Cotton

by Paul Heald

  While she waited for Hans’s reply, she clicked her way through the other results that had come back for Sweaty Palm Productions. There were not many, but clearly the business was not wholly fictitious. It was mentioned several times in various porn blogs as a good source for soft-core content, and a couple of adult sites thanked SWP for help in setting up their web pages, but nowhere did anyone mention any names or addresses associated with the business. Moreover, no one had mentioned it in several years. The last reference was a question in an adult-business forum that asked, “Who bought Sweaty Palm?” The empty thread indicated that the question had gone unanswered.

  As Melanie tapped her fingers on her desk, wondering what to try next, she got a phone call from Hans. “Do you want to know how to trace an email address?”

  “Please!”

  “Okay, go to your inbox in Outlook and right-click on any message there and then click on Message Options.” He paused for a moment. “Do you see the header that appears at the bottom with all the information? Unless the sender has engaged in some deliberate cloaking, you should be able to study that information and see who the Internet service provider is and probably the city of origin.”

  “Does it give you the physical address of the sender?”

  “Nope, just the IP address of the computer, and the computer could be anywhere in the city.”

  She thought for a moment. “So, I’m going to have to wait until I get a response from Sweaty Palm before I can right-click on it and learn something?” If SWP had not been heard from in years, she doubted that she’d be getting an answer to her query.

  “Not really,” Hans replied. “I can tell you right now all you need to know about that particular address. Unfortunately for you, it’s a Gmail account, so if these guys answer, all you’re gonna learn is that Google is the Internet service provider.”

  “We know that already.”

  “And you also probably know that you’ll need a court order to get Gmail to provide further details about the holder of the email address, and that response probably won’t include any sort of physical address.”

  She flicked a styrofoam coffee cup off of her desk into a wastebasket, put her feet up, and leaned back in her chair. “So just having the email address doesn’t get me anywhere.”

  “Not in and of itself, no, but you might do some spade work out in Los Angeles on the company. I poked around a little and it appears to have been a real business at one time, so someone might have heard of it.”

  She thanked him and tried to remember the name of anyone in Los Angeles who might be willing informally to track down the operators of James Murphy’s bikini website without officially initiating an investigation. In the meantime, she was stymied. There would be no quick answer to the mystery of who had posted the photos.

  She rested her head against the back of her chair and closed her eyes, trying to decide what to do next. She could just give up. She’d expended no significant time on Murphy’s request, and for all the reasons she had given him already, the federal connection to the case was pretty minimal. Or she could go full-out, get the FBI involved, and request that office resources be devoted to a fresh investigation. Neither option seemed very attractive. Murphy had dropped an interesting problem in her lap; she did not want to let it go and return to the endless string of dope prosecutions. On the other hand, she really did not want to convince her superiors that pushing hard on the case was the best use of departmental resources. Better to keep things low-key, call in a few favors, and do a little legwork on her own under the radar. She could always request help later, if concrete evidence justified involving others.

  And besides, even Murphy was unaware of the biggest questions his visit had posed: Why hadn’t the local police notified the FBI of Diana Cavendish’s disappearance and why had they lied about doing so to the news reporter? And why did some snippy bitch in Arkansas care about Murphy’s inquiry? If Melanie got in her car now, she could beat the traffic and get to Clarkeston well before six o’clock, a perfectly appropriate time to pop in on the sheriff and hear what explanations he had to offer.

  Melanie opened her eyes, swung her legs down from her desk, and studied the pile of motions that needed to be argued the following morning. They were all straightforward, and she was sitting second chair in order to give the department’s newest hire a bit of experience. There was no reason why she shouldn’t temporarily break away from Atlanta’s orbit and make the seventy-five-minute drive to Clarkeston. Maybe she’d even see some flowers.

  * * *

  When Melanie turned north on the I-75/I-85 connector, she popped on her sunglasses and weaved the BMW Z4 convertible in and out of traffic until she was safely past the perimeter road and out into the countryside, or at least what passed for countryside past the outlet stores that lined both sides of the highway. She searched in vain for a radio station that played something other than oldies or country music and finally popped in a CD of Broadway show tunes that her oldest niece had mixed for her birthday. Although she never mentioned the subject at work or to her friends, or to anyone, for that matter, her family was keenly aware of her history as a pageant contestant that had culminated with a runner-up finish in the Miss Georgia Pageant more than twenty years earlier. Although her niece had not even been born at the time, she knew that Auntie’s talent had been singing a medley of showstoppers, and the adoring twelve-year-old had spent hours asking about her favorites in order to mix a CD.

  To Melanie’s surprise, the recordings were pretty good, many from shows she had seen on Broadway, and she found herself adding to the music on her own. Even after twenty years, she was still intensely embarrassed by her checkered antifeminist, rhinestone-encrusted teenage past, but she could not deny the guilty pleasure of singing along with something from Evita as she slowly left the suburbs behind.

