Paper Bullets

by Reed, Annie

  I’d given up using any kind of sweetener in my tea about the same time Samantha had started seriously counting calories. The stuff in the blue packets I used to add to my tea wasn’t good for me, Samantha had informed me, and she wished I’d stop using artificial sweeteners at all. I told her that was fine, but she’d have to give up soda because that wasn’t good for her, either. She’d said fine, and we’d struck a deal.

  I wasn’t sure what had been worse—her caffeine withdrawals or me getting used to the bitter taste of unsweetened iced tea. At least I didn’t get headaches quite as often, so maybe it was a good thing after all.

  After the iced tea helped me turned my inner Dr. Phil off, I thought about the information I had learned.

  I knew more now than I had before about Lewis Richards and Justin Sewell. According to Stacy, both men had been interested in Melody, but her interest had been strictly business, even if part of that business was to sell the sex appeal of a well-toned body.

  With Richards, Melody had been his personal trainer. I wondered for how long. Kyle had told me that Richards had been suspended for the last six months so he could get his life in shape. Apparently he’d taken that literally. Had he substituted one addiction for another? Maybe. Addicts could be unpredictable people, and she’d had confrontations with him about the best way to achieve the results he wanted.

  But why had he been waiting for her outside the cafe? That couldn’t have had anything to do with a disagreement over a workout routine. Richards had invaded her personal life, just like a stalker. Had his addiction to getting his body in shape morphed into an unhealthy obsession with his personal trainer?

  I tried to remember whether I’d seen the white SUV earlier in the day when I’d been following Melody all over town so I could try to catch a glimpse of her stalker. I certainly didn’t remember a white SUV taking off after her like Richards had when she’d left the cafe. I couldn’t be sure if I’d seen him at any other time.

  Richards had clearly seen Sewell come out of the cafe after Melody just like I had, and he’d probably had a better vantage point to see her turn around and give Sewell a flirty little come-hither grin. Richards had certainly pulled away from the curb in a hurry to follow her as she headed back to work, and he’d been upset enough that he’d had the angry conversation with her I’d witnessed over an hour later.

  But was he angry enough to kill her? He hadn’t seemed angry when he’d taken my picture with his cell phone outside of the gym. He’d seemed self-satisfied, somehow.

  I didn’t have enough information to take any of my suspicions about Richards to the cops. I had a few facts, a few observations, but most of what I had was speculation, and it was going to take more than speculation to turn the detectives’ interest away from Ryan and onto Richards.

  And what if Richards wasn’t the right guy? Justin Sewell was still waiting in the wings.

  I was pretty sure Sewell was the banker Stacy had been talking about. A well-off middle class guy who’d wheedled an extra free trip to the gym out of a woman he was flirting with. Why had she agreed to have lunch with him? He didn’t sound like a guy who would spring for lunch if he wasn’t getting something in return.

  I needed more information on Sewell. I could talk to his neighbors, but a guy who moved every six months was a guy who didn’t make close ties to anyone in his neighborhood. He’d moved from branch to branch within his own bank. The people he worked with might know more about him, but if I had to guess, I imagined that while he might be the subject of company-wide gossip, I doubted any of his co-workers actually knew very little about the real him.

  I studied my reflection in the rearview mirror. My nose and cheeks were a little on the pink side, but any real sunburn wouldn’t come out until after I showered.

  Before I’d left the house, I’d changed out of the shorts I’d worn that morning and put on a pair of jeans. Not designer jeans by any stretch of the imagination, but new enough that they’d be acceptable in a casual work environment.

  My light-weight tee shirt was a little too casual, but I had a white cotton button-front blouse in the backseat I could throw on like an over-shirt, the summer equivalent of a suit jacket. I didn’t have strappy sandals in the car—I wasn’t sure I had a pair of strappy sandals in my closet either—so my tennis shoes would have to do.

  I could pull my hair back into a ponytail, wipe the sweat off my face with a little of the bottled water I always had in the car, and presto-chango—instant businesswoman off to meet with her brand new personal banker.

  I just hoped he hadn’t taken the day off.

  CHAPTER 21

  JUSTIN SEWELL STILL OCCUPIED the same desk at the bank where I’d seen him yesterday, but today his desk had a nameplate with his name on it along with a business card holder completely filled with his business cards.

  Sewell was talking to another customer when I got there, so I sat in one of the uncomfortable chairs the bank reserved for people who had to wait to give the bank their money. While I waited, I took the opportunity to observe Sewell in his natural habitat.

  His customer was an elderly woman with long white hair that hung nearly to her waist and looked far thicker than mine. Her eyes were bright with amusement as he chatted with her like she was his best friend. He leaned forward in his seat to catch something she said, his interest riveted on her, and when he chuckled in response, the woman actually blushed.

  Unlike a lot of people in service positions who had to deal with the elderly, Sewell seemed in no hurry to rush this woman. I sat waiting for twenty minutes while the two of them talked. Sewell occasionally typed something into his computer, and at one point the women took a card of some type out of her purse and showed it to him.

