Cold Winter Rain

by Steven Gregory

  When we had finished our food, I ordered three Irish coffees and pulled the MacBook out of my backpack. “I made some notes today,” I said. “I created a timeline of events related to Kris Kramer’s disappearance. You two help me think through this to see whether I’ve missed something obvious.”

  Moeller sipped his most recent Scotch. “I wasn’t much help earlier, but I’ll give it a shot.”

  “Whatever I can do,” Sally murmured.

  “Right,” I said. “So. My first knowledge of this matter came a week ago Saturday, in the morning, when Don Kramer came down here and hired me to find Kris. I flew to Birmingham the next morning, checked into the Tutwiler, met with Kramer, and read some files on a case Kramer thought might be connected to his daughter’s disappearance. The next morning I drove out to Kramer’s house to meet his wife, Susan, and their son, Paul.”

  “But your timeline should begin earlier,” Moeller said.

  “I’m getting to that. Kris Kramer disappeared two days earlier, on Thursday, the nineteenth of January. Her roommate told me that her mother came to visit in the afternoon and left the campus with her for the start of a weekend at home. Paul Kramer told the FBI that he accompanied his mother to the campus. I don’t know whether those plans changed for some reason. Maybe a family argument occurred; maybe not. I’m trying to remain objective here.

  “At any rate, Kris did not show up for classes or practice the next day, and the campus security office contacted Don Kramer at his law office. Kris’s suitemate mentioned that she also called Kramer’s office when Kris didn’t answer her cell phone. Don called home, and Mrs. Kramer told him she thought Kris had returned to school the evening before. Kramer called the Birmingham police department. The Birmingham police called the FBI when they decided they might have a kidnapping case.

  “All that occurred on Friday, January twenty. The morning of the next day, Kramer borrowed a friend’s plane and flew down here to speak with me.”

  “These versions of the disappearance aren’t perfectly matched,” Moeller observed.

  “Yes. But neither are they perfect contradictions. They’re just a bit muddled, as first-person narratives often are.

  “Kramer’s body was discovered in the rail yards in Birmingham late on the night of January twenty-third or early the next morning. We know now that he had been murdered that afternoon as he was leaving his office.”

  I heard a sharp intake of breath from Sally. “I didn’t know that. When did you learn that?”

  “Captain Grubbs shared some information about his investigation with me. I didn’t mention it until now.”

  Sally heaved another quick breath and sipped her coffee. “Okay,” she said.

  “How was he killed?” Moeller asked.

  “One shot to the back of the head with a nine-millimeter handgun,” I told him.

  “To continue with the chronology, when I interviewed Kris’s roommate Akilah at school, she gave me a memory stick. She didn’t know anything about its contents, and you and I, Hans, discovered that the contents were password-protected.”

  “And that, unfortunately, has so far been my only contribution,” said Moeller. “If I had just had more time… .”

  “It wouldn’t have helped much. The contents are also encrypted, according to Michael Godchaux, the creator of the contents.”

  “And Godchaux is involved how?” asked Moeller.

  I remembered my promise to Agent Alston and what I could and could not say about the informant. “Godchaux was also what’s called a ‘relator’ — a whistleblower — in a qui tam case — sort of like a class action — Kramer was building against corrupt officials and others in Alabama. But I’m getting ahead of myself.”

  I sipped my Irish coffee and looked at the notes on the computer screen. “When I flew down here after Kramer’s funeral, I discovered my boat had been searched and that someone had left a message on the old laptop I keep in the cabin.”

  “You didn’t tell me about the message,” Moeller said.

  “No. I didn’t think I should involve you to quite that level at the time.”

  “But now – so what was the message?”

  “Something to the effect that I needed to stay out of the oil and gas business.”

  Sally looked from Moeller to me. “Surely that indicates that Kris’s disappearance is somehow related to the lawsuit Kramer was working on.”

  “And that Godchaux and the information on that drive may hold keys to her disappearance,” said Moeller. “Unless… .”

  “Unless what?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “There are at least two other possibilities. One is that the real kidnapper is conflating the kidnapping with the — what did you call it? — qui tam litigation in order to throw you and the FBI off the scent.”

