by Ed Robinson
“If he’s driven out of the park, where will he go?” I asked. “Other camps or cabins within a reasonable distance.”
“What will you be doing while I work on all of this?”
“I was coming up with solutions to all the world’s problems,” I said. “I might go back to that, or maybe not.”
“Maybe you could heat up the grill,” she said. “I’ve got a London broil ready to go.”
“Excellent,” I said. “Sounds perfect.”
I fired up the Weber, and soon it started smoking and smelling like meats cooked previously. Red took notice and woke from his slumber. He knew that sometimes treats magically appeared when the grill was smoking. I put the whiskey away for the night but grabbed another beer as I rescued the London broil from the fridge. Brody had it soaking in a teriyaki marinade. She was in the bedroom, presumably on the phone with Mrs. Pennington. She was good at conversation. I was good at grilling meat. Things were right with the universe.
Over dinner, we discussed her chat with the runner’s mother. There was one item of interest in her home. She’d never washed his pillowcase precisely because it smelled like him. It was the only thing she could think of that would provide a proper scent. On the subject of animals, he not only liked them, but he had an uncanny way with them. Animals loved him, and he loved them back. He was a virtual animal whisperer, didn’t matter what kind. Dogs, cats, horses, and even birds were putty in his hands.
“She went on and on about this,” Brody said. “He was a regular Doctor Doolittle.”
“Probably found animals easier to relate to than humans,” I said. “That tells me he won’t hurt Red. Plus she has something he can get a scent from.”
“Are you considering searching a bazillion acres of wilderness for this kid?”
“You want me to let him go hungry?”
“I am not thrilled about you being out there for days on end with no help,” she said. “It’s not like you walk in and find him in a few hours. He’s avoided detection this long for a reason.”
“So we study the terrain,” I said. “We’ve done this before. We know at least one route of travel. It’s a starting place. I don’t care how great of a runner he is, his camp ain’t twenty miles away.”
“Probably not,” she said. “I’ll print out some satellite shots from Google Earth. Maybe we can get a helicopter to make a pass or two. The Forest Service should be willing.”
“Now we’re talking,” I said. “I’ll go dust off the mountain man clothes.”
“Good Lord,” she said. “Let me have those. I’ve been reading about washing them in baking soda. Hunters do it. No scent at all. I’m not letting you put that stuff on the way it is.”
There was no point in resisting. The clothes I wore to stalk the woods were beyond crusty. That was the point. They didn’t smell like me; they smelled like dirt. They had never once been washed. I went to find them in the garage, and they were covered in cobwebs and a thick layer of dust. Brody wouldn’t let me bring them in the house until I hosed them down and hung them on the bushes overnight. I had a pair of deerskin shoes and a floppy hat of undetermined material as well. I wouldn’t let her wash them because I was afraid they’d fall apart. I hit them with the hose too and hung them up to dry. A good rainstorm the next day further rinsed them but made drying impossible. I left them hanging like any good hillbilly would.
In the following days, it rained and rained. My tracking clothes were still hanging in the backyard. Any residual scent left by Pennington in the park would be long washed away. There was no point in trying to hunt him now. I had no starting point to put Red on his trail. In the meantime, we got our first call from a jealous wife. Creekside Investigations was officially in a new line of business.
Mrs. Bronson suspected that her husband was cheating. He was working late hours and had developed a habit of taking a shower as soon as he returned home. This was unusual behavior for him she said. There were no other signs of marital strife; they still got along well and even had sex on a semi-regular basis. Still, she was worried. If we discovered that he was not cheating, that would be great. Could we follow him and find out what was going on? We accepted the job and made an appointment to visit with her the next day.
We drove to the Bronson home in Linville Ridge early the next afternoon. This couple had a few bucks. We learned that he was an investment advisor, working for an outfit called Edward Jones. His office was only a few miles away, on 105 between Banner Elk and Boone. She gave us a picture and described his car, a late-model Mercedes. Brody took care of the particulars of our agreement while I made a quick scan of the home’s interior. Nick Bronson was a golfer, Rotarian, and all-around upstanding member of the community. His wife was attractive, although aging, and didn’t work. He had a few extra pounds around the waistline but was attractive in his own right. They were the American dream couple, living life to the fullest in the High Country of western North Carolina. I processed as much information as I could before Brody and our new client were finished. I thought about the concept of infidelity, which I should have thought more about before getting into this line of work.
When I’d been married to Laura, I never once thought about cheating on her. I wasn’t tempted. We said our vows before God, and I had no intention of ever breaking them. We were both committed to each other. After she died, it was a long time before I was ever with another woman. It still felt like cheating, even then. Brody and I weren’t legally married, but we were still just as committed. I had been severely tempted by our now friend Angelina Will, but I found the strength to resist. I couldn’t hurt the woman I truly loved. I just couldn’t do it.
There was one time when I was dating a hot lawyer lady in Punta Gorda. She was way out of my league, but I was a convenient plaything for her. I guess you could have called her my girlfriend, but we had no serious commitment. I had rescued two Russian sex slaves and put them up in a cheap apartment in town. One day I went to check on them, and the prettier one of the two decided she needed to repay me for my kindness. She had no money. I put up a small argument but quickly gave into her advances. Technically, I cheated that day, but the lawyer turned out to be an evil witch so I never really regretted it.
