The Bad Break

by Jill Orr

  The official cause of death had been suicide, according to the former Tuttle County sheriff, Joe Tackett—a man who thanks to Holman and me now stood on trial for fraud, corruption, and attempted murder. Despite Granddaddy’s supposed-best-friend Hal Flick’s refusal to consider alternative theories, I felt it in my bones that Granddaddy hadn’t left this world by his own hand. And I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit a part of me hoped that becoming a reporter would help me prove that someday.

  I walked inside the sheriff’s office and Gail, the receptionist and my ex-boyfriend’s second cousin, greeted me. “Hey Riley. What can I do for you?”

  “Hi Gail!” I said brightly. I’d always liked her and even though I wasn’t dating Ryan anymore, we were still friendly. “I’m actually going to be covering the Davenport story for the Times so I wondered if I could talk to Carl about the investigation . . .”

  “Good for you, sugar! Look at you go!”

  It had been no secret in Tuttle Corner that I’d had a bit of rough patch for a while, but ever since Holman and I broke the story about the corruption and murder of my friend Jordan James, people around town no longer looked at me as an object of pity.

  I tried to play it cool. “Thanks, I’m excited. I mean, I’m not excited about Arthur Davenport’s death—oh gosh, that sounds terrible. I’m just excited, you know, for the opportunity to . . . cover it . . . for the newspaper.” So much for playing it cool.

  Gail laughed. “I get it, honey. No worries. But it’s gonna be a couple of hours till anyone’s free. If I were you, I’d come back by after a little bit.”

  “Okay. Hey, would you mind giving me a shout if there are any developments? I’m going to run to dinner.” I jotted down my cell and handed it to her.

  “You going with that new dreamy man of yours? Mmmmm, I’d like to sop him up with a biscuit!”

  My face turned bright red. Gail knew Jay because he’d done some consulting with the sheriff’s department over the past few months and she loved to flirt with him on his frequent visits to the station. But since she was Ryan’s mom’s first cousin, it also felt a little weird to be talking about another guy with her. Even though for the first six weeks after he broke up with me, Gail had referred to Ryan as “my stupid cousin.”

  “I’ll tell Jay you said ‘hi’ . . .” I said, as I headed home, now excited about the evening ahead for a couple of different reasons.

  CHAPTER 4

  I barely had enough time to take Coltrane for a quick walk, change clothes, and swipe on a little lip gloss before I heard Jay’s car door close in my driveway. I bounded to the front door to meet him and planted a big old kiss on him before even saying hello.

  “It’s nice to see you, too,” he said, coming up for air. “Looks like someone had a good day . . .”

  “I can’t wait to tell you all about it,” I said, grabbing my sweater. “We can talk on the way.”

  We walked hand in hand over to the Shack, which was about four blocks past Memorial Park along the river. It was mid-October and still warm, but not hot—and perfect for dining al fresco. Louis seated us at a table for two out on the deck overlooking the water.

  The Shack, or James Madison’s Fish Shack, was Tuttle’s nicest restaurant by far. Originally a family home, the Shack was a two-story house with gray shingles punctuated by crisp white trim around the many windows. Inside, two dining rooms sat on either side of the narrow staircase that led upstairs to the bar area, which was always crowded on weekend nights. Instead of having tables up there, Louis and Dahlia had put in a bunch of couches and overstuffed chairs, and some low coffee tables filled with board games and trivia decks. But by far the Shack’s best attribute was its large deck that overlooked the James River. It was a wide-plank cedar deck dotted with small tables for two or four, each one covered by a black-and-white striped umbrella. It was the perfect place to unwind after a long day at work. And I was with the perfect companion to do just that.

  “You got the story,” Jay said after I’d finished telling him about my day. “That’s great!”

  “Yeah,” I said, grabbing a strand of hair just below my shoulders and twisting it. “It is. It’s just . . .” I stopped. Ever since I’d left the sheriff’s office, a kernel of doubt and insecurity had started to take root. This sort of thing had been happening a lot since I left my comfortable job as an hourly worker at the library; I’d go from wildly excited about my new career to desperately insecure in three seconds flat.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, it’s just—what if I mess up? What if I miss an important element of the story? Kay told me I’d better not screw up.”

