“I understand the two of you go out a lot.”
“Yeah. I enjoy her company. I know her pretty well, too, and, frankly, I’m surprised she came to you about Damon.”
“Do you know if they’ve been having problems?” Jill asked.
“Well, she was getting awfully fed up with the way he’d been treating her.”
“She mentioned he had refused to take her to a concert at the Gaylord Center.”
“Yeah. That was certainly one thing that bugged her.”
“What else?”
“You met her. You may have gotten the impression from the way she dresses and all that Molly’s got a pretty healthy appetite for some things.”
“Like what?”
“Well, like sex.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t think she was too pleased with Damon on that score.”
If Damon had suffered the Vietnam wound Ray Orman described, I wasn’t surprised. But it shouldn’t have taken Molly five years to reach that conclusion.
“When we saw her, Molly was definitely showing fear,” Jill said. “I doubt that came from any disappointment over being neglected or sexually deprived. Did she talk to you about what she was afraid of?”
I had to admit Jill was becoming quite adept as an interrogator. I’d have to coach her a bit, though, on phrasing her questions so they couldn’t be answered with a simple yes or no. This time it didn’t matter.
“I know she thought his Army experience might have inclined him toward some kind of violent behavior,” Peggy said. “He was a Vietnam vet, you know.”
“We know. But she told us he had never struck her.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then why be afraid?”
“She was probably afraid of what he might do if...”
When Peggy’s voice trailed off, Jill prompted her. “If what?”
“I don’t know. Just, well...”
Peggy Davidson obviously knew something she didn’t want to talk about. I didn’t think it would be wise for me butt in, so I covered the mouthpiece and whispered, “Push her.”
Jill spoke in a firm but calm voice. “What was she afraid he might find out, Peggy?”
“It’s something very personal. I’m sure she wouldn’t want me to talk about it.”
“Let me explain the situation,” Jill said. “Molly left a message on our answering machine Wednesday morning while we were out of town. She had discovered something in Damon’s basement workshop that really shook her up. She wanted us to call her, but in a way her husband couldn’t find out about it. Then we learned she and Damon had moved out of their house late that night. We haven’t been able to locate her. If you know something that might explain what’s going on, you need to tell us now.”
There was a long pause while Peggy apparently digested all of that. Finally, she said, “Molly went down there? She had talked about doing it but never dared to. And they moved out? Didn’t tell anybody?”
“That’s right. And I’m sure it was not Molly’s idea.”
Peggy spoke hesitantly. “What I was saying–or didn’t say–what I mean is Molly has been having an affair with one of our drivers.”
“At Maxxim?”
“Yeah. He’s a long haul driver. I think it’s been going on at least a couple of months. Last week Molly told me something happened and his wife had found out about them. She was afraid of what might happen if the guy’s wife told Damon.”
I decided it was time for me to make my contribution. “Miss Davidson, this is Greg McKenzie, Jill’s husband. We operate the agency together. We need the name and address of the driver. There’s a chance he might have had some contact with Molly. For her safety, we need to find her as soon as possible.”
Grudgingly, she gave us the driver’s name—Mitch Grooms. He lived in Donelson, a suburb to the west of Hermitage. His wife’s name was Ermine. I had always thought that name a bit highfalutin, considering the expensive white fur it brought to mind. Then somebody pointed out to me that it was just a weasel.
Peggy said she had once met the snotty Mrs. Mitch Grooms, whom she called a first-class bitch. Since I hadn’t had a lot of experience with different classes of the breed, I assumed that meant the woman was not too pleasant. Evidently both Mitch and Molly had reasons for straying from the hearthside.
This added an entirely new ingredient to the equation. Clearly Damon Saint was not happy with his wife for some reason. Did it involve her relationship with Mitch Grooms rather than anything to do with his basement workshop? Maybe, but that didn’t explain burning down the house. The questions continued to mount while the answers were getting almost as scarce as ermine coats at an animal rights convention.
When we got off the phone, I checked my watch. “I should have this King Cole’s report finished by five,” I said. “We can take it to the hotel and leave it with Logan, then have a go at Mr. Grooms.”
“What if Ermine is there?” Jill asked.
“Then we just might ruffle her fur.”
———
Jesse Logan glowed like a hundred-watt bulb when he read the results of our investigation. He was so pleased he wanted to buy our dinner, and I figured it wouldn’t be polite to refuse. We left the Opryworld Hotel around seven and headed home. After looking up the number, I called Mitch Grooms. Jill listened in on another phone.
A male voice answered, which I assumed was not Ermine.
“Mr. Grooms?” I asked.
“Yeah. Who’s this?”
“My name is Greg McKenzie. I’m with McKenzie Investigations. Molly Saint hired us because she was afraid of her husband, and now she’s missing. I need to know if you have heard anything from her in the last day or two.”
“You’re shittin’ me, man. Did my wife hire you?”
“We got your name from Molly’s friend Peggy Davidson,” I said. “Molly’s life could be in danger.”
“I’m sorry if she’s got problems, but I got problems, too. Lucky Ermine isn’t here right now or I wouldn’t even talk to you.”
