by David Archer
Sam found the terror cell, but a single error in judgment by Sam ended up costing the life of his friend and former police partner, Dan Jacobs, and then Sam was off across the country, chasing a lone fanatical terrorist who had concocted a plot to use one of the bombs to destroy a quarter of the country.
The plan was to set it off in Lake Mead, where it would contaminate the water that supplied seven states. If he had succeeded, it would have meant that millions of people would have had to relocate to other parts of the country to survive, while several million more, those too poor to move, would have died of radiation poisoning within months.
It was Indie who discovered the depth of the plot, and gave Sam the clue he needed to head it off, but he was severely wounded by the terrorist in the process. Another agent of Homeland Security, assigned to assist him, had taken the terrorist out just as he was trying once more to kill Sam. The bomb was disarmed, the plot was foiled, and Sam slipped into a coma that was almost the end of his life.
Sam Prichard wasn't one to go easily into that famous good night, however; defying the doctor's prediction of his demise, he had slowly gotten better, and wakened at last to find his beloved Indie there beside the bed, tears streaking her face as she prayed for him to come back to her. Those prayers were answered, and Sam was able to leave the hospital only a few days later.
Harry had surprised them with a new honeymoon package, and they had just gotten back from it the day before. Kenzie had stayed with her grandmothers again, having the time of her life since both of them loved spoiling the child rotten. But now they were home, and Indie was right—it was time to get back to life. They had found a few calls on their voicemail, clients interested in hiring Sam for various investigative work, and several messages from Chris Lancaster, the lead guitarist and manager of the band that Sam sang with, demanding that he get to rehearsal as soon as possible, and bring them some new songs to learn. He had called Chris the night before and promised to make rehearsal that afternoon at two.
Indie was loading the dishes into the dishwasher while Sam was running all of this through his mind, and when she finished she turned to him.
“So,” she said, “are there going to be any new songs today that I haven't heard? You know, you promised to play some for me weeks ago, and I still haven't heard them.”
Sam grinned. “I still haven't found that old CD, yet. You'll get to hear them all soon, though; Chris says we're going into the studio next week, so we've got to work hard to get songs ready before then. If you get done with all your errands this morning, you can always come down and listen.”
She smiled, and came over to him, slipping her arms around him and stretching up for a kiss. When he let her up for air, she said, “You can count on us being there. A band needs an audience, right? That's mine and Kenzie's job!”
Sam hugged her close, and Kenzie came over to get in on it, so he reached down and lifted her up to join them. She giggled as he made growly sounds at her, and squeezed his neck tight.
“Mmm,” he said, “a guy could start to like this!”
“You'd better,” Indie said, “’cause we're gonna keep it up forever!”
Sam let them go, and Indie had Kenzie go and get dressed so they could go and take care of shopping and school registration, while she went to their bedroom to change from nightgown to street clothes. Sam followed, and stood by the door and smiled as he watched.
“What?” Indie asked when she saw him looking her way.
Sam shook his head gently. “Just admiring the view, babe,” he said. “Just admiring the view!”
She laughed, and said, “You're crazy, I don't even have makeup on, yet!”
“Babe,” Sam said, “you don't need any. You're beautiful just the way you are!”
“Yeah, well, I'm very glad you think so, Mr. Prichard, but I don't go out without it!” She slid a pair of jeans up her legs and wiggled her way into them, glaring at Sam the whole time, then pulled a long-sleeved white top over her head, hooking her hands into her hair to pull it all out of the collar. “Aren't you supposed to be calling clients?” she asked as she went into the bathroom.
“I guess I can do that,” he said with a grin, and turned to go out to his office. He sat at his desk, picked up a pen and hit the Play button on the voicemail machine.
“Mr. Prichard, my name is Jim Durban, and I'd be interested in talking to you about a matter of marital infidelity...” Sam deleted that one, and the machine went to the next.
