“No shit,” he said and hung up.
The overcast morning had blossomed into a gorgeous afternoon. A cooling breeze held the humidity at bay and a partly cloudy sky kept the temperature from surpassing the high eighties. Traffic flowed nicely as I drove to Wrightsville Beach with Spud riding shotgun. Many drivers had their windows down and sunroofs open and their bodies moved to music blaring from their favorite radio stations.
“If I’d known we were coming to the beach,” Spud grumbled, “I’d have brought my fishing rods.”
I didn’t understand the appeal of surf fishing, other than the fact that the fisherman could enjoy the beach under the pretense of partaking in a sport. When Spud did it, he rarely came home with any fish.
Wrightsville Beach, a small island that was home to less than four thousand people, was typical of the state’s many beaches. Multicolored and multistyled raised beach cottages and scattered community shops and restaurants decorated the strip. Rolling sand dunes peppered with long wispy sea oats, clumps of seagulls resting at the high water mark, and pelicans skimming the water for schools of fish were a common sight. And nothing could compare to the first deeply inhaled breath that smelled of warm sun and sea as we approached the beach from a block away. Best of all were the brilliant sunrises: a free gift of pure art available to anyone who cared to look. As soon as I retired, I planned to relish many sunrises.
We found the address without trouble. Even though a Mustang convertible sat in the driveway, indicating an occupant, Spud and I took the liberty of walking the perimeter. The home was an oceanfront wood-framed two-story with wraparound porches and two levels of covered outdoor decks in the rear. Like most neighboring houses, it was plain in the front but elaborate in back with lots of glass to enhance a coveted view of the Atlantic. The lower deck sported a hot tub and lots of outdoor furniture. One corner housed a summer kitchen with a built-in grill and wet bar. The upper deck contained tables with umbrellas, several chaise lounges, and a lone sunbather. He spotted us and did not return my friendly Southern wave.
“Hi, you must be Walton,” I called up to him. “Your father told me you’d be here,” I lied. Spud and I made our way up the first flight of stairs and didn’t have to navigate the second up to the upper deck because the kid hurried down. He wore nothing except a pair of baggy shorts and a nervous expression as he pushed too-long stringy bangs out of his eyes. He asked who we were and I caught the faint but unmistakable odor of pot clinging to his skin. He’d been on the deck smoking a joint. I explained that we were friends of the senator and wanted to see the house.
“What for?”
Since he didn’t question the senator comment, I knew we were at the right place. Without asking, I walked through a glass sliding door into a large family room and motioned for Spud to follow. He did. After a puzzled moment, Walton did, too.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Since your father is thinking of selling the beach house, he said we were welcome to take a look around before he decides to list it with an agent,” I improvised.
“Dad is selling the beach house?” the kid said, buying into my lie.
“Yeah, and I may want to buy it. I been thinking about getting me a beach pad,” Spud explained with a wave of his walking cane, happily joining my ruse. “They’re good babe magnets.”
“Dad never said anything to me about selling,” Walton said.
“What’s that I smell on you?” Spud said to throw the kid off guard, even though he knew exactly what the odor was. You work as a cop, you learn what dope smells like. “You smoking that funny weed up there on the deck? Your daddy wouldn’t like that.” Walton tried to decide whether or not he should be scared.
“I don’t do drugs,” he said defensively. Checking out the large room, I spotted a huge flat-screen television. A news anchor was blurbing the upcoming evening news and a photo of Jared flashed on the screen above text that read FULL REPORT TONIGHT. Perfect timing!
“Hey,” I said, pointing at the TV. “Your dad said you attended the Citadel. You didn’t know that Jared kid, did you? You know, the boy who was kidnapped from some financial firm? I read in the paper that he graduated from there.”
“Uh, yeah, I guess. I mean we were actually roomies for a little while.”
“You’re kidding! How wild is that?” I said, turning on my dumb blonde—or in this case, my dumb brunette—appeal and looking at him with wide eyes. “I’ll bet that the cops will want to talk to you, then. The newspaper said they’re talking to everyone who knew him at school.”
