Dead and Gone (A Thriller)

by William Casey Moreton

  “Let me see that picture again,” she said.

  I pulled up the screen shot on my iPhone of the kid from the security tape. She studied it for about half a minute, then handed it back.

  “What was he doing with Terry?” she asked. “Was Terry into drugs?”

  “He was into everything at one point in his life or another, but I believe he was clean and trying to stay that way when he died.”

  “The kid looks like a dealer.”

  “I agree.”

  “So maybe Terry wasn’t clean after all.”

  She had a point. The kid did look like a dealer, and there was no good reason for me to believe that Terry had remained clean for any lengthy period of time, or even that he had been clean when he took his final bow in the bathtub the other night.

  “I don’t want to jump to conclusions until we have a bit more information,” I said.

  I checked my email on the iPhone for the hundredth time in an hour, in hopes Ellen might have dropped me a follow-up note to the one I had received the previous morning, but again there was nothing. Then I poured myself a shot of something strong, took a short sip, and dumped the rest in the kitchen sink. I wasn’t in the mood for a buzz.

  My assistant Heather texted me to say that Veronica Wagner’s agent wouldn’t leave her alone. I didn’t reply. What could I say? The truth was that Veronica’s agent had cashed his last commission check from her. At least that was my best guess, because the last time I saw her she didn’t look like she would be making it to any future auditions. Frankly, the way the past couple of days had gone, it seemed anything was possible.

  As my head continued to clear, more and more recent memories were starting to take shape and fill remaining blanks. I was beginning to see fuzzy snap shots of the dinner with Terry, Veronica, and the clients from Kellogg’s. I closed my eyes and tried to focus. It was still like looking through fog across a river at someone standing on the opposite shore. I struggled to recall snippets of conversation. Most of it was a jumble of white noise. Veronica had looked amazing and I was beginning to remember that she seemed to come across rather flirty that night. She was gorgeous and had smelled amazing, but the reliability of my memory was still shifty at best.

  Whitney drifted past me into the hall and her eyes went to the door. I had left the bedroom door closed and was very glad for that at the moment. The image of Veronica Wagner’s body sprawled on the floor was still very fresh on my mind.

  “I guess that’s where the magic happens,” she said with a smirk.

  I shrugged. Then my cell phone rang. It was Carmen.

  “Carmen, are you okay?” I asked.

  “I just woke up and have a terrible headache,” she said. “I want you to take me to see Terry’s body.”

  “Get some more sleep first.”

  “Nick, I want to go now.”

  I glanced at my watch, then at Whitney.

  “I need to see my husband,” Carmen said. Her words were slurred.

  “Have you been drinking again?”

  “I only stopped long enough to sleep a few minutes,” she answered.

  “If you don’t sleep you will make yourself sick.”

  “Please take me to see Terry,” she said, and then I could tell she had started crying. She had several prescriptions for anti-anxiety and antidepressant meds, so it seemed reasonable to assume she was self-medicating.

  “I’m occupied right at the moment, Carmen, but I’ll swing by first chance I get. Order some coffee and try to clear your head. It’s not going to be easy on you when you see him. It will be a traumatizing experience. I need you to understand that.”

  “I need to see him for myself,” she said and dropped off the line.

  I sighed, closed my eyes, and pushed a hand through my hair. Almost immediately my cell rang again. It was Heather again. I decided I could give her about a minute of my time.

  “Louis is standing at my desk, Nick. I have you on speaker phone,” she said.

  I was glad for the heads-up because I had chambered a choice profanity and had been ready to unload on her, but thought better of it since it wasn’t a private conversation.

  “Well, good afternoon to both of you,” I said.

  “I’m starting to doubt that you work here anymore, Nick,” Louis said in a grandfatherly tone of disapproval.

  My mind was scrambling for a good cover story. “Louis, I was just getting ready to call you. I’m on my way to take Carmen to view Terry’s body.” Not a better cover story in the world, I would say. Best of all, it was true.

