Double Cross (14 page)
“What do you mean, in a sense?”
“He used an online service to set up a temporary phone number that was an automatic forwarding device. He gives someone the temp number. They call, it goes to the online service and gets forwarded to a regular number he gives the service. He could use it both ways, too. If he wants to place a call, he gives the online service the other person’s number as the forwarding number. Then he calls the temporary number and his call is forwarded to Elise’s number. A pain to trace, especially if they use multiple layers of forwarding numbers.”
“So, how did you trace it? Have you got some sort of computer program?”
He laughed. “Nope. I did it the old-fashioned way.”
“What’s that?”
“I bribed somebody. One of the two major service-providers for that sort of thing is based in Dallas. We got lucky. The man she was looking for was using the Dallas service. I called a guy I knew over there and gave him a hundred bucks to give me the forwarding numbers. One of them was Elise’s cell, one of them was the guy’s number. And here’s the really interesting thing: one of them was Simon Mason’s.” He looked at Kacey. “That was an old forwarding number, from back before your father was murdered.”
“You mean the guy she was trying to locate had been calling both Simon and her?”
“At different times, yeah.”
“And Elise didn’t tell you what this was all about?”
“Nope.” He took a drink of his Pepsi, cupped a hand over his mouth, and belched.
“C’mon, Brandon!”
“Hey, it’s my apartment.”
I sighed. “Okay, so you paid a guy a hundred dollars to get this information for her and you didn’t even ask what it was for?”
“Didn’t figure it was any of my business.”
“What was the guy’s name who’d been calling her?”
“I didn’t get a name. Just a phone number. But it was the originating phone number. That’s what she wanted so much.” He scratched one leg with his other foot. His sock was so dirty I was surprised it didn’t leave a streak.
I coughed. “My throat’s kind of scratchy. Can I take you up on that Pepsi now?”
“Sure. Just a second.” He got up and went into the kitchen.
I leaned toward Kacey and cupped my hand to my mouth. Before I could say anything, she whispered, “It was the blackmailer!” I moved away from her just as Brandon came back in with a plastic Pepsi bottle in his hand. He handed it to me and sat back down on the floor.
“Thanks.” I braced the bottle between the splint and my thumb while I unscrewed the cap with my left hand.
Brandon smiled a closed-lipped smile, hiding his crooked front teeth. “Need some help?”
“I’ve got it.” I finally wrestled the cap off and took a drink, then set the bottle on my leg. “Simon was being blackmailed. Did you know that?”
He reached up and adjusted his glasses. “No, but I can’t say it surprises me. Did someone find out he was embezzling money from his own ministry?”
Kacey frowned. “Dad wasn’t embezzling money.”
Brandon shifted his weight on the floor. It was clear he’d blurted it without considering who Kacey was. She glared at him, and he looked toward the TV, like a dog that thinks it can make something unpleasant disappear by not looking at it.
By this time Kacey had been taking self-defense classes for nearly eight months. A good athlete and a quick learner, she could have taken Brandon apart in about thirty seconds if she decided he merited it. After what he’d just said, I thought I might let her. She seemed composed enough, but if her eyes had been pistols he’d have been dead where he sat.
I turned back to Brandon. “That’s a bunch of bull, Brandon. You know Simon wasn’t embezzling. You’ve talked to the auditors.”
He pushed his thinning hair behind his ears, but didn’t respond.
I decided to move things along. “Katie Parst told me she’d talked to you. She said you knew about Simon’s son.”
“Yeah, I know about him.”
“How did you find out?”
He put a hand on the couch cushion behind him and pushed himself up to his feet. “Look, Taylor, I don’t know who you think you’re talking to, but I don’t have to sit here and let you grill me as if I’m some sort of criminal defendant. What I do and what I know is really none of your business.”
He had a point. I owed it to him to lighten up a bit. “I didn’t mean to give you the third degree.” From the corner of my eye, I saw Kacey looking at me, her mouth open. “It was nice of you to answer as many questions as you did,” I said. “We’re just trying to figure some things out about why Elise would kill herself. We’d better get going.”
He stuck his hands in his pockets. “If you want my opinion, she was one messed-up chick. I never even got reimbursed for the hundred bucks I paid to my friend.”
I tapped Kacey on the leg and she hopped down from her stool. I knew I would hear from her when we got outside. I eased down from my stool and headed for the door. Just before I got there, I turned back to Brandon. “By the way, would you give me the phone number you found for the guy Elise was calling?”
“I would, but I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t keep it.”
“You mean you didn’t even write it down?”
He shrugged. “Yeah, I wrote it down, but it didn’t mean anything to me. I called Elise and left the number on her voice mail. She’d been calling me every four or five hours, so I called her again to make sure she got it. Then I threw the number away.”
“Can you call your friend and get the number again? I’ll give you another hundred bucks, and I’ll pay you the hundred that Elise owed you.”
