Buried Leads (An Avery Shaw Mystery)

by Amanda M. Lee

  Still, I couldn’t stop myself from digging into the bag a little more. I was scared of what I might find, and yet I couldn’t stop myself from looking. There was something hard – and sharp – in the bag as well. I couldn’t figure out what, though. To get a better angle, I pulled the bag out of the dumpster and dropped it on the ground next to my feet. I glanced around to make sure no one had arrived while I had been distracted, and then dropped to my knees.

  I opened the bag wider, pulling out the rag first. The red stains on it had dried and caused the fabric to stiffen. Under the light of day, it looked even more like dried blood. I swallowed hard, dropping the rag on the ground next to me, and then rummaging further into the bag.

  The hard item I had felt earlier was a weird plastic handle. It was broken off from something. I reached into the bag again, jerking my hand out when I felt something sharp lodge in my skin. When I looked at my hand, I realized I had a small nick in my index finger.

  Instead of shoving my hand back in the bag, I opted to rip the plastic open a little further. I felt my heart tighten when I saw what I had cut my hand on. It was a broken handsaw – and it looked like it was covered in blood.

  I stepped back inadvertently and slammed into something hard behind me. I swung around in panic. I was both relieved – and a little nervous – when I saw Eliot standing behind me. He didn’t look happy.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Nope. Not happy to see me.

  “I was looking for someone to interview who knew Brian Frank,” I said.

  “So you searched the garbage?”

  “I saw what looked like blood on a rag,” my heart was hammering in my chest. “I just wanted to see what else was in the bag.”

  Eliot took in my chalk white face and shaking hands and pulled me towards him. “Are you alright? What did you find?”

  “Look in the bag.”

  Eliot looked down at the open garbage bag and then turned his searching eyes back to me. “Is it a body?”

  “N-n-no,” I stuttered. “It’s something else.”

  Eliot looked grim as he released me and knelt to look in the bag. “Shit,” he mumbled.

  “It’s blood, right?”

  “It looks like it.”

  “What are we going to do?” I was shifting nervously.

  “We call the police.”

  That sounded like a really bad idea. “How about we just tip them off anonymously?”

  Eliot shot me a dirty look. “No. We’re not going to do that. We’re going to call them and tell them what we found.”

  “Jake is going to be really mad,” I said.

  “No, Jake is going to be pissed beyond belief.”

  I bit my lower lip. “I’ll call Derrick,” I said finally.

  “You don’t think he’ll be pissed?”

  “No, but his first inclination won’t be to lock me up.”

  Eliot regarded me with his warm eyes. “Jake won’t lock you up either. He is, however, going to scream and yell like a banshee.”

  I blew out a sigh, pulled my cell phone from my pocket, noticing that I had ignored five texts from my mom, and dialed Derrick’s cell phone. He had Caller ID, so he recognized my number. “I’m not giving you any dirt.”

  “Hello to you, too.”

  “Hello. I’m not giving you any dirt.”

  “I . . . I found something at the Frank machine shop.”

  Derrick was silent on the other end of the phone for a minute. “What did you find?” He asked finally.

  “A bloody rag and a broken handsaw with blood on it.”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “The dumpster behind the building.”

  “What were you doing behind the building?”

  “Trying to find someone to interview.”

  “In the dumpster?”

  “No. I just looked through the dumpster on a whim.”

  Derrick sounded like he was trying really hard not to explode on the other end of the phone. “Are you alone?”

  “Eliot is with me.”

  “Was he with you when you went on your dumpster dive?”

  “No.”

  Derrick sighed heavily. “Stay where you are. We’ll come to you in unmarked cars. We’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t tell anyone else about this,” he warned me.

  “I won’t,” I promised.

  “I mean it.”

  “I said I won’t.”

  I wasn’t sure if Derrick had hung up or not, but then I heard him grumbling on the other end of the phone. “Jake is going to kill you.”

  Twenty-Five

  Waiting for Derrick and the rest of the sheriff’s investigators to arrive was pure torture. I was seriously considering getting into my car and bolting. Eliot could deal with the police while I hid under the bed at my house for the next month.

  “Don’t you even think about running,” Eliot warned me.

  “I wasn’t,” I lied.

  Eliot didn’t look like he believed me. I didn’t blame him. I was too keyed up to even attempt a good lie.

  Derrick was the first person to arrive on scene. Eliot pointed to the bag on the ground wordlessly.

  Derrick looked in it briefly and then turned in my direction. “I’m assuming your fingerprints are all over this.”

  “Probably,” I admitted. “I didn’t really expect to find anything.”

  “You’re either the luckiest person I know or the unluckiest,” he grumbled.

  I was leaning towards unluckiest right now. “Is it blood?”

  “It looks like it,” Derrick said. “I can’t be 100 percent sure. I don’t know what else it could be, though.”

  “What about oil? It is a machine shop.”

  “Oil isn’t red.”

  “Maybe it’s paint?” I said hopefully.