  “Carmen can wait, Nick. I need you here at the office to deal with Veronica Wagner’s agent and these damn cops. What the hell did you do to her the other night? Did you sleep with her? Please tell me you didn’t!”

  “Cops? What cops, Louis? And why the concern over Veronica Wagner? I haven’t spoken to her since dinner the other night.”

  “Don’t lie to me. You’ve been acting strange for two days now, Nick. I need to know what’s going on with you.”

  “Well, for starters, my best friend was found dead in his bathtub, Louis. So excuse me if I’m not carrying on like business as usual.”

  “Marty Klein wants to talk to you. He thinks you might have hooked up with Veronica after dinner, and if so, that might make you the last person to see her that night. I think you should call him.”

  “I’m not calling Marty Klein, Louis. He needs to keep better track of his clients.”

  “Call him.”

  “I’m tired of talking about this, Louis.”

  “Did you sleep with her, Nick?”

  “No.” For all I knew, at the moment, that was an absolutely truthful answer. I was praying I hadn’t slept with her.

  “Handle it,” Louis said.

  I put my cell away and stared at Whitney. She was sitting on the arm of my sofa, bathed in light from a window in the living room.

  “I have to go,” I told her.

  She nodded and we took the elevator down together.

  * * *

  Campaigning sucked. Senator Harrison Shelby hated every second of it. Always had. He was good at it, great even, but it was a grind and he dreaded it with every fiber of his being. The schedules were always grueling. There was never enough time for proper sleep and the food was crap. For months at a time his life was spent on planes, buses, and in an endless string of hotel rooms. Now he was playing in the big leagues so it was only going to get more intense.

  He was in the back of a Cadillac between speeches when his cell phone rang. The number was blocked.

  “Talk,” he said when he answered.

  “Where are you?” Barry Blackwell asked.

  “Los Angeles.”

  “Gonna have to be more specific.”

  “On the road between stops.”

  “We need to talk.”

  “So talk.”

  “Face to face. Someplace private.”

  “No time, Barry.”

  “Make time.”

  Shelby glanced around the car at his fellow passengers. His campaign manager, Blake McConnell, was seated beside him, drumming his fingers on his laptop keyboard. His eyes searched Shelby’s face but Shelby glanced away at the window to the passing urban landscape. Another staffer was seated in front with the driver. The next stop was twenty-five minutes away and the speech there was scheduled to be fifteen minutes, then he would shake hands, take a tour of an automotive factory, then catch a plane to Burbank for a fundraiser that evening.

  “Are you in L.A.?” Shelby said into his cell.

  “Yes, just landed.”

  “I can give you ten minutes an hour from now.”

  “That’s all I need.”

  “What’s the problem? Why are you here?”

  “I’m going to tell you something that may or may not mean anything to you.”

  “Can’t wait.”

  “See you in an hour.”

  * * *

  Barry Blackwell watched the senator’s car r
oll toward him and park a few dozen feet away on the runway apron. He had sat inside the lounge and watched the senator’s speech on CNN. The sound had been muted so he’d been forced to read the closed captioning. Blackwell was completely uninterested in politics, so he didn’t care if Shelby eventually won or lost.

  A rear window buzzed down halfway and Shelby said, “Get in.”

  Blackwell walked around to the other side of the car and an aide inside pushed a door open. Blackwell settled in and glanced around.

  “Quite a party you’ve got going on here,” he said in a flat tone. “How about a little privacy?”

  “Is that really necessary?” Shelby asked.

  Blackwell nodded.

  The driver and the campaign staffers grudgingly stepped out and stood in a line on the apron, facing away from the car.

  “Nice kids,” Blackwell said.

  “Every one of those kids is overeducated and underpaid.”

  “Why would anyone want to be in politics? You have more money than you could ever spend, so why not just buy an island and live the good life and watch the girls in bikinis prance around on the sand?”