“Well, yeah.” Walton grinned and stole a long, stoned look at my tits. “I already did talk to them and they were real assholes, you know?”
Spud and I started touring the home, trying to look like interested shoppers. Not knowing what else to do, Walton followed.
“Cops can be such jerks,” I said, stretching my lower back and jutting out my chest. “They’re all on a power trip, or something. What did they do to you?”
“Kept asking me the same questions over again, just in a different way, like they were trying to get me to change my answer or something, you know?”
Spud made exclamation noises as he opened kitchen cabinets and closet doors and turned on and off lights. He could play a role, I had to give him that.
“Oh, man.” I gave Walton the wide eyes again. “So what did you tell them?”
“I told them that I didn’t know anything about the kidnapping, you know? Except what’s been on TV, I mean. We weren’t even good friends or anything. I just roomed with him for one semester, right before I got kicked out.”
“I heard that military academy is really tough. What did they kick you out for?”
“Well, I didn’t really get kicked out. Officially I’m suspended for a year.” He lowered his voice so my father couldn’t hear. “For smoking pot. But I never wanted to go there anyway. My dad made me, for the discipline and all that bullshit,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, going for empathy. “Parents can really suck sometimes.” Spud shot me a squinty look from beneath raised bushy eyebrows.
Walton pushed the bangs from his eyes. “Well anyway, getting snatched was just a bad break for Jared, I guess. I mean, those kind of things happen to really rich people, right?”
I nodded, agreeing.
“What do the utility bills for a place like this run each month?” Spud said.
“Uh, my dad takes care of all that,” Walton said. “Bills go to his house in Georgia.”
“Wow,” I said, going for awe. “You’ve got it really good! Living right on the beach, the house all to yourself, and no bills. You want to trade places?”
He grinned at his good fortune.
Spud and I continued forging our way through the house but didn’t see anything unusual until we got to Walton’s room. It held a desk with a computer and a bunch of equipment similar to the stuff in Soup’s efficiency apartment and I spotted a few flash drives lying next to the keyboard. But memory sticks were becoming like cell phones—most everybody had one.
“Wow,” I said again. “Were you majoring in computer science or something? I can barely work the remote for my TiVo. I’d never know what to do with all this stuff!”
He blushed. “No, I just, uh, use it for the general stuff. You know. Internet surfing and all that. I want to design video games, but my dad said I was going to law school and that was that. I told him he was crazy, so he enrolled me in the Citadel to straighten me out. Guess I showed him, huh?”
I asked to use his phone, and he pointed to a cordless home phone that sat on an end table.
“Can I use your cell phone? I’m thinking of getting a new wireless service, and I thought I’d see how your reception is here on the beach.”
“Help yourself.” He retrieved the phone from a baggy shorts pocket and gave it to me. On cue, Spud motioned Walton over to a bathroom to ask about the water pressure. I ducked outside and installed a tracker on the kid’s phone. Then
I pressed a few buttons to see his preprogrammed speed dial list. There were only three numbers and I jotted them down. I hit the redial button, and made a note of that number when it appeared in the window. I ended the call before it had time to connect and punched in a random telephone number just in case Walton wanted to see who I’d called. I got a recorded message telling me that the number I dialed was not in service. Perfect.
“Because, my friend Hal’s water pressure is so damn lousy,” Spud was gesturing with the cane when I came back in, “that he can hardly get the shampoo out of his hair. But he don’t even have any hair, except a teeny row around the back of his head and it’s thinner than a cheap potato chip. He shouldn’t even spend money on shampoo.”
Walton stared at Spud with a half-stoned, half-confused look on his face. I thanked him for use of the phone and continued leading the tour. We ended up in the garage, which was really just a closed-in space beneath the house. Spud opened and closed some windows while I changed the topic of conversation back to the Citadel.