  “So you won’t screw up,” he said, making it sound so simple. He leaned across the table and took my left hand in his right and knitted our fingers together. “Just promise me you’ll be careful.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Okay, enough about my day. How was yours?”

  Jay was a DEA agent who had moved down to Virginia from New Jersey less than a year earlier. He was brought here to go undercover to investigate Juan Pablo Romero, a restaurateur suspected of selling drugs out of his taco trucks. That’s actually kind of how we met. Holman and I were also looking at Romero’s involvement in the death of our friend Jordan—we sort of stumbled into Jay’s investigation. The spark had been instantaneous, and though it had only been a couple of months, I felt like Jay and I were on our way to something pretty special.

  “It was work, you know, fine.”

  Jay didn’t talk about his job much. I wasn’t sure if that was because he was working on something super secret or some other reason, but his reluctance to talk about work had started to pique my curiosity. “Oh yeah, what’d you do today? Did you catch some bad guys?”

  He leaned forward with a sly smile on his face. “Yeah, four or five big ones. Got ’em with my bare hands, too.”

  “Seriously,” I laughed. “You’ve never really told me what you do all day.”

  “That’s ’cause I haven’t been doing a whole lot lately,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “It’s been pretty slow. The Virginia office is nothing like Jersey—which I guess is a good thing.”

  “I like to think so.”

  “Plus, Virginia has one particular thing that Jersey doesn’t.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Definitely.” He gave me a look that could only be described as smoldering. “See, there’s this girl . . .”

  I felt color rush to my cheeks as the server came over to take our drink order. The Shack was famous for its themed cocktails and Jay ordered a Yankee Doodle Dandy brandy punch, but since I knew I’d have to head back to work, I got a Boston Tea-Totaler.

  When the server walked away, Jay pivoted. “Have your parents made it back yet?”

  My parents were in a band and spent a lot of time on the road. Wait—that makes it sound too cool. Let me rephrase: my parents made up the two-member singing group The Rainbow Connection and toured the region performing at libraries, private birthday parties, and preschool graduations, delighting the under-six set with their pun-filled songs about such topics as woodland creatures, making friends, and learning to go pee in the potty.

  “They get home Sunday,” I said. “Maybe you could come for dinner next week?”

  Jay and my parents had really hit it off. My mother was fascinated by Jay’s Indian heritage and had used it as an excuse to try out to several new vegan dishes of Indian inspiration, often asking him if this or that tasted authentic. Jay was an omnivore born in Massachusetts who had never visited his parents’ country of origin—but he always told her she had a real flair for Indian cooking, which made her love him. And my father liked everyone. Literally. In almost twenty-five years on this planet, I had never heard him say anything remotely negative about anyone—except once when he said Kim Jong-un seemed “a little unstable.”

  “I’d love that,” Jay said. “I actually promised your mom I’d bring her some of the amchoor I had my mom send from home. Sh
e wants it for her mango curry.”

  “Mom really likes you, you know.”

  “I like her too, but not half as much as I like you.” Jay reached across the table and grabbed my hand again. I linked fingers with him and squeezed back. It was probably a combination of the fresh air, the low light, and the fact that we were smack dab in that dreamy new-relationship phase—but I felt like I could stare into his eyes forever.

  “You’re going to make everybody sick if you don’t stop that.” A voice as familiar as my own intruded into the moment. It was Ryan, my ex, and he was walking up to our table.