  “You make it sound easy, but Mel only married me because she believed I would be president someday. Right now she has her fingers crossed that her investment is finally going to pay off.” Mel was short for Melissa Craddock-Shelby, heiress to the Craddock Shipping empire, with a personal net worth of approximately ten billion dollars. They had been married for twelve years and rarely spent more than a few days together due to busy schedules and the simple fact that they typically fought like cats and dogs if left in the same room alone for more than half an hour. It was a marriage of opportunity for both of them. They were a very photogenic couple, she was rich, and he was talented and ambitious. “If I retired to an island to stare at bodies in bikinis she would divorce at the snap of a finger and leave me broke. I’m a prisoner of this life I’ve created.”

  “Sucks to be you, I guess.”

  “Something like that. So what is so urgent that you flew all the way out here to waste five minutes of my life?”

  Blackwell held a file folder in one hand. He placed it on Shelby’s lap and cracked the knuckles of both hands. “We have discovered an interesting little twist about the personal life of the girl who tried to blackmail you.”

  The file folder was crisp and new, buff-colored with no label or writing anywhere on it. Shelby stared at it like it was a snake. He didn’t move or react, didn’t even blink. He just stared at it, his mind spinning at 10,000 RPM’s. His memory flashed back to the young woman who had contacted him the previous week demanding one hundred million dollars or she would ruin his life. She had claimed to be his biological child from a short, purely physical relationship he’d had with a woman during college. She had arrived well versed in his background and the documentation of a murder that had occurred during his years at Harvard University. The encounter with the young woman had left Shelby rattled, and he had immediately contacted his old friend Blackwell to look into the situation and eliminate the problem. Her sudden appearance had brought back a host of fears he had managed to push away more than two decades ago, fears that one day the truth would be discovered and everything he had worked so hard for would be stripped away.

  Shelby could only vaguely remember the stripper in Boston. She had been nothing more to him than an outlet for the pressures of school and a way to flex his massive ego. She’d had a great body and he had generously compensated her for her time and talents, and then discarded her when he got bored and was ready to move on to the next piece of meat. Then when she claimed to be pregnant and claimed the baby was his, he panicked and flew into a rage. He was a man with enormous ambitions to live in the public eye and reach the highest levels of government power and couldn’t afford to have something like this looming over him. So he made a very bold decision and saw it through to its conclusion. The story of the stripper’s murder made the papers but only for a short time before fading into obscurity.

  “What is the twist?” Shelby asked.

  A smirk spread across Blackwell’s face. “Turns out she was having an affair with an older guy in New York.”

  “Right, the ad exec.”

  “Cortland, right. Well, turns out she didn’t like to tie herself down to one man. Turns out she was also sleeping with Cortland’s best friend.”

  “Am I supposed to be shocked by any of this?”

  “His best friend was a guy named Terry Burgess.”

  The senator instantly felt his blood run cold.

  “Please tell me this is a joke.”

  “Sorry, no joke.”

  “Are we talking about the Terry Burgess I think we are talking about?”

  “Yes, senator. We are talking about your twin brother.”

  Shelby closed his eyes and released a long, slow breath.

  “It’s all in there,” Blackwell said, tapping the tip of a long, thick finger against the front cover of the file.

  Shelby opened his eyes but didn’t move a muscle. “I can’t look, just tell me what you know.”

  “Well, there’s more.”

  “I’m all ears,” Shelby said, the color having drained from his face. He put his head back and placed a hand on the armrest of the door. It had been years since Terry had crossed his mind. His brother was the last thing he had expected Blackwell to bring into the discussion.

  “Terry Burgess died the same night we took care of the girl,” Blackwell said.

  Shelby leaned forward like an electrical charge had shot through his body. “What happened?”

  “The police report is right there in the file,” Blackwell replied, “but long story short, your identical twin brother apparently slipped in the tub and fell, hit his head and broke his neck. Damnedest luck in the world. The irony of it is we nabbed his mistress the same night, and yet his freak accident was completely unrelated. Craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  Shelby’s face twisted into an expression of disbelief.

