by David Perry
When he turned it over and looked at it more closely, Jason’s heart nearly jumped out of his chest.
CHAPTER 36
“What does this say?” asked Jason. His forefinger tapped the copy of Pettigrew’s autopsy on the kitchen table.
Peter and Waterhouse had been tasked with scouring every bar and pub in Smithfield and the surrounding localities. Their goal was to find anyone who might recognize Thomas. Someone who’d seen him drinking the night he died. They’d found no one. It was another missing link fueling Jason’s suspicion.
The three men took seats at the table as Jason opened the report.
“My buddy in the Newport News PD,” Waterhouse said, “was able to get a copy of that from someone he knows at the medical examiner’s office. It’s inconclusive—”
“What else is new?” Peter chimed in.
Jason scanned the pages. “His neck was broken, so were three ribs, both arms and legs. His face was badly smashed. His blood-alcohol level was equivalent to 0.18 measured by extracting vitreous humor. Well above the legal limit.”
Waterhouse said, “What kind of alcohol?”
“What the hell is vitreous humor?” asked Peter.
“Eyeball juice,” Jason replied.
Peter cringed and rubbed his eye.
“The stomach contents show no food, only some kind of distilled spirit like whiskey,” Jason continued.
“This guy had everybody fooled,” said Peter.
“No way,” Jason declared. “Maybe he was forced to drink it.”
“You know, Jason, I’m tolerating your little investigation here,” Peter sighed. He scratched the gap in his eyebrow where the scar cleaved it. “But let’s face facts. Pettigrew was drunk. Now you’re telling me someone forced him to get drunk. Then they faked his car accident.”
“It’s possible,” Jason replied. “None of the facts point to Thomas being a drunk. Chrissie found no evidence of booze anywhere in his house. No one saw Thomas drinking anywhere in Smithfield. Hell, Walter even said Thomas was trying to get him to stop drinking a week before he died. And anyway, how the hell did he drive thirty miles when he already had a BAC high enough to stop an elephant? It doesn’t add up.”
“I’d believe it more if he was just hit over the head or shot,” said Peter. “If they were going to kill him, why go to the trouble of making it look like an accident? Why not just put out his lights and dump his body in the Chesapeake?”
“Maybe whoever did it didn’t want an investigation. If he disappeared or turned up murdered, then people would ask questions. If there’s an insurance scam, they wouldn’t want the scrutiny.”
Peter shrugged. “I’m not convinced.”
Walter produced the cell phone wrapped in its plastic bag. “I had a friend check the serial number with all major carriers. It was Thomas’s. He used AT&T, purchased the phone a year and a half ago. Where did you say you found it?”
“In a bucket of water in the back room of the Colonial.”
“Christine said he called and left a message on her phone from his cell. The phone was found in the pharmacy. I pulled his phone records. The last call was to Christine’s landline. It must have been made before the phone ended up in the bucket.”
“He was in the pharmacy the night he died,” Jason explained. “Christine said it was late when he made the call, close to midnight. The autopsy said he died somewhere between two and four in the morning.”
Waterhouse shuffled the phone logs. “According to the records, the call was made at 11:27 p.m. What was he doing in the pharmacy at that hour?”
“I’m guessing he wasn’t getting drunk. Maybe doing exactly what we’ve been doing?” Peter said.
Jason withdrew the folded prescription from his pocket, opened it, and laid it on the autopsy report. “Or maybe he was looking for this. It’s the missing prescription.”
Peter picked it up and examined it. “Big whoop! We knew the prescription existed. That doesn’t prove he was murdered.”
“Thomas thinks he was.” He turned the prescription onto its face.
Peter and Waterhouse leaned over the table as if they were looking at a rare diamond.
It read,
If you find this, I was murdered.
T. P.
CHAPTER 37
“How do we know Pettigrew wrote this?” It was Walter questioning Jason this time.