I hoped that Mrs. Bronson was wrong about her husband. The only way to find out was to follow and surveil him, which we began doing the very next night. His work hours were nine to five. We parked across the street and watched him come out and get in his car at six. We followed him to the gym on Tynecastle Highway. We used the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant to keep an eye on his car. He came out ninety minutes later and drove towards his home. We followed until he arrived at the entrance to his gated community.
His routine was much the same the following night, except when he left the gym, he parked very close to us at the restaurant. After he went inside, we followed. He was sitting at the bar with a bottle of Corona in front of him. He was alone. We waited for some mystery woman to join him, but it didn’t happen. He finished his one beer and drove home. We did not follow him into the neighborhood. His wife had given us the gate code, but we didn’t want to risk him realizing he was being tailed.
The next day Brody called Mrs. Bronson. Her husband had arrived home shortly after we’d seen him go through the gate. He’d said nothing about attending a gym. Were we sure he was in there the entire time? Was he meeting a woman inside, or slipping out a back door? We agreed to find out if we could. That meant signing up for a gym membership ourselves. Fortunately, they offered a trial run of two weeks for cheap. Hell, I didn’t even have anything resembling gym shoes. We had to drive to Boone to buy some for each of us. Brody said we could bill the Bronson’s for them.
“Time and expenses,” she said. “We can bill her for the two beers we had at the Mexican place too.”
“Sweet,” I said. “Maybe he’ll stay longer next time. We can charge her for a meal.”
The next time we followed him to the gym, we did a drive-by before coming back a f
ew minutes later and parking a few spaces from his car. We signed in at the front desk and looked over the various apparatus. I had no idea where to start or how to behave in a gym. I’d always jogged, swam, and did a few push-ups to stay in shape.
“Try the stationary bike,” Brody suggested. “It will be good for your knees.”
We each mounted a machine that allowed us to keep an eye on Nick Bronson. He was alone and working out on a rowing device. He went at it pretty hard, huffing and sweating. He didn’t seem to notice us, or at least he didn’t recognize us from the restaurant.
I cycled for twenty minutes at a moderate pace. It loosened up my legs nicely, without the pounding of a run. I switched to free weights and did some bench presses. We moved from station to station putting in minimal effort. Sure I could be in better shape, but I was there to watch a man, not turn myself into Adonis. We left after an hour and returned to the Puerto Nuevo, the Mexican place across the street. As soon as we saw his car headed our way, we hurried inside and took seats at the bar. He nodded acknowledgement when he came in and took a seat further down the bar. He ordered his Corona. No woman came to meet him. We didn’t follow him when he left, but Brody confirmed that he arrived home shortly thereafter. As far as I was concerned, the man was innocent. Our job was done.
The next day Brody called Mrs. Bronson to settle our business agreement. Somehow she got roped into a meeting with the local women’s club in Linville Ridge. We met at the golf club a few days later. Several of Mrs. Bronson’s friends wanted the same service. It would be nice to know that their husbands were as faithful as Nick Bronson. We warned them that they might not be happy with what we discovered, but they insisted. We left with six solid contacts and likely six easy assignments. We were husband watchers now; holding the fate of marriages in our hands. I almost wanted to sneak back to that golf club and warn all the men members that their wives didn’t trust them.
Some of the Linville Ridge ladies had good reason to be suspicious. We stayed busy for the next two months trailing men around two counties as they carried out their elicit affairs. Half of those we followed were indeed guilty of infidelity. The other three were clean, as far as we could determine. Photographic evidence was presented where necessary. We became familiar daytime faces at the golf club. Enough retired men who hung around during the day saw us and figured out what was going on to end our campaign in that particular neighborhood. The ladies had friends who lived elsewhere though, and soon we were in high demand all over Avery and Watauga Counties.
It was easy duty, but I was always disappointed when we caught a cheater. I wanted some male clients so we could follow women while their husbands were at work. I believed that women were just as capable of cheating, and better at deception than men were. We’d made our name with the female side of the equation though, and it was a steady stream of business and income. It was also much less dangerous than any of the previous ventures I’d gotten into in the High Country. We’d managed to create a demand where one hadn’t previously existed, which I found interesting. What else could we create that would drive business our way?
Fourteen
Our connections within law enforcement sometimes came in handy. Angelina or Rominger could give us a call when a suspect left home or work. Police officers could sometimes get into places that we couldn’t. They could also get answers that wouldn’t be freely given to civilian strangers. For the most part, this was kept on the up and up, but occasionally the rules got slightly bent. Our cop friends trusted us, and we trusted them. It was a solid working relationship.
We had new business cards made which said Marital Investigation/Discreet and Professional. We soon had more work than we could handle as word spread to more and more communities. Each successful job led to several others. We were out on the streets six nights a week, reserving Sundays as a day of rest. Booze had been completely eliminated from my life as a result. It wasn’t a conscious decision. That’s just the way it worked out. I wasn’t about to mix alcohol with business. I still downed my share of beer on Sunday evenings.