“I appreciate your situation, Mr. Grooms, but do you have any idea where Molly could be?”
“I haven’t talked to her since I saw her at work a week ago Friday. Hell, my wife would have me in court if I even looked like I wanted to call Molly. Anyway, I was told Molly was off all this past week. I was on a run for four days.”
This was not the most productive interview I’d had lately. In fact, it was getting nowhere. I decided to make one more try.
“Has your wife said anything that would lead you to believe she has been in communication with Damon Saint about this?”
“No. She never mentioned him. But she can be pretty hotheaded at times. She said she’d kill Molly if she ever caught her around me.”
I gave him our number and asked that he call if he heard anything about Molly. When I hung up, Jill looked across and shook her head.
“Somebody else out to get Molly,” she said.
“True. But I suspect Ermine is the least of her worries.”
19
Monday morning was another cool one, but what I didn’t like was the looks of the sky. Dark gray clouds cluttered my view. Something seemed to be running behind, pushing them along at an unhealthy pace. And like most of the weather around here this time of year, it came straight out of St. Louis.
“Maybe we should wait until tomorrow,” I said as we finished breakfast. The radar on TV showed a mass of white stuff obscuring the map between Nashville and St. Louis.
“We can’t afford to wait,” Jill said. “Anyway, that overcast isn’t very thick. We can get above it and fly in the sunshine.”
I frowned. “Looks like a pretty stiff wind up there.”
“So it’ll take a little more flying time. The distance is about the same as Indianapolis. Come on, Greg. I’ve got every kind of instrument you can think of on that airplane. Even if we had to fly IFR all the way, there’d be no problem. Don’t be such a wimp.”
“Wi
mpiness has nothing to do with flying. It’s based on a whole different set of criteria.”
“Criteria, being plural, is a set.”
When she starts correcting my English, I’m in trouble.
“Well, I have known some wimps who really loved to fly,” I said.
“I’ll get the flight attendant to serve cocktails the whole trip. You won’t even know you’re off the ground.”
“Just be sure you have an extra-large barf bag.”
I drove to Cornelia Fort Air Park, realizing this was my last opportunity to exercise some control over my destiny for an uncertain future. Jill did a thorough inspection of the Cessna, called for another check of the weather and filed her flight plan. I tried to think of some other good reason we shouldn’t pursue this mission, but failed. Finally, I strapped myself in, listened to the engine roar to life, heard Jill talk a lot of pilot jargon on the radio, and we took off into what quickly became an impenetrable shroud of white.
True to Jill’s word, we popped out on top after a short climb and glorious sunshine bathed us from the rear. Clumps of clouds still lurked about the sky, however, and we encountered a rash of bumps in the road. Preferring my bumps and grinds in a chorus line, I closed my eyes and pretended to doze. One thing I had learned early on was that flying does wonders for your religion. I spent most of my time uttering brief prayers.
After a span of time that seemed just short of eternity, I heard Jill request landing instructions at Lambert Field. Opening my eyes to find we were descending through a cloud bank, I promptly closed them again. A short time later I heard the screech of tires and knew we were rolling on solid ground.
Jill parked the Cessna and we headed for the hangar to make the usual ground arrangements. The temperature was considerably lower here than in Nashville, and I was glad I had donned a well-lined jacket. After Jill finished her paperwork, we rented a car and got directions to the address for Orman’s Gun Shop. Cities have a habit of changing over a forty-year span, and St. Louis hardly appeared the way I remembered it from my early days. The skyline looked different, the streets looked different, the traffic damned sure looked different.
We found the street in a suburb on the north side and followed the numbers down to a row of store fronts that included everything from shoe repairs to carpet remnants to pawn shops. Orman’s was located next to a small video rental place that advertised enough X’s to confuse a Roman timekeeper. We parked in front of the gun shop, which could have passed for the county jail with all the bars across its windows.
A bell jangled on the door as Jill and I entered, and though the place was not overly large, it appeared Orman had not lied when he said he stocked most any kind of gun you could ask for. Shotguns, rifles and handguns of every variety lined the walls and showcases. Ammunition boxes, cleaning kits, targets and various other accessories filled the shelves.
A man who could have been anywhere in his fifties or sixties sat on a stool behind a counter near the front. Nearly everything about him appeared gray–shaggy beard, long hair, skeptical eyes, flannel shirt. He was small but stocky, with leathery skin. The cardinal on his white ball cap provided a lone touch of color. Judging from the animal heads mounted high on the walls, he was a hunter.
“Good morning,” I said with my friendly-greeting smile. “Are you Ray Orman?”
He nodded. “Sure am. What can I do for you?”
I handed him our card. “I’m Greg McKenzie, and this is my wife, Jill.”
He glanced at the card, then back at me. “You called Saturday about Damon Saint. What the hell’s he done to prompt you folks to come all the way to St. Louis?”
“As I told you on the phone, Damon’s wife Molly hired us to look into him. He had made some threats that were quite worrisome. But before we could get very far with our investigation, she left a message on our answering machine to call her back as soon as possible. She was really excited about something. But when we tried to call, we found they had moved.”
