Last Call

by Libby Kirsch

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Elizabeth hadn’t spoken since they got to Janet’s house, save a low groan that had escaped when she stepped under the shower spray. Now Janet listened through the wall to the sound of rushing water as she paced her bedroom just outside the bathroom door. She had to make some big decisions in the next few hours, and she wasn’t sure who she could trust.

  She walked toward the kitchen to cue up the video for Elizabeth but stopped just short of the doorway. The computer, keyboard, and monitors were gone.

  “What the . . .”

  Jason was hiding something. She scrutinized the space on the plywood where the computer had been just an hour earlier. Suddenly, his assertion that he needed space didn’t add up. He’d left the video out for her to watch, she was sure of it, then he’d taken it away. But why? The fact that he didn’t want to watch it with her was telling. She didn’t know what it meant, but she knew it meant something.

  She raced down to Jason’s office in the basement, but it was empty. Where was he?

  She leaned back against the wall and raked a hand through her hair, then plodded back up the steps to her room to wait out Elizabeth’s epic shower. The longer she stood there, the more jittery she felt.

  According to Elizabeth, someone at the police department was on the wrong side of a murder. Janet herself had more information than she wanted about the crime, and it was only a matter of time before the truth came out. She needed to make sure it all went down on the record, in front of an audience, so no one at KPD could claim they didn’t know something important or illegal later.

  As Elizabeth’s shower entered its fifteenth minute, Janet’s cell phone rang.

  “It’s your father.”

  “Yes, I know. That’s why I said, ‘Hi, Dad,’” Janet said. “The name Sampson Foster comes up on my screen, it’s not a surprise—”

  “It doesn’t say ‘Dad’?”

  “Oh, ah . . .” She scrambled for an excuse. “I guess I put it in there a while ago, before we really knew . . .” She’d been about to say before they knew each other, but they still didn’t really know each other.

  After a moment, Sampson cleared his throat. “I have some information for you. It’s not much, but it’s a start. I made some quiet inquiries with an old law clerk who works there in Knoxville, and she says someone was researching Ike Freeman’s history recently. A lawyer was at the clerks’ office just last week, asking for copies of Freeman’s arrest warrant dated July nineteenth, which includes things like his home address and license plate information.”

  “Who? You got a name?”

  “Nope. But I’m waiting on a call from one other friend. I’ll be in touch by close of business today.”

  They disconnected. Ten minutes later the bathroom door finally opened and Elizabeth, her skin red from the long, hot shower, emerged.

  “Thanks,” she said, toweling off her hair. “I needed that. The church had a lot of things, but not a shower.” She dug a comb out of her bag and worked it through the tangles in her hair.

  No one else was home, but Janet stood reflexively and closed the bedroom door. She’d filled Elizabeth in on what she’d been up to since Ike’s death, but Elizabeth hadn’t been quite as forthcoming. In fact, she hadn’t said a word about what happened the night Ike was killed. “I need to know what happened, Elizabeth. It might just be you and me together on this. I can’t even trust Jason right now—he’s telling me not to—so I need to know everything if we’re to have any chance of figuring a way out of this.”

  Elizabeth stared at Janet through the mirror, her expression calculating. She put the comb down and dug around in her bag for a moment before she turned to face Janet, something clutched in her fist. “I left with Frank and Cindy Lou that night—our usual time, probably half past two in the morning. After I got home and changed, though, I realized I still had Ike’s car key in my pocket.” She shook her head, and Janet could imagine that she was still irritated that forgetting one small detail that night had so irrevocably changed her life. “He left in such a hail of fury that I’d put his key in my pocket, so he wouldn’t try to grab it from the basket.”

  Janet nodded, remembering one recent night during which that very scenario had unfolded, resulting in Frank’s tackling Ike and a worker’s comp case being filed. She was still paying off the claim.

  “I didn’t want to come in early the next morning to return the key, so I drove back right after I found the damn thing. It must have been after three—maybe three thirty.”

  Janet nodded again. So far, her story lined up with the timeline from Old Ben’s video system.

  Elizabeth continued, “When I got close to the parking lot, though, I could see . . . something. I didn’t know what, but there were people there who shouldn’t have been. Now, Janet, you know the Spot’s not in the best neighborhood. I wasn’t going to walk in on a drug deal or a hooker doing her job, okay? So, I circled the block, parked on the street, and crept along the storefronts. I was thinking I’d just sneak in the back door, put the key in the basket, and get on my way.”

  “Why didn’t you just go home?” Janet asked, shooting a suspicious look at Elizabeth. The bartender she’d known only peripherally for nearly two years had never struck her as someone who’d go out of her way to do anything, let alone something dangerous in the middle of the night.

  “I should have—believe me, I’ve asked myself that every hour since—but I was already there and had already wasted so much time. So, I was unlocking the back door to get in when I heard what they were saying.”

  “Who?”

  “Well, that’s just it: I still didn’t know, did I? I saw two people, but I only heard the one. He shouted, ‘You killed him! Ike’s dead! He’s dead, and it doesn’t matter what you meant to do,’ and it . . . it just turned my stomach.

