by Lane Stone
“I don’t want to talk about it. It’s too upsetting.” In all fairness to myself, between Thomas Chestnut’s murder, what was going on with Jack and the Senate Committee hearing, being a little short of sleep, I found the CDC’s phone system more than a little stressful. I was a fake temp anyway. He had no idea just how temporary I was. And was that really the best use of my time?
“Oh, you’re going to talk about it!”
Oh, yeah? I jumped off my chair and climbed under the desk. Tara swung around and sat down.
“Where’s that other one?” Harold yelled.
“She didn’t work out. HR is calling the temp service to let them know.” Tara’s voice was soothing. I think she added in a little conspiratorial wink, like ‘oh, what we competent people have to put up with.’
His silence told me HR never responded that quickly to a problem. Either that or her top button had come undone.
“She’s had problems in other positions, too. Actually, she’s been dismissed from all her previous placements. She just can’t seem to catch on. Oh!”
The last was due to the pinch I gave her calf.
“Get me on that conference call.” I pictured the boss stomping back to his office, couldn’t really hear it since he wore soft sole shoes.
I reached up and pointed to the instructions and to the paper with the call-in number. It didn’t take much to make Harold happy and that did it.
“Can I come out now?”
“In a minute.”
“Look at the photographs tacked to the cubicle,” I hissed.
Tara gasped. “Vic, over here.”
“Have you seen Leigh?”
“She’s under the desk.”
I think it says a lot that Victoria expressed neither surprise nor curiosity that I was hiding under a desk.
“Look at these pictures,” Tara said.
This time Vic positively gasped in astonishment. “How many jobs does that poor girl have?”
“Get real, Dalai Lama.” I ridiculed from below. “Tara, look for anything personal she left behind, her address, anything. Vic, go through the file cabinets behind the desk. What was she working on? Anything to do with Lake Lanier, or Buford Dam, or Thomas Chestnut?”
Tara got up and closed Harold’s door. When she returned, she reached her hand under the desk. “His back is turned.”
“Vic, how did you do?” Since she looks like a sexy math-lete, I knew if Harold came out and found her he wouldn’t suspect anything nefarious.
“I found the guest office Thomas Chestnut and other consultants used whenever they worked on-site. It’s two doors down on the right. I didn’t have time to find out if he left anything.”
I crawled out from under the desk and got on the other side of the cubicle from Harold’s door. “I’ll go look.”
My cell phone rang and Tara handed it to me. I answered it once I was in the hallway. It was a current client. She wanted to be sure we’d be following her husband, Ellis, at lunchtime. I assured her we would and hung up. This Mrs. was very wealthy. She hadn’t told him she wanted a divorce. She expected him to go for alimony because of her family money and her legal team wanted to check that.
A young woman in white painters’ overalls and a navy CDC staff t-shirt was scraping a name off the door next to Harold’s. It wasn’t the second door down, but I wanted to start a conversation. “Was this Thomas’s office?”
“No, it was Robert’s. Poor guy.”
“Why?”
“Twenty-three years of service and he was fired.”
I m-m-m’d in sympathy.
“A consultant complained about him. I don’t think that’s right. The consultant should have been put on the curb.”
I had to decide: keep her talking or see if Thomas had left anything behind. I didn’t have time to do both.
A man with an overgrown moustache he thought was amusing walked down the hall toward us and I acted like I was doing anything but talking to her. He wore the same painters’ overalls but his ensemble included a denim shirt with the CDC emblem. Rank has its privileges, I suppose.
“When you get through here, come back to the loading dock.” He nodded to me and walked off.
I slipped into the office. The guest office idea was a dud––there was nothing there.
“This is too clean,” Victoria said when she and Tara joined me.
Tara opened and closed a few metal cabinet doors. “You’re right. No guest office is this bare. There should be the odd office pen or memo pad in an overhead bin.”
They had office experience and I didn’t, so I deferred to them.
“This office hasn’t just been cleaned, it’s been cleared,” Tara said.
I walked to the door and looked both ways. “Let’s get out of here. We have some place to be at noon.”
On the way out, I pointed out the office of Robert somebody who’d been fired for playing too rough with Thomas Chestnut.
Harold’s office door opened and he bellowed to an empty chair, “I need you to….”
Mentally wishing him all the luck with that, we decamped.
A few minutes later, I was behind the wheel and we were headed back up to Gwinnett County. “Anything interesting in Janice’s desk?”
Vic was fooling around with the camera. Photos from cases have their own folder on the memory card and she wanted to be able to save those we were about to take in their proper place. We’re confident and we’re organized. “She lives in Decatur and, yes, we have her address. Her parents live in Boston and so that may be where she’s from. I think she might be engaged.”
“I don’t think she’s engaged. I think she wants to be engaged.” Tara was tapping notes into her notebook computer in the back seat.
“Why don’t you think she’s engaged?” I snagged a pair of sunglasses from the dash.
“She had too many bride and wedding magazines. And there weren’t any photos of her with a guy looking betrothed. What did you find out, Leigh?”
“Other than the first name of the guy Thomas had fired, nothing. It was Robert. That and the location of his former office should be enough for Detective Kent.”
