by Ace Collins
Lije was confused. This sounded nothing like the Heather he knew. “That’s not like Heather. What’s the sticking point? Where’s the roadblock?”
“Where the money went. You told me she’s in big financial trouble. She simply will not tell me anything about it. She claims she can’t. I think she’s protecting someone. But if she’s not going to help me, then I’m not going to be able to help her. By the way, the drug test came back clean. She says she’s been clean for a long time.”
Trying to overcome his grogginess, Lije attempted to put together a plan. Heather had to wise up, but maybe she had to be with someone she trusted. It might be that he was the only person who was close enough to her to have a chance at getting the truth. “Where are you now?”
“I checked into the Creekway Motel when I got here,” McGee answered. “Not much in the way of luxury, but I did get a good night’s sleep.”
“Well, check out now. We’ll move you into my guest house. There’s lots of room. And you can use my office to work.”
“Listen Lije, sounds great, but I want to keep you out of the middle of what’s going on. A media circus has come to town and you don’t need to be one of the performers. I’ve seen this show before and it’s always ugly. Hordes of news crews camping out, TV and cable networks, Court TV, newspapers, magazines. I’ve even heard that Entertainment Tonight is coming. What I need is an office with a couple of desks, nothing fancy.”
“You’re probably right. I’ll arrange an office for you. But why the national attention?”
“Your case is big news. It’s been the number-one story on TV and in the print media in this region. It’s now gone national. And why not? Murder of a beautiful woman in a small town, wife of the local rich guy, who also is gunned down. Another attempt on his life. A lawyer who works for him is arrested. Lije, I’ve been in this business long enough to know that this is the perfect story for the press.”
“I know. I’ve watched it myself too many times,” Lije said.
“I figure the shows will start by implying a sordid love triangle. Think of the worst thing you can imagine, then go further. Not only is Heather going to be dragged through the mud, so are you, my friend. You don’t need to be seen with the chief suspect’s lawyer. Not good for you and not good for her. We have to keep you as far away from me as possible. We can’t even be seen talking.”
Stunned, Lije stood up and carried the cordless phone to the far side of the master bedroom. Peeking between the blinds, he saw that it was a beautiful, cloud-free day. No reporters were camped outside.
“Listen Kent, from your experience, how long before the real media circus comes to town? I don’t see anyone outside now. How long before it’s more than just the area and state media?”
“Probably a few days. The ABI doesn’t want the lid to blow off until they’re sure they have a bulletproof case. And, for the moment, they seem to have local authorities under control.”
It was time to shuffle the facts. What did he have? What did he know? If he placed his cards on the table, he might come up with a plan that would help clear Heather. He knew she was innocent. Which meant the real killers were still out there. Heather had no connection to Farraday Road, at least none that he knew. But the ABI was acting as if the case was all but over. Heather supposedly near the house last night; Heather and her debts.
And then there was Swope’s Ridge. One man had already died because of it. Was that the connection?
Those were the cards, and this was not a hand he wanted to hold. To begin to understand how to play, he was going to have to go to the source, the only one alive with a link.
“Okay, Kent, here’s what I’ll do. I’ll go down and see Heather, find out what she’s hiding, and give you a call. I’m sure I can convince her to talk to me. And don’t try to talk me out of it. This might well be the only day I can do it without creating video footage for Extra.”
Crossing back across the room to his dresser, he glanced in the mirror. All things considered, he looked much better than he felt. “I’ll call you in an hour or so. I’ll get what you need from Heather.”
“Fine,” McGee replied. “While you’re at the jail, I’ll call Hillman’s office, try to get the full details of the crime, then I’ve got some research to do. Listen, if you don’t get Heather to open up, I’m afraid all my courtroom theatrics won’t do much good. And whatever you do, avoid the media.”
“I’ll call you when I know something.” He tossed the phone onto his bed. It was time to go to work.
Lije was drinking a Coke for breakfast when Curtis entered the kitchen.
“Are you still babysitting me?”
“Yes, for the time being.”
“Then I guess the only way you’re going to do your job is by sticking with me. I’m going to visit Heather and then visit Dean’s widow in Mountain View, which is south and west of here.”
Before she could reply, Curtis’s phone rang. She listened for a few moments, asked, “Are you sure? ” and then hung up.
“What’s up?”
“Somebody just brought a coat back to the diner. Seems a local businessman picked it up by mistake the night you were there. Said it looked a lot like his. So the one in Melbourne could be yours. There wasn’t anything in the pockets, but I still need to pick it up so the lab can go over it. And I need you to confirm it is yours.”
“I’ll go with you.” Kaitlyn had bought the coat for him in New York. It was made by the Westchester Clothing Company. She thought it was a perfect match for the Cord. He always figured that when she bought it she had been motivated by the romantic image of Humphrey Bogart in the old films she loved so much. She always insisted he wear it when they went out on a foggy or rainy night. When this was all over, when the lab was finished, he wanted that coat back.
“There’s one more thing,” Curtis said. “With Jameson in jail, the state isn’t going to foot the bill for protection anymore. So I’ll be leaving.”
