I let my thoughts wander back to Ella Jane as Kyle steered the car into the restaurant parking lot. She must be terrified, feeling so bad and being alone. When my eyes pricked again I let it go.
It wasn’t until I’d inhaled a burger and a large order of tater tots and stolen three onion rings from Kyle that it hit me.
I dropped the napkin I’d been wiping my hands on into the empty brown paper sack and dove for a pen and pad.
“What?” Kyle sat up straight, putting his half-eaten burger on the dash.
“Celia. She was supposed to have just broken up with Burke. And now Ella Jane is pregnant and Burke is dead,” I jabbered as I scribbled it down.
“And Celia is skulking around talking about making people sick and looking like hell.” Kyle stuffed the burger back into its wrapper and dug his phone out of his pocket. “Holy shit.”
“Take the sheriff for a beer and see how much he knows about her.”
Looking up from his screen, he started the car and threw it in reverse. “On it. And you?”
I nodded to the folder.
“I’m going to poke around this gambling thing.”
27.
Digging up bones
I dropped Kyle in front of his building and he offered a reassuring smile as he shut the door and leaned in the open window. “We’ll get there. I’ll call you in a little while.”
“Good luck,” I said. “And thanks again.”
“You behave yourself, and for the love of God, be careful.”
“I won’t do anything that would put me in danger.” I smiled. “Trust me.”
His ice blue eyes rolled back. “No comment.”
I laughed and waved as he turned for the front of the building.
Snatching my phone out of my bag, I dialed Joey’s number.
Before he could get the “hey” all the way out of his mouth, I started talking.
“You said you couldn’t go to Calais when we talked on Saturday,” I blurted. “But I saw your car there this morning. Are you still there? Please tell me you don’t have anything to do with Burke.”
I gripped the steering wheel tighter as I turned on Grace Street, a heaviness in my chest as I waited for the answer. But I had asked. Not long ago, I would’ve been too afraid of the answer to force the question out.
“Of course I don’t. I meant it when I told you I didn’t know the guy,” he said. “What I do know is it doesn’t seem to matter what’s a good idea and what’s a bad one where you’re concerned.”
I let the subtext go for the moment, blowing out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. Of course he didn’t. Because he was really telling me the truth—the whole truth, this time.
“I did some digging on Jolene Sammons,” I said. “Old news articles were all I could find, but it’s a start.”
“Let me guess: Her death was wrapped up really quickly.”
“I haven’t been able to get hold of the coroner’s report, but the paper said the sheriff closed the case in ten days. Though Sammons has some new partners at the top of my suspect list.”
Deep breath in.
Heavy sigh out.
“One of those wouldn’t be a guy named Phil Jinkerson, would it?”
I parked the car in the Telegraph garage and shut off the engine, letting my head fall back.
“It would indeed. Why do you know that?”
I could almost see his long fingers touch his temple, his tell for frustration or indecision. “He owes some dangerous people a whole lot of money, Nichelle. I started asking about Sammons the other day, and I came across someone who knew this Jinkerson guy because Dale introduced them. He was heavy into sports betting, and lousy at picking winners. Two days was as long as I could stand not stepping between you and this kind of trouble. I drove down this morning to make sure Sammons knows I wouldn’t be happy if you got hurt trying to chase down whatever’s going on out there. And to sit down with this Jinkerson myself. I’m pretty good at reading people.”
He was trying to protect me. Better still: He was talking to me. Honestly. Not hinting and issuing vague ominous warnings. A smile played around my lips despite the spiraling insanity of this story.
“You didn’t find him, did you?”
“I’m sorry to say I did not. Dale hasn’t seen him since Saturday.”
My fingers curled tighter around the phone.
“I went to his house. Someone had tossed it pretty good already.”
“Wasn’t me.” Joey chuckled.
Damn. “Someone you know?”
“Let me see what I can find out without raising any eyebrows.”
“Thank you.” The words came out throaty and raw. “Really.”