“To St. Louis?”
“I don’t think so, but we don’t know where. I’m hopeful you can tell us something about him that might point us in the right direction.”
Orman leaned his elbows on the counter and shook his head. “Like I said, I’ve not heard anything of him in some eight or ten years.”
“It seems about seven years ago he turned his carpet cleaning business over to the guy who worked for him,” I said.
“That when he went to Nashville?”
“Apparently. He told the guy in Indianapolis he was being sent on a clandestine government mission.”
“Christ. That damned boy had some wild ideas. He was a good soldier, though. I trained him.”
“Are you retired from the Army?” I asked.
He nodded. “Master sergeant. I’d been saving up for a long time, bought this shop when I got out. Was you in the Army?”
“No, I retired from the Air Force. I was with the Office of Special Investigations.”
“That’s like CID, right?”
“Right. We were Air Force detectives. You say you trained Saint. Were you with him in Vietnam?”
“Part of the time. He was the demolition man on my team. For a while we were assigned to a Special Ops Group reconnaissance team composed of Americans and Nungs.”
“What are Nungs?” Jill asked.
“It was a tribal group originally from the border area between North Vietnam and China.”
“You must have been gathering intelligence,” I said.
“Yeah. We did a lot of hit-and-run operations. After that they transferred us to the Phoenix Program.”
“I’ve read some reports on that one,” I said.
“I think there were lots of reports on it. A lieutenant I knew was called to testify before Congress.”
“How about enlightening me,” Jill said.
“We worked with what they called a PRU—Provisional Reconnaissance Unit of the South Vietnamese army,” Orman said. “We were charged with rounding up and neutralizing Communist guerillas who were members of the National Liberation Front.”
“And how do you neutralize someone?” Jill asked.
Orman just grinned.
“It’s a euphemism,” I said, “for what the CIA used to call terminate with extreme prejudice.”
Jill’s eyes widened. “Oh.”
“The PRU’s were tasked to assassinate NLF leaders,” Orman said. “They would go into villages and round up anybody who looked or sounded like they might be friends of Charlie. The PRU’s had monthly quotas to fill. Sometimes they went overboard.”
I nodded. “The report I read said 25,000 were killed during the Phoenix Program.”
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” Orman said.
“That must be what Molly was talking about,” Jill said. “A driver had told her that some Vietnam vets were still causing a lot of trouble after they got home.”
Orman propped his elbows on the counter. “You take a kid out of high school and teach him to kill. Then you send him halfway around the world with lethal weapons and order him to shoot anything that moves. After a year or so of that, when he’s turned into a well-oiled killing machine, you send him home, cut him loose and say go find yourself a job. Well, if he tries to do what he’s been trained to do, the cops ain’t gonna like it. Right, Mr. McKenzie?”
“Correct. And if the people on the home front aren’t too happy to see him back, that complicates things even further.”
“You got that right. Fortunately, most managed to put the killing fields behind ’em. But a lot of guys got in a lot of trouble. One I know of was a buddy of Saint’s who came by here recently. He spent time in Leavenworth for bank robbery. Apparently he’s doing okay now. But that damned war wrecked a lot of lives.”
I reached in my jacket and pulled out Molly’s wedding photo. “Here’s a picture of Damon made when he got married,” I said, handing it to Orman.
As the bell jangled at the shop door, the old sergeant stared i
nto the photo, his eyes bulging.
“That’s not Damon Saint. That’s Chad Rowe.”
20
Before I could ask anything else, a new customer walked up, a tall, husky man dressed in a hunting outfit—brown and white camouflage pants, jacket and cap.
“Got my gun ready, Ray?” the man asked in a booming voice.
Orman glanced up, his face still twisted in a troubled look. “Yeah, Jeb. I’ll get it. Hang on, McKenzie, be right with you.”
As he walked toward the rear of the shop, the customer looked across at me. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”
I leaned against the counter. “No problem. We were just chatting.”
“You one of Ray’s Nam buddies? Seems like every time I come by here, he’s telling war stories.”
I shook my head. “I was Air Force.”
“Oh. The guys who dropped the big ones.”
Most of my war stories, at least the ones I could mention, were pretty boring. Anyway, I didn’t want to get into a talkathon with this guy. So I merely said, “Yeah. We dropped the big ones.”
Orman was back in a few moments with a slick-looking rifle that had what appeared to be a sniper scope mounted on top. He handed the gun to the man, charged his credit card and thanked him for the business.
I turned to Orman as the customer left. “What kind of game will he shoot with that?”
“He didn’t say, and I don’t ask a lot of questions.”
“Afraid of the answers you might get?” Jill asked.
He didn’t reply.
I picked up the photo. “Getting back to this, Chad Rowe as in row your boat?”
“R-O-W-E,” Orman said. And, after a few moments, “He’s another guy who was in my outfit. I probably shouldn’t say anything else. He’s had enough trouble already. I don’t want to add to it.”
“We think he’s a danger to his wife,” I said. “We need to find him before he does something to her.”
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