Hour Game

by David Baldacci

  “I used to work at the Greenbrier Resort over in West Virginia. She and her family came there right regular.”

  “And she was… demanding?” said King.

  “She was a royal pain in my fat ass,” declared Priscilla. “And if Junior was dumb enough to steal from a witch like that, he deserves whatever he gets.”

  Lulu pointed a finger at the woman. “Mother, we have things to discuss with these people.” She looked up at the front door of the trailer where Mary Margaret was listening and trembling in her distress. “Things the children don’t need to hear.”

  “Don’t you worry about that, honey.” said Priscilla. “I’ll fill ’em in on all their daddy’s shortcomings. Only take me a couple of months.”

  “Now, Mother, don’t be going and doing that,” said Junior as he studied his large feet. He was a good foot taller than Priscilla Oxley, though he didn’t outweigh her by all that much, and yet it was clear to both King and Michelle that the man was terrified of his mother-in-law.

  “Don’t you call me Mother. All the things Lulu and me done for you, and this is how you repay us? Getting yourself in trouble, maybe going to the electric chair!”

  On this, Mary Margaret’s sobs turned into earsplitting wails, and Lulu erupted into action.

  “Excuse me,” she said politely but firmly to King and Michelle.

  She marched up the steps, grabbed a fistful of her mother’s dress and pulled the larger woman into the trailer along with Mary Margaret. From behind the closed door they could hear muffled cries and angry voices, and then all became quiet. A few seconds after that, Lulu reemerged and closed the door behind her.

  “Mama sometimes goes on when she’s been drinking. Sorry about that,” she said.

  “She doesn’t like me much,” said Junior unnecessarily.

  “Why don’t we sit over here?” said Lulu, pointing to an old picnic table on the right side of the trailer.

  Once settled there, King filled them both in on the visit to the Battles’.

  Lulu said, “The problem is that.” She pointed to the large shed behind the trailer. “I’ve told Junior a million times to put a door and lock on that thing.”

  “Old story,” he said sheepishly. “Working on every-body else’s house, ain’t got time for my own.”

  “But the point,” continued Lulu, “is that anybody can get in there.”

  “Not with old Luther back there,” Junior said, nodding at the dog that had emerged once more from the shed and was barking happily at the sight of his owners.

  “Luther!” said Lulu incredulously. “Sure he’ll bark, but he won’t bite, and he’ll roll over like a baby when somebody brings him food.” She turned to King and Michelle. “He has buddies coming over all the time to borrow tools. When we’re not here, they leave little notes and let us know when they’re gonna be bringing the things back, and sometimes they never do. And Luther sure as hell never stopped one of ’em.”

  “They’ll leave a six-pack as a thank-you,” offered Junior quickly. “They’re good old boys.”

  “They’re old boys all right, just don’t know how good they are,” said Lulu hotly. “One of them might’ve set you up.”

  “Now, baby, ain’t none of them gonna do that to me.”

  King cut in. “But all we have to show is reasonable doubt. If the jury thinks there’s an alternative out there, well, that’s good for you.”

  “That’s right, Junior,” said his wife.

  “But they’re my friends. I ain’t gonna get them in trouble. I know they ain’t done nothing to hurt me. Hell, there ain’t no way they coulda broke into the Battles’ place. And let me tell you, they ain’t gonna go up against Ms. Battle, that’s for damn sure. I ain’t got no college degree, but I’m smart enough not to take the woman’s damn wedding ring. Shit, like I need that grief?”

  “You don’t have to do anything against your friends,” said King emphatically. “Just give us names and addresses, and we’ll check them out very discreetly. They probably all have ironclad alibis, and we can move on. But look, Junior, friends or not, unless we find other possible suspects, the evidence against you is pretty persuasive.”

  “Listen to him, Junior,” said his wife. “You want to go back to jail?”

  “Course not, baby.”

  “Well, then?” She looked at him expectantly.

  Junior very reluctantly gave the names and addresses.

  “Now, Junior,” said King delicately, “I need you to be straight with me here. We’re working for your attorney, so everything you say is confidential, it goes no further.” He paused, choosing his words carefully. “Did you have anything to do with that break-in? Not that you did it yourself, but might you have done something to help somebody else do it, maybe even unknowingly?”

  Junior stood, his hands balled into big fists. “Okay, asshole, how ’bout I mess up that face of yours!” he roared.

  Michelle half rose, her hand sliding to her holstered gun, but King motioned for her to stop. He said calmly, “Junior, my partner here was an Olympic athlete, holds multiple black belts and could kick both our butts with her feet alone. On top of that she’s holstering a nine-millimeter cocked and locked and could put a round between your eyes at fifty feet much less five. Now, it’s been a long day and I’m tired. So sit down and start using your brain before you get yourself hurt!”

  Junior glanced in surprise at Michelle, who stared back at him without a trace of concern or fear on her features. He sat, but his gaze kept skipping to her as King continued. “We don’t want to be surprised down the road. So if there’s anything you haven’t told us or Harry, you need to correct that right now.”

