by Donna Ball
He held up a hand for calm. “Mel. She sent a message earlier and I don’t want her to worry. Smile, sweetheart.”
He pointed the phone at me and I quickly managed a smile and a wave as he snapped the picture. He said, “Check your messages. She copied us both on a group photo in front of the hotel.”
I found the photo and texted back a series of hearts and smiley faces. It was the best I could do.
Miles tapped out a few more commands, scrolled a screen or two, and said, “Just like I figured. Bail bonds and DUIs.”
I rubbed my forehead, trying to focus. This was an awful lot to take in for someone who only had a couple hours’ sleep. “What?”
Miles pocketed his phone and explained. “Most people think all lawyers are automatically rich, but lawyers are a dime a dozen these days, and unless you’re in a big city with a big firm, it can be hard to make a living—particularly if you’re not very good at it and you have expensive hobbies and high-class tastes. I don’t know if you noticed that van she was driving, but it had to be forty, fifty grand.”
“Aggie said Marcie has a huge training facility and the property sounds gorgeous,” I admitted. “She said their whole club has events there.”
“She has a storefront practice in a strip mall that advertises for credit score repair and foreclosure protection, removing DUIs from your record, that kind of thing. Not to say that can’t be a lucrative specialty, but it’s also the kind of business that’s usually done on a cash basis, and where it can be a good idea to have some physical backup when the usual methods of collection aren’t effective. So I’m guessing that’s how she got involved with these guys and was ready to listen when they came to her with an idea to increase her earnings. I mean, her dogs, with Neil handling them—think of him as the jockey—had been winning for a few years, right? Don’t believe for one minute that whatever racket they had going on doesn’t go back a decade or so, and they’d been tracking the winners. They didn’t want her money. They never do. What they wanted was her assets—the dogs, the handler, the ability to call the shots.”
My throat was dry. “But—that’s crazy. Why would anybody do that? An agility trial is never a sure thing. A thousand things can distract a dog and change the outcome. That’s what makes it a trial. You can’t call an agility trial any more than you can call a—”
“Horse race?” he suggested, and I felt sick.
I grabbed the orange juice and took a swallow. “So what you’re saying is that this—this mob person or persons—”
“Organized crime,” he corrected.
“Had big money on the outcome of the Standard Cup—”
“It doesn’t have to be just the Standard Cup,” he pointed out. “If I know the way these things work, and I do, there has to be more than one commercially sponsored contest, am I right?”
He was right. I tried to stop the big-screen unfurling before my eyes of the names of pet supply companies and big-box pet stores that sponsored competitions. I cleared my throat tightly. “Had big money on the Standard Cup,” I repeated, “but they were betting against Neil and Flame. All was well until Neil hedged his bets, so to speak, with Bryte.”
Miles nodded soberly. “It’s never the horse,” he said. “It’s the jockey. Or, to be precise, it’s the combination. They figured Neil for a no-show because of the palimony thing with Marcie. They didn’t count on him going all out with his own dog. So, in the end, they made sure he didn’t.”
Suddenly I was intensely homesick. All I’d ever wanted was a little playtime, a chance to get away, a respite from the challenges of the past year. This was turning into a nightmare, and I wanted to go home. Things were so much simpler in Hansonville. Miles must have seen it in my face because he reached across the table and took my hand.
“I’m so sorry, honey,” he said.
I said forlornly, “I really kind of liked Marcie. She raised such great dogs.”
Our food arrived, and I asked the waitress to bring my take-out orders now so the food would have a chance to cool before I gave it to the dogs. Miles dug into his plate with gusto, and I picked apart my grilled cheese, nibbling on the French fries.
“What doesn’t make sense,” Miles said after a time, “is why they would go after Marcie. Breaking Neil’s knee is one thing. It’s practical and efficient and it solves the problem.”
I stared at him, the sandwich motionless a few inches from my mouth. “Who are you?”
