3 Buried Leads

by Amanda M. Lee

  After the waitress had left, my mom turned to Derrick and Devon. “How are you guys doing? I keep seeing you on television every night Devon. You’re doing a very good job on this Brian Frank story.”

  What am I? Chopped liver?

  “Thank you,” Devon said graciously, shooting me a pointed look. “I appreciate you watching my newscasts.”

  Yeah, we’re all thrilled.

  “That man obviously killed his wife,” my mom continued. “I don’t see why Jake just doesn’t arrest him.” She turned to me curiously. “What did you find in back of that building?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied.

  “I saw you on the television,” my mom chided me. “The camera does add ten pounds, by the way. I know you were up to something.”

  Eliot was shaking with silent laughter next to me.

  “They busted me for trespassing,” I lied. “I didn’t find anything.”

  As much as I would like to crow about what I had uncovered, I knew that Derrick would wrestle me to the ground and make me eat raw eggs before he let that happen.

  “Is that true?” My mom asked Derrick dubiously.

  “It is,” Derrick averted his gaze. He could never lie to my mom. That was something I overcame in my teens.

  “Well, they should have thrown you in jail,” my mom said.

  “Thanks, mom.”

  “That’s the only way you’ll learn. You were never one of those kids that would just believe me when I told you the stove was hot. You had to touch it yourself to make sure I was telling you the truth.”

  “That only happened once,” I protested.

  “Yes, because you burnt yourself.”

  “When you play with fire, you get burned,” Derrick said.

  “Thank you, Mr. Fortune Cookie.”

  Derrick stuck his tongue out at me.

  I turned to Eliot. “Still glad you came?”

  “Always. It gives me a whole new insight into why you act the way you do.”

  “Really?” I raised my eyebrows.

  “These people have driven you to the brink of insanity. I’m just trying to keep you from toppling over the edge.”

  “You’re a philosopher now?”

  “Maybe I always was.”

  Since our dinner had arrived, and my stomach was growling loudly, I decided to let Eliot’s comment go. He watched me eat about half my plate in three minutes and started laughing. “Didn’t you eat today?”

  “I didn’t feel well this morning,” I reminded him. “And then I was busy all afternoon.”

  “You were sick this morning?” My mom asked.

  “Not sick. Just nauseous.”

  “You’re not pregnant are you?” She shot a dark look in Eliot’s direction, and the panic in her voice was evident.

  “I’m not pregnant,” I sighed.

  “She was hung-over,” Derrick supplied.

  If I could choke him with his bacon burger I totally would.

  “Hung-over? On a week night?”

  “I was with Carly,” I answered.

  “What? Did she call off the wedding again?”

  “Yeah, but just for a half hour or so.”

  “I don’t see why Kyle puts up with her,” my mom clucked.

  “Probably because she’s hot – and she sleeps with him.”

  “That’s as good a reason as any,” Derrick agreed.

  Devon shot him a dirty look, but my mom’s trumped it. “That’s not funny, Derrick.”

  “Sorry,” he mumbled.

  We all looked up as my grandfather seated himself at the far end of the table. When he saw Eliot, he looked surprised. “You’re back?”

  “You seem surprised?” Eliot replied.

  “You spent a day with us. Most people with any sense run for the hills.”

  “I think your family is nice,” Eliot said simply.

  “Give it time,” my grandfather said before digging into his own plate of spaghetti.

  “This is really good,” Eliot said to the table.

  “It’s a secret family recipe,” I teased.

  “Can you cook it?”

  Like all my cousins, I had spent time working in the restaurant as a teenager. I actually could cook, but more often than not I opted not to. “I can cook,” I said cautiously.

  “That’s going to be my thank you,” Eliot decided. “You’re going to cook me dinner.”

  “Thank you for what?” My mom asked suspiciously.

  Uh-oh.

  I kicked Eliot under the table as a warning. “I have a present for her after dinner tonight,” Eliot said evasively.

  “What present?”

  “Um . . .”

  “It’s dirty sex mom,” I blurted out. Such a mistake.

  “Avery Elizabeth Shaw! You do not tell people that in public.”

  “Then don’t ask,” I grumbled.

  The rest of the dinner was decidedly uncomfortable. Once we were done, Eliot and I said our goodbyes. We didn’t speak to each other until we were outside of the restaurant.

  “Another fun family night,” Eliot laughed.

  His phone started to ring at this point; he looked down at the screen and then up to me. “It’s Brian Frank.”

  I waited as he answered the phone. His part of the conversation was brief. When he disconnected, he turned back to me. “He wants me to stop by the house.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I can meet the au pair by myself and then just let myself into your apartment when I’m done. I have a key now..”

  “That you do,” Eliot said with a laugh. He closed in on me and gave me a long, lingering kiss. “Don’t fall asleep,” he warned me. “I have plans for you. And be careful with the au pair. I don’t think she’s involved, but she still might be dangerous.”

  “I won’t fall asleep,” I laughed.

  I watched as Eliot drove away and then headed towards my own car. I pushed the button to unlock it – even though you didn’t need to lock your vehicle this far north – and I heard a crunch on the gravel behind me.