  Ryan had been my first love, the guy I was sure I’d spend the rest of my life with. He was also the guy who’d broken my heart into a million tiny pieces when he’d decided after seven years that I wasn’t enough for him. He’d run off to Colorado (literally in the middle of the night) and called me from the road to break things off. But he never really let me go, giving me just enough hope that we’d get back together to keep me on the line for nearly a year. And then a couple of months ago, he’d come back home, told me he loved me, and that he wanted us to be together forever. I found out approximately twenty-four hours later that while living in Colorado he’d gotten a woman named Ridley pregnant and that he planned to move her to Tuttle Corner to raise the baby around family. He begged me to stay with him, saying he loved me and that Ridley was just a fling. But there are flings and then there are babies that result from flings. The whole thing was a little too complicated for me. While I believed Ryan loved me, I’d come to realize that the way he loved me wasn’t good enough—not anymore. I deserved more. Making the decision to move on was one of the hardest things I’d ever done but it set me on a new, brighter path forward. I hoped Ryan would accept it eventually and find his own brighter path.

  “Hi Ryan,” I said, pulling my hand back from Jay’s.

  “Hey,” Jay said, and I could hear a faint weariness in his voice. Ryan was as much a part of Tuttle Corner as I was, and it seemed we were forever running into him.

  “Hello, lovebirds!” Ridley, who was a step behind Ryan, floated up to our table and bestowed upon us a blinding, thousand-watt smile. How somebody that pregnant could be that graceful I would never understand. Every head in the place turned to watch this vision of maternal loveliness glide by. When Ryan first told me about Ridley, I thought of her as the bizarro me—my complete opposite in every way. This image was confirmed when I actually met her. Ridley stood six feet tall and had long, toned limbs and a thick swath of white-blond hair that fell effortlessly to the middle of her back. She had startling blue eyes and approximately twelve perfect freckles distributed evenly across the bridge of her button nose. Her lips were full, bow-shaped, and naturally pink; her teeth straight and white; and, as if that weren’t enough, she had one of those raspy voices like a DJ. Oh—and at eight months pregnant she looked like most of us do after a big meal. There was no evidence of any sort of pregnancy weight gain other than the tiny bump just under her tanned, pierced, and always-exposed belly button.

  Ridley and I were learning to coexist, but I’ll admit it hadn’t been easy for me. I was over Ryan, but seeing his perfect Amazonian baby mama and the way everyone fawned over her made me feel things I wasn’t proud of—things I didn’t want to examine too closely.

  “You remember Ridley,” I said to Jay.

  Jay smiled politely, but when he didn’t blush or stammer like every other man in town did in her presence, I fell just a little deeper for him.

  “So, what are you two kids up to tonight?” Ryan asked, as if the appetizers and drinks offered no clues.

  “Just having a little dinner,” I said, unable to keep the sarcasm from my voice.

  “Us too,” he said and clapped Ridley on the back of her shoulder. “Ridley can really tie on the old feedbag now that she’s in her third trimester.”

  Ridley, instead of being offended, threw out a throaty laugh. “Yeah, I can’t seem to get enough these days.” She swirled her hands around her perfectly shaped bump and I felt a pang of something deep within. “I sometimes wonder if I am incubating a baby lion with all the cravings for red meat.”

  “Oh, that’s just a Sanford for you.” I said it before I even thought about it, and then immediately regretted it. It was an intimate comment, exposing my deep and thorough knowledge of the Sanford family. Ryan’s eyes found mine. I felt the unidentified emotion again and wondered if my ovaries hadn’t heard the news that Ryan and I were over.

  “Well, I think you look super healthy,” Jay said. “Enjoy your dinner.” Translation: move along, people.

  Ryan held my gaze for a moment too long. “Yeah, you guys, too.” But before he turned to walk away, he said, “Hey, did you hear about Thad Davenport getting arrested?”

  “Wait—what?” I said. I dug out my phone from my purse and sure enough, Gail had texted me fifteen minutes ago: Thad arrested. Tab throwing one hell of a fit.

  This was big. I looked up at Jay, an apology cocked and loaded.

  “I know that look—I’ve given that look. Go.”

  “You’re the best.” I kissed him goodbye. “I’ll make it up to you.”

  Without so much as a glance at Ridley or Ryan, he held the side of my cheek close to his and whispered, “I’ll hold you to that.”