  As they neared the end of the conversation, Sewell printed out forms for the woman to sign, and she handed over a wad of cash from her purse that made me lift my eyebrows. She’d either won big at one of the casinos or cleaned out the stash she’d been keeping under her mattress for the last forty years.

  Sewell had to walk by me to take the cash to one of the teller windows. He spotted me waiting, and the smile he’d had for the elderly woman dialed up a notch.

  “Hello, there!” he said to me. “Great to see you again.”

  I smiled back. If he didn’t remember me, he was doing a good job of faking it. Then again, how many women had tracked him down just to ask if he’d dropped twenty dollars on the street? I’d only done that the day before.

  “Are you waiting for me?” he asked.

  “If you’ve got a minute.”

  My answer pleased him. “For you? I’ve got two,” he said. “Don’t go anywhere.” And then he was off to the teller line to deposit his customer’s cash.

  It took another five minutes for him to finish up with the elderly woman. Sewell actually walked her halfway to the glass doors in the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that opened from the bank into the office building’s lobby. She left all smiles with a hint of a blush still staining her cheeks.

  “Now, what can I help you with today?” he asked as I sat down in one of his client chairs.

  I’d had plenty of time to study the brochures outlining the various accounts the bank offered. “I’m interested in one of your business checking accounts.” I wasn’t really, but I could fake it.

  “Great!”

  He went into a short spiel about the types of accounts the bank offered. He talked with the same charm and enthusiasm I’d seen him display with the elderly lady.

  I had to admit, being the focus of all that charisma dialed up to about nine was a little disconcerting. I had to remind myself that this man had been interested in my ex-husband’s fiancé and I was only here because I was investigating her death.

  A death he didn’t seem particularly upset about.

  If he’d shed any tears over Melody, I could see no evidence of puffy eyes or the same type of stress I’d noticed in Stacy when I’d met with her at the gym. Did he even know that Melody had died
, or would she simply be someone he never heard from again?

  After he was done reviewing the accounts his bank offered for small businesses, I settled on a low-cost checking account that I planned to keep open only as long as I absolutely had to. If he was disappointed that I hadn’t picked an account with a bunch of bells and whistles and a high monthly service fee, he didn’t let it show.

  He opened a new screen on his computer and began asking me questions about what type of business I had. I handed him the copy of my private investigator’s license that I kept in my wallet.

  “You’ll find all the information you need on here,” I said.

  He took the license and peered at it. “Abby Maxon,” he said, reading my name printed on the license. “You’re really a private investigator?”

  “Sounds more glamorous than it is,” I said.

  “You mean it’s not like on television?”

  “Most of the time I sit around and wait for people to show up so I can serve them with papers they’d rather not get. Although every now and then...” I lifted an eyebrow and deliberately let the sentence trail off to see whether he’d bite.

  He bit.

  “You get something interesting?”

  I shrugged. “Something like that.”

  He leaned toward me, like he had with the elderly woman, only now his smile looked conspiratorial.

  “Anything you can share?”

  I returned the smile. “In this town? The divorce capital of the world? What do you think?”

  His expression didn’t change but rather seemed to freeze for a split second, almost like he was trying to decide what reaction was most appropriate.

  He hadn’t paused for a moment when he’d read my last name off my license. Sure, I could have handed him a fake I.D., but I’d wanted to see if he reacted to my last name. Maxon wasn’t all that common, but he hadn’t tumbled to my connection with Melody through her fiancé’s last name.

  No. What had tripped him up was the fact that I worked divorce cases, which meant I followed people around trying to catch them in infidelities.

  I hadn’t been asked to do that often over the course of my career, and most of the time I turned those cases down. Nevada was a no-fault divorce state, which meant neither side needed proof of infidelity to split the sheets. But throw in a prenuptial agreement and bank accounts with more zeros than I’d ever see in my lifetime, and proof of infidelity became a big deal.

  I didn’t like digging into someone’s marital dirty laundry. I wouldn’t be doing it now if the stakes weren’t so high.

  “I bet you see a lot,” he said, still smiling that conspiratorial smile, only now it didn’t quite reach his eyes.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

  “Well,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Let’s get you set up here so you can get back at it.”

  He didn’t chat with me much after that. I’d rattled him, as much as I suspected a man like Justin Sewell could be rattled.

  Ed Hastings used to send me books that he thought I should read just so I’d be prepared for the kind of people I was likely to meet when I was out trying to serve summons and subpoenas on people who didn’t want to be found. One of the most disturbing books he’d given me was about the sheer number of sociopaths and psychopaths in the world, most of whom hid in plain sight.

  Charming and charismatic, the book had called them. People who didn’t mind walking over other people to achieve whatever it was they wanted to achieve. People who faked emotional responses like a pro because they’d spent their entire lives studying and emulating what they thought were normal reactions to any given situation.

  I was in danger of releasing my inner Dr. Phil again, but I was pretty sure that Justin Sewell was at least a sociopath.

  Was he violent? I had no clue. He could certainly turn his emotions on and off, but not all sociopaths or psychopaths were violent. According to what I’d read, non-violent sociopaths who passed as normal had learned to channel their violent tendencies into some socially acceptable competitive behaviors.