  Derrick shook his head. “Even if it turns out to be something besides blood, you’re going to be in a whole heap of trouble with Jake.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  “I did,” Derrick said morosely. “As much as I wanted him to tear you a new one, I was afraid he would freak out in front of a bunch of people and try to throttle you. Then Eliot would step in and everyone would go to jail.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He started swearing like a sailor and hung up. I’m fairly certain he’ll be here when he calms down a little bit. You may have handed us a big break here, after all.”

  “I don’t think he’s going to see it that way,” I countered.

  “Probably not.”

  We lapsed into silence for a minute. I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket another two times. Since it was probably just my mother freaking out because I’d ignored her earlier texts, I decided to keep the streak alive and really unhinge her. I didn’t think I could keep my fingers from shaking long enough to type on the phone anyway. “Where is everyone else?” I finally asked.

  “The tech team had to get their equipment. They’ll be here in a minute.”

  “Why didn’t you guys search this place before?”

  Eliot cleared his throat. “Do you really think that’s important right now?”

  “I was just asking.”

  Derrick glared in my direction. “We had no reason to search here,” he said. “We can’t just break into a place and look around. We need warrants and evidence.”

  “I didn’t break in,” I argued. “I just walked through the gate.”

  Thankfully for all of us, the tech team had arrived on scene and was now making their way into the open yard. Eliot led me to the wall of the building. I noticed he positioned me between him and Derrick. I figured it was a strategic move.

  The three of us watched the tech guys work in silence for about fifteen minutes. Then I heard a loud voice from around the corner and knew that things were about to get ugly.

  “Where is she?”

  Derrick exchanged a quick glance with me and then pus
hed himself away from the building to position himself between Jake and me. “Here it comes.”

  Jake rounded the corner. His gaze fell on me almost immediately. “You are unbelievable!”

  I remained mute. There was no point irritating him anymore than he already was.

  “You don’t have anything to say to me?”

  “Not really.”

  “If I’m not mistaken, we just had this conversation less than an hour ago.”

  “What conversation?”

  “The one where I told you not to put yourself in a situation like this!” Jake’s voice was shrill, and he was gesturing wildly.

  “No, you said if I was going to do anything I should take Eliot with me. Look, Eliot is here.” I didn’t mention the fact that he was only here out of sheer coincidence. Wait, why had he come here? Now probably wasn’t the time to ask him that question, I figured.

  “You only hear what you want to hear, like always,” Jake was ranting now. “It’s unbelievable. You just don’t listen. It’s like you’re deaf and dumb.”

  I opened my mouth to argue, but Eliot shot a hand out to stop me. “Don’t,” he warned.

  “I tell you what not to do and then you go and do just that,” Jake was on a roll now. “You ignore the law. You ignore that little voice inside of you that tells you that what you’re doing is a stupid idea. You ignore your family. You ignore me.” He glanced in Eliot’s direction. “I bet you don’t listen to him either.”

  I knew he was nowhere near being done, so I just sat back and waited for him to get everything out. I didn’t really have a leg to stand on in this argument anyway. I needed to plot my next move.

  “I don’t know what chemical imbalance you’re suffering from that makes you just walk into these situations,” Jake raved some more. “Now you’ve created a whole mess of my investigation.”

  “Actually, I think I helped you.” I don’t know why I open my mouth sometimes. Seriously.

  “You helped me?” Jake’s eyebrows were practically melding with his hairline.

  “Garbage pickup in the city is tomorrow. If I hadn’t looked in the dumpster, no one would have found this.”

  Jake took a step towards me. His face was so red I was momentarily worried that he was going to have a heart attack right in front of me.

  Eliot stepped in front of me protectively. I knew it wasn’t necessary. Even as irate as he was, Jake would never actually physically hurt me. “She knows she made a mistake,” Eliot said calmly. “Screaming at her isn’t going to change anything.”

  “No, but it will make me feel better,” Jake grumbled.

  The tech officers were still working dutifully, but I noticed they were occasionally shifting their eyes up in Jake’s direction occasionally. They seemed nervous.

  Jake was now pacing a five-foot path in front of us. He was muttering to himself, but I could still hear every fifth word or so. Moron and idiot seemed to be his favorite options at this point.

  I turned to Eliot dubiously. “I told you we should have just made an anonymous call.”

  Jake stopped pacing and rounded on me in disbelief. “You weren’t going to call us?”

  “I wonder why?” I said sarcastically.

  “Yeah, this is all my fault.” Jake started pacing again.

  After about an hour, the tech guys finished up and were carrying the bag of garbage to the front of the building. A second team of tech guys were now searching through the rest of the dumpster.

  Eliot and I followed Jake and Derrick, who were trailing behind the first set of tech guys, back to the front of the building. Jake hadn’t said anything else to me since his last explosion, but I did notice him shooting me angry looks on occasion.

  When we rounded to the front of the building I stopped in disbelief. All four area news vans were parked in front of the facility. Crap.

  Jake looked as surprised as I felt. “What the hell?”

  “They showed up a few minutes after you got here,” one of his deputies said from the other side of the gate.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I was told that would probably be bad – especially given the mood you were in.”