Victoria told me she hadn’t found any information on water safety and Buford Dam. Damn.
***
I was moseying through the parking lot of the Days Inn on Jimmy Carter Boulevard when Mr. Ellis Jones, walking hand in hand with a young woman, turned around and looked right at me. Our eyes met. I read his mind and knew what he was about to do. “We have us a runner.” This happens from time to time and, yes, we have an app for that.
I pretended to give chase.
Tara yelled from the sidewalk, “Hey, Bryan?”
It’s the craziest thing––if you call someone who’s doing something––or someone––he shouldn’t be doing, a random name, he’ll stop and look at you, relieved. Of course, the camera in Victoria’s hand went click, click, click.
***
We got back on I-85 north. Our first stop was my house to feed Abby and take her out, and then we headed to the Cracker Barrel on Lawrenceville-Suwanee Road for lunch and to get my Jeep.
I checked my watch for billing purposes. Then we were back talking about Thomas Chestnut. We got to talking about what a good idea it would be to check out his home, then wondering if Bea had a key. Tara called her. She didn’t, but she told us the address and where he hid one. He lived in Duluth, as does Kelly Taylor, on Abbott’s Bridge Road.
Victoria and Tara ordered Cracker Barrel cheeseburgers without the buns and I had a vegetable plate of fried okra, baked apples, carrots and broccoli. My phone rang but the number wasn’t one my phone recognized.
“I’m changing planes,” Jack said. “It seems my departure from the Army is being brought into this.”
“I thought your retirement had been approved and signed already.” I took a sip of tea, then a deep breath. I got up from the table and walked outside.
“It hasn’t gone all the way up. Even if it had, I can be re
called at any time until I turn sixty-five. The Army can keep a general on active duty, and there’s less paperwork to get me to do something if they keep me on active, rather than recalling me.” He hesitated, then plowed ahead. “An officer is retired at the highest rank served on active duty satisfactorily. That’s what they’re threatening me with, if I don’t return to testify on night raids.”
“I know that three and four star positions are temporary but you’re two star. They can’t take that rank away from you, can they? Even though there’s no military judicial action over your head?”
“I’ve got to go.”
“Wait, I thought the Army didn’t want you to testify?”
“They don’t, but the Secretary of Defense obviously does. Gotta go. I’ll call when I can.”
Tara and Victoria were looking at me when I came back to the table. I leaned in so I could speak in a low voice. “He’s on a plane. He left because they want him to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee in an open hearing instead of a closed session, and he doesn’t want to.” Saying it, I realized it sounded like he must be guilty of something. “You know how he feels about military officers making political statements and he’s tried to stay above all that. He doesn’t want to get pulled in now that he’s about to retire.”
Tara pointed at me with her spoon. “How can the Army do this to him? Who do I need to write to?”
“He doesn’t think it’s the Army, he thinks it’s the Secretary of Defense or someone in the Senate.”
The waitress brought our food. She smiled down at us. “What’s the matter, girls? Men trouble?”
“Men are trouble,” Tara answered.
“I hear that.”
We laughed, then tore that food up.
About half way through, Tara came up for air. She steepled her fingers under her chin and squeezed her eyes shut. “I keep thinking about finding Thomas’s body.”
I rubbed her back. “That was upsetting. Especially since you now know he was Paul’s stepfather. We’re not used to having our different worlds overlap.”
“It’s not that. It looked like a tableau, or a setting in a painting. Crime scenes are supposed to look messy.”
Vic’s eyeglasses were on the table by her plate, and she put them back on. “What’s been bothering me is the statistical likelihood we would be at the scene of another murder.”
“You mean, why us?” They both nodded. “If Bea didn’t recommend us to Thomas, who did? I guess he could have found us on the internet or in the phone book….” I trailed off because those possibilities were about as satisfying as fat-free cookies.
We paid the check, then Tara rode with me and we followed Vic to the Toyota dealership to pick up my Highlander Hybrid. We made another detour to my house to leave the Jeep, then it was on to Alpharetta for Vic to drop off her car at her house. From there it wasn’t far to the house where Thomas had lived and loved.
CHAPTER 16
Continuation of statement by Leigh Reed. Since we were in the car together we were talking business.
Tara said, “I’m a little worried about Bea. She’s not over that kidnapping and what’s to say it won’t be attempted again? The police don’t know who kidnapped her or why.”
Victoria twisted in the seat and looked back at her. “Who are you and what did you do with Tara?”
“I know last time I wanted nothing to do with murder, but….Whewee! This is swanky.”
“Your house is this big.” Whereas Jack and I had turned right onto Abbotts Bridge Road from Peachtree Industrial when we went rafting, today we turned left, or south. Several streets along there are named Bridge this or Bridge that. The bridges referred to traverse the Chattahoochee River. The houses were set back very far from the road and were very large.
“All three of ours are, but they don’t have a majestic approach like this,” Tara said.
Vic was laughing. “Uh-oh, Tara’s going to get a new driveway, landscaping, and move her house back in the lot. Leigh, are you finally happy with your windows?”