  “The man was swearing up a storm, and I was backing up—believe me, I was heading straight back to my car, but then I heard him say, ‘This will be my badge, for sure,’ and, ‘We’ll have to burn the body.’ Janet, I froze. I—I felt so guilty. Here I’d been the one to take Ike’s keys! If he’d had them, he might not be dead!

  “I felt this . . . I don’t know, sense of responsibility to make sure no one got away with anything. So, when the people were debating what to do with Ike’s body, I . . . I hopped in Ike’s car and drove away.”

  “Jesus,” Janet whispered.

  “I know! What was I thinking? I didn’t have a plan—I just thought whatever was happening out there wasn’t good—it-it wasn’t right—and I wanted to . . . keep them from covering up whatever had happened.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Well, I called you! Fat lot of good that did me.”

  Janet blanched. She remembered getting the delayed notification of Elizabeth’s call the next day at the Spot, but if she was honest with herself, she probably wouldn’t have answered an after-hours call from Elizabeth, anyway.

  The young woman continued, her tone fevered as she reached the crux of what had sent her into hiding that night. “I flew out of the lot, I didn’t know if they were going to chase me, so I drove hard all the way home and didn’t stop for a single red light. I knew I couldn’t go to the police—one of them was involved! I was going to just park the car at the downtown courthouse that morning, make an anonymous call or something, and be done with it—but then I was so out of sorts that I nearly rolled over the parking block at my apartment and this fell off.” She plunked a small electronic device down on the bed between them.

  “What is it?” Janet asked, holding it up to eye level. It was smaller than a belt buckle, and had a smooth front and rounded edges. Or at least, it used to. One side was smashed in, a crack spidered out from the center of the device, and the whole thing looked like it had been melted.

  “I researched it when I got inside, and that’s when I started running.” She looked at the device with mistrust. “It’s a GPS tracker. A really powerful one.” She passed something els
e to Janet. It was about the same size but had a hinge on one side and a powerful magnet on the smooth back. “The tracker was inside this case—someone put it under Ike’s car. It must have scraped loose when I hit the block.”

  “So, you were worried someone would know where Ike’s car was—where you were!”

  “Exactly. So, I dropped it in a bowl of water, microwaved it, and smashed it with a hammer.” She grinned at Janet’s bewildered expression. “I wanted to be absolutely sure it didn’t work, but at the same time, I knew my house had been trackable. I mean, who’d put a GPS tracker on Ike’s car?”

  Janet didn’t answer.

  “I’m not sure it makes sense now in the light of day, but then, I was worried it was whoever killed him. So, I dropped my dog off at Paul’s next door and took Ike’s car to the church. I’ve been in and out of churches and parks ever since.”

  Janet felt a gut punch of guilt. This poor girl, all of twenty-five or twenty-six, was all alone with no one to turn to. She certainly wouldn’t have thought to turn to her boss, who’d been leaving her angry messages, accusing her of theft.

  “Why didn’t you come into the bar the next day? We could have sorted it all out together.”

  “I did.”

  “What?”

  “I came in—walked straight into the office—and I was going to talk to the detectives, but then I heard the voice from the night before—the one who’d been making such a ruckus about moving the body. So, whoever was in on Ike’s death is a major player. That’s when I knew I had to hide.”

  Janet sucked in a breath and tried to clear her head. She’d thought she’d heard something in the office when O’Dell was interviewing her. Finch had been nearby, too. So, which cop knew about the murder—or did they both?

  They had work to do.

  “I think we need to gather all the players tonight—get them all in the same room and start asking questions. We’ve got the place wired up—”

  “Because someone was stealing from the register? Janet, I wanted to say—”

  “It’s not important now—we have other things to worry about,” she said over Elizabeth. “The Spot is wired from top to bottom, though, and if we get people talking, we might shake some information loose. If it’s all caught on camera, no one can deny it after the fact.

  “I’ll invite Benji and Abe to the bar to talk with Larsa, Ike’s daughter,” she went on. “Abe wanted to discuss something with her the other night, but she wasn’t there,” she added when Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. “We’ll have Detectives Finch and O’Dell sitting on the other side of the bar, listening in.”

  Elizabeth jumped up, nodding with a spark of something other than fear for the first time that day. “They’ll think they’re there to witness a confession—”

  “But we’ll really be finding out which of them was involved. If we’re lucky, we’ll also find out who delivered the fatal blow. A bar is like a confessional—you never know what might come out when people have a beer in front of them. We can use the TV screens to our advantage, if anybody clams up.”

  Elizabeth dropped the destroyed GPS tracker back into her bag. “How do we get them all there, though? Abe and Benji won’t come if they know what we’re planning.”

  “True, but I have some ideas about that,” Janet said.

  “Well, what do you want me to do?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Head back to the church and keep a low profile. We’ll need you in place in the office before we open. Seeing you will be such a surprise that it might help shake some tongues loose.” Elizabeth gave her a look and Janet shrugged. “We’ll clue in Cindy Lou and Mel, but that’s it.”

  “What about Jason?”

  Janet blew out a breath and sat down with a thump. She stared at the door before finally shaking her head. “I have an idea about why Jason’s backed out of this one, but I don’t know exactly where his loyalties lie. He can’t know what we’re doing.”