Walton said he wasn’t ever going back to the military academy and didn’t give a rat’s ass who knew it. He was just staying at the beach house until he found a place of his own, he explained. And no, he wasn’t working anywhere, but that didn’t matter. I wondered why it didn’t matter. Everyone had to earn spending money somehow.
I nodded to Spud to let him know I was finished with the kid.
“Ah, I don’t know,” Spud muttered after looking inside a storage room that was built into the oversized garage. “I think this pad might be a little too big for me. Tell your daddy when you see him that I’ll get back to him.”
We were pulling out of the driveway when Walton realized that he’d forgotten something. “Hey,” he called. “What’re your names, anyway?”
Spud mumbled something unintelligible that ended in “-field” and we drove off.
I gave Spud a squeeze on the shoulder. “You did good, Spud. Bill ought to get you an acting job!”
“Thanks.” He patted my knee. “You and the twins did pretty good yourselves.”
I scolded him with a sideways look.
The sun was sinking gracefully and had metamorphosed into a deep golden yellow with startling streaks of orange, giving the sky a lazy, late-afternoon glow. One of the most incredible things about living in Wilmington is watching the sun materialize over the ocean and watching it disappear into the river.
“I don’t think that kid’s elevator goes all the way to the top,” Spud announced.
“He’s having a tough time living up to the senator’s expectations and he’s angry at the world.”
“Hiding something, too,” Spud said.
“Yep,” I agreed.
“But it ain’t the rich boy, least not inside that house.” Spud had been very thorough during his pretense of shopping for real estate. He had searched every possible space where a person could be.
“Nope.”
“You think he’s smart enough to have written the computer virus? He had that big computer setup and all.”
“People are smart in different ways. Walton doesn’t appear to have an ounce of common sense, but he could be a genius like Soup on the computer. Hard to say.”
We picked up a twelve-pack of beer and a box of fried chicken with biscuits for Spud’s poker game.
“Thanks for your help today,” I told him when we pulled into the Block.
“No problem. But next time you say you’re retiring, remind me to laugh, for crying out loud.”
THIRTEEN
The countdown readout my head was revolving much too quickly and there were only five days left until our patch of earth rotated into the consequential calendar square of July first. I couldn’t help but think of it as an execution date for someone, most likely Jared Chesterfield. Not to mention the momentous occasion when the biggest cybercrime in history would occur, if Soup didn’t stop it.
With nothing better to do at the moment, I made an appearance at the Barnes Agency. Although Rita bitched and moaned about the heavy workload since I retired, she appeared to be handling things just fine. I’d driven Spud and Hal—who was still blessed with a driver’s license—to pick up the Chrysler at J.J.’s Repair Shop and stopped at the agency afterward. Rita shot me a don’t-you-feel-sorry-for-me face. I almost heard weepy violin music playing in the background.
Our secretary had a baby boy, she told me, and it weighed seven pounds, seven ounces. She couldn’t tell me what Suzie had named the kid, but Rita knew its weight. Baby Seven-Pound-Seven-Ounces received a blanket and a sport stroller compliments of the Barnes Agency.
Looking like an excited kid with a new toy, Rita sat at her desk testing a gadget. It looked like an ordinary fountain pen but contained a radio-frequency detector and would alert her with a slight vibrating mechanism if someone within a ten-foot radius was wearing a wireless microphone. The pen was a much more subtle way to tell if someone was wearing a wire than patting them down. Surprisingly, it was an actual ink pen encased inside a Montblanc shell. You could write a note or sign a restaurant tab with it.
Trish had borrowed the agency’s surveillance van for a few hours and, through an office window, I saw her pull into the driveway. She was one of the few people I allowed to use the van for jobs other than my own, but she was good with the electronics and smart enough to stay out of trouble. The agency also allowed her to run a tab for use of the van, and she paid it off by working for us when we needed her. It had been a pretty good setup for both of us.
“Hey, Jersey,” she said, breezing through the door and tossing the van’s keys to Rita. “What are you doing here? You miss the place?” Trish is petite and usually wears her waist-length blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. When sitting in the driver’s seat of the big Chevy van, she could pass for sixteen.