“I am! The mahogany trim is beautiful. But now the bedroom looks like it needs painting.”
As Bea had promised, there was a fake rock beside the front porch step, hiding––sure––a key. The porch was square and only the front was open. On the left and directly ahead there were tall windows. The front door was on the right. A layout like that gave us each something to do. I unlocked the door, while Vic looked in the side window and Tara peeked in the middle section.
“The office is over here and I can see his computer waiting for me.” This was Christmas for Victoria. “What do you see, Tara?”
That was when I realized Tara was frozen to the spot.
“There’s someone looking at me.”
We couldn’t just take her word for it and get the hell out of there. Oh, no. That would have been too easy. We each had to look and get the sin scared out of us. Paige Ford stood there in blue jeans and a Peachtree Road Race t-shirt from a couple of years back.
“Do you think she sees us?” Vic was talking out of the side of her mouth, like a ventriloquist.
Paige raised a gun. It was about as big as her hand, but when a gun is pointed at you it looks like a bazooka.
“I’m guessing, yes,” I said.
She pointed with the gun to the open door. “Do you want to come in?”
In unison, we shook our heads no, keeping our eyes on the gun.
“This was my father’s. It’s not loaded.”
Tara and Vic turned to go in, but I stopped them. “Put the gun down first.”
“Sure.” She threw it onto an ornate, antique loveseat, in the foyer. The damn thing went off, giving new meaning to the term, throw pillow, when two of them became airborne. Because she seemed genuinely startled, I ran in.
To be on the safe side, I planted myself in between Paige and the gun. If she made a move for that poor loveseat, I was going to knock her down. I gave up blueberry cobbler at Cracker Barrel for this? To be cut down in my prime? “Why would your father have a loaded gun?”
Since he’d been murdered, I guess he had it for protection, but I wanted to give her an opening to start telling us what she knew.
“He had received several threats.”
“From whom?” I asked.
“I don’t know who it was. He never told me.”
Tara walked over and put her arm through Paige’s. “I just peed in my pants. Just a little, but still, so we’re going to have to do better than that.”
“There were phone calls and he didn’t recognize the voice. She never called when he was here. She always left messages.”
“She?” I asked.
Paige nodded.
“Saying what?” I thought that was a logical next question, but maybe that was just me.
“I couldn’t get any specifics out of him. Other than it was a woman calling and giving him instructions. To my dad it sounded like an ultimatum.”
“Could it have been someone at CDC?” Of course, Bea had talked about Thomas having a dispute with a man, but there was always Janice Marshall.
“No.” She sounded certain.
“If you don’t know who it was, why are you convinced there wasn’t a CDC connection?” I asked. My heart rate had returned to normal, but when she took a step toward me, it sped up again.
Vic took her arm. “Let’s go in here.” She led her into the home office off the foyer.
Tara was walking toward the back of the house. “I’ll get you a glass of water.” Our eyes met and I knew she’d do as much snooping as she could get away with while she was at it.
I folded one of the dead pillows around the gun and took the whole business into the living room. An ornately carved Chinese trunk sat against the far wall and looked like a good hiding place. Gingerly I put the pistol and pillow down on the sofa, and unlatched the lid. It was empty so I placed the gun inside, with all the respect a gun like that deserves. It had a new home until we could tell Detective Kent abo
ut it. I gave the heavy lid a tap and let it fall. When it landed, the damn gun went off again. I jumped. What the….?
From the kitchen, Tara screamed. Victoria yelled my name.
“I’m okay, y’all.”
Vic and Paige sat on a black leather sofa. I collapsed on a matching recliner. I don’t know who invented the recliner, but that is a piece of furniture I hate myself for loving. The oversized cherry desk and built-ins kept the room from looking like a total man cave. I didn’t see any bullet holes, which was, of course more than I could say for the foyer and living room.
“What the hell would make a gun do that? I’ve heard of hair triggers, but that’s downright unsafe.”
“Not all of my dad’s reconfigurations were improvements.”
Tara joined us and stood in the archway. “Ya’ think?” Then she walked, back to the kitchen, touching the wall now and again for support.
Victoria touched Paige’s hand. “There might be something on his computer that would tell us.”
“You can look.”
“If you insist.” Vic was sitting behind the desk and had his computer on before the phrase was out of her mouth. She pulled a box about the size of a pack of cards out of her handbag and attached it to Mr. Chestnut’s computer via a USB port.
“I’m going to get back to work. I’m donating his clothes to the Salvation Army.”
Tara was back. “And then you’ll put the house on the market?”
Paige spun around. “Why shouldn’t I? Do you think Dr. Armistead is going to try to take it from me? My dad’s will left everything to me! I was his only real child.”
I hoped the gun was hidden well enough.
“Paul’s not interested in this house, or anything else that belonged to your father.”
Paige dropped down on the bottom step and, hiding her face in her hands, cried. Tara sat down and put her arms around her. I went to check on Vic, but she came out to us.
I knelt down in front of Paige. “Did you put the chip in your dad? You didn’t answer when we asked you that on Sunday night.”
“No! And I never even saw a scar on his shoulder.”