We’d forgotten all about Ed Pennington. It had been months since we’d even mentioned his name. That changed when we got a call from the Ashe Country Sheriff. There’d been no sign of our runner at the State Park, and the campgrounds had been reopened, but new reports had started coming in from two campgrounds to the north of the state park. I wasn’t being asked to investigate. It was just a courtesy call.
A quick check on Google Maps revealed nine campgrounds within easy hiking distance of the park. A fifteen-minute drive by car wouldn’t be hard to reach on foot for Pennington. The two places that he’d visited were River Camp USA and Twin Rivers Campground. They were both alongside the New River, just south of the Virginia state line, minutes apart. I wasn’t sure what to do about it, though. Brody called Mrs. Pennington to let her know that her son was still alive, and still pilfering campgrounds.
We decided to drive up that way and take a look around. Both places were well kept, with clean bathrooms and nice facilities for both tents and RVs. The owner at Two Rivers was friendly and professional. She showed us around and offered to make us a reservation. It was a beautiful place, but we told her we had some more looking around to do. She made no mention of late night raids on her campers. The owner of River Camp USA was a bit odd. The place had some serious issues. The grounds and utilities were in serious disrepair. Jay was in no mood to talk with us about anything unless we were ready to rent space. He made no mention of Pennington’s antics either. We left without making a reservation at either campground. I hadn’t given enough thought to restarting the mission to bring the runner in. Chasing cheaters was so much easier. The jobs were lined up and waiting for our attention.
Next, we followed Wayne Camp from Banner Elk to a seedier section of Boone. He was an electrical engineer married to an older woman who stayed at home during the day. She said that he’d been acting strangely lately. That’s all she had to tell us. He worked irregular hours all the time, so it wasn’t coming home late that triggered her suspicions. We guessed that having husbands followed had become trendy amongst the women who could afford it, and Sandy Camp was keeping up with the latest Avery County “It” thing.
We followed her husband for two weeks. He went to a lot of different locations to consult on construction and rehabilitation projects. Some of these were in less than desirable neighborhoods. We lost track of him several times because there was no place to set up and watch him, but it appeared that he was doing his job rather than secretly meeting women. The man likes to get his drink on. We watched him down booze in a few different bars until it became impossible to follow him inside without him recognizing us. He never went home without hitting a bar, and he seemed to have no preference as to where he drank. He went wherever it was convenient in his travels.
One night he made an additional stop after his work and drinking were done. Between the Walmart and Highway 105 was one of those lower class areas dominated by trailers and section 8 housing. We could think of no legitimate reason for him to visit this place. Again, access to a decent vantage point was limited. We stuck out like a sore thumb. Brody dropped me off and continued driving. I had a camera, my weapon, and nothing else. I tried to act casual but soon ran out of excuses to be on that particular street after dark. Brody came back and picked me up. We drove to Walmart to figure out what to do next.
“If he’s seeing a woman in this neighborhood he’s scraping the bottom of the barrel,” Brody said.
“Cheap whore or drugs,” I said. “Maybe, both.”
“Did you see where he went?”
“Nope,” I said. “Could be any of a dozen places.”
“Let’s drive back by and see what we can see.”
Wayne Camp was on his way back to his big ass SUV as we passed. We kept driving, with no idea where he’d come from or what had taken place. We had no hard evidence to convince his wife that he was cheating, but we had obvious suspicions. We kept them to ourse
lves — no point in alarming his wife for no reason. We kept up our surveillance, and the same thing happened several more times. We were never able to see where he went. We couldn’t hang out conspicuously. We couldn’t ask too many questions of passersby. We needed more information about who lived where, what went on, and the nature of his business.
Getting to the bottom of the mystery took more investigative time than any of our other jobs. Rominger hooked us up with the Boone Police Department for some background. We went to City Hall to go through property records. Brody searched for arrest records of any individual that we could identify as living there. We observed casual drug deals while casing the place when Camp wasn’t present. Camp himself had never been arrested for any reason. He was an upstanding citizen who made a good living. There was simply no reason that we could think of for him to make periodic visits to a bad neighborhood. He never stayed long. He didn’t seem like the type to buy crack in the hood. He didn’t seem like he’d need fifteen minutes with a cheap whore twice a week either. What the hell was he doing there?
We’d been spending too much time and energy with this guy and getting zero results. I advised Brody to tell Mrs. Camp to come out and ask him what he was doing. A little communication can go a long way. If he denied his comings and goings, she could have a reason for suspicion, but we couldn’t definitively say what he was up to. We had a backlog of other cases to get started on, but my curiosity was strong on this one.
I also didn’t want to make a habit of not finishing what we started. Accepting defeat is a good way to make a habit of losing. We trailed new suspects at night but kept working the Camp case during the day. We got Rominger to visit the apartment complex in question and ask around. He talked to some officer on the Boone Police Department about the place. They started keeping a closer eye on it, spending some time on the ground, learning what they could. One of them caught Wayne Camp coming out of one the units at night and questioned him. That’s how we got the real story.