“Hell of a day,” I said.
Shirley regarded me cautiously, took in my bulletproof vest, and pointed a false fingernail at the agents hauling boxes. “You with this crowd?”
“I met Eddie years ago,” I said, “back when he got caught up in a little trouble over women and credit cards. The feds let me come along today.”
The light of recognition flared in Shirley’s eyes. “You’re that lady private investigator. The one who gave me the Kleenex.”
I nodded.
Shirley glared at the ground, dug the toe of her high-heeled sandal into the rusty pine needles. “Well, you can tell your cop friends Eddie paid for what he done back then. He’s been straight ever since.”
“With your help,” I surmised.
“I divorced him,” she told me, “but that don’t mean I don’t love him. I always loved him. You gotta stand by the ones you love. Most folks don’t understand that nowadays. But I think you do.”
“I hope I do.”
And for some reason I couldn’t name, I glanced toward the apartment complex. Beneath the aluminum overhang, Barrett stood watching me with Shirley. Like a cowboy ready for a gunfight, his feet were squarely planted and his arms hung loosely at his sides, and though I couldn’t see it beneath his coat, I knew his nine-millimeter was within easy reach. He’d kept me from getting hurt on the Lady Luck last night and I knew he’d do everything in his power to keep me from getting hurt now. Shirley, I was certain, would do the same for Eddie.
“Where is he, Shirley?”
“Workin’.” Shirley reached into the V-neck of her top and fished a pack of cigarettes from her bra. She offered me one, but I declined. “He’ll go off for days at a time, come back with a nice roll of cash. He’s been able to pay his rent on his own. I don’t have to carry him no more.”
“That’s great.”
“Yeah, he’s been doin’ good for a couple years. He can even skip a card game now and again.”
“Any idea where he’s working?”
Shirley shook a cigarette from her pack and tucked it between her painted lips. “I’ve asked him. He’ll just say he’s workin’ outta town, stayin’ outta the big house. That’s all.”
“Well, if you hear from him, call nine-one-one to report it. You know the drill. You don’t want to face charges for aiding and abetting.”
Shirley stubbed out her cigarette as if it had gone sour in her mouth.
“Or,” I said, picking up her clipboard and borrowing her pen to scratch my phone number at the top of her checklist even though my cell was nothing more than a pile of ash, “you can call me. I won’t lie; Eddie’s going to have to face some tough questions from the authorities. But you know I’ll give him a fair shake.”
Shirley nodded. She wouldn’t look me in the eye. And I couldn’t say I blamed her.
“Well.” I rose from the bench. “It was good to see you again, Shirley. I’m just sorry it had to be like this.”
“Me, too,” she murmured. “Me, too.”
Barrett met me at the corner of the apartment building where pine needle mulch and a sickly magnolia sapling passed for landscaping. In the privacy that distance brings, I told him about Eddie’s sketchy employment situation, about his erratic work schedule, and about his pockets being full of cash these days. Cash payments meant Eddie probably hadn’t filed a tax return. We’d never connect him with an employer through the IRS. And that left me with one conclusion.
“Eddie’s boss must be calling him up, sending him on odd jobs,” I said. “I’m sure Callahan’s pulled Eddie’s phone records. Match a name to an incoming call and we might hit the jackpot.”
“Unless Eddie’s using a burner.”
Which was entirely possible. With a few greenbacks and no contract to sign, disposable cellphones were easy to get these days. As a result, some calls were notoriously hard to document.
The frustration of it had Barrett scrubbing his face with his capable hands. “Phone records or no, I’m going to find this Eddie guy.”
“We’ll find him,” I promised.
“I’m going to find him and I’m going to see justice done for Damon and the dead.”
I nodded, because a sudden lump in my throat wouldn’t let me do much else.
“I’m going to do this, Jamie, and I’m going to get out of this dead-end assignment. I’m going to have something to offer you—”
“Wait. What?” A strange foreboding crept into my gut, threatened to turn me inside out. “You don’t have to offer me anything—”
“Yes, I do. That’s what a man does when he wants to ask a woman—”
“Adam, slow down—”
“I’ve been thinking about this for months. I don’t want to slow down.”