“Hello, I'm looking for Mr. Prichard,” said a woman's voice. “My name is Juliette Connors, and I have a matter of some urgency to discuss, involving assets my soon to be ex-husband is hiding, and if you'd call me back, I'd appreciate it. My number is...” Sam made a note of the number; Indie could knock that one out in her sleep, and it might be worth some serious money.
There were a couple more like the first one—Sam didn't do wife or husband trailing, just as a matter of principle—and he deleted those as well. He hit play on the next to last one.
“Mr. Prichard,” said a man, “I'd like to talk to you about finding my wife. She disappeared about three months ago, and I've got people trying to say I've done something with her, but I haven't. Her sister claims that my wife told her she was afraid I was going to kill her. Mr. Prichard, I never was a threat to her, not in any way, and I don't know why she left, or where she could have gone, or anything, but my lawyer says just the fact that no one can find her is making me look bad. I need help, please. My name is Albert Corning, and my number is...” Sam wrote it down. This man sounded like he might have a real problem that needed his help.
The last call was different, though. When Sam hit play, he heard a recorded voice say, “Hello. This call is from” and another voice said, “Carl Morris,” followed by the first, recorded voice, saying, “who is an inmate at the county jail. To accept the call, press five. To decline the call and block all future calls from this inmate, press nine.” The call had come in the day before they got home, and there were no more calls after it.
Sam thought about it for a moment, but he was pretty sure he didn't know any Carl Morris. Still, it could be someone to whom he'd been recommended, so he looked at the number it had come from and dialed it back. A bored deputy answered, “Detention Center.”
“Hi,” Sam said. “Can you tell me if you still have a Carl Morris in jail there?”
There was a moment of silence, and then Sam heard whispering on the other end. He furrowed his brow, wondering what was going on, but suddenly a different voice came on the line.
“You're looking for Carl Morris?” it asked, gruffly.
“Yes. I'm Sam Prichard, private investigator, and he left a message on my phone a few days ago from the jail. I was calling to see if he's still there.”
“Well, Sam Prichard,” the voice said. “This is Sheriff's Detective Orville Kennedy. I happened to be here at the detention center right now, because I'm officially notifying Carl Morris that he's been indicted on three counts of murder this morning. Is he a client of yours?”
Sam let his eyebrows come back down off his hairline. “Not yet,” he said, “but then I haven't had the chance to speak with him yet. Can he be given a message to call me back?”
Detective Kennedy made a sound that was a cross between a chuckle and a snort. “Yeah, I can do that. Word to the wise, though,” he added. “If you agree to work for him, get your money up front, and quick. His assets may be frozen pretty soon. Morris was indicted this morning on three counts of first-degree murder in the axe-murder-style deaths of his wife and their two kids. Wife's family is already talking about filing wrongful death lawsuits, so he may not have any way to pay you before too long.”
Sam's eyebrows went back up. “You sound like you've got a pretty solid case. Any possibility of his innocence?”
That snorting laugh came again. “I was at the scene,” Kennedy said. “We found Morris passed out cold on the floor, right next to the bodies, and there was blood everywhere. H
is prints were on the old hatchet he used as a weapon, some of them even bloody prints, ‘cause the blood was splattered everywhere, all over the room and all over him. He reeked of cheap whiskey, and had Adivol in his system. You know what that is? Sleeping pills, but when it's mixed with alcohol, it can cause some pretty bizarre behavior. No sign of a drinking problem before this. We couldn't wake him up, so we took him to jail and let him sleep it off. When he woke up, he said he didn't have any idea how he got there, and didn't remember anything, so I told him what he'd done, and the guy just fell apart and flipped out. He's a big mother, a bodybuilder, and it took eight of us to restrain him and the nurse had to give him a shot to calm him down. You figure it out—I sure as hell can't.”
Sam wrote down what he was hearing. “All right,” he said. “Please, tell him to call me. You never know, he might have something to say, and if it seems appropriate, I'll call you.”
“You do that,” Kennedy said, and hung up.
