Offside Trap

by A. J. Stewart

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Get Your Next eBook Free

  If You Enjoyed This Book...

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  For Gareth Williamson,

  in loving memory

  Chapter One

  A CRIME SCENE on a university campus attracts a crowd quicker than a Labrador to a dropped hot dog. Which made the scene I drove by as I swung in through the rear campus entrance all the more interesting. If not for the lack of students milling about, anything to avoid the three whole hours of class on their schedules, then certainly for the lack of crime scene tape. And police. I dropped down the gears on the Mustang and rolled by the baseball diamond that should have resembled a movie set but instead looked as quiet as a baseball diamond usually did in the off-season.

  I pulled across the road and into the parking lot in front of the athletic center. Like much of the inner campus, the building was a mix of red bricks and white stucco. The red bricks hinted at a pedigree of Ivy institutions; the stucco hinted at the cost of red bricks. The result was less Harvard than Holiday Inn Suites. I slammed the car door shut but left the roof down, making me glance skyward. The sky was heavy for the first time in weeks and the air clung to my shirt.

  I pushed through the double doors into the gym and was hit by a potpourri of dried sweat and cleaning solution. A fit young thing in a tight workout shirt and ponytail smiled and directed me to a set of stairs and I strode up two at a time and hit the second floor. The smell had gone and the easy care tiles gave way to gray industrial carpet. Each office door had a pane of marbled glass with a name or three stenciled on it. I reached the end of the corridor and found nothing but a women’s bathroom. I turned tail and headed back along the row of doors. The room I wanted had one name and a title. Kimberly Rose, Athletic Director. I tapped the glass and stepped in. Beyond the door I found a small office. Another door sat off to the right. A young guy in a gold polo with a panther on the breast looked up from a computer monitor and smiled.

  “Can I help?”

  “Miami Jones,” I said by way of explanation. The guy nodded, hit a button on a console and spoke into a small unit that was attached to his ear. He nodded several more times. I took in the office walls. They were covered in photos and posters of young people playing a variety of sports. Girls playing soccer, boys playing lacrosse. I noted there wasn’t a football shot to be seen. There were team photos, basketball and baseball and field hockey. The shot of a girl serving in tennis. I thought I recognized her from somewhere. The guy at the desk looked up, smiled again and told me to go through.

  The interior office was much bigger. There was a conference table in one corner under a massive whiteboard. A shelf of books flashed titles like Leadership in Sports Management and Team Building. Horizontal blinds were pulled all the way up offering a view of the road and an expanse of green sports fields. A counter-height desk without a paper on it took up most of the end of the room. Kim Rose stepped out from behind the desk, light on her feet. She wore slim khaki slacks and a blue polo with a panther on the breast. Her skin was pulled tight across her face. She had black hair cropped short and brown determined eyes that creased slightly in the corners as she smiled.

  “How are you, Kim?”

  “The Miami Jones,” she said, opening her arms for a hug.

  “In the flesh,” I said. We wrapped arms around each other. Her waist was thin and she didn’t carry an ounce of anything she didn’t need. She slapped my back and then pulled out and held my shoulders like she was appraising a limited edition print.

  “You’re still alive,” she said.

  “Some days more than others.”

  “Well, it’s great to see you. It’s been too long.” She gestured to a small sofa that sat below the window. I sat at one end. She faced me, her back to the armrest, and she crossed her legs like she was practicing yoga.

  “How’ve you been, since college?” she said.

  “Still alive, as you point out.”

  “I saw where you got pushed up to the majors. Oakland wasn’t it?”

  “Ancient history.”

  “What happened?”

  “It didn’t stick. And what about you? Olympics, World Cup?” I glanced around the room. “Where’s the silverware? Or should I say gold?” It was then I noticed that the room contained nothing of a personal nature. No photos, no medals, no trophies.

  “Ancient history.” She smiled. “And now you’re a detective?”

  “I am.”

  “With that guy? The one you met while we were at UM?”

  “Lenny Cox, yeah. But he’s no longer with us.”

  “Rival company?”

  “Dead.”

  She nodded the way people do when death rears its ugly head in a conversation. We sat in silence. I recalled how silence between us had once been so comfortable. Not so much now.

  “So you called?” I said.

  She took in a deep breath, in through the nose, out through the mouth. I recognized it well. She did it every time she stood in front of a penalty kick, every time she wanted to focus her mind on the task at hand. The last time I saw her do it I was watching the television in the bar at Longboard Kelly’s, and she was shutting out the national anthem before a World Cup soccer final. Now her breath blew long and low and she looked at me. She laid her hands in her lap and tapped her fingertips lightly together. I don’t think she noticed. She was focused on me.