“Well, I want you to!”
Heads turned our way and all the agents got an eyeful of the private-eye-turned-security-specialist who’d lost her cool with the military cop.
“You want Adam to…what?” Callahan asked, appearing at my side and pushing into our conversation like a nosey neighbor.
An uncomfortable heat flooded my cheeks.
And Barrett’s face went blank.
“I want to find Eddie as much as you do,” I said, skipping over Callahan’s personal question and giving her a professional answer. “But domestic terrorism is a far cry from Eddie’s past indiscretions. Why would a guy like him want to walk onto a crowded riverboat with a bomb in his bag?”
“You never know what someone else is thinking.” Callahan’s eyes slid toward Barrett, then back to me. “We know nothing of Eddie Jepson’s politics or his ideology.”
Eddie had always looked out for Eddie—and done as little work as possible to meet that goal.
That was Eddie’s ideology.
“Money,” Barrett told her, “can make a man change his tune.”
“Follow the money,” I agreed, and told Callahan what Shirley had told me about Eddie’s new career path.
Callahan’s brows hitched higher on her forehead. I took this to mean I’d impressed her. Until she said, “Well, Jamie, I guess it’s a good thing you stumbled across my operation after all.”
With that remark, she was gone, hiking across the lawn to confer with the agent loading the evidence boxes into the van.
I wasn’t sorry to see her go.
“When did she start calling you Adam?” I asked Barrett.
“She always has.”
“Always?”
“We’ve crossed paths a time or two over the years.”
“Oh.”
Thinking of Barrett with April Callahan made me feel forlorn all of a sudden. But that wasn’t right. Barrett was standing right here beside me.
He grinned at me, but his smile was a dim shadow of the bright beacon it usually was.
“Jealousy looks good on you, honey.”
“I’m not jealous,” I scoffed.
But to tell the truth, I kind of was. Which made me wonder how Ray couldn’t be. Ray and Corinne were married, which to my way of thinking signaled a strong commitment—and a deep vulnerability. In marriage, you handed someone else the power to break your heart. So, you needed to guard your heart, and each other, jealously. Yet, as far as I could tell, Ray hadn’t noticed Bran sniffing around his wife. However, maybe Eddie had.
I said, “Why do you suppose Eddie approached Bran last night? And why was Bran harassing Monique?”
“Some guys push women around and call it flattery.”
I remembered Bran avoiding confrontation after sneaking down Ray’s stairs the day before, and how he slipped from Ray’s kitchen rather than risk exchanging strong words with me that morning.
“Yeah,” I said, “but I don’t think Bran’s one of those kind.”
“What kind do you think he is?” Barrett asked.
“That’s part of the problem. I don’t know yet.”
“Well, keep your head down,” Barrett warned.
It was a soldier’s sentiment, and Barrett meant every
word of it.
And that warmed my hesitant heart.
Chapter 11
Thanks to the information printed on the registration slip I’d discovered in Bran Laurent’s glove box, I found the man’s apartment with very little aggravation, and that was a good thing considering my aggravation quotient was already full up this weekend.
Bran’s white Tundra sat on a quiet street in front of a 1930s redbrick building, framed by sprawling blue-green junipers throwing off tentacles like a band of octopuses. A sandstone keystone in the middle of the façade bore the street address. Terraces on either side of the structure flanked apartments A, B, C, and D. Bran lived in apartment C, which I figured was the top unit on the left.
I made this brilliant deduction after the downstairs neighbor emerged from his apartment with his lunch bucket in hand, kissed his wife on the doorstep, and started up the street at a fast clip for the bus stop. A steady stream of children, wearing shined shoes, pressed pants, and long-sleeved polo shirts stitched with the crest of the local parochial school, emerged from the first-floor apartment on the right. Their mother, her hair in an elaborate crown of braids pinned to the top of her head and a Bible in her hand, herded them to a beaten-up minivan, no doubt for a timely arrival at Saturday evening mass.