Sam looked at the number for Albert Corning, the man who said his wife was missing, and dialed it. It rang twice, and then the same voice as the one on the message answered the phone.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Corning? This is Sam Prichard, private investigator. I'm returning your call.”
“Yes!” Corning said excitedly. “Mr. Prichard, thanks for calling me back, I really appreciate it! This has turned into a nightmare!”
“Well, I heard what you left on my voicemail,” Sam said. “Can you give me a bit more information?”
“Sure,” Corning said. “About four months ago, my wife Annie started acting strangely, and I have no idea why. She started going out and being gone for hours without answering her phone, and a few times she took some money out of the bank but swore she didn't know where it went, and then I woke up in the middle of the night a few times to find her gone, but she'd come in sometime in the early hours of the next morning and say she just couldn't sleep and went for a drive. The next morning, she'd insist I dreamed the whole thing, that she hadn't gone anywhere. I asked her if she was seeing someone, having an affair, and she always swore she wasn't, and that everything was fine between us. Then, three months ago, I came home from work on a Tuesday and she was gone, but no one has seen her since then. She left her clothes, didn't take any extra money out of the bank; the only thing I can tell she took with her is her purse. Her car was found abandoned at Wal-Mart.”
Sam pursed his lips. “Mr. Corning, did you ever find any kind of evidence of an affair? Was she inattentive to you, did she seem cold or standoffish?”
“That's the thing,” Corning said, “she always acted like everything was good! We made love almost every night, and she was always doing little things for me, like making me coffee and bringing it to me in the mornings, or getting herself all prettied up before I got home from work, meeting me at the door in a negligee—I thought she was just going through some kind of a phase, and I tried not to worry about it, you know? But then she just vanished, and I have tried everything I can think of to find her on my own, and now her kids and her sister are saying I killed her or something! I can't sleep, I can't work, I can't even think! I need help, Mr. Prichard.”
Sam nodded into the phone. “Yeah, it sounds like it. Listen, can you come over to my office this morning? Say in a half hour?” Corning agreed, and Sam gave him the address.
He hung up the phone and looked at the other number he'd made a note of: Juliette Connors. He dialed the number and it was answered on the first ring.
“Hello?” he heard, in a low, sultry voice.
“Mrs. Connors? This is Sam Prichard, private eye, returning your call.”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Prichard,” she said. “I'm glad to hear back from you. I've got a problem, I'm afraid; my husband Alex and I are getting a divorce, and in the financial disclosures we both have to make, he's missing some assets that I know exist. I'm looking for help in finding where he's hidden them. Is that something you can do? An old friend of mine suggested I call you, and said you'd know his name—Jimmy Smith?”
Sam stifled a groan. Jimmy Smith was a former client who had hired Sam to clear him of a murder charge that Sam had helped to bring against him. Sam had thought Smith would never want anything to do with him again, even though he'd been quite generous with his fee and bonus.
“Yes,” Sam said, “I know Jimmy. And I think I can help you with your problem. Could you come by the office later this morning, say around ten-thirty?” Once again he gave out his address, and sat back to think about the strange cases he was looking at.
Mrs. Connors' case wasn't too bad. Sam was fairly sure that once he knew what assets were being hidden, Indie could track them down pretty quickly. Corning's case, on the other hand, could be a pickle. If his wife had vanished voluntarily then she was one of the “maliciously-missing” that police often complained about. These people were often very hard to track, especially if they'd done any research on how to disappear without a trace. In most cases, they didn't turn up until something almost coincidental happened, like running into someone they knew, or getting fingerprinted after some minor arrest.
On the other hand, if someone had orchestrated her disappearance, then Sam could be looking for a body, and then a killer. If Corning was actually innocent, then there was someone out there who knew the truth, and Sam's job would be to figure out who that might be and bring them in for questioning.
He was letting all of this roll through his mind when his desk phone rang. He answered it, saying, “Sam Prichard, Private Eye.”