  “I need your help.” She said it like she was requesting a kidney.

  “Okay.”

  “I need you to investigate something for me.”

  I nodded. We had covered this much when she called my office, and it seemed we were tap dancing around a candle.

 
“Tell me your problem,” I said.

  “There are so many. Where do I begin?”

  “At the end.”

  She tapped her fingertips. “One of our student-athletes overdosed.”

  “Yes. On what?”

  “I don’t know. Some new fancy thing.”

  “When?”

  “They found him last night.”

  I nodded and looked at her. She was tanned but not too much. Like she spent a lot of time in the sun but always wore sunscreen. My hands looked like Naugahyde in comparison. She didn’t take her eyes off mine. Most people would gaze away, at their lap or over my shoulder. Not Kim. When she gave you her attention, she was fully committed.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s take a step backward. Who’s the kid?”

  “Which kid?”

  “The one who OD’ed.” I creased my forehead. It was reflex and contributed to the furrows on my well-weathered brow.

  “His name is Jake Turner.”

  “Is? He’s not dead?”

  “No, God no. He’s in the hospital.”

  “When you called, I assumed. So what’s his condition?”

  “Coma, I’m told.”

  I nodded. “What’s his relationship to you?”

  “He was on the lacrosse team.”

  “Any good?”

  “The star player.”

  Kim unfolded her legs and stood. She strode to the front of her desk and leaned her back against the edge. It was one of those desks for people who liked to stand while they worked. Kim was one of those people. She never stopped moving. It explained why she was still so trim five years after having ceased playing any kind of professional soccer, and why I had to run six miles a day along City Beach just to stave off a muffin top. I didn’t get up from the sofa.

  “What aren’t you telling me?”

  Kim shifted her feet and looked at me again.

  “The president of the university wants me out.”

  “Why?”

  “He doesn’t like sports.”

  “He wants you gone because he doesn’t like sports?”

  “No. He wants me gone because he wants all sports programs gone and therefore he has no need of an athletic director.”

  “The president wants to kill all sports programs?”

  “Yes.”

  “He doesn’t understand salubre corpus, quod mens sana?”

  “I don’t understand that.”

  “A healthy body, a healthy mind.”

  “No. He believes that sports takes money away from academic research.”

  “Does it?”

  “What the hell has that got to do with anything?”

  “It might explain his position.”

  “His position is moronic,” she said, pushing away from the desk. She began pacing. “We’re a Division II school. We don’t have football so we don’t bring in the big bucks. But our basketball team has won division titles, our lacrosse program is as good as any and our women’s soccer team has produced two Olympians. That’s not to mention Caroline Sandstitch.”

  When she said the name I remembered where I’d seen the girl playing tennis in the poster in the outer office. It had been at a tournament out on Key Biscayne. I got tickets from a grateful client and had been more interested in the hors d’oeuvres and champagne than the tennis, but I recalled her losing in straight sets.

  “She top fifty?” I said.

  “Top thirty now. And we have some good kids coming through. But it will be for nothing if he gets his way. It will be all gone. Basketball, baseball, crew, soccer. Everything, even golf.”

  “You have a golf team?”

  “Of course, we’re in the golf capital of the world. We have men’s and women’s teams, and we even offer a major in golf administration. Hell, he’ll probably get rid of that too.”

  I paused for a moment and then asked Kim to come and sit down. She stopped pacing and sat, legs crossed, fingertips tapping.

  “Tell me what all this has to do with the kid in hospital.”

  “He’s a student-athlete, you see? Millet will try to link this to the athletics program. Use it to shut us down.”

  “Millet?”

  “Dr. Stephen Millet, PhD. The university president.”

  “And does it have anything to do with the athletics program?”

  “Of course not, Miami—come on. The kid took some designer drug. It happens. It’s college after all. The fact he’s an athlete is neither here nor there.”

  “Okay. So what is it you want me to do?”

  “I need you to find out what the drug is and who’s supplying it.”

  “I’m pretty sure the local police will do that.”

  “The local cops are all in Millet’s pocket. I need you to find out the truth, not what Millet says, so I can show that this is not an athletic department issue.”

  “I see.”

  “And I need you to do it quietly. I can’t have him know that you are doing this for me or he’ll use it against me.”

  “That won’t be easy.”

  “But you can do it, right? Discrete investigations, and all that?” She smiled her tight smile.

  “With us, it’s relatively discrete investigations. But I’ll see what I can dig up for you.”

  She put her hand on mine. “I appreciate your help on this.”