While Bran’s neighbors went about their business, I continued to lie low across the street, comfy and cozy in my rental car, with Ray’s notebooks spread across my discarded jumpsuit on the passenger seat beside me. The sun slipped toward the western horizon and its long rays, paired with the windshield, the greenhouse effect, and the fact that I’d been up all night, conspired to make me drowsy. At some point, I must’ve dozed off, because a dog barking in the distance had me jumping upright in my seat and gripping the steering wheel like I’d been granted the pole position at the start of the Indy 500.
But any kind of surveillance isn’t a race. As Ray would say, it’s a test of patience. And my patience was finally rewarded when Bran emerged from his apartment on the second story, trotted down the steps, and hopped in his truck to drive away.
As soon as he turned the corner, I was out of the car. My eyes were grainy from a long night and my stomach rumbled with the memory of the cookies Cora, the smock-wearing mother figure, had offered me in the secret bunker, but none of that mattered to me as I circled the apartment building with the help of a narrow alley out back. Above, Bran’s blinds, those horizontal vinyl things, were shuttered tight. A frosted window indicated his bathroom probably overlooked the alley, but the aperture was short and skinny and, as an escape route, couldn’t accommodate much more than a cat.
I hustled up the concrete steps to the second level, careful to make no noise. Bran’s own little terrace played host to a mountain bike, an iron bistro set where he might sip coffee on nice mornings, and a pair of muddy sneakers. Dropping flat to the wall so anyone who might be inside couldn’t see me from the window, I leaned on the doorbell.
An old-time buzzer went off like an angry bee inside his apartment. And when the buzzer got no response, I hit it again. This time, I leaned on it—and kept on leaning on it—until I should’ve heard movement or muttered curses inside.
I got neither.
The door boasted a deadbolt and a pretty good one, too. There’d be no rattling the knob until the spring mechanism in the lockset gave way, or wedging a gas station’s affinity card between the strike plate and the bolt. To enter here, I’d need time, a set of solid lock picks, and a boatload of specialized talent—or to find Bran’s spare key tucked along the jamb—but smart money wouldn’t bet on either option.
Instead, I moved to the window. Original to the place, it was a flimsy, aluminum-framed, single-paned thing. And it was meant to open vertically, with the two halves meeting in the middle like a set of French doors.
Flat and stamped out of sheet metal some eighty years ago, a simple latch held both halves of the window shut. But that didn’t deter me. Scooping up one of Bran’s abandoned sneakers, I slipped a hand into it, applied its sole to the overlapping strip where the panes met, and gave the entire window a jiggle.
The vibration made the latch bounce up and down on the pin securing it to one of the frames. I pushed harder, waggling the window all the while, and the latch jumped higher. The glass rattled in its age-old glazing, but I kept at it until the latch bounced free of its catch soldered on the opposite half of the window. Free of the force that held the window closed, both halves swung wide.
In a wink, I reached in, lifted the blinds, and climbed up and over the sill. I found myself in a glorified studio apartment. I could see most of it from where I stood, latching the window closed.
Bran, it seemed, was a better housekeeper than me. In the galley kitchen, clean dishes sparkled in the drying rack. Plumped pillows stood at attention against the bed’s headboard. A newspaper and a number of magazines had been neatly stacked on the coffee table fronting the sofa. Only the bathroom was out of sight, and I was willing to bet it was as tidy as the rest of the apartment. But I wasn’t in a hurry to look at it. Because something else drew my interest.
All quarter-sawn oak and old-fashioned varnish, Bran’s desk dominated a third of the little apartment. At one corner, a wire basket held outgoing mail. A short stack of manila file folders waited in an orderly manner on the other. In the dead center, one of those enormous calendars served as a blotter. A weighty brass lamp with a green glass shade arched over it.
I dropped into Bran’s desk chair and let my fingers do the walking through the file folders. Each was labeled the way Ray preferred, with a client name and range of dates on the tab, but the info didn’t ring any bells. According to the contents, none of these clients had requested that Bran bully Monique Wells, the blond bombshell Specialist Damon Maddox had brought to Dining Out, or bump up against Eddie Jepson at all.