He brushed the comment aside absently. “But what they did to Marcie… That’s not only killing the golden goose. It’s sloppy.”
“She must have double-crossed them somehow.”
“I don’t see how. There wasn’t time.”
I took a bite of my sandwich, chewing thoughtfully, thinking back over the timeline of events since the trial yesterday. I swallowed hard and reached for my orange juice. I looked at Miles, and slowly it all came together.
“Oh my God, of course,” I said. I put my glass down with a thump. “I think I know who did it.”
~*~
FIFTEEN
Two hours, ten minutes before the shooting
Jeremiah Allen Berman loved the twenty-first century. Everything was so easy these days. He’d been out less than a month and already he’d met three different guys that were living high, hardly lifting a finger. One of them was selling credit card numbers he collected by pointing his cell phone at a gas pump—whoever would’ve thought of a thing like that?—and another lifted complete IDs from hospital records. The third fellow probably worked the hardest, but he was making a killing backing up his truck beside an eighteen-wheeler in the freight yard, clipping the security cable, and off-loading the contents. With a crew of six, he could be in and out in fifteen minutes and do a half million dollars in merchandise a night. What a world they lived in. It was just made for guys like Jeremiah Allen Berman.
The hard-asses in prison used to try to rag on him about vo-hab—try being the operative word because nobody lasted long on Berman’s bad side—but his daddy didn’t raise no fool. Daddy used to say, “This world, she’s made for the thinking man.” Then he’d spit a stream of tobacco juice and let out a screech of laughter that could raise the hairs on a dead man’s balls and add, “A thinking man that knows how to swing a two-by-four upside somebody’s head, am I right, boy?”
Jeremiah Berman slid onto the sticky barstool in front of a big-screen television and grinned to himself. “You don’t know how right you were, Daddy,” he said. “You just don’t know.”
He reached for his cell phone and swore when the movement reminded him of the pain in his hand. The damn thing was already starting to swell up. He should have shot that son of a bitch when he’d had the chance.
The bartender gave him an odd look. “Get you something?”
“Budweiser,” he grunted without looking up and carefully plucked out his cell phone with the other hand.
He’d stolen the cell phone, along with a hundred ten dollars cash, from his fourteen-year-old niece, who knew what he’d do to her if she told anybody. Not that she didn’t deserve it, anyhow, prancing around the house all dressed up like a twenty-dollar whore on New Year’s Eve. And what the hell was his brother thinking, giving her a cell phone that cost more than one of them fancy new flat-screen TVs when he was always groaning about how he could barely make the mortgage and drove a six-year-old pickup? Well, he didn’t exactly drive it anymore, since Berman dumped it in the mall for a Honda with a spare key hidden in the wheel well. But still, he deserved what he got. Just how often had that son of a bitch come to see him when he was upstate, anyhow?
On the other hand, the M14 his brother kept locked away in a steel gun cabinet in the basement was a pretty good consolation prize. He could let a lot slide for the satisfaction of knowing that baby was going to be by his side if he needed it.
Nobody messed with Jeremiah Allen Berman. Hadn’t he just proven that? It had taken twenty years, but he’d settled the score, fine and good.
/> The cash was almost gone, but it didn’t matter. He’d get more. Now that he’d taken care of business, he had plenty of schemes. And none of them involved knocking over gas stations for a handful of cash, either. He was smart, now. He was using his head. And those tar-faces up at Marion who used to jeer at him about his computer classes were laughing out the other side of their asses now.
There was a computer in every public library. Anybody could just walk in and connect to the Internet. You could sit outside a coffee house or a book store or a hundred other places and nobody would ever know who you were while you stalked them on Facebook, stole their bank account numbers, ripped off their credit cards, sent them threatening e-mails, and one day, maybe even showed up at their door. It was a world wide open. And it was waiting for him.