  After a long moment Junior shook his head. “I’ve been straight with you. I didn’t do it and I got no idea who did. And right now I’m gonna go see my kids.” He rose and stomped into the trailer.

  CHAPTER

  21

  WHEN KING AND

  Michelle walked back to their car, Lulu went with them.

  “Junior’s a good man. Loves the kids and me,” she said. “He works hard, but he knows things don’t look good for him, and it’s drilling a hole right through his belly.” She let out a long sigh. “Things were going good, maybe too good. My job’s going great, and Junior’s got more work than he can handle. We’re building a new home, and the kids are doing real good in school. Yeah, maybe it was all going too good.”

  “You kept your maiden name?” said Michelle.

  “I don’t have any brothers,” Lulu replied. “My sisters took their husbands’ names. I just wanted to keep the Oxleys around at least so long as I’m alive.”

  “You work at the Aphrodisiac, don’t you?” asked King.

  She looked a little startled. “That’s right, how’d you know?” She suddenly smiled. “Don’t tell me you been there.”

  King smiled back. “Once. Years ago.”

  “When I first went to work there, it was more a whorehouse than anything else. It was called the Love Shack back then, you know, after the B-52’s song. But I saw a lot more potential than that. Over the years we’ve turned it into a nice club. Okay, we still have the dancers and stuff, but that’s only in one section, the original part of the place. Junior did a lot of the new construction work. You should see some of the millwork in there now, wood columns, nice moldings, classy drapes and wallpaper. We got a real nice restaurant, with linen and china, a billiards room and a place to play cards, a movie theater and a first-class bar with a special ventilated place so the men can smoke cigars; and we just started a club for local businesspeople. You know, a place to come and network. We got Internet access, a business center. Revenue up eighty-six percent over last year, and last year was the best year we’d had in the last ten. And I’ve been pushing to change the name to something a little more…”

  “Tasteful?” said Michelle.

  “Yeah,” said Lulu. “I own a piece of the place, so that’s me and Junior’s retirement. I want it to be as profitab
le as possible. I got the costs in line, manageable debt levels and strong cash flow with little direct competition, and our target demographic is golden: male high income earners who don’t care how much they spend. You should see our EBITDA level compared to what it was.”

  “You sound like quite the businesswoman,” said Michelle.

  “Didn’t start out that way. I didn’t even finish high school. My daddy had an aneurysm when I was only sixteen. Dropped out to help nurse him. Guess I wasn’t much of a nurse; he died anyway. But then I married Junior, went back and got my GED and took business courses at the community college. I started working at the Love Shack part-time. As a waitress,” she added quickly. “I don’t have the necessary physical equipment to be one of the dancers. Worked my way up, learned the business, and there you are.”

  “And one of your dancers was just killed,” said King.

  Lulu stiffened. “How’d you know about that?”

  “We’re sort of informal consultants to Chief Williams,” explained King.

  “She was one of our former dancers,” corrected Lulu.

  “Did you know her?” asked Michelle.

  “Not really. We got lots of dancers come through. Most don’t stay all that long, nature of the business. And we play it by the rules. We don’t allow anything but the dancing. We’re not looking to lose our license to operate because some girl wants to make some cash on the side by spreading her legs.”

  “Did Rhonda Tyler want to do that? Is that why she left?” asked Michelle.

  “I already told the police all this. Is there some reason I got to tell you too?”

  “No reason at all,” said King.

  “Good, ’cause I got enough on my mind without worrying why some gal got herself killed.”

  “I doubt she intended that to happen,” said Michelle.

  “Honey,” said Lulu, “I been in this business long enough and seen enough that nothing—and I mean nothing—would surprise me anymore.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” said King.

  As they drove off, Lulu watched them and then went inside the trailer.

  Michelle eyed her movements in the side mirror. “She says she didn’t really know the woman, and yet she was able to ID her off an artist’s composite sketch, and she knew about the crotch tattoo? Come on, I’d call that a little inconsistent.”

  “Could be,” said King.

  “And while Junior may be too dumb to know what to do with bearer bonds and jewelry, I think his wife is plenty sharp enough to sell that stuff and make some decent returns.”

  “If that turns out to be correct, our client is guilty.”

  Michelle shrugged. “Those are the breaks sometimes. What next?”

  “We track down who installed those secret drawers in the Battles’ closets. We check out the alibis of Junior’s friends, and we fill in Harry on what we’ve done so far.”

  “And we wait for the next murder to happen,” added Michelle, sighing.

  CHAPTER

  22

  DIANE HINSON LEFT HER

  downtown law firm as she nearly always did, at seven in the evening. She climbed into her late-model Chrysler Sebring and drove off. She picked up some carry-out dinner at a local restaurant, drove to her gated community, waved to the elderly guard inside—who carried no weapon and could have been easily overpowered by a couple of husky twelve-year-olds—and proceeded to her townhouse situated at the end of a pipestem street.