“The boss came by to check up on me,” Rita answered. “I think she feels guilty about dumping everything in my lap.”
“What are you working on?” I asked Trish, ignoring my partner’s barb.
“The usual. This lady’s pit bull lawyer hired me to get some skinny on the husband, who filed for divorce. He’s an orthopedic surgeon and graciously offered to let her keep the Beemer and the beach house,” Trish explained while folding a piece of Juicy Fruit into her mouth, accordion style. “Thanks to me and your clunker of a van, Pit Bull is now armed with audio and video of the good doctor bumping bellies with another woman. Even better, the girl is only seventeen and a patient of his. She’s the star of her high school tennis team. He scoped her knee last year.”
“You’re calling my van a clunker? I’ve been through a lot with that van. She’s a classic.”
“She’s twelve years old and backfires at the most inappropriate times. By the way, you owe me for an oil change. Six quarts and a filter. Labor was free. My boyfriend said the oil hadn’t been changed in so long, it had the consistency of chocolate syrup with coffee grounds mixed in.”
I pulled a twenty out of my wallet. “Chocolate syrup? He must’ve been hungry, thinking about food when he was draining the oil pan. Don’t you feed the poor fellow, like a good little missy?”
Trish took the twenty and pocketed it. “No, he feeds me,” she retorted. “I dumped the dentist. This is a new one. He’s a mechanic and he knows how to cook. A biological male miracle. I’m in heaven.”
Trish had a knack for attracting boyfriends whose particular skills she just happened to need at the time. She claimed it was coincidence, but Rita and I knew differently. In the past year, she’d dated a carpet distributor, a building contractor, and a dentist. She now had brand-new berber carpeting throughout her condo, a screened porch addition behind it, and laser-whitened teeth that blinded you when she smiled.
I asked Trish to keep tabs on the senator’s beach house during the next two days. If my visit had frightened the kid, Walton Ralls would make phone calls and stir things up. I wanted to know what, or who, surfaced when he stirred. Since he wouldn’t want the calls on the p
hone bill that his father paid, he would most likely do his calling from the wireless phone that now had a tracker in it.
“I want to know when someone else is in the house besides the kid—friends, delivery people, whatever,” I said. “They’ll probably spend time on one of the outside decks. Use the directional zoom and let me know if you hear anything interesting. Also, there is a tracker on the kid’s wireless. Number three.” Trish needed to know which tracker I’d used so she’d know which preset phone number to dial in on. Since it was a residential neighborhood with a lot of beach home rentals, she could slap on the fake flooring company or locksmith door magnets and the clunker would blend right in.
“No problem, Jersey. I really enjoy doing your shit work,” she said and took the keys back from Rita.
“You’re well compensated for doing my shit work.”
“You mean use of the clunker? That’s good compensation?”
“How much did you earn from Pit Bull? You always work on a fee-plus basis. How much ‘plus’ will you get for the skinny on the surgeon doing the tennis star?” I challenged.
Her lips stretched into a sly smile. “Yeah, yeah. I know. I couldn’t have gotten what I did without your clunker. In fact, I’ve grown quite fond of the van. When I leave it here at the agency, I get separation anxiety.”
“Why don’t you just make yourself a set of keys?” I said, ignoring her sarcasm. Between jobs for us and her own, Trish had possession of the surveillance van more than Rita or I did. Neither of us liked to do surveillance, but it was a necessary evil and Trish was good at it. Plus, she had something I didn’t—a lot of patience.
“Sure,” she said, dropping the van keys into a handbag that was slung canteen-style over her body.
“While you’ve still got the mechanic boyfriend,” I added, “why don’t you see if he’ll give the old girl a tune-up? I think she needs a new fuel filter, too. And the tires are probably due for a rotation.”
Trish produced a smirk and aimed it my way. “I’m not dating him for his mechanical abilities.”
T. Lynn Ocean - Jersey Barnes 01 - Southern Fatality Page 14