by Bryan Gilmer
He stuck the phone into his pocket, and it immediately rang.
It was Caroline Kramden. “My editors are in love with me now, so thanks for the break. The TV guys didn’t have it.”
“It was a win-win. What’s up?”
She waited a second. “I’ve got a document you may want to take a look at. It might help your investigation.”
“What is it?”
“You have to see it. Where are you?”
“Near downtown.”
“Me too. If you’ve got a minute, drop by my place. I live in Cameron Park behind St. Mary’s Episcopal School.” The sprawling campus of the 160-year-old girls’ school near North Carolina State University reminded Jeff of Taft. Caroline gave Jeff the address. “Park on the street in front of the main house, walk down the alley, come through the wooden garden gate. I rent the apartment above the garage.”
* * *
The house at the address was an odd combination of gothic and Craftsman styling, with tapered porch columns atop stone piers, semi-circular attic windows and copper gutters. Ivy covered a bank at the front of the property. The main house was dark, and a Realtor’s sign stood in the front yard. He walked down the alley, unlatched the tall wooden gate with his thumb and stepped inside the privacy fence.
Caroline’s voice shouted, “Over here!”
He made a right turn. She was coming down the steps from her apartment, wearing white cotton shorts and a tight T-shirt and carrying a tote bag. She led him across the brick patio, which had a hot tub sunken into it.
“Should be warmed up by now.” She crossed her arms over her stomach, grabbed the T-shirt hem and pulled it over her head. It caught him completely by surprise. He couldn’t stop his eyes from darting to her heavy breasts bundled in the lemon-yellow bikini top, but he tried not to alter his expression.
“I should have told you to bring your suit so you could come with.” She bent toward him and pushed her shorts to her ankles. She was some kind of amazing flirt. The bikini bottom was actually pretty modest. She was a size or two larger than Ashlyn, a lot curvier. But he thought they both had great bodies. Caroline was clearly comfortable enough with hers.
“You from the Midwest?” Jeff asked. “Everybody at Northwestern from corn country said ‘come with.’ ”
“Maryland. Went to school in Missouri, though.” She daintily dipped a toe, then walked down the steps. To hide the effect her display had on him, Jeff kicked off his sandals, sat on the edge of the tub and dipped his feet into the warm water. She sat diagonally across, maybe three feet away, and reclined so her hair pooled on the surface behind her. “I wanted to go to school far, far away.”
There was a story there, but she started firing questions before Jeff could find out more.
“Where’d you grow up? Tell me the story about the aristocratic family that gave you that name and made you ‘the third.’ ”
“It’s a pretty weird story.”
He told her he’d grown up as Jeff Davis Swaine The First in Charlotte, a namesake of the president of the Confederacy. But a trip to Disney World with his Baptist church choir at age 13 had altered the direction of his life. In line for Space Mountain, he’d met a girl named Ellen from Rye Brook, New York, and they’d become pen pals. She’d suggested he was smart enough to get a scholarship to her boarding school, Taft, in Watertown, Connecticut. He’d applied, been offered a free ride and had a big fight with his folks over it. They were dead against it until one of the executives at the uniform company where his mom was a payroll clerk had told her what an incredible opportunity Taft was. Mom had talked Dad into shipping him off to boarding school.
In a clerical error – or maybe as a parting gift – Taft had printed his name on his transcript and diploma as J. Davis Swaine and added the Roman numeral III. So he’d applied to journalism school at Northwestern University that way and picked up another diploma with it. When he realized he couldn’t survive on what the TV gig paid and didn’t like the work anyway, he’d found the job with CB Allison through a schoolmate. The firm had gotten Jeff’s name legally changed to match his diplomas. Now many colleagues and clients called him Davis, he told her. Friends called him Jeff. His parents still called him J.D.
