Absolute Liability

by Jennifer Becton

  “Not really. Ron and I met over a complaint on Friday. He sent me some paperwork on the liability case. He seemed helpful enough.”

  “Sandra said the assailant was a man—average height, average weight, Caucasian—with brown hair. He was dressed in business casual: a dark shirt and khakis,” Starnes told me.

  “That’s pretty vague,” I said, knowing full well that the average person makes a terrible witness. They don’t really know what they’re seeing until it’s too late to absorb the details. “Nothing distinguishing about the guy?”

  “He had a gun,” Starnes deadpanned. “And he was shoving you into the trunk of the black Altima.”

  “Well, that’s interesting because I didn’t see any men with guns this afternoon. And, as you see, I wasn’t taken.”

  Tripp turned to Starnes. “So do you think Raleigh and Browning are lying about the kidnapping? Or did they confuse Jules with someone else?”

  I tried not to let it bother me that I had suddenly become invisible or that they were asking the same disturbing question that I’d been pondering.

  “They were both pretty insistent about the abduction,” Starnes said. “We ought to assume they mistook the victim for Jackson here.”

  Even though I hadn’t been consulted in the matter, I agreed. Though I’d spent little time with either of them, Ron and Sandra didn’t strike me as people who called in false police reports.

  Tripp nodded. “They were looking down from the fifth floor, so general build and hair color might be all they could be certain of.”

  “Right. Jackson matched the victim’s description, but we’re looking for someone who looks like her.”

  Someone who looked like me from five stories away. Who could that be?

  The victim had been taken from the Southeastern building, so it was likely that she was one of their employees or possibly a visitor to the building. Because I couldn’t speculate on visitors, I began to run through Southeastern employees in my mind, but I didn’t know many, and I didn’t think I bore a real resemblance to any of them.

  Who could they possibly think was me? “Have you accounted for all Southeastern employees?”

  “We had a roll call first thing to rule out employees as the possible abductor.” Tripp pulled a sheet of paper from his coat pocket, unfolded it, and handed it to me. “I’ve got an employee list right here, and we’ve already accounted for everyone on it.”

  I scanned the paper anyway, and a light began to burn somewhere in my brain. Hot fear began to crawl over me.

  “Amber Willis,” I said.

  Both detectives looked at me.

  “Has anyone seen Amber?”

  “Who’s Amber?” Tripp plucked the roster from my hand and searched for her name. “I don’t see an Amber on the employee list. I would have noticed an Amber.”

  He would like Amber, I knew. Sweet, innocent—just like me when we dated in high school and about the same age too.

  “She’s an intern who worked in the cubicle nearest to my office. She’s probably not on that list since she’s just a temp. I got her a bear claw,” I concluded as my concern grew. More lights went on in my brain. “From a distance, I could see witnesses mistaking Amber for me. We both have medium-length brown hair.” Amber usually wore hers down and perfectly coiffed, whereas mine was usually up and casual. But men never notice subtle things like that. Now, get a boob job, and they’ll notice. “We’re roughly the same height and weight. I’m older, of course, but from the fifth floor, they might not have been able to tell.”

  “Then Rubik’s Ron and Browning may have screwed the pooch.” Starnes grabbed his cell and called in to request that someone locate Amber and take inventory of the other interns.

  Meanwhile, Tripp flipped through his pad. “She worked in a cubicle, but she might have been taken from the office where you were working. Room 114, right? Near the exit.”

  I nodded. “She was probably in my office to return the papers I asked her to scan.” I tried not to look as panicked as I suddenly felt. Someone who looked like me was taken from my office.

  What the hell was going on?

  “You know anything else about Miss Willis?” Tripp asked.

  Starnes snapped his cell phone shut and ambled over to add, “Family problems? Boyfriend?”

