painful reminder.
Helen and Chris had been high school sweethearts. Theirs had been a passionate relationship. Both families had been certain the young lovers would marry. After graduating, Chris went off to boot camp and Helen went to West Virginia University. Weeks later, he received a Dear John letter from her. Only recently had she revealed to him the reason for the break up.
“Why don’t you have hard feelings for me?” Helen asked.
“Maybe because you were like the daughter I never had before you broke Chris’s heart.”