He didn’t tell Caroline that Ashlyn had taken to calling him Jeffrey. And now he noticed that, like a good reporter, she was nodding, listening and keeping her mouth shut as he went on. Because of Ashlyn and professional boundaries, Jeff was now feeling like he shouldn’t be talking like this with her. He hated to be on the wrong end of the interview, especially when he found the woman asking the questions so sexy that it threw him off his game. He ended the press conference by asking her how the cancerous dog story had turned out.
“Great. And since you mention it, now would be a good time to look inside that envelope.” Her foot broke the water gently, and she smiled and pointed to the tote with her dripping big toe.
He took the envelope, tore it open and removed a two-page computer printout, an e-mail to Caroline from the Raleigh City Clinic, thanking her for a gift of $9,300 “in loving memory of your beloved dog, Beatrice.”
“I bet you didn’t give the clinic $9,300.”
“Excellent guess. If I had that kind of money, I’d pay off half my Visa. I didn’t get that message until after their office was closed today. It could be some wiseass reader who saw the dog’s name in my story. But I thought it might mean something, and that you’d like to have it.”
He instantly decided not to mention the e-mail he’d gotten from the Triangle Children’s Medical Fund. He looked up from the note to thank her. She was fixing him with a drowsy, brazen stare.
A line popped into Jeff’s mind. Inside his head, he practiced saying it with a smile of his own that would certainly make it work: Why don’t we go upstairs? I’d like to see your place.
Really, he needed to leave right away. Caroline was like a two-scoop ice cream sundae when you hadn’t eaten a real meal for a week. “Thanks for this,” he said, picking up the envelope, “I ought to get home.”
But as soon as he began the sentence, she stood and waded to his edge of the tub. And before he’d finished it, she’d pressed her dripping breasts tightly against his belly, laying the side of her head just under his chin and wrapping both arms around him. He could feel her outline soaking warmly through his polo shirt and shorts.
“Uh-uh,” she murmured. “Stay.”
WEDNESDAY
Fourteen
The office trailer blocked the rays from the construction site’s single, anemic security light, so Leonard had to feel around in the dark to find the heads of the screws. The Phillips bit slipped satisfyingly into place. The tool screamed and then stopped, screamed and stopped – a variation on the siren sequence of notes from the last track, he realized – until he’d undone two rows of screws. At 2:30 a.m., no one was around to hear the serious racket he was making, and there had only been three sets of headlights on Rocky Falls Boulevard since he’d parked here five minutes ago.
He had again limited himself to one mouthful of sanitizer, but thankfully the pure taste lingered in his mouth.
Leonard put on leather gloves and peeled back the trailer’s skin, pulled out glass-fiber insulation and threw it onto the ground. Then he kicked at the sawdust paneling that made up the interior wall until he had a hole between studs big enough to crawl through. Not his most glamorous burglary, but this was just the first step.
He found himself underneath a countertop on a vinyl floor littered with chunks of dirt. He pushed a rolling chair out of the way, then stood and brushed the grit from his hands. He pulled out a small metal flashlight and shone the beam, finding a sign on the far wall with the name of the contracting company that was building this new shopping center.
Tonight was the perfect moment for this track. A dozen flatbed trailers loaded with structural steel beams stood parked in rows on the muddy, graded shopping center site. The Freightliner road tractor bearing the erecting contractor’s name was still hitched to one
load. But the crane hadn’t yet arrived at the jobsite. Leonard found a row of brass cup hooks near the door to outside, and a pleasant sparkle greeted his light: keys. He looked them over until he found one that said Freightliner. He pulled it from its hook and kissed it.
He unlocked the door with the little diamond-shaped window and walked down three wooden steps. He froze at the bottom when a car’s headlights appeared out on the highway. When it had passed, he strode toward the truck, grabbing and dragging along a couple of the orange caution barrels with those flashing lights he’d always thought of as “blinkies.” He wedged them onto the trailer with the steel beams.
The truck cab wasn’t even locked. He climbed into the springy seat and bounced up and down. He clutched and turned the key to fire up the diesel engine. He figured out how to release the air brakes and wrench the shifter into low gear with the help of handy diagram stickers. This truck was fancier than the ones he’d driven in the Army.