  Given that I’d been at Southeastern only a day and a half, I was surprised to realize that I actually had information to share. “Amber’s cubicle is the closest to my office door. I heard her talking to another temp yesterday. Said she broke up with a boyfriend recently. She called him Irving. He went to Central Georgia College, I think.”

  Tripp and Starnes lit up visibly. “Did it end well?” Tripp pressed.

  “At that age, do they ever?” I asked, careful not to glance at Tripp. “But she said Irving wasn’t happy about the breakup.”

  “Irving: that a first or a last name?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “You ever see this Irving?”

  “No, sorry.” I finally looked at Tripp. He seemed disappointed by this news. “I told you I don’t know Amber—or anyone at Southeastern—well.”

  “It’s okay, Jules. You haven’t given us much, but we’ll look into this Irving guy.”

  “Well, if it helps, she was cutting out caffeine.”

  That earned me some hard looks. I smiled as sweetly as I could.

  Tripp and Starnes turned away, probably to discuss the situation, and headed toward the cruiser. “Wait,” I called, trying to think of anything that might unlink me from this mess. “Was anything taken from the office? Besides Amber.”

  Starnes turned back and rasped, “That’s something you’ll have to tell us. The place was a mess. Papers all over.”

  I cut my eyes to him. “The office was trashed?”

  “Yeah,” Starnes said, shrugging and continuing to the car.

  “Come on, Jules,” Tripp called. “Let’s head back.” He scowled at my Explorer. “Why don’t you leave that car here and hitch a ride with us?”

  I understood his unspoken point. If I had truly been the target of an abduction—and it was beginning to seem highly likely that I was—it was best to protect myself, and I was currently unarmed. Though investigators of the fraud unit are legally allowed to carry weapons in the line of duty, I liked to do the paperwork portion of investigations without a firearm strapped to my waist. Usually, I only carried my gun—a Smith and Wesson M&P .40 caliber—during interviews that I thought might benefit from a bit of intimidation or after the arrest warrant had been issued and the apprehension was about to take place. At the moment, this decision had made me vulnerable.

  It was best to stay with Tripp, but I wanted to retain some means of transportation. “Can’t I…?”

  “Not a good idea.”

  “At least let me get my purse and roll up the windows.”

  Tripp must have seen me hesitate before closing my car door because he put a hand on my back and propelled me toward the cruiser, persuading me all the way. “Look, Jules, media’s all over the place. They probably already have photos of you going back to kindergarten graduation. They’ll see you walking in, and it’ll turn into chaos. Better to sneak in the back door with us. I’ll bring you back to your car as soon as I can.”

  Starnes was much less conciliatory. “Just get in.” He opened the back door and gestured at me to enter.

  Nope. No way was I riding in there. The backseat of a police cruiser was not an inviting space. Upholstered in black vinyl and divided from the front seat by heavy wire mesh, it vaguely resembled a county fair roller coaster. It even smelled like one.

  I walked around the car and took shotgun instead. I shut the door and buckled up.

  Starnes cursed and got in the backseat. The suspension rocked under his weight, and the car did actually feel a lot like a roller coaster as he adjusted himself. Once he was settled, Tripp started the car and headed back toward the office. As we pulled out of the Stop ’n’ Shoppe lot, I realized I’d left my
coffee, the box of donuts, and Amber’s bear claw in my car, but I didn’t ask to go back for them. If Tripp was right, Amber was in no position to eat sugary, fattening pastries right now, and my iced coffee was watered down anyway. Plus, knowing that I was the intended victim in this abduction made me feel jittery again. Definitely no more caffeine for me.

  The black and white’s radio crackled to life, but the sound was turned down so low that I couldn’t understand what the voice said. Based on the slump of Tripp’s shoulders, I knew Amber had not been accounted for.

  As Tripp talked into the radio about changing the focus of the search from me to Amber, I let myself consider the possibility that Amber actually was the intended target and not me.