  I could only hope it wasn’t my mother and she didn’t want to talk about my sex life anymore. I squared my shoulders and made to turn around, but whoever it was had maneuvered in behind me.

  I felt an arm go up across my mouth and press a cloth there. I could smell the faint traces of medicine. I tried to struggle away, I really did, but I fell into blackness again. My last thought was that this had happened to me before – and only a few months before.

  Nothing good ever comes from family dinner.

  Thirty-One

  I woke up slowly.

  It took me a few minutes to get my bearings and realize where I was.

  At first, I thought everything had been a dream and I was home asleep in my bed. I don’t usually sleep sitting up – or with my hands bound behind me, though – so that fantasy died a quick death.

  The next thought that went through my mind was that my eyes had been glued shut. That was an utterly terrifying feeling, until I realized that whatever drug had been used to knock me out was just making the lids feel like they were anchored in granite.

  The third thought I had was that I was never going to live this down with my mom – if I lived that long. Of course, Jake and Eliot were going to be massively pissed, too – and I honestly couldn’t fathom how they would blame me for this snafu. I knew that they would, though.

  I was trying to get a feel for my surroundings, without alerting whomever had taken me that I was now conscious. It only took me about a minute to realize that I was in a car. Michigan roads are some of the worst in the country. Even on a paved road you can’t go for more than a couple hundred feet without hitting a pothole that will knock your fillings loose.

  I tried to open my eyes just enough to see if we were on a highway, but the window to my right was completely dark. There was no way of knowing where I was.

  My next order of business was to figure out exactly who had me. I could feel a figure n
ext to me in the car – but I couldn’t make out who it was without actually opening my eyes, and I didn’t think that was in my best interests at this point.

  The radio was on, and it was turned to some current hits station. There hadn’t been a break in the music yet, so I couldn’t tell if we were still getting Detroit area stations or not.

  The figure next to me had been silent up until this point. “I know you’re awake.”

  I recognized the voice and, truth be told, I wasn’t surprised. Brian Frank.

  “Why did you take me?” I opened my eyes fully and took my full situation in for the first time.

  I was sitting in an upright position, with my hands bound behind my back, in the passenger seat of his blue SUV. Thankfully – or depending on what kind of driver he was unthankfully – I wasn’t strapped in to my seat.

  “You know why I took you,” Brian said, never taking his eyes off the road in front of him. At least he seemed to be a conscientious driver.

  “Actually, I’m still not clear on that,” I said.

  “You knew.”

  “I knew what?”

  “That she’s dead.”

  “I actually didn’t know that,” I countered.

  “Really? Isn’t that why you came out to the house today?”

  “I just came out to interview you,” I lied.

  “You really shouldn’t treat me like an idiot,” Brian said. He was eerily calm. It was actually worse than if he had been screaming and threatening me. It proved he was thinking – and he clearly had a plan in mind. “I’m not an idiot.”

  “If you knew the cops were closing in, why didn’t you just run?”

  “What do you think I’m doing now?”

  “Most people don’t stop and kidnap a newspaper reporter before they run from the cops,” I pointed out.

  “I’m not most people.”

  He had a point.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Away.”

  “Away where?”

  Brian ignored my question. Instead, for the first time since I woke up, he fixed his cold eyes on my face. “What did you find at the machine shop?”

  Should I lie? Probably not. It was better that he believe the cops knew everything. “Bloody rags and a saw.”

  Brian nodded stiffly and then turned his attention back to the road. It was pretty foggy out. That’s a regular occurrence this time of year, when the ground is still warm and the nights turn swiftly cold. In the dim glow of his headlights, though, I did manage to catch sight of a highway marker – it showed that we were still on I-75. The upcoming exit marking was for Saginaw. We were heading north.

  “Nothing else?”

  What else was there? “Not that they told me,” I said honestly. “Why? Was her body in there?”

  “No, not in the garbage. Part of her was on the roof, though.”

  Part of her? Eww.

  “Why did you put her on the roof?”

  “I didn’t think anyone would look for her there.”

  “What p-p-p-part of her?” Even for me, this was a disturbing conversation.

  “Her torso. I moved it there from the woods the other day.”

  “You cut her up and put her in the woods?”

  “I didn’t know what else to do,” Brian said simply.

  I swallowed hard. “Tell me what happened, Brian. Maybe I can help.” When dealing with crazy people, it’s important to make them believe you’re on their side. Sure, they’re usually paranoid and it doesn’t work – but it’s better than nothing.

  “We were arguing,” he started. “She was getting ready to go on another trip with Dick. I knew they were sleeping together. She wasn’t having sex with me. She hadn’t in a really long time. I told her what I suspected. I expected her to deny it. She laughed at me, though.”

  I watched him closely for signs that he was about to become unraveled, but he was just as calm as he had been when I first regained consciousness. I had no idea if that was a good or bad sign. I was leaning towards good – for the moment, at least.

  “She told me that she had to find a man, a man that had goals and wasn’t happy being a house husband. That was pretty ridiculous coming from her, since it was her idea that I stay home and take care of the kids in the first place.”