  I smiled, looked down at my coffee, and took a little sip. At the moment neither Moeller nor Sally needed to know I hadn’t exactly told the FBI about the message on the laptop. “And the other?” I asked.

  “The other is that the message did come from the bad actors in the oil and gas case, but they had nothing to do with the kidnapping.”

  “How does Kramer’s murder fit in?” I asked Moeller.

  “Same analysis. Could be related to the kidnapping. Could be related to the qui tam case. Could be related to both.”

  “Or, just keeping it logical, maybe neither,” I said.

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “Let me go on through the timeline,” I said. “So after I returned to Birmingham, I spoke with Sally again to see if she could help me find Akilah. Sally took me to the suite she and Kris Kramer shared… .”

  “And we discovered Akilah had been murdered,” Sally said.

  “Yes. Her room had been searched, and she had been strangled. It seems a strong possibility that it was someone who’d been sent to look for the thumb drive. My presumption has been that the intruder did not expect to find Akilah there and killed her to remove a witness.”

  “Pointing to some relationship with the Michael Godchaux business,” Moeller observed.

  “Right. The next day I spoke with Mrs. Kramer again, and she and I visited the Woolf White firm, where Bill Woolf created an arrangement for me that would allow me free rein to review their files on the Godchaux matter.”

  I skipped the dinner date and the overnight in Sally’s condo. Although Moeller had never hesitated to describe the activities on the Billy Tell or in his chalet southeast of Geneva, I preferred a little mystery. And besides, at the moment Sally sat close enough to touch.

  “The next morning a local talent named Billy Royal breaks into my hotel room posing as a room service waiter and tries to muscle me.”

  “And fails.” Sally smiled a little.

  “Later, Royal tells me he had nothing to do with the boat incident and that a guy who looked Italian hired him, but he doesn’t know the guy’s name.”

  “How plausible is that?” Moeller asked.

  “I believe him. If you met Billy Royal you’d understand. He’s not capable of making anything up.

  “And that’s essentially all the important events. This recitation hasn’t been as linear as I’d have liked. Anyway, before speaking with Royal, I flew to New Orleans and met with Godchaux. Godchaux gave me the password for the thumb drive, and when I returned to Birmingham, I turned the thumb drive over to the FBI so they could extract the files.”

  Moeller finished his most recent Scotch and noticed, apparently for the first time, the Irish coffee. “Did I order this?” he asked.

  “No, Hans, I ordered one for each of us,” I reminded him.

  “Thanks, my friend, but I can’t drink coffee late at night. Keeps me awake, you know. I need my sleep in order to keep up with the young ladies,” he said. “Single malt Scotch, now, that’s different. Quite different. Good for a body. Anything interesting on the thumb drive?”

  “I haven’t heard from the fibbies yet. I handed over the drive this morning after meeting Royal at the jail.” />
  Moeller nodded. “So how close are you to finding this girl and solving a murder?”

  I shrugged. “Solving the murder of my client is not my job, not technically anyway. The police and FBI are on it. They have a few leads. But my best guess, and probably theirs, is that the killer was probably sent by the same people who hired Billy Royal, and that the murder is related to the oil and gas investigation.”

  Moeller persisted. “And the girl?”

  “If it’s a kidnapping case, it’s an unusual one. No ransom note. No contact from anyone who claims to have taken her. Most of the time in such cases those circumstances are not good news.”

  “Why?” The question was Sally’s.

  I glanced from Moeller to Sally and back. A bit of cream and a tablespoon of coffee remained in the bottom of my glass. I drank it off before answering and set the glass down with a louder thud than I intended. Flying back to Birmingham was definitely out of the question until the middle of the morning. “Because most of the time if there is no ransom note within two days, the victim doesn’t make it out alive.”

  Moeller finished his Scotch. “Well, Slate, you’ve managed to render me depressed, tired, and drunk. I shall have to repair to the quiet of my boat and process all this information in my sleep. Perhaps then some answer will come to me in my dreams.”