He let out the clutch, and the engine coughed as the truck began to move almost imperceptibly, changing the patterns of light inside the cab. He chuckled at the orange blinking through the rear window. He upshifted as the back of the trailer cleared the front edges of its mates. He pulled hand over hand to steer the heavy load of steel onto Rocky Falls Boulevard.
After half a mile, at the I-540 overpass, Leonard stopped on the shoulder to let a following car zoom past. When it was out of sight again, he backed and pulled the truck – almost jackknifing it once – until he had it where he wanted it: perpendicular across the southbound lanes. He shut off the engine, turned on the truck’s emergency flashers and climbed down from the cab, locking the doors behind him.
He placed the blinky barrels on the dividing lines between the southbound lanes so no one would crash into the friggin’ thing and get decapitated. That wasn’t in the spirit of this composition at all.
Leonard checked again for cars, saw none, and pulled the .380 from his coat pocket. He’d kept the blue-steel semi-automatic from the load of stolen guns. It reminded him of one he’d admired in a pawnshop case as a teenager. He got a nervous little thrill from the cold steel and turned on his heel to face the truck.
He fired. Fluid drained onto the ground, looking dark as blood in this light.
The diesel fuel wouldn’t catch fire, since it only exploded under the pressure inside an engine, but they’d probably bring out a HAZMAT crew to clean up the spill, and that would take a while. Excellent.
And they’d have a harder time moving the truck without fuel. And with 18 flat tires. His ears rang from the shot, and he cursed himself. A musician had to be smart about his hearing. He stuffed in yellow foam earplugs, almost burning his cheek on the gun barrel in the process.
He fired slugs into the tires in succession with a drummer’s perfect rhythm, seeing his written score for the piece in his mind, counting out the measures to time the leaps of the pistol. He worked around the truck methodically until he’d created a 40-ton roadblock.
The traffic engineers around here were clearly no military strategists. Making all the traffic in an area rely on one big-ass road made it plenty easy to bring traffic to a stop, either by accident or on purpose. Why, thank you folks; thank you very much. This next tune is one I call “Choke Point.” It’s off “Stolen Inspiration,” and there are autographed copies on sale out in the lobby…
He bet they wouldn’t have this road cleared until lunchtime or after. They might need a crane to unload the beams onto another trailer, and then they’d have to change all those tires, then tow the road-tractor. He could hear the horns honking, the bass line of the heavy engines that would be idling …
He walked the half-mile back to the construction site smiling as a single car approached the roadblock and its brake lights lit up the pavement in red. He surveyed the empty lanes that would soon stack up with these useless automobiles, thinking how hard it would be for most of them to turn around across the landscaped median, hearing how the notes screeched to a halt at the end of this piece.
Leonard started up his station wagon and drove one mile to the hauling company headquarters where there was always a dump-truck load of gravel ready to go out the next morning. He stole the key from that office, then loaded his 10-speed bike from the wagon into the passenger side of the truck cab.
He cranked the truck and drove to Creek Crossing Way at its intersection with Rocky Falls Boulevard. No cars. He used the hydraulic levers to dump a mound of gravel across three lanes with the sound of a massive snare-drum roll, blocking the only logical workaround for the roadblock he’d made at the interstate. He backed the truck into a utility pole, pulling down wires onto the intersection.
He left the truck next to the gravel pile, shot holes in its fuel tank and tires and got his bike down. For once, a bike would be the way to travel in Rocky Falls. His breathing quickened as he worked the pedals, and as he began to coast down a slight grade, he tossed both sets of truck keys into a storm grate. He was back at the hauling company to pick up his station wagon within a couple of minutes.
Leonard was home and in bed by 5:30. He set his clock radio to wake him at 7:37 for “traffic on the sevens” and drifted to sleep with his music looping through his head in an endless encore.