  “You bet.”

  She stood and I followed. “I can get a few students together for you to talk to. A coach or two.”

  I shook my head. “I’ll let you know if I need that, but for now, just tell me the kid, Jake Turner was it? He was found at the baseball diamond, right?”

  “Yes, under the away team bleachers.” Kim pointed out the window. “I’ll have my assistant walk you over.”

  “Don’t bother. I’ll walk around a bit, get a feel for the place. I’ll let you know if I need anything.”

  “Sure, whatever you want. And Miami, it’s great to see you. I’m sorry it’s been so long.”

  I nodded. I was going to wink but thought better of it. I smiled instead, and then I walked out.

  Chapter Two

  THE UNIVERSITY SAT on sprawling grounds west of Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, on the wrong side of the turnpike. In the not too distant past there had been plenty of land, so the campus had spread out rather than up. Then the housing estates and strip malls leached westward until they butted up against the Everglades. Now the college was surrounded by suburbia, in one of those parts of the state that baked in the summer to remind you that you were in Florida, but was far enough away from the beach to make you forget why you came.

  Kim had described a gulf between her athletic department and the academic side of the college. The gulf was literal too. A thick expanse of blacktop, a road that severed the sports fields from the main campus buildings. The only sports facility on the campus side was the one I had just come from, which housed the gym, the basketball center and the athletic department offices. Across the road lay a speed hump that seemed much larger than it needed to be. The far side of the road housed several older buildings, tagged as offices for coaching staff, physical fitness instructors and rehab. Beyond those lay the green fields I had seen from Kim Rose’s office. Fields for soccer and lacrosse. There were no stands or bleachers, just what I counted to be about ten playing fields.

  Further along the road I wandered past a stand of Australian pines, which stood guard over the turnstiles to the baseball diamond. The structure was too small to be called a stadium. There were bleachers on either side of home plate, wood on the first base side, aluminum on the third base side. Either someone had started to renovate and quit halfway through, or they really wanted the away team’s supporters to be uncomfortable. Aluminum seats in Florida summer were like sitting in a griddle pan. A green concrete ramp sloped up between the stands, right behind home plate. I ambled up to take in the ground. The main campus grounds were immaculate and the buildings new, clean and sterile. The baseball facility however, looked
like it had been stolen from Asheville, North Carolina, circa 1950. Below me were ten rows of concrete slabs leading down to the plate. No ergonomic plastic seats. Seriously BYO cushions. The sideline bleachers above ran back just beyond the first and third bases respectively, each ending abruptly. Beyond the bleachers a chain-link fence looped along patchy grass, around the outfield and back again. The outfield was lush and long, recovering from a hot summer. The diamond itself was sharply marked on immaculately groomed red clay. Where the bases should have been there were only large divots, the bags themselves having been removed until spring training, lest the bases literally get stolen. The fractured gray sky served to throw a dull tint over the field, as if to say closed for business.

  I noticed someone sitting in the bleachers on the home side, in the top corner as far from home plate as one could get without clambering off the structure and leaping onto the grass bank. The person was sitting alone with their thoughts, staring at the diamond. Bleachers are like that. Back when I played in the minor leagues I used to wander up into the stands along the baseline and think about my game or my life or nothing at all. The person turned and I noticed a ponytail dropping from behind her head. She was wearing some kind of athletic training uniform: T-shirt; shorts and knee-high socks, all white. The sky made her hair look the color of straw. I didn’t think she noticed me so I stepped back down the ramp. I ducked under the aluminum stand on the away side, where Jake Turner was found.

  It was dark underneath, shards of light seeping between the gaps in the seats. The breeze tinkered with the hollow aluminum slats, making the whole area sound tinny. It looked the kind of place a student would go to take drugs. Secluded and dim. No one would have reason to go under there unless they shared the habit. The ground felt soft yet firm underfoot, like moist clay. I wandered back out to the green ramp and stepped across and under the bleachers on the other side. If anything the light was lower and the wooden benches served to absorb the sound, giving the space a silent, cave-like quality. This side was an altogether better place to partake in a drug habit, at least the kind that couldn’t be consumed at a bar. It was a heavy and depressing area and I felt my back shiver as I moved about, light on my feet as if in a church. To my right the gloom seemed to shift, like a temporal displacement. I closed my eyes and then opened them and allowed them to adjust, and then I glanced sideways at where I thought I’d seen movement, and a hazy apparition appeared, ghostly white. It took a few moments to realize it was the girl I’d seen sitting up on the bleachers. She was hazy in my vision, but I could make out the uniform.