“I pulled several prescriptions from the files. Prescriptions Thomas had taken from doctors over the phone and written down. They were written months ago. They’re the same. Take a look.” Jason removed six more prescriptions from a folder.
“The handwriting looks the same, I’ll give you that.” Peter nodded. “But just because he wrote it doesn’t mean he was actually killed. Maybe he wrote it in a fit of paranoia.”
“C’mon, Peter. Give me a break!” Jason glared at his brother. “Can you use that pea brain of yours for a second?”
“So now you’re a conspiracy nut too. I think you’re partaking of some your own product, Jason.”
“That’s enough, you two,” Waterhouse interrupted. “The autopsy…” The private investigator flipped the pages of the report. Finding the section he was looking for, he read from it. “Right here, it says he had two sutured wounds, front and back, in his right shoulder. The wounds were relatively recent but definitely inflicted before the death occurred. The ME opened the sutures and reported a pulpified track between the scapula and the left humerus radiating to the surrounding tissues. It’s consistent with a gunshot wound. The bullet went clean through.”
“Two wounds?”
“One in front of the shoulder, one in the back.”
“Entry and exit?”
“Yup.” Waterhouse pulled several eight-by-tens from the stack. Jason winced at the first photo. “It appears our dearly departed Thomas was shot in the back, and the bullet exited through the front.”
“He was running away.”
“Damn,” Jason said. “What do you think?” He passed them to Peter. There were four photographs. One of Pettigrew’s torso, one of his upper back, one of both legs, and a close-up of the face.
Waterhouse said, “The coroner is certain it’s a bullet wound. But he said it had nothing to do with the cause of death.”
“So why wasn’t it investigated?” asked Jason.
“I can’t answer that. But as a former cop, if I saw the gunshot wound and thought he died in a car wreck, I probably wouldn’t pursue it either. Especially if it was sutured. What would be the point?”
“The guy was shot!” A look of incredulous disgust spread across Jason’s features. “The last time I checked, that was a crime.”
“The police are overwhelmed with cases. He’s dead. The result of drinking and driving, supposedly. The two had nothing to do with each other.”
“Isn’t this enough to take to your buddy the cop?”
“Not really. It’s all circumstantial.”
“These files and notes are not circumstantial,” Jason pleaded.
The three men contemplated the photographs in silence.
“If he was seen in an emergency room, wouldn’t they file a police report?” Peter rubbed his eyebrow.
“Yes, they would,” Waterhouse replied.
Peter shook a cigarette loose from a pack. “I need a smoke. Let’s go outside.”
They withdrew to the back porch, the same porch where Jason had first seen the article about Pettigrew’s death in the Hampton Roads Gazette. Peter and Waterhouse lit cigarettes, while Jason sipped from a bottle of water.
“My buddy on the force checked for reports of gunshot wounds treated in emergency rooms in the area for the last month,” said Waterhouse. “There were none for Thomas’s wound. He wasn’t treated in a hospital.”
“So who sutured it?” asked Peter.
“I’m no doctor,” said Jason, “but whoever did it knew what they were doing. A physician—or someone with that kind of skill—sutured those wounds.” Jason did not v
oice his thought that Jasmine Kader was a physician. Had she been involved in Thomas’s death? Did she suture the wound, and if so, why?
Waterhouse said, “I know you don’t want to tell Christine about the autopsy results. But we need to find out what she knows. Maybe she remembers if he looked or sounded like he was in pain.”
Jason drained the water bottle and they moved back inside. “What about you? You were his friend. When was the last time you saw him? Did he appear to be injured?”
Waterhouse shook his head. “Thomas and I had dinner a week before he died. We played chess and talked for a few hours. He was his usual self. If he was hurt, I would have noticed. He was fine.”
“What date exactly?”
“Thomas died on the night of the fifteenth, a Friday. His body was found on the sixteenth. We had dinner at Outback on the Saturday before, September ninth.”
Peter shook his head. “What if he was shot the same night he died?”