“Hello. This call is from” and he heard Morris's voice say, “Carl Morris,” and then the recording continued, “who is an inmate at the county jail. To accept the call, press five. To decline the call and block all future calls from this inmate, press nine.”
Sam punched the five, and then said, “Hello?”
“Mr. Prichard? This is Carl Morris. The detective said you wanted me to call you back?”
“Yes, Mr. Morris,” Sam said. “I got your message and called this morning to see if they'd tell you to call me back, and ended up talking to Detective Kennedy. From what he told me, you're in quite a mess.”
“Ha!” Morris said. “Yes, I guess you could say that. I've been charged with killing my wife and kids, and they just told me that they're going for the death penalty.”
Sam sighed. This man's voice said that he had already given up, and a hopeless man wasn't the best to work with. “What did you want from me, Mr. Morris?”
Morris was quiet for a long moment, and then said, "Mr. Prichard, I suppose I'm hoping you can find out just why I did it."
Sam's eyes went wide again. “Mr. Morris—you're saying you're guilty?”
“Mr. Prichard, here's what I know,” Morris said. “I was found unconscious beside the bodies of my family on my living room floor. The doors were all locked from the inside, and the police had to break in. I was unconscious, like I said, and they couldn't rouse me, so they brought me here and did blood tests, and found that I was drunk and had drugs in my system, the kind of drugs that supposedly can make you do this sort of thing. When they told me what I'd done, I just lost it, and they had to sedate me, but I've come to grips with it now.” He sighed. “The murder weapon was an old tomahawk that I've owned for more than twenty years, and it had my prints all over it, including many of them in my family's blood. Since there is no way anyone else could have done this, Mr. Prichard, what I want to know is how and why I did it. Y'see, Mr. Prichard, I don't ever drink, and I don't take any kind of drugs, not even aspirin. It's sort of a phobia, because I hear all the possible side effects on TV commercials, and I just can't see putting that stuff into my body. So I want to know how I got drunk, and how I had this sleeping drug in me, since that combination is probably what made me do this. And then I want to know what could have triggered me doing something like this.”
The longer Sam had listened to Morris, the more he was getting an eerie feeling that something about this case wasn't right. “
Mr. Morris, if you want to hire me, then I need to come down and see you. I can be there around noon, if that's okay with you.”
“I'd like that very much, Mr. Prichard. Shall I tell them you'll be coming?”
“Yes, do,” Sam said. “They know me down there, it won't be a problem.”
Sam got off the phone and read through the notes he'd made several times. If Morris was telling the truth, then Sam couldn't help but wonder how any combination of drugs and alcohol could bring something like that out of a man who wasn't already prone to violence. He made a note to ask Morris about his mental health history, and to have Indie find anything she could on the man and his family. If he had any kind of a record, she'd find it, and it might tell Sam something about how this might have happened.
Meanwhile, he wasn't entirely computer illiterate himself. He went to the local newspaper's website and ran a search for Morris's name, and found the stories that had run already.
“Aurora Family Slain In Grisly Triple Murder,” screamed the first headline. The story underneath it told how police had received a tip that Carl Morris, thirty-four years old, had murdered his wife (Genevieve, thirty-three) and children (David, sixteen, and Elana, thirteen) by hacking them to pieces with an old Indian tomahawk. They had arrived to find the house locked up tight from the inside, and when they'd seen through a window what appeared to be bodies, they had broken in to find the three victims, and Carl unconscious on the floor beside their bodies.
Carl was taken to the jail, where blood tests were run; he was found to have alcohol and zolpidem, a drug most commonly sold under the brand name Adivol, in his system. Zolpidem, the article said, is known to have side effects that can include hallucinations, especially when taken with alcohol, and there was speculation that this may have played a part in the horrific crime.
Neighbors said they were shocked, and that Morris had never seemed to have any sort of drinking problem. Most described the family as happy and always friendly, and it was noted that they'd had a big cookout at their house only two nights earlier, with most of the block in attendance.