The Kill Radius

by Nichole Christoff

  Chapter 9

  Cautiously, I stepped into the hallway. Ray was still banging around in the kitchen below. Behind the closed door of the bathroom, water ran, muffling any other noise—such as an intense conversation.

  I wasn’t sure Corinne was as clueless about Bran’s involvement in Ray’s business as she pretended to be. Or about Bran’s affairs altogether. She could claim she didn’t know who Monique Wells was, or why Bran had buttonholed her during our little cruise, but fifteen years ago, the Eddie Jepson case had been a turning point for Ray Walther Investigations. Corinne had deposited Ray’s fattest paycheck to that date, courtesy of our very wealthy client who’d wanted to stick it to Eddie after he stuck it to her. And I couldn’t believe Corinne had forgotten that.

  So Corinne was faking.

  Which made me more eager than ever to chat with Eddie myself.

  Barrett and the feds just might have him in custody. But if the late-breaking news on the TV downstairs was anything to go by, they hadn’t caught him yet. Of course, if they had, a list of his former associates and known cronies wouldn’t hurt the investigation, either. At one time, I’d had that information. And if I knew Ray, he still did.

  Ray may’ve hung out his shingle as a private eye, but long before he did that, he’d been a military cop. While in the army, he’d developed a number of good habits that he’d kept with him after he went civilian. One of those habits was extensive note-taking.

  As a result, I’d rarely seen Ray without a notebook.

  When we worked together, Ray had meticulously jotted down every observation. At that rate, Ray had gone through about three or four notebooks a year. I wanted the ones he’d used when we’d tracked down Eddie Jepson—and I thought I knew where to find them.

  At the far end of the hall, a white cord dangled from the ceiling. I grabbed hold of it and pulled. A trapdoor swung down from the drywall with a groan. When neither Ray nor Corinne hurried to check out the sound, I unfolded the collapsed ladder doubled up on itself and began to climb.

  Ray’s attic was dry and dusty. Plywood laid across the joists made a thin makeshift floor. I squinted, spied the outline of a bare bulb and its beaded chain. I gave the chain a tug. Harsh yellow light flooded the place.

  Cardboard boxes crowded close. Some of the boxes were ancient. Some were relatively recent additions since Corinne had entered Ray’s life. Directly across from me, a long white box housed the Walther family Christmas tree. Fancy red boxes with hinged lids held bulbs and ornaments while the green ones kept wreaths at the ready. Totes and tubs contained clothes that Corinne couldn’t wear during her pregnancy, as well as Ray’s old army gear. But I wasn’t interested in these.

  I was interested in the file boxes.

  Ray, I knew, still occupied office space in that moth-eaten strip mall. But he’d always stored his old documents at home. After all, private eyes produce a lot of documents, and spending money on a storage facility to house them all could break the bank.

  I moved to a carton topping a stack of boxes beneath the apex of the roof. On the end of it, Ray’s scrawl labeled the contents as tax returns. The second one claimed to contain last year’s case files. I shifted both boxes aside. And behind them, I struck gold.

  The dates on the end of that box corresponded to the year we’d busted Eddie. I lifted the lid and plowed to the bottom of it. There, I found Ray’s little spiral notebooks. Ray had filled three of them that year. And here they were.

  Flipping through the first one, I found Ray’s minute-by-minute observations as we’d tracked down a deadbeat dad who’d spent all his cash on a girlfriend young enough to be his daughter—and in the second one, I found Eddie Jepson’s name. But time was not on my side. Corinne could exit the bathroom at any moment and wonder what I was doing in her attic, so I crammed the lid on the box, shoved it into place, and stuffed the three little notebooks into my jumpsuit pocket.

  Corinne caught up with me in her closet. A pair of those black knits she’d carried turned out to be sweatpants that fit me like capri-length leggings. I’d appropriated an old blue oxford shirt that belonged to Ray and had paired it with a maroon sweater I’d seen him wear to do winter yard work. The tails of the shirt peeked from beneath the sweater’s hem. Both hit me about mid-thigh, covering my derriere, and when coupled with my government-issued canvas sneakers, made me look like a co-ed on laundry day. But at least I wouldn’t get pulled over by the police for impersonating an inmate on the lam, and my jumpsuit would leave the Walthers’ house as a tidy bundle under my arm, concealing contraband notebooks.