  Jake glared at me again. “How can this possibly be my fault?” I asked him. “They obviously got the tip from someone in your department. I certainly didn’t tell them.”

  Jake mulled that over for a second. “They probably heard it on the scanner,” he said finally.

  I noticed that Shelly was moving away from her news van and towards us. She slowed her pace when she saw me with Jake.

  I smiled at her with false brightness. “Hi Shelly,” I greeted her with faux enthusiasm. “Fancy seeing you here.”

  Shelly ignored me. “Sheriff Farrell, is it true that you found a body?” She shoved a microphone in Jake’s face.

  “No, it is not true,” Jake argued. “We did not find a body.”

  Shelly looked disappointed. “What did you find?”

  “We’re just doing some simple tests for our investigation,” Jake said stiffly. “Trying to leave no stone unturned.”

  Shelly shot a glance at me. I was suddenly interested in the cut on my finger. “What is she doing here?”

  “Ms. Shaw was just . . . helping us with our investigation,” Jake gritted out.

  I raised my eyebrows in surprise. “I was?”

  “You were,” Jake confirmed. “Her help has been invaluable.” I could tell that statement hurt.

  “How did she help?” The venomous tone of Shelly’s voice was pretty frightening.

  When the other news representatives caught sight of Jake, they all rushed around us and started shoving their own microphones in Jake’s face. “Did you just say that Avery Shaw is helping you with the investigation?” The question had come from Devon – and she didn’t look any happier than Shelly was.

  “I did,” Jake said. “I cannot go into details right now. Our investigation, including Ms. Shaw’s part in it, is not open for public consumption.”

  Shelly looked dumbfounded. “So she gets to know what’s going on and we don’t?”

  Jake grimaced. “I guess you could say that. Although Ms. Shaw will not be printing anything from the investigation in her publication at this point.”

  I hadn’t agreed to that. I opened my mouth to argue my point but Eliot wasn’t taking any chances. He clamped his hand over my mouth to make sure I couldn’t say anything stupid.

  “She doesn’t look like she’s agreed to that,” Shelly pointed out. “Personally, Sheriff Farrell, I don’t think it’s particularly fair that Ms. Shaw is getting better information than the rest of us.”

  “Oh, that’s rich,” Devon shot back. “Since you’ve been getting special treatment from the sheriff yourself, I don’t really think you have any place to complain.”

  “I have not been getting special treatment,” Shelly argued. “He hasn’t told me anything, no matter how hard I try. He says he can’t talk about an ongoing investigation.”

  I couldn’t help but wonder exactly how hard she had tried – and what her methods of interrogation had involved. My guess was a thong and love cuffs.

  “Besides,” Shelly continued. “You’re not exactly innocent in this. You’re sleeping with one of the deputies involved in the case.”

  I glanced over at Derrick. His cheeks were reddening under the sudden scrutiny of the media throng.

  “Don’t equate my relationship with Derrick to your social climbing with the sheriff,” Devon challenged Shelly. “What Derrick and I have is real. What you have is ruthless ambition.”

  I was starting to like Devon.

  “Everyone knows he’s always going to favor Avery over you, anyway,” Devon charged on. “He can’t help himself. No one can figure out why. She’s nuts.”

  The love is gone.

  I turned to Eliot. “We should probably go.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.”

  Eliot and I slunk away, leaving Jake to deal with his media
harlots and me to wonder how I was going to explain this to Fish. So much for getting off his shit list.

  Twenty-Six

  Eliot and I said our goodbyes on the street. When I had asked him why he was at the machine shop, he had been evasive and didn’t answer the question. I figured that he was going to do exactly what I had done – he just didn’t want to admit it.

  When he left to get in his truck, I couldn’t help but notice that he didn’t give me a kiss goodbye – or ask me over to his place for the night. He must be really mad.

  I went back to the office, dreading the lecture I was about to get from Fish. I had no choice, though. I needed some direction on where I should take my investigation next. I didn’t think that Jake’s orders were enough to stop us from printing what I had found, but I wasn’t sure if that was the way Fish would want to play it. We really couldn’t afford to piss Jake off at this point.

  Fish was waiting for me when I entered the building. “You did it again,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You got personally involved in a story.”

  “It’s not my fault. I went to the machine shop to try and find someone that has known Brian Frank for a long time. It just happened.”

  Fish shook his head distractedly. “I don’t know how you do it?”

  “Just lucky, I guess.” I was going for cute. I think Fish read it as deranged.

  “What did you find?”

  I figured Fish had met me in the reception area because he didn’t want to risk anyone else hearing what I had stumbled on. After I told him, he seemed to consider our options in silence for a few minutes. “We’re not going to run anything tonight,” he said finally.

  “Are you sure?”

  “The sheriff clearly doesn’t want anyone to know what we’ve found,” Fish said. “He’s not going to tell anyone else. If we run with this, we run the risk of getting something wrong. We’ll wait.”

  I was silently relieved. I didn’t want to piss Jake off anymore than I already had. “So what do we tell everyone?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? You know that’s not going to work. They’re going to be on me the minute I walk into the newsroom.”