by Nick Pirog
This was one of mine.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“I’ll be back on Thursday,” I said.
She wasn’t looking at me. She was too busy blowing raspberries on May’s belly.
“Bree!” I shouted. “Did you hear me?”
“Yeah,” she said, glancing up. “You’re gonna be back on Tuesday.”
“Thursday. Today is Tuesday.” For having a near-genius IQ, Bree was the consummate scatterbrain.
“Right,” she said, then bent her head down and blew on May’s belly. May squirmed with delight.
“Come over here.”
She sighed, then walked over.
I pointed to the piece of paper I taped to the fridge. I went over the piglets feeding schedule with her, plus a few other notes. “If you give them baths, you need to use the Johnson’s Baby Shampoo on Harold, he’s sensitive to anything else.”
“Thomas,” Bree said, grabbing my shoulder. “They’re gonna be fine. They’re pigs. Now say goodbye and go wherever you are going.”
“Ohio.”
“Yeah, go to Ohio. We’re gonna be fine.” She turned and ran toward the piglets—her blue hair flopping up and down—chasing them into the living room.
I followed the three. Bree was on her back on the floor and Harold was standing on her chest licking her face.
“Piglet kisses!” Bree screeched. “Yay!”
I said goodbye to May first. I gave her a kiss on the head and said, “You be good.” Then I softly grabbed Harold’s face and said, “You’re the man of the house now. You watch over your sister.”
He oinked.
“Here,” Bree said, handing me my backpack from off the couch. “Leave.”
“Okay, I’m going.”
Ten minutes later, I pulled up to Wheeler’s house. She was standing in the driveway. She was wearing blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and her trusty red St. Louis Cardinals hat.
I rolled down the window and said, “You know, we’re only staying two nights.” For some reason, I assumed Wheeler was the type of girl who would travel light.
I was wrong.
She had a huge overnight bag and then one of those enormous plastic suitcases.
I grabbed her suitcase, which would not have flown for free on Southwest, and said, “What did you pack? Gold bullion?”
“Just the necessities.”
I pulled on the zipper of her suitcase and she screamed, “Don’t you dare.”
I laughed and re-zipped it, then I jumped back in the driver seat and said, “You ready for this?”
“Columbus or bust.” She gave my knee a light slap.
She was in a jovial mood and she had packed for a three-week Caribbean cruise, but this wasn’t a personal trip. This was all business. There was one more thread we needed to pull. That thread was in Columbus, Ohio.
And it had once been married to Lowry Barnes.
Eight hours in a car with someone you don’t know all that well is a big gamble. It’s Russian roulette. You could easily have your brains splattered all over the inside of the car. Luckily, with Wheeler, each time the trigger was pulled, it was a blank.
The conversation was easy and light. We chatted about past relationships, our families, sports achievements, anything and everything. As we entered Ohio, though still a few hours from Columbus, I steered the conversation toward the reason for the trip.
“Did you know Kim?”
I’d burned a lot of bridges over the years, at the Seattle Police Department, at the FBI, but I still had a few contacts that hadn’t deleted my number from their phones. One of these was Kevin Bolger, whom I’d met while working in Philly. He’d retired from the force a few years back and now did contract investigation for a law firm, but he still had access to a number of different law enforcement databases.
He’d found Kim Barnes, now Kim Harrison, living in Columbus, Ohio. He’d run a background check on her, digging up everything he could find, which proved rather anticlimactic. She worked at a nail salon, had a few grand in credit card debt, rented a small house, and owned a seven-year-old Ford Focus.
But her past was a different story.
Kim grew up in a trailer park on the outskirts of Tarrin. Her parents weren’t just poor, they were shit poor, or as Bolger put it, “They didn’t have a pot to piss in.” This is where she met Lowry Barnes, whose parents also lived in the trailer park. At seventeen, she found herself pregnant with Lowry’s child. Two years later, a second child would come. The couple married a few years after that, moving into a trailer of their own. Soon thereafter, Lowry’s troubles with the law began and it wasn’t long before Kim found herself raising her two children by herself and working two jobs to keep the lights on.
“I knew of her,” Wheeler replied. “But I didn’t know her personally. She got in a fight with one of my friend’s little sisters once.”
“Over what?”
“I’m not sure. Probably a guy. What else do girls fight over?” She gave my knee a squeeze.
I grinned, then asked, “What about after the murders?”
“It was such a whirlwind with my dad, getting everything in order for his funeral, that I don’t really remember much.” She paused then said, “But I do remember when I heard she moved out of town. It was three or four weeks after my dad’s funeral and I was going over my dad’s appointment book with his receptionist. She told me how she had seen Kim loading up a moving van the day before.”
“I’m surprised it took her that long to leave. She probably couldn’t go into town without being shunned.”
She nodded, though I didn’t detect a whole lot of sympathy.
An hour later, we reached Columbus. It was closing in on 8:00 p.m. We grabbed a quick dinner, then made our way to a Holiday Inn across the street from the restaurant. We were both tired from the drive, and after a quick kiss goodnight, we retired to our respective rooms.
