by Derek Fee
Shea tossed two bills on the plate containing the bill. ‘What kind of exit strategy do you have in mind?’
‘The kind where we’re still in the land of the living.’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
A bout the time Moira and Shea were leaving the restaurant in Burlington, Jamie Carmichael was exiting the Coastal Grand Mall in Myrtle Beach. She had wakened that morning and decided that she was being stupid. A flash of inspiration had given her a strategy for staying alive. After all, what the hell was she running from? There was no point in behaving like a fugitive from justice. All she really needed was to lay low for a while. There were ample funds in her account so why not enjoy an extended vacation? As soon as it was light, she had quit the motel and taken a taxi to downtown Charlotte. She had breakfast in a small restaurant while she waited for the car rental office across the street to open at seven thirty. She rented a 2016 Malibu, threw her bag in the trunk and hit the road to the coast. It was vacation time! Four hours later, she was in Myrtle Beach.
She rambled through the mall, purchasing jeans, a few sports shirts and a new pair of trainers. Inside a cubicle in the ladies toilets, she removed her top and skirt and put them in one of her new bags. She took off her shoes and detached the wig from her head. She quickly changed into the new jeans and a shirt, and put on men’s socks and trainers. She left the cubicle and walked directly out the door to the mall. The person who exited the ladies toilet was to all intents and purposes a man. It was Jamie Carmichael as she had been born.
She dumped the bags into the trunk of the Malibu and drove to the Coral Beach Resort, where she checked in for one week paying with the credit card she had been afraid to use. If there was someone out there looking for Jamie Carmichael, a female secretary in Concord, they were going to be mighty disappointed when they ran into Jamie Carmichael the former male librarian from Memphis. She was never quite sure whether it was by chance or divine intervention that her mother had named her Jamie.
Jamie had exited the womb with all the attributes of a male. As far as she could remember, she was almost five when she started to feel more female than male. But it might have happened earlier. It was not cool in south Memphis to declare that you felt more female than male, so Jamie kept her sexuality to herself. In a house full of kids, she was never going to get away with wearing her sisters’ clothes, and she often wondered whether her siblings had any idea that there was a little girl hiding behind the male façade that she presented. She had to wait for more than twenty-five years to be the person that she had always wanted to be. For that she had to leave Memphis and start life all over again as a woman. There were no TV cameras following her around like Caitlyn Jenner. She wasn’t thinking of herself as a representative of all those black people with gender-confused issues. She was the same Jamie Carmichael but this one was female.
She always considered that life had dealt her a bad hand, but now, sitting in her hotel room, she knew that the ability to appear as a man might just turn out to be a life-saver. She thought about heading for the pool but laughed when she realised that she had brought neither a bikini nor swimming trunks. She had been experimenting with hormone replacement treatment over the past year and although her breasts were developing she could still just about get away with being a guy who has well-developed pecks. She switched on the TV and flicked through the channels, avoiding those portraying either fictitious or real murders. They were a little too close to the bone. Forty channels later, she turned the TV off. Her driver’s licence had passed as identification at the reception, even though the photograph made her look like a male member of the seventies’ band Earth, Wind & Fire. She laughed at the thought. Even when you’re running for your life there are a few light moments. She lay back on the bed. The confidence she had felt leaving Charlotte was dissipating fast. She was beginning to doubt that her vacation strategy would prove enough to keep her safe.
CHAPTER TWENTY
M oira and Shea went their separate ways after they left the restaurant. They were in one of those moments well known to police investigators and sailors: they were becalmed. They had covered the bases that they could and for the moment there was nothing else to do. Shea needed a good night’s rest so Moira sent him home. She then rode the subway to the Kendal/MIT station and alighted there more by accident than design. She remembered Wilson’s lessons. An investigation can die if momentum is not preserved. That’s why there are so many open cases sitting on the desks of police officers. If you’re not moving forward, then evidence is disappearing with every moment that passes and the case is going cold. She could already feel the temperature falling on the Gardiner investigation. Almost by accident she found herself outside the Landmark Theatre in Kendal Square. She had been there several times with Brendan and knew that she was sure to find something of interest on one of the eight screens it contained. She needed to clear her mind and escape all the thoughts relating to the investigation and also to her life. She looked at the list of movies showing and saw one entitled Don’t Think Twice. It seemed appropriate. She bought a ticket and looked forward to a couple of hours of brain candy.
Two and a half hours later, Moira stood outside the building housing Brendan’s apartment. She had been standing for several minutes looking at the building without feeling like entering. Maybe it would have been better for her to have stuck with the programme and turned down the opportunity to get involved in Frank Shea’s investigation. Sitting in the back row of a lecture theatre at Harvard wasn’t the worse kind of life and it was highly unlikely to get you killed. Finally, she made up her mind and went in. As soon as she entered the apartment, she smelled cooking, which meant that Brendan was already home.
‘Hi.’ Brendan came into the living room with a large smile on his face and made straight for her. ‘I’ve been a bit of an asshole lately.’ He threw his arms round her and kissed her, then stepped back realising that his kiss hadn’t exactly been returned. ‘Bad day?’ He sat her down on the couch and sat beside her. She looked close to tears.