  Who would want to kidnap a college kid like her? Amber seemed nice, if a bit scattered. She was working at Southeastern for the summer to pay for books and lodging at Asbury. She was a communications major, which seemed to be code for a sweet girl with no real direction in life. Amber seemed efficient and good hearted. Just not particularly motivated.

  I didn’t know much else about Amber, and other than the boyfriend, I couldn’t think of a reason she would have been abducted.

  Yet she had been taken. And from my office.

  How significant was that? Had she just happened to be there when her abductor came looking for her, or was the abductor actually looking for me?

  Although the idea of me being confused with a perky college girl was flattering, it didn’t seem likely. But if Ron and Sandra had mistaken Amber for me too, maybe it was possible. The abductor would have expected Julia Jackson in that office, and if he took Amber instead, he apparently didn’t know me at all. I rolled that idea around in my mind.

  I supposed I could imagine a mix-up of this nature happening because, in my experience, criminals were rarely among the top fifty percent of the population in intelligence. Maybe not even the top eighty percent.

  And although most fraud I investigated was nonviolent, it made sense that someone might one day turn out to be prone to aggression. Let’s face it. People hate insurance companies. Even more than that, they hate fraud investigators. Loads of honest, hard-working people try to eke a little more money out of a claim; that’s common, almost natural. But a shocking number of otherwise law-abiding citizens attempt out-and-out fraud: fake car-theft reports, not-so-accidental fires, staged car crashes.

  I sighed. Leave it to me to go from a high-risk job on the police force to one in the universally reviled world of insurance. I hadn’t gone out looking for a job as an insurance fraud investigator. I mean, who grows up dreaming of working in insurance? Not me.

  In fact, I’d applied for numerous other non-law-enforcement positions before I’d finally given in and sent a resume to the Georgia Department of Insurance.

  And the DOI was the only place that called me for an interview. I don’t know what I’d expected, really. I’d been working to become a police officer since I was fifteen years old. I wasn’t qualified to do much else, so I’d exchanged yellow crime scene tape for the red tape of the business world.

  The scary part was that I actually kind of liked it.

  For one thing, my natural personality was more suited to a quieter life. In the insurance game, I wasn’t required to rush into buildings while shouting at suspects to show me their hands. I didn’t have to search people’s clothing—and their body cavities—for small bags of drugs and other assorted goodies. Plus, I could wear almost anything I wanted, and I didn’t have to carry around forty pounds of radios, Tasers, handcuffs, guns, and spare magazines. As a bonus, I wasn’t scared of being killed in the course of a normal workday.

  At least not usually.

  I looked out the window of the cruiser. We had already turned from University Avenue onto State Street and were descending into downtown.

  Mercer is a city that always seems to be on the cusp. On the cusp of dying out, on the cusp of revitalization: it sort of floats between the two. And back in Civil War days, it was on the cusp of being burned by General Sherman. Fortunately, it escaped destruction. As a result, many antebellum homes still stand on the outskirts of town, and its infrastructure is still what it was in the days of slavery and cotton plantations.

  Southeastern is one of the most contemporary styled buildings in town, and as such, it stands out. To say the least.

  I could see the light glinting off the building before the structure itself came into view. It’s not a very tall building—five floors in all—but the architect designed it out of mirrored glass, which was supposed to help it blend in with the environment.

  Unfortunately, that only worked to a degree. Birds were unaware of the building’s existence until they flew smack into it, slid down the surface of the mirror, and ended up in a heap of feathers on the sidewalk. Humans, however, were painfully aware of the Southeastern building. When the sun struck any surface, it blinded everyone within a ten-mile radius.

  We all squinted at it. Tripp and Starnes put on their aviator sunglasses. As I glanced between them, I wondered if they’d shopped for them together.

  Even in the brilliant sunlight, I could tell that Tripp hadn’t exaggerated. The place was already alive with reporters and police personnel. They didn’t waste time. The information officer, whom I couldn’t identify because of the glare, had managed to corral the press behind some yellow tape at the corner of the building. Exits were monitored by uniformed officers, who, in turn, were carefully observed by the press. Sneaking in on my own would have been impossible.