My phone chimed and I picked it up off the pillow.
It was a little after 9:00 a.m., and I had five missed texts. All from Bree.
I sat up with alarm. Something must have happened to one of the piglets. I scrolled through her texts and gave a sigh of relief. It was just a bunch of pictures. Harold and May in the bathtub. Harold and May rolling around in the mud. Harold and May asleep on one another. Harold and May eating waffles.
The last text, the one that woke me up, read: I started Harold and May an Instagram account. They already have 500 followers!!!
I laughed.
I texted back: How did they like the waffles?
She instantly replied: They loooooooooooved them!
Me: Chips off the old block!
I dressed, then knocked on the adjoining door. Wheeler opened it a moment later. She smiled meekly and said, “Good morning.” She was wrapped in a towel and her hair was wet.
“I’d say.”
I showed her the pictures Bree sent. She snickered, then said, “Oh, what a proud papa you must be.”
I beamed.
Wheeler finished getting ready and twenty minutes later, we zipped through the McDonald’s drive-through—Sausage and Egg McMuffin for me, Sausage and Egg Biscuit for Wheeler.
“How could this ever work?” I said, handing over her breakfast sandwich. “We’re like the Capulets and the Montagues.”
She found this amusing.
It took ten minutes to drive to where Lowry Barnes’ widow lived. I pulled onto a side street, continued for two blocks, then Wheeler said, “That’s it right there.”
It was a small, cookie-cutter, stucco house with a tiny lawn. The house next door was nearly identical, save for the large truck parked in the driveway.
I made a U-turn and parked on the opposite side of the street. I told Wheeler to hang tight and I jogged up to the house and rang the doorbell. It didn’t appear anyone was home, and I wasn’t surprised when no one came to the door. On my way back to the car, I took a minute to check out the large black truck in the neighbor’s driveway. It was facing away fr
om the garage, which struck me as odd.
Back in the car, I asked Wheeler, “What kind of truck is that?”
She raised her eyebrows as if to say, “Really?”
“I’m not a truck guy,” I protested.
“A Ford Raptor.”
“What does one cost?”
“Fully loaded? Probably high fifties.”
“How old do you think that truck is?”
She gazed out the window, then pointed to the truck’s front grill and said, “They changed the grill on the newer models. I’d guess it’s three or four years old.” She glanced at me questioningly, “Why? You thinking about buying a truck?”
“I’m gonna have to if I want to fit in with all you rednecks.”
She gave me a quick slap on the leg, which led to some light kissing, then some heavy kissing. I was getting ready to round second when a blue Ford Focus pulled onto the street and Kim Harrison’s garage door began to lift.
Wheeler and I waited a long minute, then stepped from the car and started toward the house. It took Kim Harrison half a minute to open the front door. No doubt she was finishing up putting the frozen items in the freezer and she shouted, “I’m coming!” on two separate occasions.
When Kim did come to the door, the first thing I noticed was she was bone thin, which I attributed more to DNA than to anything illicit. She was medium height with her blond hair up in a bun.
I asked, “Are you Kim Barnes, widow of Lowry Barnes?”
I could see her contemplating lying. Her eyes moved to Wheeler, a spark of recognition flashing after a moment, and then she said, “Yes, I am.”
I glanced at Wheeler. Her jaw was set and her eyes narrowed. The abstract blame she felt toward Kim was palpable.
I nudged her with my arm.
Perhaps sensing the same tractor beams, Kim said, “I’m sorry about your father.”
It was only five simple words, but they could have been five million for the amount of power they held. Whatever hatred, blame, censure, or rebuke Wheeler felt dissipated.
Kim took a step forward and the two women embraced.
I was reminded Kim was also a victim. Not only did she lose her husband, she lost her town. I would need to keep this in my periphery when I interrogated her.
The two women wiped away tears, then Kim invited us inside.
“Just give me a moment while I finish up putting the groceries away,” she said, then instructed us to go to the living room.
Wheeler and I sat down on a tan sofa. The room was simple, void of any noticeable extravagances.
“You okay?” I asked Wheeler.
“Yeah,” she said, wiping away the last of the moisture from beneath her eyes. “I don’t know what came over me. The second I saw her, it was like I saw him. Saw Lowry.”
I nodded.
“I keep forgetting that she suffered even worse than me. She had to live with that guilt.”
“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.”
“Promise me you’ll take it easy on her.”
“I promise.”
“Why did you just cross your legs before you said that?”
I didn’t have a chance to respond. Kim stepped down into the living room. “Would either of you like something to drink?”
Wheeler and I both declined.
Kim took a seat in the recliner opposite the couch. When she was comfortably seated, I asked, “Can I use your restroom?”
I used the restroom, then took a quick detour into the kitchen. Kim’s purse was on the kitchen counter, and I rummaged through it quickly, then returned to the small living room. The two women were mid-conversation.
“Where are your kids?” Wheeler asked.
“Summer camp.” Kim smiled. “Thank God.”
“Is it a day camp?” I asked, resuming my seat on the couch.