‘I’m so bloody confused.’ She knew that her eyes were moist.
Brendan had expected something like this. He didn’t need to have studied psychology to understand that he might have similar feelings if he had decided to give up his job and go to another country where he was effectively an alien. Maybe he was asking too much of Moira. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but neither of them had fully considered the wide range of consequences. Three months in and the adventure that was Boston and Harvard had begun to lose its gloss. There were issues of homesickness, but he was sure that the principal issue was one of loss of identity. Moira had a career that she loved and, while that career didn’t define her, it was a big part of her life. ‘How would you like to take a trip home for a few days?’ The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them. He realised how dangerous the offer he had just made was to their relationship.
Moira’s eyes brightened and she smiled. She knew the sacrifice he had been prepared to make and she loved him all the more for it. ‘I’d love to, but I’m not going to.’ She kissed him. ‘If I went back to Belfast, you’d probably need a couple of wild horses to drag me back here. I said I’d give Boston a year and that’s what I’ll do.’
Relieved, he put his arm round her shoulder. ‘Now, tell me what happened today.’
They sat close together while Moira related the day’s events. They were going nowhere fast. They had trawled through Gregory Gardiner’s personal and working life and found nothing. The secretary, Jamie Carmichael, had also disappeared, but Moira wasn’t sure whether it had anything to do with her boss’s disappearance. The lunch with O’Malley had shaken her. They had approached the search for the reason behind Gardiner’s disappearance like it was a game. But if Gardiner had been murdered, those responsible wouldn’t want his death to be investigated. And if they had murdered once, a second and a third corpse wouldn’t bother them. She stopped when she saw the look of concern on Brendan’s face.
She thought about it for a moment. ‘Not really.’
‘Frank is an adrenaline junkie, so dropping a bit of danger into the mix won’t deter him. In fact, it could have the opposite effect. I don’t give a shit about Frank. He can take care of himself, but I’ve got used to having you there beside me when I wake up in the morning.’
She smiled. ‘If that’s all you’d miss, then I’m easily replaced.’
‘Let’s be serious.’ Brendan held her by the shoulders. ‘This is not Northern Ireland. There are more than fifteen thousand homicides in the US every year. For God’s sake, most years there are more people shot by children in the US than are murdered in the whole of Europe. This is one of the most dangerous countries in the world, and you may be dealing with a lone criminal, a murderer or even an entire criminal enterprise. It reminds me of those old circus acts where the lion tamer puts his head in the lion’s mouth. Let it go.’
‘If we don’t make progress soon, then it may go on its own. Gardiner has been missing for going on three weeks. The trail is colder than a penguin standing in a blizzard at the North Pole. I doubt if Miami PD is still investigating, and if we don’t get a lead soon we might be forced to drop our investigation.’ What then? She didn’t want to go back to sitting in the back row of the lecture theatre, but her visa precluded her from working. The search for Gardiner might be a fool’s errand, but it at least meant she was doing something. And right now, doing something, even if it was going nowhere, beat the hell out of doing nothing. She looked into Brendan’s eyes. There was pleading there again. ‘I’ll be careful, I promise. At the first sign of trouble we’ll hand whatever we have over to the police. And you’ll be in the loop every step of the way.’
‘Do you think that’ll satisfy the adrenaline junkie?’
She remembered the look on Shea’s face at the lunch with O’Malley. She was about to answer when she stopped herself. She didn’t want to spoil dinner.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
F rank Shea climbed off the rowing machine in the gym at his condo. Sweat was coming from every pore and his heart was pumping. He had pushed himself harder than usual. Since he entered Devens as a fat boy and exited as a lithe fit specimen of manhood, he had become addicted to exercise. Besides the physical benefits of exercise, he valued the time spent in the gym for meditation. He sat with a towel round his neck and his head down. The lunch with O’Malley had had a profound effect on him. He had never for one moment thought that he was putting Moira in danger. In fact, he now considered himself naïve that he had never thought that finding out what happened to Greg Gardiner might end up by getting both Moira and him killed. He didn’t care that he might be in danger. He needed that buzz in his life. Some people found the buzz at the gambling tables while others found it at the track. He discovered his need for it the day he walked into the trading room at Morgan Stanley. There was nothing on Earth like the feeling of having several million dollars in a trade that could go either way. Some guys are born with a talent for baseball or basketball; he was born with a talent for taking risks and trading. The greater the risk, the more money there was on the line, the more he liked it. He had built a business worth many millions of dollars until the ‘scumbag’ gave his name to the Feds as an inside trader. That was the end of the business and the end of his ‘fix’. There would be no more trading or any involvement in the financial markets. He looked at the pool of sweat on the floor. What does a guy worth more than a hundred million dollars but without a job do with himself? He could have started a motor racing team and put his life on the line, but that wasn’t him. Instead, he had become a searcher, seeking to replicate the buzz he had felt in the trading room.