  Clarkeston was only seventy miles from Atlanta, but somehow it fell outside the gravitational pull of the sprawlingest city in the South. Even though the city’s suburbs reached halfway there, grasping and swallowing more and more green space and another clutch of sleepy towns every year, Clarkeston remained out of its reach, protected by a large state park and sheltered by a wall of dense kudzu climbing the trees at its border. About twenty-five miles from the little college town, Melanie left the interstate and took a two-lane road that would eventually turn into Main Street. She glided through hay fields and pine plantations, delighting in the tight steering of the car as she accelerated through each turn, until she felt the leaden yoke of her job loosen a bit and found it replaced by a sweet melancholy she had not felt for a long time.

  She had pushed herself relentlessly in Washington to build a reputation as one of the toughest prosecutors in her department, and although she had complained about the unavailability of her ex-boyfriend as he was sent around the country by the FBI, she had been only slightly less obsessed with her job. After her last promotion, her workload had eased a bit, but she had had no clue what to do with the hard-won respect and the extra bits of free time. When the opportunity arose to impress a new set of attorneys and judges, back in the state that had known her only as Miss Georgia Runner-Up, she jumped at the assignment. The smart thing would have been first to spend a couple of months meditating in a Buddhist monastery or seeing a really good therapist, but instead, she packed up her bags, rented a townhouse in Buckhead, and dived headfirst into a new challenge.

  But it wasn’t really a new challenge. It was the same sorts of cases and the same sorts of people as before, and now she was stuck in a town loaded with crummy high school memories and filled with as many box stores and strip malls as the DC suburbs, but with no National Mall or Old Town Alexandria or Adams Morgan or Rock Creek Park to soften the assault on her aesthetic sense. Worst of all, she had known this before she moved back. She had been self-aware, knowing precisely what she was getting into, and yet unable to say no.

  In less than an hour, the outskirts of Clarkeston suddenly appeared below her as the car parted a f
ield of sorghum like the Red Sea and crested a steep hill west of the town. She smiled and turned off the stereo. It was tempting to think about what life in a small college town might be like. Her co-clerk still lived in town, having turned down a prestigious job with the Office of Legal Counsel in Washington to teach history at Clarkeston College and stay with the beguiling widow he had met there. His life offered the road not taken: spouse, children, golden retriever, and plenty of time to play, think, walk the dog, whatever.

  After she passed through the ugly thicket of Hardee’s and Dollar Generals that ringed the edge of town, she hit a string of green lights and soon found herself in the middle of downtown Clarkeston, fast approaching the federal courthouse where she used to work. She drove two blocks past it and found a parking place on the street a short walk from the police substation located in the county courthouse. She almost hoped she would not find the sheriff in his office there. She had asked her assistant to find his home address, and confronting him there might throw him off his guard. There was nothing like the feds showing up at dinnertime to unsettle a small-town cop.

  She walked to the back of the county building and followed a string of police cruisers to a glass door almost hidden by a pair of potted crepe myrtles. The station lobby was empty, so she walked up to a battered wooden counter and studied the city map taped to its top while she waited for the sergeant to return. When he did, he looked like he had just shot himself up with steroids in the back room. His biceps and shoulders were massive, barely contained by a khaki short-sleeved shirt. His identity badge, naming him as Officer E. LeQuire, looked like it was pinned directly into his chest, but his unblinking eyes and pinpoint pupils suggested that pain was just a minor inconvenience. A polite request to see the sheriff was initially met with resistance, but her business card got the officer’s attention, and after a couple of minutes of waiting, the walking tree stump was leading her down a dingy hallway to his boss’s office.

  “Ms. Wilkerson,” the sheriff said graciously, glancing at her card and waving her into a wooden chair across from his desk, “what can we do for you?”

  Melanie knew a little bit about the man in front of her. He sat back informally, with his fingers laced behind his head, but she knew better than to underestimate him. Her assistant had told her that Sheriff Porter Johnson was a former football player at the University of Georgia who had gone to the state police academy when a knee injury ended his playing career. He was not a dumb jock, however. He had made the dean’s list all five of his semesters at Georgia, and despite the fifties-style buzz cut, distended paunch, and down-home country mannerisms, his piercing brown eyes looked anything but stupid.

  “Sheriff Johnson,” she said with a smile and the sweet flattened vowels that she seldom dared to use in Washington, “thank you so much for making the time to see me.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a copy of one of the pictures of Diana Cavendish that James Murphy had found on the Internet. “I’ve had a bit of something cross my desk and, quite frankly, I thought you would be the best person to ask about it.” She handed the picture to him.

  He raised his eyebrows at the racy photo, but he offered no sign that he recognized the beautiful woman. “Should I know her?”

  He was now watching her as carefully as she had been watching him. She blinked innocently and offered him the same smile she had used to edge out Miss Fulton County for Miss Congeniality at the Atlanta teen pageant. “Her name is apparently Diana Cavendish.” She looked down at the picture as if to make sure she had given him the proper photo. “I was told that she was kidnapped, presumed murdered, here about five years ago. The Clarkeston police conducted the investigation.” She reached over and pushed the photocopy back toward him. “Are you sure you don’t recognize her?”