  Things had been going well for Hinson this year. A newly minted partner at Goodrich, Browder and Knight, Wrightsburg’s second largest law firm, she’d finally met a man she thought might be the one, a six-foot-three accountant four years her junior who liked to white-water raft and could beat her occasionally on the tennis court. She felt that any day he might pop the question, and her answer would be an immediate yes. She’d also brought a new client into the firm with billings well into the six figures that would add significantly to her personal income. She was thinking of moving into a single-family house. To do so with a ring on her finger and a husband to grow old with would be a dream come true for the thirty-three-year-old lawyer.

  She parked her car in her garage and went inside. She placed her dinner in the microwave, changed into her running clothes and headed out. Three miles and a little over twenty minutes later she arrived back a little sweaty but barely short of breath. A decent middle-distance runner in college and dedicated amateur tennis player, she’d kept in excellent shape over the years.

  She showered, ate her meal, caught a TV show she’d been looking forward to seeing, and received a phone call from her accountant beau, who was in Houston on a corporate audit. After some breathy promises of truly memorable sex once he returned home, she hung up, watched the late news, noted it was nearly midnight and turned off the TV. She stripped down to her panties in the bathroom, pulled on a long T-shirt she kept hanging on the door there and headed to bed.

  She sensed the presence behind her, but before she could scream, the gloved hand closed around her neck, cutting off her wind and with it her voice. A very strong arm encircled her body, pinning both her limbs to her sides. Stunned, Hinson found herself being shoved facedown on the floor, unable to move or scream as a gag was placed in her mouth and her hands bound behind her with telephone cord.

  As a criminal lawyer she’d defended accused rapists, getting some men off who should have gone to jail. She’d considered those professional victories. Lying facedown on the floor with a crushing weight on top of her, she steeled herself to be raped. With suffocating dread she knew that at any moment her underwear would be pulled down and the humiliating and painful violation would commence. Nauseous with fear, she told herself not to resist, let him have his way, and possibly she would survive this. She hadn’t seen his face. She couldn’t possibly identify him. He would have no reason to kill her. “Please,” she tried to say through the gag, “don’t hurt me.”

  Her plea went unheeded.

  The knife plunged into her back, grazed the left side of her heart, was pulled free and plunged in again, tearing a two-inch gash in her left lung and slicing into her aorta on the way out. By the time it was over, a dozen wounds mottled her back. However, Diane Hinson was dead by the fourth.

  The man in the black hood bent over her, careful not to step in the pool of blood forming on the carpet, and turned Hinson over on her back. He lifted her T-shirt, took a Sharpie pen from his pocket and drew a symbol on her flat belly. He made the same symbol on the wall behind her bed. He drew it large, since he didn’t want anyone to miss it. The police could be such imbeciles.

  He went back to the body and carefully unhooked the woman’s anklet, the one he’d admired in the shopping mall parking lot, and placed it in his pocket.

  He left the knife by the dead woman’s side; it couldn’t lead back to him. He’d pulled it from her kitchen drawer when he’d entered the house earlier. He’d been hidden behind the bushes in the darkness next to her garage door waiting for her to come home. When she opened the garage, he waited until she had gotten out of the car and gone inside. Most people closed the garage door on their way inside the house using the remote button near the door leading into the house. She’d never seen him slip inside.

  He untied her hands and wedged her arm against a partially opened bureau drawer. He’d observed at the shopping mall that she wore a watch, so he hadn’t bothered to bring one. He set the watch hands to where he wanted them and pulled out the stem, freezing it at that number on the dial. He said no prayer over the body. Yet he did mumble something about this being a lesson to keep one’s ATM receipts.

  He methodically went through the room looking for potential evidence of his presence but found none. Fingerprints and palmprints were out of the question. Not only had he worn gloves but he’d glued felt pads to each of his fingertips and palms. He slipped a small, handheld vacuum out of his coat pocket and ran it over the floor and under the bed where he’d been hiding. He did the same in the coat close
t where he’d initially hidden, and continued that process on the stairs and finally the garage.

  After that he took off his hood, slipped on a beard and hat and left out the back door. He made his way to his car, which he’d parked on a side road outside of the fancy gated community with its elderly, weaponless security guard. The VW started up. He drove fast but within the legal speed limit. He had another letter to write. And he knew exactly what he wanted to say.

  CHAPTER

  23

  SEAN KING WOKE EARLY

  on the forty-foot houseboat that was parked at his dock. The rented houseboat was home, at least until he could finish building a new house to replace the one that had disappeared into a man-made crater. He donned a wet suit, drew a quick breath and then dove headfirst into the water. After a spirited swim of several hundred yards he returned to the houseboat and embarked on a two-mile trek in his Loon kayak. His partner’s energetic ways were rubbing off on him, he had to grudgingly admit.

  As he was paddling through the water thinking this, he looked up and saw her. He wasn’t surprised, even at this hour. He often wondered if she ever slept. Could it be that his partner was really a vampire who happened to have no problem with sunlight?

  Michelle was in her scull rowing with a skill, strength and intensity that King could only dream about. She was moving so fast that anyone unacquainted with the woman would have assumed her craft was under motor power.

  He called out to her, his words carrying far over the calm waters.

  “Time for coffee, or are you heading for the Atlantic this morning?”