“You coming over to the dark side, Pete?” asked Jason.
“Don’t go there, brother,” Peter shot back. “As you so eloquently put it, I’m trying to expand this itty-bitty brain of mine.”
“What if we ask someone at the Colonial?” Waterhouse said, thinking out loud.
“That’s not a good idea. It might raise alarms. Someone might mention that we were asking.”
Waterhouse persisted, glaring at Jason. “There’s no police report about a shooting. You don’t want to ask anyone at the Colonial. You don’t want to ask Christine. What the hell do you want to do?”
“I don’t know,” Jason replied.
“Jason, I was a cop for more than twenty years. It’s never easy to investigate a murder. You have to scramble some eggs to get answers. If we want to get to the bottom of this shit hole, we need more answers. Christine might have them.”
Jason looked between the grungy private investigator and his skeptical brother. “I don’t want to hurt her again. But you’re right, it needs to be done. I’ll talk to her.”
* * *
In a dark room surrounded by glowing electronic instruments, a female technician with thick glasses, spiked hair, black nail polish, multiple earrings, and a top-secret clearance watched the graphic display of the audio recording pulse with every word. With the exception of the few minutes the three men had been outside, every word had been captured with remarkable clarity.
She quickly encrypted the vital passages and forwarded them to Hammon.
CHAPTER 38
All three men rode to Christine’s house in silence. Christine showed them in, offered sodas and snacks. Jason hesitantly asked her about the days leading up to her father’s death, explaining that they were trying to pin down exactly when Thomas had suffered the gunshot wound. Christine nodded once and reminded them that she’d seen the wound when she’d identified the body. But she hadn’t known it was a gunshot wound at the time. She hadn’t found out until a police detective asked her about it. The second to last time she’d spoken to her father was three days before the accident. It was on the phone, and he sounded like his usual grumpy, distracted self. She didn’t know anything more.
Relieved to be done with the questions, Jason brought up the voice message, which was the primary reason for their visit tonight.
“I don’t erase my messages until the mailbox is full. It’s a bad habit,” said Christine.
“Don’t apologize,” Jason replied. “Your bad habit might help us figure out what happened that night.”
“I didn’t have much trouble finding it. It’s just noise. I don’t see how it’s going to help. It was between eleven thirty and midnight when he left the message. Obviously, I wasn’t home when he called. In fact, I was at his house looking for him. He tried my cell earlier and didn’t leave a message. I’d left it in the car. The second time he called the house directly.”
She punched the speaker button and hit play. The generic female voice recited the date and time of the call, September 15, followed by Pettigrew’s cell phone number.
The first sounds were whooshes of air. The breaths were hushed and hurried, overlapped by the rustling of clothing. They paused briefly, as if Thomas had ceased all movement and was remaining perfectly still. The silence was broken by muffled voices. Peter and Waterhouse leaned in, angling to hear.
Jason, instead, studied Christine. She was hearing the final sounds her father had made hours before he died. The noise that had held no meaning for her that first night was now eerie. She looked pained, forlorn.
The aging pharmacist seemed to be tapping—no, scratching—the mouthpiece of the phone. Intermittent bursts of varying duration, some shorter, some longer. In the longer noises, it became apparent he was using a fingernail.
Peter elbowed Waterhouse lightly. Waterhouse nodded. Both former military men recognized the patterns. They asked Christine for a pen and paper.
Christine returned with the items and handed them to Peter. “What’s this for?” she asked.
“Can you please replay the message?”
She punched a button and the message began again. Peter marked the paper with dashes and dots. After the third replay, the message was complete.
After the scratching ended, rustling and garbled words followed. The word “you” came through loud and clear in Pettigrew’s husky voice. He sounded disgusted, shocked; he’d recognized the person he addressed. Finally, a metallic clank and the sloshing of liquid. Then the line went dead.
“That’s when the cell phone ended up in the bucket,” said Jason.