  As we skirted the parking lot, the glare from the building seemed to prevent anyone from noticing our arrival, not that one more cop car would have been newsworthy. We circled around the building to park in the back lot, managed to avoid the bird corpses on the sidewalk, and went through the delivery entrance that was guarded by only one uniformed officer.

  His eyebrows flew to his hairline upon seeing me.

  “Special Agent Jackson, you’re here. You’re okay,” he said as he looked between the three of us for an explanation.

  “Yes, I’m safe,” I said, hoping that would suffice.

  “That’s great news.” The officer checked the volume on his radio. “I didn’t hear the announcement you’d been found.”

  I smiled at his youth and exuberance, thinking this must be his first big case.

  Tripp was not so kind. “There’s been no announcement, so keep this to yourself, kid. There’s more going on here than meets the eye.”

  The young officer nodded, seemingly pleased to be privy to such inside information, and he stepped aside to let us pass.

  Tripp’s cell phone rang just as we got inside. After giving a few affirmatives, he hung up.

  “No one can find Amber. No one’s seen her since about 2:45, but her purse was in the cubicle nearest Jules’s office, so she didn’t just step out early.”

  Now that my fears about Amber were confirmed, I was starting to feel numb, and I knew my mental reflexes were slowing down. I took a deep breath and willed myself to think clearly.

  Tripp patted my arm and then turned me toward his partner. “Starnes, go with Jules to her office. Take note of anything missing.”

  Tripp disappeared into a sea of cops, and I was glad I wasn’t among them. Starnes didn’t share my opinion. He watched his partner head off to collect the glory for finding me and identifying the possible victim, while he was stuck babysitting little old me. The news would spread all over the building soon.

  “That’s Tripp.” I shrugged. “He’s not deliberately trying to give you the shaft. He just gets excited.”

  Starnes’s eyebrows lowered and a crease appeared above his nose. “I know. I know. But it still pisses me off.” He grunted and escorted me toward the office I’d been using. “You know what to do at a crime scene, right?”

  I rolled my eyes. “You got gloves?”

  He called to a uniformed officer, who handed me a pair of latex gloves. I snapped them into place and walked into the office.
/>   My heart fell.

  It was bad. Papers were everywhere. Maybe there had been a search; I couldn’t tell yet. The only good thing was that there was no blood.

  On my first pass, I just picked my way around the office, observing. I did not touch anything, even with the gloves, and I tried not to breathe much.

  Then I swept the room again, but this time I allowed myself to be more tactile in my approach. One wall housed an entire bank of filing cabinets, and I opened a few of them. They were all organized and neat, untouched. Only one drawer stood open, but most of its contents had been removed, and now that I looked more carefully, it appeared that they had been scattered purposefully around the room. My chair and desk were completely covered, and the floor looked like a patchwork quilt of papers and dull tan folders.

  It seemed likely that Amber had come to my office to return the files, and she had encountered my abductor. No struggle had ensued; he’d had a gun. She would have acquiesced quickly and quietly. Besides, a struggle would have caused too much commotion. One of the other two interns in the main office would have seen or heard.

  I studied the papers and folders on the floor. I did this even though I had known right off that the abductor had taken more than just Amber Willis with him when he left.

  And this knowledge made me even more certain that I was the intended victim.

  Damn, he thought as he ran his fingers along the furrows of his forehead. He felt his facial muscles contract as his eyebrows drew down in consternation.

  It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

  In fact, none of this was supposed to happen at all.

  But this is what you get, he thought, when you partner with fools; they do dumbass shit and leave you to clean up the piles.

  His cell phone rang, and he knew who it was without looking at the caller ID.

  “Don’t call me at this number again.” He kept his voice quiet, businesslike. “I’ll contact you.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” his partner said. “You won’t need to call. I’ve got the situation handled.”