  “You’re sure he’s dead?”

  Blackwell nodded. “One hundred percent. Coroner’s report is in there with photos of the body. He’s the spitting image of you, senator. Would probably creep you out to take a look, so I’d suggest you not.”

  Shelby grimaced at the thought. His curiosity got the best of him and he flipped the file open and thumbed through the pages until he found the pics from the coroner’s office. Of course, that was a bad idea, precisely as Blackwell had warned. A cold chill walked up his spine as he stared at his own dead face. The hair was cut different but other than that the two men were interchangeable.

  “His hair was longer,” Blackwell commented.

  Shelby nodded slowly. “Are you positive this isn’t related to getting rid of the girl.”

  “Just dumb luck, senator. I’ve looked at it from every angle, and we are clean. No worries.”

  “If there are no worries, why did you feel the need to deliver this news personally?”

  “Consider it a professional courtesy. Besides, I wanted to see the look on your face. It was priceless.” The devilish grin spread even further before quickly retracting as Blackwell collected the file from Shelby and tucked it under one arm.

  “You’re a real prince,” Shelby said.

  “Sorry for your loss, senator. I’ll have my secretary send flowers.”

  “Save your money.”

  “Look at the bright side, that was your face in those pictures, but at least it wasn’t really you. That should be enough to cheer you up.”

  “Go away,” Shelby said, refusing to make eye contact.

  “My pleasure,” Blackwell replied and opened his door.

  Senator Shelby watched him walk away as the staffers again filled the car, busy with their cell phones and laptop computers. Shelby’s mind had been momentarily distracted from the details and pressures of the campaign, but he couldn’t dwell long on thoughts of Terry Burgess or the girl who had threatened to blackmail him. After
all, both were dead now, so there was no longer any reason to waste time or energy dwelling on people from his past.

  CHAPTER 26

  We parked at the funeral home and I cut the engine. Carmen was wearing the big glasses again and making an effort to appear sober. She could have passed for many things, but sober wasn’t one of them. She looked like she had survived a hurricane. Whitney was in the backseat of my Mercedes and hadn’t said a word since we picked up Carmen.

  “I don’t want to go in,” Carmen said, staring straight ahead at the single-story brick building. “Take me home.”

  “You’ve come all this way,” I said. “Are you sure you don’t want to see him?”

  She touched a tissue to her face to brush away a tear. “I need a drink,” she said.

  I glanced in the mirror at Whitney. She raised her eyebrows and mouthed the word “WOW.”

  Carmen searched her purse and recovered a bottle of prescription pills. She popped the cap and tipped four or five brightly colored capsules into her palm.

  “That looks to me like more than the recommended dosage, Carmen,” I observed.

  “Mind your own business.”

  “How about we slow down on the intake of chemicals for a moment.”

  “Mind your own business,” she repeated.

  It was late afternoon. The sky was cloudy but the threat of continued rain seemed to be only a threat for the moment. The brick building was very nondescript and sterile looking. The landscaping was pleasant and comforting, but also slightly creepy in a pleasant and comforting way. I’ve always hated funerals and funeral homes and avoided them at all cost. I wasn’t enthused about strolling inside to look at my best friend’s lifeless body stuffed into a box.

  I managed to talk her out of the meds, at least until after the viewing, though I knew that afterward we might both need to consume a full dosage. Whitney waited in the car while I escorted Carmen up the sidewalk. There was music playing inside. Again, creepily pleasant and comforting. We were greeted by a man that looked like Lurch from The Adams Family, only without the robust personality (where do they find these people?). His name was pinned to the breast of his suit. Rowan Crowl. My immediate impression was that this man looked exactly like a Rowan Crowl. He was pale with a ruddy complexion, and it looked like it caused him physical pain to smile.