Next, I fanned through the oversized sheets of the calendar, but found nothing interesting jotted in the squares. Even Bran’s outgoing mail was boring. Apparently, the folks at his cable provider, electric company, and insurance agency would receive his payments for services rendered in the next three to five business days.
I moved on to the desk’s drawers, located computer cables neatly coiled in the top right-hand side. The accompanying laptop was missing, and I didn’t see a printer anywhere, so there’d be no pulling juicy secrets off his hard drive. In his lower right drawer, however, I hit pay dirt. Beneath a collection of yellow legal pads, Bran had laid a lockbox.
It was heavy-duty slate-gray steel with four dials comprising a combination lock set into its face. I hauled it onto the desktop and turned the crank that would release the lid, hoping that Bran was as fallible as many human beings I’d met as a security specialist. Afraid they’ll forget the magic numbers safeguarding their valuables, plenty of my new clients confess to having left the tumblers open and their safe or box shut, but unlocked. Naturally, that rarely ends well. But Bran had taken precautions. The lid didn’t budge.
I rifled through the rest of the desk, looking for dates or digits in series that might open the box. I came up with nothing. I tried turning every dial one numeral to the left. Nada. I reset and tried every numeral to the right. Nope. Not even the dates on the desk calendar were helpful. At this rate, Bran would return and catch me in the middle of this illegal exercise. Then I set the dials to Corinne’s birthday. And the box opened.
In a black leatherette wallet, beneath the title for his truck, the rental agreement for his apartment, and myriad other documents, I found Bran’s PI license. It hadn’t been issued by the state of Mississippi, however. After all, the Magnolia State is one of a handful that don’t regulate the private investigator profession. As a result, any Tom, Dick, or Harry can hang out a shingle and take on clients as a private eye. But that wouldn’t be advisable. The real private investigators’ community is a tight-knit one. Anyone running afoul of its ethics and standards to fleece the public would run the risk of exposure, not to mention possible prosecution for any c
rimes, backed up by well-documented evidence that would certainly stick.
When it came to legitimate qualifications, however, Bran Laurent appeared to be the real deal. The great state of Louisiana had seen fit to issue him a journeyman’s private investigator’s license, which meant he’d studied the law, apprenticed with a reputable PI, passed a stringent exam, and could now ply his trade for any agency within its borders. How and why Bran had ended up in Beauville, Mississippi, I had no idea, but at least Ray hadn’t formed a professional partnership with a faker.
Still, even though Bran was a licensed investigator, I didn’t see a permit for another item tucked into the bottom of the box. It was a Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special, a snub-nosed revolver that, with its negligible weight and short barrel, took more skill than most handguns to use accurately. I myself preferred the Beretta 9000S, but mine was locked away in my Alexandria, Virginia, townhouse. Bran’s weapon was ready to rock and roll with a full complement of .38-caliber rounds onboard. But it also smelled of oil, meaning it hadn’t been fired recently without Bran taking the time to give it a good cleaning afterward.
Because a girl can’t be too careful with these kinds of things, I darted to the kitchenette’s sink to borrow a dish towel. I wiped my fingerprints from the snubby and returned it to the lockbox. That’s when I discovered the digital camera, zipped into a neoprene case.
With their built-in zoom lenses and digital capabilities, cameras like this one were every PI’s tool of the trade. With a snap, an investigator could document the activities of a cheating spouse, a deadbeat dad, or other person suspected of wrongdoing. So with a flick of the power switch, I fired up the camera, just to see what Bran had been photographing.
I set the device to display the images stored on its data card and the first photo flashed onto the small screen embedded in the camera’s back. Apparently, a red Hyundai Accent had skidded along a guardrail to smash into a telephone pole. Several shots catalogued the damage, but the pictures held no meaning for me. Neither did the next set. They captured the comings and goings of half a dozen well-dressed guys visiting a sprawling plantation house in the countryside somewhere.
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