  “Not bad,” Corinne declared when I’d made my grand entrance and rejoined her in the bedroom.

  “Thanks, but will that cute boy in my algebra class ever ask me to the prom?”

  “Tired of your soldier already?”

  I tried to laugh at Corinne’s joke but couldn’t quite pull it off. Because Corinne sank onto the charcoal coverlet at the foot of the bed she shared with Ray. I saw no sign of her cellphone, but I had no doubt she’d taken it to the bathroom for an in-depth discussion with Bran.

  “Are you tired?” I asked, my stomach turning sour. “Of…everything?”

  I couldn’t bring myself to say Ray’s name.

  And Corinne, rubbing her swollen belly slowly, couldn’t quite meet my eye.

  “I’m eight months pregnant, Jamie. I’m tired all the time.”

  Maybe that was true.

  And maybe it wasn’t.

  “Everybody decent?” Ray bellowed, his voice much too close to the bedroom door. He had to have overheard my question to Corinne. And her response as well.

  “We’ll be right down,” Corinne called. “Jamie and I are chatting.”

  And my heart stuttered to a stop.

  She’s going to tell me, I thought. She’s going to say she’s leaving Ray for Bran.

  But instead of confiding in me, Corinne gathered up my folded coveralls, and the notebooks they contained, and passed the parcel to me.

  “Good luck with this Eddie Jepson business,” she said. “Good luck with your soldier, too. And if you would, please tell Ray I’m going to lie down for a nap.”

  After a dismissal like that, I had little choice but to leave my best friend to her thoughts and dreams. I left Ray, too, brooding in his kitchen over more vodka, less coffee, and watching the aftermath of last night’s explosion unfold on TV. If the scrolling newsfeed at the bottom of his screen were to be believed, the feds hadn’t found the Lady Luck bomber in their raid on that Mississippi farmhouse—and that meant Eddie might very well be gearing up to kill more men and women in uniform.

  In the privacy of my rental car, parked in the busy lot of a Winn-Dixie grocery store, I thumbed through one of Ray’s notebooks and let the intervening years fall away. Whenever Eddie had been down on his luck, he’d cried on the shoulder of his ex-wife, Shirley Smith. A bottle blonde with a big heart and a rack to match, the middle-aged Shirley had held down a steady job as a building manager and rent collector for a conglomerate owning a series of tenements on the outskirts of the commercial district. While she’d never loaned Eddie cash, she’d often let him flop on her sofa. Shirley came to Ray’s notice when she bailed out Eddie after his arrest. And she came to mine when I witnessed her shedding tears at his sentencing. Finding ourselves in the same elevator afterward, I’d passed her a packet of tissues. Back at the office, Ray had read me the riot act for that.

  “Emotional involvement ruins objectivity,” he’d ranted.

  He’d been right. I’d developed a much thicker skin since then. In most instances.

  But I was willing to bet Shirley hadn’t.

  I drove over to the cinder-block monolith that Shirley had managed fifteen years ago. The place had probably seen its first tenants during the high times of the 1960s. Now, fault lines zigzagged through the mortar between the massive blocks, and the large aluminum overhang protruding from the front of the building like some kind of theater marquee had lost its Space Age s
heen. The pin oaks along the sidewalks, though, had grown with time. They were gorgeous even without their complete complement of summertime foliage.

  This was a neighborhood where residents could step out to get beignets and freshly ground coffee from the reasonably priced mom-and-pop bakery on the corner on a Sunday morning, and go home to curl up with the newspaper in bed. On Saturday afternoon, however, business was slow, and I had no trouble swinging into a parking space in front of a unisex hair salon. I approached the building on foot, strolled up to the entrance as if I didn’t have a care in the world.

  The place offered a modicum of security with an electronic lock on the lobby door. An aluminum panel outside hosted a line of push-button buzzers. Each would ring in its corresponding apartment to tell the resident he or she had a visitor wanting to be let in downstairs.