  He reluctantly picked the paper back up, squinted, and cocked his head to the side. “Yeah,” he replied with a practiced thoughtfulness, “the hair threw me off. This does look a lot like Cavendish.” He pushed the picture back toward her and offered his own attempt at a disarming smile. “Where did you get this? Has someone found her?”

  Despite his attempt to appear disinterested, she clearly had his attention. “No, not yet. Someone in Clarkeston sent us the picture, and before we took any action, we wanted to confirm her identity.” She took the photocopy, folded it carefully, and put it back in her purse. “I thought you might be the best person to talk to.”

  “Now, Ms. Melanie,” he said, managing to mix equal parts condescension and steel in his voice, “the college could have done that for you.”

  “I know,” she lied, “but I have another question that only the Clarkeston police can answer.”

  “And what’s that?” His cell phone rang, and after looking at the number, he slid a finger across the screen and put it back in his pocket. “I’ll be happy to tell you anything you need to know, but please tell me what’s really brought you over from Atlanta. I don’t understand why anybody in the US attorney’s office would have an interest in an old local case.”

  It was a good question and an inevitable one. She had given it some thought on the drive. Admitting she was purely on a fishing expedition was not a feasible option, so she had decided to go with a tinted version of the truth. “The person who uncovered this picture asked us to reopen the FBI investigation into Cavendish’s disappearance. When I contacted the FBI for details of the kidnapping, they told me that they had no record of any involvement. There never was an FBI investigation, even though kidnapping is a federal crime. So that sort of becomes the question: why was the FBI never contacted in this case?”

  She expected him to bristle. After all, it was essentially either an accusation of incompetence or a suggestion of some sort of deliberate malfeasance, but instead of getting defensive, he knitted his eyebrows and shook his head slowly.

  “I don’t know where you’re getting your information, but we informed the FBI three days after the disappearance.” While Melanie struggled to process the claim made by the sheriff, he rolled his chair backward across the space behind his desk and pulled a file out of a gray metal cabinet. He flipped through the first couple of pages and then nodded his head. “Yup, exactly three days after.” He slipped the file back into the cabinet. “Not that they were much use.”

  After years of questioning witnesses, Melanie had a good feel for when people were lying, and Sheriff Johnson sounded like he might be telling the truth, especially since he must have known that she had the ability to double-check his statement with the bureau. But it was damn convenient that he remembered the precise moment when he called the FBI and just happened to have a five-year-old file so handy. He was staring hard at her, his expression straddling the border between curiosity and annoyance. She’d wait to process the implications of his claim, and she pressed the only advantage that she had.

  “Isn’t three days a long time to wait to call the FBI when a kidnapping has clearly occurred?” The sweet edge to her voice had faded, and for the first time in the interview, Johnson responded with irritation.

  “We don’t need to justify our investigation to you, ma’am. As you know, being a lawyer and all, we have no obligation to report a kidnapping to the FBI, especially when there’s no evidence of any interstate transportation.” He stood up and walked past the desk to the door. “Now, I’m sure you need to be getting back to Atlanta before it gets too late. Rest assured that we can handle our own cold cases.”

  She was tempted to respond with something cute: Is it really a cold case if you know Jacob Granville is the murderer? But she bit her tongue. She had only James Murphy’s word that Johnson had stonewalled the investigation in order to aid Granville’s flight. She reminded herself she was just on a fishing trip and stood up to shake the sheriff’s hand. “Thank you for your time, Sheriff Johnson. We’ll be in touch if we have any more questions.”

  “Well,” he pushed open the door and held it long enough for her to slide out into the hallway, “now you know where to find me.” It shut behind
her almost immediately and she was left with an unsettled feeling. Why hadn’t he been more curious about a new source of information in one of his murder cases? Why did the specter of a federal investigation not intimidate him? He should have been way more upset by the suggestion that the FBI should have been called in sooner, but he had barely blinked.

  Melanie drove through the streets of Clarkeston aimlessly, trying to figure out whether she was smelling a rat or just being paranoid. Not every small-town southern cop was corrupt, after all. Mostly, she was annoyed at her inability to engage with Johnson and drag any information out of him. She had been disarmed by the good ol’ boy, but he did make one interesting statement. He stuck by the story that the FBI had been asked to help in the Diana Cavendish case. That conflict with her own brief research was worth checking out from the federal end of things.

  VII.

  WILLS

  Father Thorsten Carter sat in his car outside the home of Caroline Rodgers, the widow of his predecessor and a potential blockbuster donor to St. James Episcopal Church. Her large two-story brick house stood out on a street consisting mainly of older Victorian homes and the occasional shotgun bungalow. Despite the family money that she and her deceased husband had purportedly inherited, the home looked a bit run down. Rusted steel awnings cantilevered gloomily over the windows, suggesting correctly that no major renovations had taken place since the 1950s. The short front porch was made of poured concrete, and over the years it had cracked and caused the black wrought-iron railing to pull away from the frame of the front door. The driveway, however, hinted that the rumors of wealth might well be true. A gleaming Mercedes convertible was parked under a large tulip poplar and a young man with a chamois was carefully buffing every inch of the car until he could see the pores of his face in the reflective surface.