  Elizabeth frowned. “I guess I have one last question: who’s Mel?”

  “She’s our new bouncer.”

  “What happened to Frank?”

  “He got reassigned . . . to another job.”

  Elizabeth nodded grimly. “I never liked him.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Okay,” the young woman said, now pacing the same stretch of floor Janet had trod just a few minutes earlier. “It’s going to happen tonight. The Spot opens in just a few hours. Is there enough time?”

  “It will be close,” Janet said. “But I think we’ll make it.”

  “What about Larsa? Where are you going to find her? You said she was acting odd last night?”

  “I have an idea of where to find her, too. Come to the Spot before five. Make sure to park Ike’s car around back, so nobody sees it.”

  Janet sent a text to Jason, telling him what she needed him to do but leaving out the other details. She had to get moving—there were phone calls to make and people to see. She drove away from her house feeling hopeful for the first time in days. She didn’t know everything about Ike’s murder yet, but she was finally on the right track to finding out.

  Would Larsa agree to help her—if Janet could even find her? She had to at least try. But first, she was going to the Spot. She had to get organized for the day ahead.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The bar was dark when she pulled up, and the building gave off an unexpected abandoned feeling that matched Old Ben’s place next door. Cindy Lou was scheduled to open, but not for a couple of hours, so Janet knew she’d have a quiet place where she could make some phone calls to put that evening’s plan into motion before going in search of Larsa.

  Anxiety crept up her spine as she pulled out her key ring, and when she turned the key, the dead bolt didn’t make a sound, because the door was already unlocked.

  A quick look behind her confirmed that hers was the only car in the lot. She could taste the tension in the air.

  She hesitated at the threshold and pulled the door open wide. It was dark inside, so dark she could barely make out the tables and chairs sitting mere feet away. She glanced to her right and saw that the blinds—which she’d opened and pulled up last night—were closed and lowered. She gulped. Someone had been here.

  “Hello?” she called, her voice weak and warbly. She cleared her throat and in a stronger voice said, “Who’s here?”

  Janet felt around the wall for the baseball bat that always rested right by the door. When her fingers closed around the neck she swung it around, then stalked into the bar—her bar. She held her head cocked to the side, ready to pick up any noise that didn’t belong, as she made her way to the light panel on the opposite side of the room. Her body betrayed her brain, though, and all she could hear was her own heartbeat thundering in her ears.

  Reaching out a hand, she flipped the switches up. Nothing happened. “What the—” Had vandals broken in and cut the power, or was something more sinister at play?

  Pressing her back against the wall, she stood frozen until her eyes adjusted to the dark. Still on high alert, she looked slowly over the room, then shuffled along the back wall to the office door. She tried the handle—it gave without resistance. She pushed the door open, then, with a small gasp, gripped the bat and rushed toward the stranger inside with a banshee yell.

  Just before she swung, though, Frank said, “Jesus, Janet, what the hell?”

  She skidded to a stop and took a few steadying breaths before her shock turned to anger. She swung the bat down to her side. “Frank! What are you doing here? Did you break in?”

  He dug a key out of his pocket. “It’s not breaking in when you have a key.”

  She tapped the bat against the concrete floor. “It is breaking in when you’re no longer authorized to use that key,” she said. “And obviously you know that; you lowered the blinds out there to hide the fact that you’re in here messing around. I’m calling the cops!” She stalked past Frank to the phone and picked up the receiver.

  “He
y, wait a minute. I didn’t do anything to the blinds. I’m just here to get a few things I left behind. It’s not my fault you left the office unlocked!”

  “Unlocked? I didn’t leave any of these doors unlocked. And what’d you do to the power?”

  “I’d guess you didn’t pay the electric bill,” Frank answered with a smirk.

  “No, you pr—” When she’d turned back to Frank she noticed something was wrong with the door. She set the phone down and tracked back across the small room. In the dark bar she hadn’t noticed, but now, with light streaming in through the office window, she saw that the lock had been broken. A large dent bowed in the metal door near the dead bolt. Parts of the lock were flat-out missing.

  “What did you do?” she asked. “It was you, wasn’t it? Stealing from the register? Here I’ve been thinking it was Elizabeth, but it was you all along!”

  “I wouldn’t steal from this hole-in-the-wall bar any more than I’d be caught dead working here. Please. You’re not even worth my time.” He turned back to the storage cabinet and pulled some items off a shelf. “I just came to get my things.”

  “What things?”

  He held out a small mirror and a comb, and when he shook out a folded jacket, a piece of paper fluttered to the ground. “Ah, sweet,” he said, bending down to retrieve it. “I forgot about that.”

  “What is it?” Janet looked at the scrap of paper. “You broke in to get a shopping list?”

  “No. It’s the phone number of a girl from the other night. I told her I’d call her, and right now that might be the only thing I’ve got going for me. The phone number for a pretty girl.” He smiled at the paper and tucked it into the breast pocket of his button-down shirt.

  Janet looked incredulously at her former employee. “If you think of anything else you left behind, come back during normal business hours, okay? I’ll walk you out.” She led the way back to the bar.