  I squinted at the names beside each button. Some were jotted on bits of card stock. Others were the work of a fancy label maker. Someone had lovingly inked Shirley Smith’s name in calligraphy—she lived on the first floor—and had scribbled another in blue ballpoint. It read:

  JEPSON

  APT 00 D

  I took this to mean Shirley had taken pity on poor Eddie and had rented him a basement apartment. Not that I got the chance to immediately find out. Barrett appeared at my elbow, slipped a familiar hand over mine.

  “I’m happy to see you, honey, but the feds don’t love you like I do.”

  Barrett had changed out of the government’s complimentary jumpsuit but had left his uniform at home. Instead, he wore hiking boots and jeans and a nylon jacket over a navy henley topping a forest-green T-shirt. He looked good that way, and I didn’t need my glasses to notice he wore a Kevlar vest under it all.

  I said, “My party invitation must’ve got lost in the mail.”

  “I’m sure that’s it,” he agreed, his fingers lacing through mine.

  Like we were an ordinary couple out for a walk, I let him lead me away from the building and across the street where a collection of overgrown bushes on the edge of a church parking lot hid a typical white panel van. Except this van was parked behind three more just like it. And that wasn’t typical at all.

  As Barrett and I approached, the van’s rear door sprung open. Benches lined both sides of the cargo area. Agents of unknown affiliation lined the benches.

  They didn’t look happy to see us.

  And neither did April Callahan.

  At some point, she’d traded her short black skirt and trench coat for jeans and combat boots. And she’d accessorized her look with a heavy-duty Glock at her hip. She glared at me as she slammed the cargo doors behind us once Barrett and I climbed into the vehicle.

  “I thought I sent you home, Ms. Sinclair.”

  “No, I’m in Mississippi for the weekend, so I thought I’d take in the sights while I’m here.”

  “Well, there’s not much to see in this neighborhood.”

  “That,” I said, “depends on your point of view.”

  Callahan’s mouth formed a hard, harsh line, and I wondered if she was pissed off enough to tuck me out of the way. Say, in a holding cell on Fort Donovan. Because I’d just interfered in a federal investigation. Of course, my arrival in the middle of her raid had been an accident. But accidents only counted with horseshoes and hand grenades.

  “I’ve worked with Jamie before,” Barrett interjected. “I can vouch for her.”

  “Can you vouch for the suspect?” Callahan snapped. “So help me, if you’ve scared him off, Jamie—”

  “If Eddie took off,” I retorted, “you can blame it on this little caravan you’ve got parked within spittin’ distance of his place. With his history, he can smell law enforcement from a mile away.”

  Callahan frowned, her resolve wavering.

  “What do you want to do, April?” Barrett pushed. “Stand here and argue with Jamie, or pick up Jepson? The farmhouse was a bust, and I’ll be damned if I don’t have him in custody today.”

  Barrett had a firm grip on his temper, but fury and frustration emanated from him like heat. And I knew it stuck in his craw that, as an army officer rather than a civilian one, he had no jurisdiction in Beauville. He needed Callahan to do her part because that was the only way he could do his.

  “Get her a vest,” Callahan told Barrett as if I weren’t even there. “But she stays in the van. I don’t want her in the way when I serve the building super with the search warrant.”

  “The super is Eddie’s ex-wife,” I said.

  Callahan blinked in surprise.

  And I smiled. “Shirley shouldn’t give you trouble. But you never can tell.”

  The look Callahan leveled at me could’ve steamed the wrinkles out of my shirt.

  “Stay behind Adam,” she ordered, “and you can tag along.”

  I didn’t like how Callahan hadn’t done her homework regarding Shirley Smith, and I didn’t like that she was so comfortable calling Barrett by his first name. Cops typically called other cops by their last names, and feds did the same. Unless, of course, they had a personal reason not to.

  I stuffed that lovely thought in the back of my brain and got into position as Callahan’s cronies shut down the street in front of Eddie Jepson’s apartment house. They moved fast, setting up a perimeter around the block and controlling it. A hazmat crew rushed forward, sweeping the area with their Geiger counters. And when a tactical team boosted the lock on the building’s entrance, I was right behind Barrett and Callahan as she banged on Shirley Smith’s door. The woman who opened up was older, and I hoped wiser, than I remembered, but from her bleached curls to her crepey cleavage to the clipboard in her hand, she was the same woman who’d gladly accepted my tissues in the elevator after Eddie’s sentencing.