So he paid for his beer with a twenty, logged into Facebook, and scrolled back through his recent history. There she was outside the Pembroke Host Inn sign in her baseball cap and dog sweatshirt with a big yellow dog at her side, posting, “Ready to take every blue ribbon in Pembroke, SC!” More pictures of the yellow dog, more stupid posts. Some black and white dogs, more posts. There she was in her baseball cap and dog shirt with the black and white dog. More pictures of dogs. More pictures of the hotel. He just smiled.
“Sayonara, baby,” he murmured and then he looked up and there she was on the television.
At first he couldn’t believe it. The television news had to be wrong. There it said in bold caption over the video of some woman with a dog, talking to a reporter: Hotel guest Raine Stockton finds body of murdered woman.
He said hoarsely, “Turn it up.”
When the bartender didn’t react quickly enough he half lifted himself from the stool and shouted, “I said turn it up, asshole!”
The bartender took his time pointing the remote control at the television and raising the volume. All he caught was the last part of the segment.
“Thank you, Miss Stockton,” the serious-faced reporter said as she turned to the camera. “Once again, police are still investigating this bizarre assault and murder of a hotel guest outside the Pembroke Host Inn here in Pembroke. The identity of the victim is being withheld pending notification of next of kin. We’ll keep you updated as the story develops. This is Carolina Mays, WCGA News.”
Somebody said, “Thank you, Carolina,” as Raine Stockton and her yellow dog moved out of the shot.
Jeremiah Allen Berman stared at the television screen in slack-jawed disbelief for a minute, then became aware of the sharp gaze of the bartender and dropped his eyes to his phone. She was still there, in the baseball cap and the dog shirt. Brown ponytail, slim figure. But there was something different. How could she be different? She’d come out with her black and white dog ten minutes after he’d called her room, hadn’t she? How could she be different?
He took a long slug of his beer, and his face hardened as he swallowed. Brown ponytail, dog shirt, baseball cap. And behind her, the entrance sign to a fairgrounds. Google maps found it in .03 seconds.
Jeremiah Allen Berman was nobody’s fool. Nobody’s. And now he was pissed.
* * *
Detective Laraposa seemed less than excited to learn why I was calling. “You do realize we’re investigating a murder here, Ms. Stockton,” he said. “So unless you have some new information that pertains to the case…”
“Look,” I said, “I don’t know how this is connected to Marcie’s killer, but you need to have your men search the field behind the hotel for a lead pipe. My dog Cisco found it this morning and he was showing an usual amount of interest in it.”
“Ms. Stockton—”
“The kind of interest he usually shows when an article has recent human scent on it, or strong scent, like blood.”
“The medical examiner didn’t find any sign that the victim was struck with any sort of weapon.”
“But her boyfriend was. Neil Kellog.”
Now he was interested. “What do you know about that?”
“I just left him. He’s co-owner of the dogs and—well, that doesn’t matter. The thing is, the way he described the man who attacked him sounded a lot like the man I saw with Marcie yesterday afternoon at the hotel. But what I forgot to tell you was that he was carrying a bag with him when the two of them went to walk the dogs. What if the lead pipe that he used to attack Neil with was in the bag? And what if the reason he took the bag with him when they walked the dogs was to get rid of the weapon in the field, where no one would associate it with the attack on Neil?”
The detective was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Thank you, Miss Stockton. We’ll look into it. We have your contact information if we need anything else.”
All in all, that was a very unsatisfactory conversation.
I made a wry face as I tucked the phone back into my pocket. “They’ll look into it.”
Miles’s expression was mostly sympathetic. “Not like working with the hometown cops, huh?”
“I can’t believe she sat down at the table with us last night as calm as you please, knowing Neil was passed out on the floor with pain.” I gave a dismayed shake of my head. “I thought I was a better judge of character than that.”
“Maybe she didn’t know,” Miles suggested. “Her boyfriend—or whoever it was who was with her—might not have told her. People who take care of problems like that don’t usually give the details.”
I said, “I’m starting to see where Melanie gets her really, really bad television viewing habits.”