Lije wasn’t going to argue with the hand fate had tossed his way, even if it placed him in greater danger. “Do you want me to take my own car then?”
“No, not for the trip to the jail,” the agent replied. “I’ll take you down there and to Melbourne. But after you look at the coat and I bring you back, you’re on your own.”
“Tell you what. I’ll take the Cord. Once I get to Melbourne, I don’t want to have to come back home and then drive all the way to Melbourne again to get to Mountain View.”
LIJE WAS ALONE IN THE CLASSIC CORD AS HE DROVE down Shell Hill. After stopping off at his office to pick up the metal box containing the papers for the land deal, he drove to the jail. He parked the Cord and saw Curtis standing by her Victoria. He nodded in her direction, but headed toward the front door of the building. He wasn’t shocked when she jumped into action. It was as if she were racing him for a prize. Lije grabbed the door handle a second before Curtis.
“I win,” he said. “No, it’s your turn to listen. This is private. There’s information I need. Heather’s not going to tell me anything unless we’re alone. So you’re not coming any farther than the front desk. Understand?”
Curtis didn’t like it and he could see she thought about arguing. “Fine. Just don’t keep me waiting too long.”
After being processed, Lije was led into the visitor’s room. It was stark, cold, and smelled of Lysol. It seemed more like a morgue than an area set aside for meetings. For two minutes he shared the room with only the odor. Then the matron, a heavyset woman he had known for years, ushered Heather in.
Heather was handcuffed and shackled, dressed in an orange jumpsuit. It was obvious she hadn’t slept. Looking at her disheveled hair and frightened expression, he couldn’t believe this was the same woman he had worked with for three years. The zombies in old horror films looked better than she did.
“Heather, how are you doing?”
The matron guided her into a chair across the table from him. “I’m okay, I guess.”
“Cou
ld you leave us alone? ” Lije asked the matron.
“Sheriff Wood doesn’t want this woman hurting anybody else, so he ordered me to stay with y’all.”
“She’s chained,” Lije pointed out. “She weighs about a hundred and ten pounds, and she’s across a four-foot table from me. I’m fine. Watch through the window if you like, but we need to be alone when I talk to her.”
“But you ain’t her lawyer,” the woman argued. “I met him this morning.”
Lije stood and walked toward her. “Gladys,” he whispered as he put his right arm around her shoulder, “I’ve known you a long time. You know me well enough to realize I wouldn’t be here if I thought for an instant Heather was behind any of those things they’re saying she did.”
The woman leaned closer. “Lije, you mean you really don’t think she did it? Really?”
“I don’t think she had a thing to do with any of it, but for me to set the record straight, I must have a few minutes alone with her. Go tell the sheriff what I just told you, and then the two of you can watch through the window over there. If anything happens, just rush in. Okay?”
She nodded, took another look at Heather, and walked out the door. He waited for her to appear at the window before moving back to the table and taking a seat. “Okay, Heather, how are you really doing?”
She fell apart. “I really didn’t do any of this! I had no part in it! But I realize I’ve dug a deep hole and jumped in. How did I get into this mess?”
Leaning forward, Lije said, “McGee can get you out of that hole and show everyone connected with this case that they’re wrong about you, but you have to help him. The motive they’re tying this to appears to be your urgent need for money. I’m told you’ve gone through more than twenty-five thousand and you’re even behind on your car payments. The DA will combine the money with your past drug addiction and your family situation. They know about your guns. There’s enough circumstantial evidence to make McGee’s job very difficult. So I have to know what you were doing with the money.”
Moving her chair closer to the table, she whispered, “I can’t tell McGee and I can’t tell you.”
“Why?”
“Because …” The word seemed to freeze on her tongue. Her eyes darted back and forth before she mouthed, “Because they’ll kill him if I do.”
Lije leaned back in his chair, tented his fingers in front of his face and studied Heather. The confident and outgoing lawyer was gone. The woman sitting across the table looked as if she was being strangled by a silent and invisible foe. Something had complete power over her. But what was it and when had it begun?
“They’ll kill who? ” he asked.
She just shook her head.
Putting his hands on the table, he said, “At least tell me when this started.”
She hesitated, looking over at the matron through the glass. “About three months ago.”
He knew her well, had seen her almost every day for the past three years, but he could not think of anything that had occurred then that would’ve so altered her life and judgment. But as he thought about it, there had been a subtle personality change. She had tried to mask it, but she had seemed more on edge and much more emotional than normal. She had made silly mistakes on contracts, gotten angry over seemingly insignificant comments from clients, and had been late to several meetings. Until this moment they had all seemed insignificant and he had written them off. What had triggered that erratic behavior?
“Heather, this is between you and me for the moment. I trust you enough to know that you didn’t kill Kaitlyn. Now you have to trust me.”
“But …”
“If I find that what you tell me is so sensitive that it might cause someone else to die, then I won’t pass it on to McGee. But you have to tell me … now.”
The terrified woman looked down at the table. He watched her for just a moment and then said, “Heather, snap out of it. What’s going on?”