  CHAPTER 5

  I heard the yelling before I even walked inside the sheriff’s office.

  “Are you out of your mind?” Tabitha, red-faced and wild-eyed, was screaming at Carl Haight. “You let him go right this minute or I will sue every last person in this room!”

  “Tabitha—I mean, Miss St. Simon,” Carl struggled to retain his professional demeanor. “You need to calm down or I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  When I walked in, no one even looked at me. Every employee of the Tuttle County sheriff’s office was watching the dramatic showdown between Carl and Tabitha.

  “How could you even think Thad could do something like kill his own father? It’s ridiculous!”

  “Miss St. Si—”

  “He’s a well-respected cardiac management specialist!”

  “Miss St.—”

  “He can’t even kill a spider! He puts them onto little slips of paper and takes them outside, for Pete’s sake! In all my life I have never seen such a gross miscarriage of justice, not to mention complete idiocy!” She spat the words like bullets from a machine gun. No one dared interrupt her or attempt to step in between the two.

  As the former target of several Tabitha rants, I wasn’t intimidated. I walked over to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “Tab? Can we talk for a second?”

  She had the wild look of a jaguar that had been interrupted mid-kill, but after a second, sanity returned to her eyes. “Fine,” she huffed, then jabbed a finger in Carl’s direction. “But this is not over, Haight. You got that? I’m going to get the best freaking lawyers money can buy and sic them on you and this two-bit operation you’re running!”

  “C’mon now.” I led her toward the front steps of the building.

  “Can you believe this?” She leaned against the railing just outside the building. “Thad—a murderer? It’s insane.”

  “Just slow down a minute,” I said in what I hoped was a soothing voice. “Tell me what happened.”

  Tabitha smoothed her long dark hair and tucked both sides behind her ears. She took a deep breath before explaining. “Acting-Sheriff Haight said he wanted to take our statements, but I knew something was off when they separated us. I was with Butter, who basically just asked me a bunch of inane questions that I’m pretty sure he was reading off of a Google search of ‘What to ask people after they find a dead body,’ all the while eating an entire pound of pistachios, mind you.” She rolled her eyes.

  “But Thad was in another room with Carl forever. Once they finished up, everything seemed fine, and Thad and I were about to leave when Carl got a phone call from Dr. Mendez in Richmond. He said that in addition to the knife wound in Arthur’s chest—
which we already knew about—there was something else. Results from the quick tox screen showed high levels of digitalis in Arthur’s blood.”

  “What’s digitalis?”

  “They use it to treat heart-rhythm problems. But Arthur didn’t have any heart problems.”

  “Okay . . .” I waited for her to put this all together for me.

  “Duh. Thad sells Digoxigon, a form of digitalis.”

  “Wait—what? I thought Thad was a cardiologist?”

  Tabitha gave me a look that might as well have turned me to stone. “No.”

  “But you just said that he is a cardiac management specialist, isn’t that the same thing?”

  Two peach blooms appeared on her cheeks. “He is a cardiac management specialist—for Helder Pharmaceuticals.”

  “So he sells drugs?”

  Tabitha’s blush deepened, the peach blossoms morphing into the redder blotches of anger. “Yes, technically he is a pharmaceutical sales representative. But he is in the upper echelon of sales for Helder, and reps their cardiac-care medications.”

  I was dumbfounded. Tabitha loved to throw around that her fiancé was a cardiac specialist, and even inserted herself into conversations with library patrons about heart health issues, citing her expertise as a result of her fiancé’s line of work. She knew people assumed he was a doctor and never once corrected that perception.

  “I never said he was a doctor,” Tabitha said. “Anyway, do you want to know what happened or not?”

  I nodded. I put a pin in this whole Thad’s-not-really-a-doctor thing and made a mental note to come back to it later.

  “Okay. So since one of the drugs Thad reps is Digoxigon, which, like I said, is a form of digitalis. Naturally, he carries samples of it in his car and stores samples at home . . .”