Fifteen
Jeff made it back to his loft to shower just after sunrise. It occurred to him that he had to get rid of more of these vintage soft drink bottles before he could complete the renovations. For some reason, the building had come stacked with hundreds of cases of them, all from the ’50s and ’60s, mostly Mint Cola, Cheerwine, Big One and Nugrape. At first, he was kind of annoyed at having to dispose of them. Then he realized he could sell them in batches to antique dealers and one by one on eBay for an average of five or six bucks apiece. He’d raised an astonishing $50,000 so far, money he was using toward the renovations. He planned to build a few hundred bottles that weren’t in collectable condition into a cool-looking glass wall to partition off the kitchen.
Ashlyn’s call came just after he turned on the shower. “Hi, sexy. I miss you up here. It’s weird sleeping by myself.”
“Hey.” He shut off the water again, walked out to the living room and sat down cross-legged in the center of his air mattress. Concentrating his weight made him sink to the floor. He wiped his eyes and stared across his cavernous, unfinished loft.
Ashlyn said, “So?” and Jeff realized he’d been quiet too long. A stomach cramp nudged at him.
“I miss you, too, cutie.” He imagined Ashlyn in some hotel room with framed prints of flowers, dark wood veneer furniture and a mauve bedspread.
“Are you at my place?”
“No. I’m in the donut factory.”
“Aww. Your first night there. I bet you were lonely. I can’t wait to join you. I wish I was there right now. Did they deliver your furniture?”
The guilt cramped Jeff’s stomach like food poisoning.
“Nah. I’m urban camping.” He struggled for something else to say. “I think you’ll like my new couch if they ever do bring it.”
“I bet I will,” she purred. “It’s nice to be with a man who stays away from the cheap stuff.”
That made Jeff wince. “I tried to call you last night to tell you how beautiful the skyline view is here at night.”
“I bet it is. I got your message. But you didn’t pick up when I called back.”
He remembered silencing his phone without looking at the caller ID at Caroline’s.
Ashlyn’s conference was going fine; she felt lonely; she really missed him.
He told her he wanted to talk longer, but he had to get to work on the case. He folded his phone shut and wiped his hand back across his hair.
He opened his wallet and pulled out a picture of him and Ashlyn at the North Carolina State Fair in Raleigh. She held her face pressed against his shoulder, her own shoulder nestled under his arm and her small left hand pressing a cone of cotton candy against his stomach. He had rushed into the frame after balancing the cam
era on the window ledge of a funnel cake trailer and setting the timer, he remembered. She looked really pretty, but the picture was somehow wrong. He tossed the snapshot across the room like a Frisbee.
He was pissed at himself. He didn’t owe Ashlyn an extension of their relationship, and yeah, it might not last much longer. But he did owe it to her to do things in order.
And he didn’t feel any less lonely this morning. That was for sure.
Jeff shook his head, palming his scalp. He remembered he had a coffee maker here but no coffee or filters. He took the quickest shower he could in the curtainless stall, then stopped on the way to the office to give $3 to the ubiquitous green chain.
He got to his office feeling – for some reason – kind of angry. Sarah wasn’t in yet, which surprised Jeff. He’d heard something about a traffic snarl in Rocky Falls on the radio on the way in, so that was probably it.
He stuck his head out his office door and asked Annie.
“She just called. There’s some big truck stalled across the southbound lanes of Rocky Falls Boulevard, right by the freeway interchange. And on top of that, a dump truck wrecked and spilled its load on Creek Crossing Way. Traffic’s backed up five miles. Some people can’t even get out of their subdivisions. Sarah would just work from home, but there’s no place to turn around.”
Jeff shrugged and checked out the Progress-Leader website. He went from angry to furious.
Fucking Caroline Kramden! This time, the stories were on the main page of the site, played with large headlines: “Subdivision project linked to pet deaths.” And there was a sidebar: “Golden retriever Beebee had beaten cancer.”
He read the first paragraphs:
Beatrice, an 11-year-old golden retriever, survived being hit by a car as a puppy. Just last year, she also beat cancer, which went into remission during an expensive course of chemotherapy.