  “I’m here for Eddie Jepson,” Callahan announced, brandishing her warrant. “Get your master key.”

  Shirley quaked, but she didn’t quibble.

  Not that Callahan gave her much of an opportunity to do so.

  “Move, move, move!” she yelled.

  “He’s in the basement,” Shirley said. “Fourth door down.”

  And then we were in the basement with Callahan pounding on Eddie’s door.

  “Open up! Federal agents!”

  Light shifted under the door across the hall. Another opened a hairline crack. A tenant in Apartment A stuck his skinny nose into the corridor, saw what was happening, and shut his door with a bang.

  “Use your key,” Callahan ordered Shirley. “Stand aside.”

  Shirley, mouth twitching as she bit back tears, did as directed. Callahan’s agents swept past us, flooded into the apartment with their guns drawn. Shirley burst into sobs and clung to me like a vine.

  “Why are they doin’ this? What’s Eddie done?” she cried.

  Inside the apartment, an agent shouted, “Clear!”

  “Stay here,” I told Shirley. “Don’t move unless someone tells you to.”

  Barrett and I entered Eddie’s place. It smelled faintly of mildew and boiled cabbage, but the scent was stale. There was no fresh ozone from a recent shower, no odor from too much morning cologne. Eddie hadn’t entered this room in days—and no one else had, either.

  A couch with sagging springs squatted against the wall. A jumble of clean laundry occupied an armchair. Stacks of old newspapers and a box of crushed soda cans cluttered the far side of a Formica-topped, chrome-legged dining table. But the rest of the surface was clear of debris. As if it had been cleared for a purpose.

  “This is where he worked,” Callahan declared.

  Two men, in nitrile gloves and the nondescript windbreakers of some government agency or other, pushed in carrying tackle boxes large enough to house the gear that could catch Moby Dick. While one photographed the table’s surface with the biggest camera I’d ever seen, the other prepared vials and swabs. I figured the camera took images in a variety of spectra and the swabbing would detect trace chemicals. But the Geiger counters had remained quiet throughout this expedition, and
that, to my mind, was the most important test.

  Still, I looked on with an eager eye, staking out a spot beside Barrett and a spluttering radiator.

  Callahan joined us there.

  “The ex-wife,” she said to me. “Does she know you?”

  “Not really,” I admitted. “We met fifteen years ago, but I don’t think she recognized me just now.”

  “Refresh her memory. I need to know where Eddie Jepson is and when he’s coming back.”

  “I’ll give it a go.” I wanted Eddie found as badly as she did. “But look around, Callahan. I don’t think he’s coming back here anytime soon.”

  “Ma’am?” One of the techs working the tabletop brandished a vial. The swab and the fluid inside had turned a virulent pink.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Absolutely nothing,” Callahan growled.

  And she was absolutely right.

  Chapter 10

  Callahan managed to mind her manners as she asked Shirley Smith the most basic of questions in the basement hallway. For her part, Shirley insisted Eddie had stuck to the straight and narrow in recent years, and maybe he had. Until now.

  When Callahan turned her loose, Shirley sought the fresh air of the outdoors. The patch of property where the apartment building sat bumped up against a row of scraggly pine trees. Beneath them, azaleas struggled to bloom. Shirley snagged a seat on a concrete bench someone had set among the bushes. The whole arrangement was kind of pretty—if you could overlook the agents carrying box after box loaded with so-called evidence from Eddie’s apartment.

  Other tenants had drifted out of the building to stand in the afternoon gloom and take in the show. Passersby forgot about their Saturday errands to stop and stare. I, too, watched and waited while Shirley laid her clipboard beside her and fired up a cigarette. Her heavy chest rose and fell as she drew deep drags of nicotine-laden smoke—and when her shoulders eased into a more relaxed position, I made my move.

  Without waiting for an invitation, I slid onto the bench beside her.