“Anytime, Princess.” His voice was soft. “Still on for dinner?”
“My place at five thirty? We can cook something if you want to stay in.”
“I’ll see you tonight.” He clicked off the call.
I kicked my door open, my brain spinning in at least thirty directions—the most tempting of which was planning my evening.
Focus, Nichelle.
Sports betting, huh? Just exactly how deep was Jinkerson in?
I strode straight off the elevator to Parker’s office, where I found him staring at his computer. His fingers rested on the keys, but the screen was blank.
I shut the door behind me and moved to the desk. “How you holding up?”
He shook his head before he turned around. “Half the people I know, not to mention a few cops, think I might be a murderer, and I’m supposed to get married this weekend at the scene of the crime. I feel like I’m losing my mind.” He rested his elbows on the desk and dropped his head into his hands. “How did my life go from perfect to completely screwed in less than a week?”
I plopped into the chair behind me and pasted on my sunniest smile. “Sounds like you need a nosy crime reporter. Lucky for you, we happen to know one.”
He raised his head and tried to smile. “We do, huh?”
I nodded, letting the smile fade as I caught his gaze. “Sports betting. I’m not asking for the cops or for the crime desk, and you can’t bullshit me, Parker. I need some questions answered. Right now.”
“What the hell does gambling have to do with my wedding?”
“Kyle thinks Burke was into it. ‘Special guest of guys who do things like kill a man and stuff him in a barrel and then go have dinner without washing their hands’ into it. And now I’ve got a missing vineyard manager and a good lead that says he was playing with those same folks. Plus, what we can find says Burke was winning—and Jinkerson wasn’t.”
Parker’s eyebrows disappeared into his unruly blond hair. “One thing Mitch always had over everyone was money. Why would he get mixed up in that?”
“The same reason the two richest guys in my high school stole car stereos on the weekends. It’s a rush.” I bent to retrieve a pad and pen from my bag and blinked when the room spun as I sat back up.
“You okay?” Parker asked.
I nodded. “Pulling all-nighters isn’t the fun it was ten years ago. It apparently takes days of solid sleep to get back on my feet now.”
He reached across the desk and squeezed my hand. “Thank you, Nicey.”
I smiled. “Of course.” I opened the pad as he leaned back and laced his fingers together behind his neck. “Who do you trust?” I asked.
He smiled. “That’s not the easy answer it would’ve been this time last week, huh?”
“I’m so sorry, Parker.”
He shook his head. “It’s okay. Good to know who your friends are, right?”
He barely got the last word out before we both sat up straight. “Tony!” we blurted in unison.
Parker chuckled and sat back in his chair. “Great minds blah blah something something.” He winked.
I bit the end of my pen. “I asked Ashton once if Tony was ever involved with anything shady and she swore he wasn’t.”
“He would never. But he knows everyone. I me
an…every. One.” Parker pulled his phone out and tapped the screen a few times while I scribbled notes. If Tony knew anyone who could tell us what Mitch might’ve been betting on, it could be the piece I needed to get to who put him in that barrel.
Parker stood. “You up for a little drive? Tony’s in Williamsburg. Says he can meet us in New Kent in half an hour.”
“Let’s go.” I followed him back to the elevator hoping Kyle was having some luck with the sheriff and the lab. There was a way out of this mess—one with a happy ending. Maybe the path to it was through New Kent.
Tony Okerson stirred sugar into his coffee, his hand moving at slow-turtle speed as his brow furrowed before he looked back up at us.
“Damn, man.” He shook his head at Parker. “This is a clusterfuck if I’ve ever seen one.”
Parker’s laugh was dry. “You don’t have to tell me twice.”
I tapped my pen on the table. “A more accurate word hasn’t been invented,” I said, flipping my notebook open. “I know this is a lot to take in, but we have about four clocks running against us here, Tony. Is there anyone you can think of who might talk to us about this? Anyone Burke knew, maybe?”