  For all I knew, Justin Sewell could have channeled his aggressive tendencies into developing a killer backhand and a murderous serve, charging the net to a first place victory in a local tennis tournament.

  But what if Melody had done something that triggered a violent reaction? They’d seemed to part ways after lunch on good terms. Could something have happened that made him snap and kill her just a few hours later?

  When Sewell finished setting up my new business account, I wrote a check for the minimum amount required to open the account. He lifted an eyebrow when I handed him the check.

  “It’ll take me a while to transfer everything over,” I said.

  He seemed to consider me for another split second. “So why are you really opening this account?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “I read the brochure you gave me yesterday. I liked what it said.”

  His expression told me that he didn’t buy it for a minute. “The bank you’re with now offers better features for its small business customers than we do.”

  I decided to play on his vanity. “You’re right, but I’ve yet to be treated as well by anybody there as I’ve been treated by you. Banks make a big deal about giving personalized service, but what they really want is to sell you everything they possibly can.” I gave him a grin I hoped was at least a little flirty. “At least you make me feel good while you do it.”

  He didn’t say anything, but he did seem to be thinking over what I said.

  “Tell you what,” I said. “Give me the name of your manager, and I’ll write a glowing letter about the great customer service you gave me here today. That’s got to at least win you brownie points, right?”

  He chuckled. “Okay. That I can do. But if you really want to help a guy out, you’ll let me tell you about what else the bank can do for your business.”

  “You get more than brownie points for sales, I’m guessing, than glowing letters extolling your great customer service skills.”

  He spread his hands in a what can you do? gesture. “You can’t blame me for trying.”

  I nodded toward the paperwork I’d just signed. “You’ve got my name and number. Give me a call sometime, and maybe we can talk about it over a drink.”

  Now, I had no illusion that I was anywhere near as attractive as any of the women who worked at Right Track Fitness. I certainly wasn’t dressed like I had a lot of money. But I could tell that I’d intrigued him, if for no other reason that he didn’t know if I knew something about him that he wanted kept secret.

  The smile he gave me this time reminded me of a shark’s grin. “All right, Abby. I’ll keep that in mind.”

  When he took my check over to the teller line to make the deposit, I sat back in his client chair and wondered if I’d just bitten off more than I could chew.

  Ed used to tell stories about how, when he’d been a detective with the Reno Police Department, he used to deliberately push people past their limits to see if he could get them to make a mistake. He had scars from some of the times he’d pushed people too far, including a puckered scar on his right shoulder from a bullet he’d taken when an embezzler thought Ed had backed him into a corner he couldn’t get out of. Embezzlement was usually a non-violent crime, and Ed hadn’t been ready for the man to come after him with a gun.

  I didn’t think Sewell would come after me with a gun, but would that change when he discovered my connection to Melody?

  I hadn’t come to the bank with much of a plan. Mostly I’d wanted to see if he’d had a reaction to Melody’s death, and when it didn’t look like he had, I’d pushed him. I’d deliberately baited him, and I’d set myself up to get in deeper. I could just imagine telling Kyle that I had a date for drinks with a sociopath.

  I glanced toward the front of the bank, trying not to fidget while I waited for Sewell to come back with my deposit receipt so I could leave.

  The glass walls at the front of the bank gave me a clear lo
ok at the lobby as well as Liberty Street beyond through the floor-to-ceiling windows that made up most of the building’s first floor walls. Even in the middle of the afternoon, traffic was heavy on Liberty Street, the cars backed up waiting for the light. In a few more weeks, a lot of that traffic would be Harley Davidson motorcycles when Street Vibrations rolled into town.

  One of the secretaries in Ryan’s office building had told me once that the heavy rumbling of so many motorcycle engines echoing off the smooth glass and steel of the high-rises downtown made it almost impossible to concentrate on her work.

  I could just imagine the noise. My office was downtown too, but in an old converted house a few blocks west of Virginia Street, the main drag through town where the Harleys cruised. Still, whenever a major event like Street Vibrations hit town, I was thankful that most of the time my work took me away from the office.

  The light must have changed on Liberty because the cars started moving again. In the gaps between the cars, I could see another bank across the street and the parking lot next door.

  A white SUV was parked in the lot.

  A white SUV with tinted windows.

  I couldn’t make out the license plate on the SUV from where I was sitting, and I couldn’t very well just get up and walk away before Sewell had a chance to give me the paperwork for my new checking account.

  I made myself turn back toward Sewell’s desk. I pulled my cell phone out of my purse just to give myself something else to look at so I wouldn’t be tempted to turn around and stare at the SUV again.

  If that was Richards in the SUV, what the hell was he doing here? Was he watching Sewell now? Why? Because he thought Sewell had something to do with what happened to Melody?

  An ugly thought crept in. Richards had taken a picture of me yesterday while I was in line to get gas. He knew what my car looked like, what my license plate number was.

  What if he was following me?

  But why? Did he suspect I had something to do with Melody’s death, just like Archulette and Squires did? Richards was suspended. He wouldn’t be involved in that investigation.