Perhaps he had always known that there was a possibility that the search for the cause of Greg’s disappearance might end badly, but he didn’t like the thought that he was putting someone else in danger, especially if that person was Moira McElvaney. He was beginning to see why Brendan was so cracked over her. She wasn’t only beautiful, she was feisty and intelligent as well. Forget about it. Moira and Brendan were an item. They loved one another and he loved both of them. He took the towel off his neck and headed for the shower at the end of the gym. He pulled off his wet sweatshirt and slipped out of his workout pants. He stood in the shower and hit himself with the cold water. What had started out as just another search for the elusive buzz was becoming something altogether more complicated. He switched the shower to lukewarm. He needed to get Moira out of his mind. He hadn’t made love to a woman in over three months. When he exited Devens, he had gone a bit crazy for sex. Most of it was of the uncomplicated paid-for variety. A hundred million dollars was one hell of a babe magnet. But the babes it attracted were the kind whose teeth were sharper than a great white. He put on a towelling robe and went into the living room. Justin had gone home and he was alone. He thought of Brendan and Moira sitting in their apartment across the river. He crossed to his bar, poured himself a shot of Midleton Very Rare 1985, and gazed out the picture window over Boston. There were numbers in his phone that he could call and he wouldn’t be lonely any more. He discarded the thought.
He was about to start making dinner when his phone started to spin and play the theme song from the Magnificent Seven. It was a message from Ricky. He picked the phone up and read, ‘Jamie Carmichael used her credit card in Charlotte and Myrtle Beach’. While the phone was still in his hand, it started to ring. The caller ID said it was Moira. He smiled before he answered. It wasn’t over until the fat lady sang, and that could be some way off.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
T he sky was a brilliant blue as the Lear 31A banked to make its final approach to Grand Strand Airport just to the north of Myrtle Beach. Moira looked out the window at the blue waters of the Atlantic and wondered why the same water that looked so blue in South Carolina could look slate grey in Northern Ireland. She had woken at five o’clock in order to be at Lawrence Airport at six. Shea had whisked her aboard the Lear and they had taken off more or less immediately. It was travelling by plane as it should be. No check-in, no security screening, no waiting room, no final check of the boarding pass, just a short stroll to the plane parked directly in front of the terminal. As the pilot had completed his checks for take-off, the passengers sat back in their deep leather seats and tucked in to breakfast packs containing orange juice, fresh croissants and coffee. The flight from Boston to Myrtle Beach took about four and a half hours cruising at two hundred miles an hour ten thousand feet above the Atlantic coast. Experiences like this helped counteract Moira’s thoughts of an early return to Belfast.
‘You really own this plane?’
Shea had already confirmed this fact several times, but Moira continued to ask the question. ‘I do.’ He had bought the Lear in a fire sale for just over one million dollars and had given it an eight hundred thousand dollar refit. It was leased to a private jet service company and produced a yield of six per cent per annum for him. And he had the use of it for the cost of the pilot and the fuel any time he needed it. The trip to Myrtle Beach would probably cost him three thousand dollars.
Moira felt like she had been caught up in a whirlwind. She had phoned Shea immediately after she received the text from Ricky and they had agreed to strike while the iron was hot. Carmichael might be in Myrtle Beach today, but she could be somewhere else tomorrow. Moira had heard the excitement in Shea’s voice as they made the arrangements.
It was just after half past ten when they walked out of the small airport terminal at Myrtle Beach. Shea picked up the rental car and punched the Coral Beach Resort into the GPS. Thirty minutes later they arrived in the parking lot of the hotel.
The receptionist at the Coral Beach had been selected for her blonde hair, her cherubic tanned face and her sunny disposition. Her ‘How can I help you?’ wasn’t so much a statement or a request as a plea. Refusing to allow her to help would have been the height of churlishness. Mo
ira was almost bowled over by her enthusiastic friendliness, which typified the American people for her.
‘Hi.’ Moira recovered from the blast of enthusiasm. ‘Can we speak with Jamie Carmichael please?’
‘Absolutely.’ The receptionist started to type on the computer and then picked up the phone. She dialled a number and turned her smiling face on Moira, who could hear the ringing tone on the other end. ‘I’m sorry, ma’am.’ The receptionist put down the phone. ‘It appears that Mr Carmichael is not in his room at the moment. Perhaps you could try the coffee shop or the pool.’
Moira did a double-take. ‘I’m sorry but we’re looking for Miss Jamie Carmichael.’
‘Our guest has that name but he is certainly a gentleman. I checked him in myself yesterday.’
‘What!’ Shea interjected. He was a trifle pissed that they had travelled nine hundred miles for absolutely nothing. He made a mental note to wring Ricky’s neck when they got back to Boston.
The receptionist looked from Moira to Shea. The sunny disposition had disappeared. ‘Are you folks with the police?’
Moira smiled her most beatific smile. ‘No, we heard that one of our friends, a Miss Jamie Carmichael, was in town and we just wanted to look her up.’
The receptionist was still wary. There were two other people waiting for her attention. ‘Excuse me. I have other guests to deal with.’ As she departed, the smile returned to her face and she launched another enthusiastic ‘How can I help you?” at the next person in the line.