  “Sometimes people think they want something until they get it and then they realize it’s not how they envisioned,” I offered slowly.

  “How is that my fault?”

  “It’s not,” I said quickly. “Tell me the rest of the story.”

  “We were fighting because I told her that I thought she needed to spend more time with the kids,” Brian said. I could see the relief actually roiling off him. He just wanted to tell someone what had happened. “I told her she shouldn’t go on the trip and stay at home. She told me that she was going with Dick, and when she got back she was filing for divorce.

  “Divorce,” he said bitterly. “We don’t get divorced in my family. Marriage is forever. A promise is forever. She gave up on forever.”

  I sat silently and let him talk. I didn’t think telling him that she probably should never have married him was going to be productive at this point.

  “I grabbed her arm when she tried to leave the room,” Brian continued. “I just wanted her to listen to what I was saying. She smacked me across the face and told me I wasn’t a man, and she needed a man. I just snapped.”

  “Then what happened?” I prodded him. I wanted to know everything just as much as I didn’t want to hear any more of the lurid tale.

  “I grabbed her around the throat,” he said. “I didn’t even really squeeze that hard. I just wanted her to take it back. I wanted her to take those words back. She started panicking when she realized she couldn’t breathe and she started clawing at my wrists. I let up for a second. I really didn’t want to hurt her.”

  Brian turned his glassy eyes in my direction. He wanted me to understand that this was all some sort of terrible accident.

  “I also realized that I was stuck,” he continued, turning back to the road. “She would have me arrested. She would take my kids away. She would take my kids and raise them with that man. I couldn’t have that.

  “I started squeezing again. I squeezed hard. I couldn’t let her take my kids. She was gone in a few seconds, I swear. She didn’t suffer.”

  “Where were your kids?”

  “Asleep,” Brian said simply.

  “Where was Steffi?”

  “Asleep.”

  “No one heard anything?” I couldn’t quite believe that.

  “We argued all the time,” Brian explained. “It was nothing new.”

  “So, everyone in the house was asleep and your wife was dead on the floor. Why didn’t you call the police and tell them it was an accident?”

  “The old accidentally strangling your wife defense doesn’t seem to go over well in the court system.”

  He had a point.

  “But why did you chop her up?”

  “I didn’t at first,” Brian said. “I just knew I had to get her out of the house before anyone woke up.”

  He lapsed into silence for a minute, clicking his brights on and off to see if that helped with the dense fog. It didn’t.

  “A dead body is heavier than you think,” Brian said suddenly. “I thought I could just pick her up and move her. She’s not very big, you know? She was too heavy, though. Then I thought I could drag her, but it was too hard. I have a bad back.

  “I knew I needed some leverage, so I took my belt off and wrapped it around her neck. That way I could pull her down the steps with the belt.”

  I was suddenly sick to my stomach thanks to the verbal picture he was painting.

  “It took me about fifteen minutes to get her down the stairs, even with the belt. I had to stop a couple of times and rest. I was terrified that someone would wake up and come see what I was doing, but no one did.

  “When I got her downstairs, I hauled her out to the garage. I managed t
o get her in one of those plastic storage bins. She just kind of folded up inside. It looked like she was sleeping.”

  I doubted that.

  “I used a piece of wood as a slide and pushed the bin up in the back of my truck and shut the door. Then I went to bed.”

  “I bet you had nightmares,” I said with faux sympathy. I was trying to get him to trust me, even though I was wishing I had my own belt to strangle him with at this point.

  “Actually, I slept like a baby.”

  That’s the sign of a true sociopath, I thought.

  “So what did you do the next day?”

  “I pretended that she went on the trip.”

  “You just left the body in the car?”

  “What was I going to do with it? I had to pretend it was a normal day. I went with Steffi to the park and watched the kids play. We all had dinner. I even read them bedtime stories.”

  What a great dad.

  “Steffi could tell I was upset, so I told her that Sarah and I were breaking up. She didn’t seem surprised.”

  I bet.

  “We had a few drinks together and . . .”

  “You slept together?”

  “We made love,” Brian corrected me. “It was the best night of my life, other than the fact that I still had to get rid of Sarah’s body. I decided that I wanted to make a life with Steffi. She’s a much better mother than Sarah ever was.

  “The next morning, I drove my truck to my dad’s machine shop,” Brian said. “It’s been closed for the past few weeks for retooling. I knew no one would be there. So I took her body inside and cut it up.

  “It was harder than I thought it would be. The first saw broke. I had to get a bigger saw. When I was done, I wrapped each piece in plastic and put it back in the bin. Then I went home.

  “After everyone was asleep, I took her body out into the woods around the park. I couldn’t carry the bin out there, so I borrowed my kid’s wagon and put the body parts in it and pulled it behind me.

  “I spent hours trying to hide each piece. Then, after I was done, I realized that if I left it in the plastic then I was leaving evidence behind. I had to go back and get all the plastic off, but it was almost dawn.

  “I went back home and returned the next night. It was hard to remember where I had hid everything, but I managed to find everything and take the plastic off. While I was out there, though, I figured out that her torso was too big to hide.