  “Answers would be welcomed, whatever their source, my friend.”

  Outside, Moeller made his slightly uncertain way toward the Billy Tell, while Sally and I carried our bags along the catwalks to slip A-7. The Anna Grace sat, gleaming softly in the dim electric light, graceful and undisturbed, in the calm still water of the harbor. I stepped onto the gunwale, gave Sally a hand up, unlocked the companionway door, and stepped aside for Sally. She stepped down the steep stairs carefully, then turned around with a big smile. “I’ve never spent the night on a boat. Two firsts for me today.”

  I smiled. “If you’re lucky, maybe we can make it three.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Tuesday, January 31

  A few minutes after six, I rolled out of the double berth, careful not to waken Sally, pulled on sweats and boat shoes, and went topside. There was no rain, and the temperature was in the high forties, but low clouds threatened and a damp breeze made the temperature seem lower. I walked over to the marina and bought two large styrofoam cups of marine-grade coffee and brought them back to the boat. A few others were stirring around the marina grounds, fishing crews, a few marina employees, a boat owner or two.

  Sally was in the shower. I placed one of the coffee cups on the stainless sink ledge in the galley, went back topside, and sat with my feet in the boat’s cockpit.

  The day after I’d thrown everything in the Camry and driven south from Birmingham all the way to Beach Boulevard, the southernmost east-west road in Alabama, I’d driven over to the marina at Orange Beach — owned then by Fob James, a former Alabama governor – and bought a live-aboard sailboat. I renamed it the Anna Grace.

  But the boat was more than a home. A thirty-two foot Allied Seawind ketch, she’d taken me solo around the Florida peninsula, through the Florida Straits and up to Bahia Mar, a pause for fresh water and provisions before the short sail over to Freeport. She had been south and east to the Caymans, south to Jamaica and down to the Leeward Islands. Constructed of fiberglass, she was strong and solid and, because of her ketch rigging, easy to sail single-handed. One of her predecessor sister boats was the first fiberglass vessel to circle the watery part of the world. She was fast, too; she’d averaged a hundred miles a day on the run to Jamaica.

  The Anna Grace and slip A-7, Orange Beach Marina, Orange Beach, Alabama, had been my home now longer than any other place I’d lived as an adult.

  At this hour in the winter months, the marina was quiet enough to hear water lapping gently against the unmoving pilings, punctuated by the occasional squeak of a boat rubbing against a bumper or the musical clank of rigging slapping a mast. Not yet visible over the Florida panhandle, the morning sun painted the eastern sky orange.

  The companionway door opened. Sally climbed the stairs carrying the styrofoam coffee container in one hand, the other holding closed an old robe of mine. She sat beside me in the cockpit.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Hey,” she said. “I think I like sleeping on a boat.”

  “Once you get accustomed to the new sounds, the slight motion is a little like being rocked in a cradle.”

  “Something like that, I guess.”

  We sat for a few minutes in silence listening to the sounds of the marina morning: a few low voices, the cries of seagulls, and in the distance, a heavy diesel engine snorting to life.

  “Did we accomplish anything last night?” Sally asked.

  “Oh, I’d say so.”

  She elbowed me. “Besides that. Did the discussion at dinner help?”

  I shrugged. “No conclusions. But the exercise did crystallize the events for me and helped me get the timeline straight.”

  “That’s something,” she said.

  “Yep.” I swallowed the last of my coffee. “We need to start back.”

  “I’ll get dressed.” Sally stood, gathered the robe at her waist, and stepped with care out of the cockpit and down the companionway.

  North of Gulf Shores, almost at the Baldwin County line, tall electrical transmission towers and power lines require a brisk initial climb of all aircraft heading north from Jack Edwards airport. No problem for the Albatros, but my practice has always been to peg the airspeed at best angle of climb, Vx, the speed at which maximum altitude is gained per unit of ground distance. Even in a single-engine Cessna, especially when the air is cold and dense, this airspeed yields a deck angle that can create the illusion that the airplane is going straight up. In the Albatros, the angle is even nearer vertical.