“I didn’t really know Mitch Burke, but what I’ve heard about him made me okay with that.” Tony sat back in the booth and spread his arms down both sides of the bench. “I’m sure I know some guys who did though, if he was that into betting.” He drummed his fingers on the laminate bench top. “The question is whether they’ll talk to you or not. People tend to get antsy around reporters asking about illegal activity.”
“I’m not looking to indict anyone on a gambling charge. All I want to know is if this can lead us to who killed Burke.”
“Right. And how do I go ‘Hey Rob, come talk to this reporter about your bookie, and oh by the way—know anything about this recent murder?’”
Any sane person would tell us to go straight to Hell.
Ugh. I tapped one foot.
“So we’ll go undercover. Just say I want to place a bet on Thursday night’s Generals game.”
Tony’s head bobbed slowly as he reached for his phone. “Let me make a couple of calls.”
He stepped out into the sunlight, scrolling through his contacts as he walked. I watched through the grimy plate-glass window at the little roadside diner where nobody cared who any of us were and cared even less what we were discussing.
“He’s a good friend,” I said.
“They’re the best.” Parker sipped his soda and smiled. “You’re not too shabby yourself.”
I didn’t get another word out before Tony slammed back through the front door, reaching the end of the table in three long strides. “Y’all are never going to believe this.”
I sat up straight, taking in the extra-wide of Tony’s famous baby blues and the tight set of his jaw. “What?”
“Former teammate of mine likes to place occasional large bets. Never on football, even these days. But horses, baseball, boxing. Probably other stuff I don’t know about.” Tony’s words were clipped, a marked departure from his easy drawl.
“I told him I had a friend who wanted to put a chunk of cash on Thursday’s Generals game.” He shook his head, and a light went on in mine.
“Oh, shit.”
Parker’s head whipped back and forth between the two of us. “What?”
Tony held my gaze for a second and nodded. “Yeah. He told me if I want to bet on baseball in Richmond, there’s only one bookie to talk to—Mitch Burke.”
Leaping. Louboutins.
28.
Money and Monsters
I couldn’t have told a judge how I steered the car back to the Telegraph building if Virginia’s sentence for distracted driving was a whole summer wearing clogs.
Parker and I spent the entire drive lost in our own thoughts. I was desperate to get ahold of Kyle, but afraid to interrupt whatever he might be doing. If Burke wasn’t betting, that explained why his financials didn’t show evidence of gambling. But how the hell did a pretty-boy pitcher from a wealthy family end up running a bookmaking operation? He worked for the baseball club, for crying out loud. And Jinkerson—if he was betting through Burke and losing, and now Burke was dead, no cop would give Parker a second thought until they found him. Puzzle pieces crashed together in my head, and I tried to shake it clear, noticing as I did that we were parked in the paper’s garage.
“Wow.” Parker let his head drop back against the seat.
“Yeah.”
“So what now?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a murder victim with more enemies.” I shot him a sideways glance. “I went back out to Augusta this morning and talked to the dispatcher, who also happens to be the sheriff’s daughter.”
He turned his head without lifting it. “And?”
“And she’s carrying Burke’s child. Says they were planning to get married.”
Parker’s emerald eyes popped so wide I could see white all around the green. “Holy…He was into a little bit of everything, huh?”
I snorted. “And everyone. The girl at the vineyard, Sammons’s niece? She thought they were getting married until recently.”
Parker whistled, punching the button to release his seatbelt. “I’m really sorry for what happened here, but does it seem to you that he just kind of went through life discarding or upsetting people as he pleased? There are consequences for that kind of behavior.”
“It appears he learned that the hard way.” I shook my head. “The rules are different for the rich a lot of the time, you know? When Daddy’s money can always bail you out of trouble, and you don’t have to treat anyone with respect, I guess this is what it turns you into.”
“A monster.” Parker shook his head as he kicked the door open. “Makes me suddenly grateful for my solidly middle-class upbringing.”