“No, three weeks. On one of the lakes about an hour from here. A bunch of the kids from the neighborhood go each year.” She took a breath, then said, “But I’m guessing you guys didn’t come all this way just to ask about my kids.”
I decided to be straight with her. “I’m a retired homicide detective and for the past couple months I’ve been reinvestigating the murders your husband committed.”
“Ex-husband,” she said.
“You guys were divorced?”
“No, I mean, he’s dead, he’s not my husband anymore.”
I wasn’t sure if I only knew the correct terminology because I’d dealt with widows on a number of occasions while working as a detective, but I felt obligated to correct her. “Lowry isn’t your ex-husband, he’s your late husband.”
“Late?”
“Yes, late refers to deceased.”
I looked over at Wheeler. She raised her eyebrows. I wasn’t sure if this meant she also didn’t know the correct terminology or that I was acting like a nincompoop.
“Anyway,” I said, “that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that over the course of my investigation, I turned up evidence that proves your husband didn’t act alone.”
“There was another shooter?”
“No. Lowry was the lone gunman. He shot those people. But the reason he killed them isn’t what everybody thinks.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was made to look like Lowry was waging this vendetta against his manager at the Save-More because he was fired.”
Kim must have thought this was a question and said, “Yes.”
“But Odell, his manager, wasn’t the target. The target was Neil Felding.”
“Neil Felding?”
“Yes. He was one of the people killed.”
“I know,” she scoffed. “You think I don’t know the names of the people my husband killed?”
“I’m sorry.”
“You should be.” Her eyes began to water. “I watched every single one of their funerals you know.”
“You were there?” Wheeler asked.
She shook her head. “I made my friend Tally go and record them on her phone. I watched them all. I still have them saved on my computer.” She lowered her head and sobbed.
Wheeler grabbed my forearm and I said, “I’m sorry.”
I gave Kim a few moments to collect herself, then said, “Then you know that Neil Felding worked for the Lunhill Corporation?”
“Yeah.”
“But what you probably didn’t know is that Neil was about to blow the whistle on a huge cover-up Lunhill had been hiding for more than twenty years.”
I tried to read her reaction. She appeared genuinely surprised. “Really? What was it? The cover-up, I mean?”
“It’s complicated, but basically, Lunhill introduced a growth hormone in the early 1990s that when administered to cows would cause them to produce more milk.”
I wasn’t surprised when she said, “rBGH.”
“Correct. Lunhill tested the hormone at a dairy in Tarrin.”
“Mallory’s?”
I nodded. “They tested the hormone on seventeen cows and fifteen of them died. Then they fudged the data on the reports they sent to the FDA and their product was passed.”
Her eyebrows rose. “But if they fudged the data on that, then they could have done it for everything, all their stupid GMOs and pesticides and all their other shit.” You could almost watch the anvil fall. “That would have destroyed them.”
“Exactly. And Neil Felding was about to blow the whistle on them when, quite conveniently, he was murdered.”
I could see her thinking everything over.
I said, “Neil wasn’t an innocent bystander. He was the target. Your husband went to Save-More to kill Neil. He made it look like he was there to kill the manager.”
“But why would he do that?”
“Money.”
The word sat in the air for one second. Then two. It was the Hindenburg, hovering around the small room. And just as bright as the explosion of the floating hydrogen bomb, so too was the look of acknowledgement on Kim’s face.
W
heeler and I had driven eight hours to see Kim’s face flush.
That was the last thread. Lowry getting paid was the first domino. Without that, the others would never fall.
“You know about the money,” I said.
She frowned. “Money? What money?”
I tried to remind myself Kim was also a victim. She had to deal with growing up poor, getting knocked up by Lowry Barnes, supporting their two children while Lowry was locked up, Lowry murdering five people, being ostracized from her town, forced to pack up and leave. What was the big deal if she got a little money? In the grand scheme of things, did it really matter?
Yes, it did. At that moment in time, it mattered a whole fucking lot.
She might not have known where the money came from, but she sure as shit knew it had blood on it.
“How much did they give you?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“How did it come? A big bag of cash? A money transfer? Stock options?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Bullshit!” I belted.
She was stunned into silence and I said, “You think you were so smart. Move to Columbus. Rent a small house. Don’t flash the money. And you did so well. Except for one thing.” I grinned. “Yeah, you know what I’m talking about.”
She glanced up at me.
“You grew up shit poor. Parents didn’t have money. Then you had a couple kids. Then your husband gets locked up. You worked two jobs just to put food on the table. And then finally, you get some money. And let’s call it what it really is, blood money. And you can’t help yourself, you had to have it.”
Wheeler grabbed my arm and turned me toward her. “You promised.”
“I had my legs crossed,” I snorted.
I turned back to Kim. “But you were smart about it, you didn’t buy it in your name. You just wanted to prove to yourself you made it.”
“What are you talking about?” Wheeler blurted.
“The truck, the one in the neighbor's driveway. It isn’t theirs.” I tilted my head toward Kim, “It’s hers.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kim said, her teeth gritted.