He didn’t acknowledge that, frowning thoughtfully. “I still don’t see how any of it relates to the murder, though.”
The waitress brought the take-out boxes and our check. Miles reached for it automatically, checked himself, and passed it to me with a smile. I turned down the corners of my mouth and dug some cash out of my back pocket.
“Where are we going from here?” he asked, making a visible effort to appear cooperative.
“To feed the dogs,” I replied. I left cash on the table and gathered up the foam take-out boxes. Miles stood, and I glanced up at him as I slid out of the booth. “And then,” I conceded, “back to the hotel to check out. But first we have to go by the fairgrounds and turn the dogs over to Aggie. ”
He took the boxes from me. “And after that? I like to plan my day.”
I hesitated. I know it sounds crazy, and maybe I was in some kind of shock, but in my heart I was grieving the loss of the three-day trial and perhaps our last chance at a double qualification. Miles must have seen it in my face, because his lips tightened, and I could feel his disappointment in me. I said, “I’ll let you know, okay?”
He nodded, but his tone was distant as he said, “Sure.” He took out his phone and checked his messages while we walked to the car.
I don’t like feeding dogs out of take-out containers—they have a tendency to accidentally eat the containers—so I scrambled around in my dog bag until I came up with two collapsible food bowls and an aluminum water bowl that I always kept in the car for emergencies. I filled the three bowls with steak and eggs and watched the dogs inhale their feasts while Miles walked a few feet away and returned phone calls. I offered each of the dogs a water chaser in their empty bowls and decided to wait until we got to the fairgrounds to walk them. I’d just finished wiping down the empty bowls and putting them away when Miles returned.
He said, “How about dropping me off at the hotel so I can pick up my car? Since you don’t know what you want to do yet.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Miles, don’t pout. This isn’t the way I wanted to spend my weekend either, you know.” I held out my hand for the car keys. “I’ll drive.”
He tossed the keys to me. “Not pouting. There’s still time to drive to the beach if you want to. If not, I’m going back to Atlanta.” He got into the passenger seat and closed the door before adding, “As soon as I see you safely checked into another hotel.”
I drew a breath for a snippy remark, thought better of it, and started the en
gine.
We didn’t speak again until I stopped in front of the side entrance to the hotel. The scene of the crime, with all its trappings, was on the opposite side of the building, and I’d deliberately avoided going that way. On this side of the building the parking lot was mostly empty, no one was coming or going, and it might have been any ordinary day at any hotel in that quiet space between checkout and check-in times.
Miles put away his phone and looked at me. “Do you want me to pack the rest of your things?”
“My bag’s already packed,” I admitted and reached to turn off the ignition. “I should go in and get it.”
He said, “Go on and take care of the dogs. I’ll bring it to the fairgrounds. Maybe by then you will have decided what you want to do.”
Why didn’t I just tell him I’d go to the beach with him? Was that really such a bad idea? Of course they wouldn’t cancel an AKC sanctioned trial with over three hundred entries because of what had happened to Marcie, but did I really think there was any possibility at all of having fun now? Would any of us who had been at the hotel this morning be able to compete with any spirit at all, and would anyone even be able to look at an agility course today without thinking of Neil and Bryte, who wouldn’t be running… and who might not, in fact, ever run together again? My boyfriend just offered me a quiet beach to walk on and a strong shoulder to lean on. Of course I should say yes.
I said, “Thanks. I’ll meet you at the fairgrounds, then.”
A flash of impatience crossed his eyes and he opened the door. Then he hesitated, turned back, and leaned across the seat to brush my cheek with a kiss. He winked at me. “Love you, babe,” he said. “It’s something people say.”
I should have said it back. Later I would die a thousand deaths inside, over and over again, wishing I’d said it back. Instead, I gave him an exasperated look and replied, “I’m not your ‘babe.’”
He grinned and got out of the car. “I know,” he said.
He closed the door and lifted his hand in a casual wave as he took out his key card. I drove away and didn’t look back.