  This time I left Sally’s headset volume turned up, and this time she didn’t scream on takeoff. All I heard was a quiet “wow,” as the wheels came up and I pulled the nose up to peg the airspeed. In minutes, we had leveled out at ten thousand feet, and we cruised into Birmingham with only a minor traffic delay for sequencing and landing.

  Back at Sally’s condo, Sally changed clothes and hurried out the door to return to her office. I chose a blue blazer, white shirt, and repp stripe tie. It was time to update Bill Woolf on the status of things, including my meetings with Michael Godchaux and with Agents Sanders and Alston.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Sally texted me just as I was knotting my tie. “MY OFFICE NOW!”

  Then, almost immediately, another. “CALL ON YOUR WAY.”

  So I locked the door, walked to my car, and headed toward the Alabama Southern campus.

  Once in the car, I chose Sally from my contacts list and selected her phone number. My call went straight to voice mail. I didn’t leave a message. The campus was minutes away, and she would see that I had called.

  At the campus gate, the same guard I’d seen before waved me through. Before the bar came down behind me, my phone rang. “Slate,” Sally said. “It’s Paul Kramer. He’s here, in my office. I already called Captain Grubbs, and he’s here too. Paul says he knows where Kris is.”

  “I’m thirty seconds away. Thanks.”

  Leon Grubbs and Chief Miller were both standing in Sally’s inner office. Paul Kramer, looking pale and miserable, his hair unwashed, sat on Sally’s couch. Sally sat near him, her hand on his shoulder. Grubbs, Miller, and Sally were speaking quietly to the boy.

  Paul Kramer shook his head in answer to a question I could not hear. “Nobody ever looked in the secret room,” he said. “Not the FBI, not the police. Nobody. And my parents didn’t tell them to. My dad never goes –never went down there, and my mom, well, I guess she didn’t want them in there. I don’t know.” He shook his head again and stared down at the floor. “I should have told someone before, I know.”

  Miller spoke. “What about your mom not wanting the police in the secret room? What do you mean?”<
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  Paul Kramer shook his head again and let out an explosive breath. “Don’t you see? It’s my mom. She’s kept Kris down there all this time. She wouldn’t let her come out. She’s … she has her locked in there. My mom has my sister locked up in our house.”

  Sally looked up at me for the first time, her expression a mask. Grubbs noticed me and said, “I think we’re about to find your missing girl.” He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, made a call and barked orders at the person who answered.

  “Who could know?” Sally said to no one in particular.

  “I wanted to tell someone. My mom forbade me to tell. Dad didn’t know. I don’t know why she did it,” he was saying.

  Grubbs said, “It’s all right now, son. We’re going to get your sister out of there.”

  Paul looked up at Grubbs and Miller, then noticed me. “My mom?” he said.

  “One step at a time, Paul,” I said. “First let’s allow the police to do their jobs and make your sister safe. Then we will see about what to do regarding your mom.” I looked at Grubbs. “Mind if I tag along?” I said.

  “Right behind me,” he said.

  Miller said, “We will stay right here with the boy.”

  “I’ll stay with you, Paul,” Sally said.

  “Let’s go,” Grubbs said.

  The immediate vicinity of the Kramer home was a chaos of black and whites and unmarked police cars, parked at all angles, half in the street and half on the lawn. The TV film crews were in hyperdrive, reporters and their makeup people and cameramen elbowing each other for space to shoot standups. They shouted questions at Grubbs as we picked our way through the police cars, but he shook his head and grunted out “No comment.” Wet trees dripped rainwater onto my shoulders as we walked through the Kramer front yard and into the house.

  Inside, Agent Patricia Sanders sat at the booth in the kitchen across from a tall blonde girl whom I recognized from her pictures: Kristina Kramer. They were both drinking tea. The girl wore an Alabama Southern sweatsuit, and her feet were bare. In the girl’s lap, I noticed a small stuffed deer, tan with white spots. Two fingers of one hand rested on the deer’s head. Across the island from them, wearing a priest’s collar and looking uncomfortable, stood a slim middle-aged man with dark hair and a graying goatee.