The two other men nodded in agreement.
Waterhouse and Peter hunched over the paper. “Mine’s a little rusty,” said Waterhouse. Peter had jotted a string of letters under the dashes and dots.
threemengunssos
The significance of the letters became apparent as Peter rewrote the string with the correct spacing inserted.
Three men. Guns. SOS.
PART TWO
CHAPTER 39
Monday, October 2
“Mr. Jason,” Lily Zanns lectured, “I was counting on your youth and energy to allow you to keep up with the demands of the work. Have I not made my expectations clear? Or was I faulty in my judgment?” She sat behind her desk, a chief executive handling an underachieving underling. “Please tell me why I shouldn’t fire you immediately.” More than her words, the expression on her normally stoic face told him he was on the brink of being out of a job again, this time involuntarily.
Jason gazed at Zanns, trying with every sinew in his body to hide his contempt. The millionaire entrepreneur had been scolding him for ten minutes, her words uncomfortable and self-righteous. I’m going to put up with it to get some answers, he told himself as he half listened.
The current objective overrode all else. At the same time, Jason wanted to retain his position. Not because he desired the salary or the prestige, but because finding the truth and restoring Thomas’s reputation were paramount. A small part of him even hoped that Christine might be a term in that equation.
“No, Lily,” he replied, leaving out the “Ms.” on purpose. “You made yourself quite clear.”
Did Lily know about what Fairing was up to? He was her employee. Zanns was cordial but firm with her pharmacist, not like her convivial relationship with Jasmine Kader. Fairing seemed to have a healthy respect for Zanns. Yet Jason sensed a deeper connection between them. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Would that connection cause her to protect Fairing? Or would she condemn him for the scoundrel he was?
Jasmine Kader’s involvement also worried Jason. Zanns and Kader had spent a lot of time together at the gala for Thomas, whispering and smiling. Jason didn’t want to jump to conclusions and make Zanns guilty by association. But then again, everyone around her was up to their eyeballs in corruption.
He hadn’t seen nor spoken to Jasmine since his drunken episode at the Southern Belle on Friday. He’d drunk too much before, especially in college, and as much as he hated to admit it, h
e recognized he’d had a blackout. It had never happened before.
But he needed to see her again. There were unanswered questions. Had Jasmine sutured Thomas’s wounds? Had Jasmine been a party to Thomas’s death? He was going to look her in the eye one more time to see if the truth was there.
“Then where are the pharmacy locations we talked about last week? Have you contacted the commercial real estate agent? Have you even set up a meeting with them?”
“I haven’t had time.”
Zanns bit her lower lip. “Excusez-moi? You haven’t had time?”
* * *
Zanns bored into Jason Rodgers with her unrelenting gaze. She’d been keeping him on the defensive, but he was a cool cucumber and did not easily give up. Cooper’s assessment of his tenacity was spot on. Rodgers was driven by the need to know what had happened to his mentor. It was obvious he would not give up until he had answers. He’d been digging around in the pharmacy files. That much she knew. The night security guard had called and informed her that he had found the pharmacy unlocked the other night. He said that a man named Rodgers had shown up because the alarm had been triggered. But the guard was suspicious that the man hadn’t wanted to report it to the police.
A call to the monitoring service told her that Rodgers had used his access code to disarm the alarm system. They’d notated that Jason Rodgers had deactivated the alarm, saying there was a plumbing emergency. She’d had Sam do a quick search, but he found nothing out of the ordinary. Zanns had checked her files and found insurance remittance statements missing. Statements corresponding to the months in which the bogus prescriptions had been delivered to the pharmacy. Rodgers had been searching her office. He probably suspected her of complicity in the crime. It was time to flush Rodgers out and trick him into letting on what he knew. If she played it correctly, she could keep him as an ally for just a little longer and stall his probing. She needed him around. Her bluff would be risky, but she suspected Rodgers would take the bait.