I laughed and followed him to the elevator. “Amen to that.”
I checked the time on my phone when we stepped into the newsroom. Just past three. Bob would be in with the section editors finalizing tomorrow’s edition for at least another twenty minutes, so I hurried to my desk and flipped my laptop open, logging onto Channel Four’s site to stalk Charlie and pulling out my notes for the day.
Her piece on Burke was the fifth story down, and my fingers shook as I clicked the trackpad to bring it up. I scrolled, my eyes scanning for Parker’s name.
Not there. I went back up and read it from the top.
Nothing. Nothing she couldn’t have gotten from the obit or my story anyway. She’d talked to two people in the Generals’ front office and had a line about an ongoing police investigation.
That was it.
I pulled a pen from the cup on my desk and clicked it in and out as I stared at the screen. Just because she hadn’t run it yet didn’t mean she didn’t have anything. But why would she sit on it?
I couldn’t come up with a good reason, and certainly had more pressing questions to spend my time on than whether or not I was beating Charlie this week. Andrews could take his bitching straight out to the beach for a flying leap off the first pier he saw. We’d had three shark attacks over spring break too.
I clicked over to the police reports database and opened my email, hoping there was nothing too involved that required my attention.
An armed robbery at a convenience store in Short Pump, and the final report on a meth trailer in Goochland that went up in flames as the drug unit was getting ready to bust the operation. Four arrests, though three of those people were still in the burn unit at St. Vincent’s.
Easy enough. I pulled my two earlier stories on the fire and wrote a new lead about the arrests, added the background about the six-month investigation into the manufacturing operation, and a few quotes from the fire marshal about the dangers of cooking drugs—both in general and in an enclosed space.
I got lucky and managed to catch the convenience store’s owner by phone, but not so lucky in that he screamed for twenty minutes about high rent and safe parts of town a
nd how he was just going to buy a gun of his own. I thanked him and replaced the receiver, shaking my head.
People who don’t understand that criminals have cars always astound me, and then there’s the statistical likelihood that him having his own weapon would just end with him or one of his employees getting shot. Ugh. Kyle’d even conceded that one after months of trying to get me to buy a gun over my loud assertions that I’ve met folks capable of shooting other people enough times to know I’m not one of them, and it was a dumb idea. Mace, I can handle all day. Especially with the nearly lifetime supply Kyle sent over when he heard that.
That only left Aaron, who didn’t answer his desk phone or his cell. I left messages on both before I opened a file and wrote the rest of the story, leaving a hole for his comment and tacking the Crimestoppers hotline number onto the end.
Clicking back to the first window, I read through the copy on the fire once more before I attached it to an email to Bob, adding a note that we had file photos from when Lindsay went to shoot the charred remains of the trailer a month back.
I glanced at the clock and smiled. Four cups of coffee and a little motivation, and I had done all that in just over an hour. I’d take any small victory I could get.
Turning back to my notes on Mitch Burke, I opened the file I’d started on him over the weekend and started typing all the new information. I’d just added an all caps “BOOKMAKING? REALLY? WTF?” when the Channel Four Twitter feed popped up in the corner of my screen with Happening Now: Richard Burke to hold press conference Wednesday morning RE: death of son Mitch. Watch News4 for up-to-the-minute coverage.
I closed my eyes and rubbed my forehead, Aaron’s voice ringing in my ears. “Richard Burke wants Grant Parker in a jail cell.”
The cops failed him, so he was taking his crusade to the media. I felt for the man, but he was testing my patience.
I didn’t need to beat Charlie. But I did need to know what the hell she thought she had on Parker and where she was getting her information—though I suddenly had an interesting theory on the latter.
I popped to my feet and grabbed the notebook and pen off my desk, half-running to the elevators. Andrews wasn’t the only person in this building who could be determined when he wanted something.
Lethal Lifestyles (A Headlines in High Heels Mystery Book 6) Page 21