“It’s … about my brother.” Her voice was barely above a whisper.
“Jim?”
“Yes. If I tell you what’s going on, they’ll kill him.”
“Who?”
“The terrorists.”
“Heather, Jim was killed in Iraq over a year ago. I was at his funeral.”
“WE ALL THOUGHT JIM DIED IN IRAQ,” HEATHER whispered, “but he’s alive!”
Lije stared open-mouthed at her. He couldn’t believe what she had just said. “How do you know? How did you find out?”
“Three months ago the assistant director at the funeral home in Springfield called me. He said the army opened the grave and reexamined the body. It wasn’t Jim in the coffin. It was another member of his unit. DNA proved it. We had been told that Jim’s body couldn’t be identified because of the IED blast, so they had used his personal effects and dog tags to ID the body, or what was left of it. They made a mistake.”
“Didn’t the army call and tell you?”
“No, they just told the funeral home to rebury the casket. My dad and I were never notified.”
“What about the other family?”
“I checked. I got the name from the funeral home. Also the town where they lived. They had a funeral for their son a few weeks later.”
“So where is Jim now? Why did the funeral home call you?”
She sighed. “I’m getting to that. The man at the funeral home—his name is Paul Meyers—told me that the casket was empty. He said he would not have known that except my mother had asked him to put a Bible in with Jim before he was buried. He’d forgotten, so before they put the casket back in the ground, he opened the lid, and that’s when he discovered there was no body inside.”
“This all sounds pretty unbelievable. Is Meyers your only source for this?”
Now that her secret was out, Heather seemed more like herself. “Yes. Meyers told me he confronted the colonel who was in charge of the exhumation. The colonel told Meyers that Jim was considered missing in action, but to make it easier on us, since they still believed he had been killed, he was still being listed as killed in action.”
Lije nodded. “Sounds to me like someone is covering their tail. Go ahead, let me hear the rest of it.”
“So the colonel told Meyers to forget the exhumation ever happened. Meyers told me it bothered him so much that he couldn’t sleep and that’s why he called me. He said he’d done some checking and found someone who could help me. He said that person would call me in a few days.”
“And did someone call? ” Lije asked. His skepticism had kicked in and he wondered why Heather had not recognized what he believed was a carefully orchestrated scam targeting grieving military families.
“Yes. A few days later I got a call from a man in Memphis. He asked to meet with me. He said Jim was alive. I took the next day off from work and drove to Memphis. We talked for about an hour in the corner of a motel restaurant. His name was Charles Sutton. He said he had spent thirty years working for the CIA. He showed me some identification. He explained that when he retired, he started using his contacts to quietly rescue people who were being held captive in Third World nations. He produced a blurry photo of Jim and said he was being held in Iraq by one of the radical groups aligned with Al-Qaeda.”
“And you believed him,” Lije said.
“I was horrified. Sutton said that every horror I could think of was being used on my brother. He said his sources indicated Jim probably couldn’t last another six months. To me, this was worse than his being dead. He was alone and forgotten. He had no way to get out.”
“I’m guessing,” Lije said, “that Sutton told you he had the connections to get Jim out of Iraq and back home.”
“Yes, he even gave me a list of names of people he had helped to free. I recognized two Italians and a man from New Zealand from photos I had seen in Newsweek.”
“Heather, how much did he tell you it was going to cost?”
After brushing at her tears with the back of her hand, she said, “He assured me he had a
solid retirement plan and wanted nothing for himself, but it would take at least fifty thousand dollars to buy Jim’s freedom and pay his way back to the States. He also told me that if the story got out in the news, Jim and several other Americans being secretly held in Iraq would be executed. He showed me video on his computer of a beheading. It was horrible. I couldn’t let Jim die like that.”
“When was the last time you heard from Sutton?”
“About a week ago.”
“How much have you already paid him?”
“Thirty thousand dollars.”
“And how much more do you have to pay him to buy Jim’s freedom?”
“I have to FedEx twenty thousand dollars to his office by the end of the month. The address is in my desk. And it has to be in cash. The terrorists want American money.”
Drumming his fingers on the table, Lije considered his options. His first impulse was to roll his eyes at Heather; she’d been taken in by a scam that anyone should have seen through. Yet if the story the funeral director had told her was true, then he could see how she would fall for the pitch. With no real family other than an alcoholic father, she had tossed reason out the window and embraced the impossible story. No use yelling at her now; she could beat herself up later.
“Lije? Is it all a lie?”
Reality had set in.
“I don’t know about the part concerning your brother’s body—that much might be true. But you can be sure that Sutton took you for a ride. Now that I know what’s going on, we’ll get this thing fixed. Don’t worry.”
Getting up from the table, Lije waved at Gladys. He watched her come in, help Heather from her chair, and escort her from the room. He considered his next move. McGee could pull the strings needed to find out quickly if Jim’s body was in the grave. That would be easy. Armed with this information, McGee surely had the contacts to find, dress down, and then expose Charles Sutton.
He picked up his personal items at the front desk and walked back out into the sunny parking lot. Curtis was waiting for him just outside the front door like a loyal puppy.