He scratched his head. “Sorry, can’t help you. My friend doesn’t work there anymore. He got fired a couple days later. Apparently I wasn’t the only one he’d been selling information to.”
Kacey crossed her arms. “Oh, c’mon—”
I touched her back. “Too bad. Listen, thanks again, Brandon.” I opened the door and Kacey and I walked out into the hallway.
When the door closed behind us, she turned toward me so quickly that she practically pushed me against the wall. “Why didn’t you—”
I held my finger up to my mouth and whispered. “Wait ’til we’re in the elevator.”
We walked down the hall, and when the elevator doors opened and we stepped in, Kacey’s face turned a new, brighter shade of red. “He was lying and you let him off the hook! I think
he
was the one blackmailing Dad.”
he
was the one blackmailing Dad.”
“Look, first, we don’t know he was lying. And second, even if he was, it’s a long jump from there to the conclusion that he was blackmailing your dad. He’s been a good friend to me, and he was right. I owed it to him not to grill him like that. Besides, he wasn’t going to tell us anything else the way we were going.”
“How do you know? You just gave up!”
I hit the lobby button. “I didn’t give up, I just stopped for today. If what he was telling us was true, whoever was calling Elise must have been the blackmailer. Why else would he have been calling your father, too?”
“Why would you think Brandon was telling the truth?”
“Why do you think he wasn’t?” I leaned back against the wall and put my hand on my side as the elevator dropped.
“Are you okay?”
“It’s starting to hurt. I just need to get home and take a pain pill.” I pulled up my sweatshirt and checked the gauze. The blood spot was expanding. There was no use worrying about it until we got back to the house. “What was it about Brandon’s story that was so unbelievable?” I said, still looking at the gauze.
“For starters, that he didn’t keep the phone number of the guy he found.”
I pulled my sweatshirt back down. “Why is that so unbelievable? If Elise calls him out of the blue, and he finds a phone number for her, and he thinks it’s somebody she’s hooked up with over the Internet, why would he keep it? It wouldn’t mean anything to him.”
“Okay, but what are the odds that his friend is no longer working at the phone forwarding company?”
“I have no idea, and neither do you. We don’t know anything about the guy or the company. It’s easy to jump to wrong conclusions when you’re emotionally involved.”
“Emotionally involved?”
“The minute Brandon accused your dad of taking the money, you were all over him. I could tell by looking at you.”
The elevator door opened. Kacey put her hands in her jacket pockets and walked out into the lobby. She continued to walk in front of me as we went through the revolving door to the sidewalk. My side hurt pretty bad, but I did my best to keep up.
Out on the sidewalk, she spun to face me. I straightened my back, which made me wince. She didn’t seem to notice. “So, somehow the blackmailer who called Dad ended up talking to Elise. Do you think Elise was in on it? She knew about Chase and could have decided to cash in.”
I was glad to see she was thinking again rather than emoting. “I’m not necessarily saying that, although it’s a possibility. The flip side is that it’s really hard to picture Elise doing something like that to your Dad. She loved him.”
Kacey fell back in stride with me as we walked toward the car, which she’d parked in a metered space. I tried to walk as normally as possible, but it was impossible not to limp.
“Who knows?” she said. “As they say ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’”
I walked around the car to the passenger door while Kacey dug in her purse for her keys. She opened the door and looked over the top of the car at me. “What if Brandon was lying, though? He could have been the one blackmailing Dad. Maybe he and Elise were in on it together. Or Elise could have found out he was doing it and was trying to stop him. Either one would make sense.”
We got in the car. The windshield was frosted. Kacey turned the key and hit the defrost button. Then we sat back and waited for the windshield to clear.
“But Elise was the one embezzling money,” I said. “We know that from the auditors.”
“Okay, but that would fit either way. She could have been embezzling with Brandon, or she could have been embezzling to pay Brandon. For that matter, I guess she could have been embezzling to pay anybody who was blackmailing Dad.”
I shifted my weight to try to find a more comfortable position. Now my finger was aching, too. “Good point. Then, of course, there’s still the most obvious possibility. Maybe Elise was just embezzling the money for herself.”
“That wouldn’t explain the mystery caller who was calling both her and Dad, though.”
“True.”
She put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb.
I leaned my head back against the headrest. “There are so many possibilities it’s making my brain hurt.”
We were cruising down Cedar Springs Avenue when Kacey put her hand over her mouth. “I just thought of something!” she said through her fingers.
“What?”
“If Brandon was blackmailing Dad, do you think he could have killed Elise?”
I laughed, which hurt like crazy. I doubled over and held my side.
Kacey’s eyebrows narrowed. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
I straightened back up in my seat. “I’m fine. It’s really starting to hurt, though.”
“We should have waited until tomorrow to go to Brandon’s.”
“It’s okay, really. Anyway, the idea that Brandon could be a murderer is the best argument you could have made to take the heat off of him in my mind. You saw him. I don’t think a killer is lurking anywhere beneath that doughy exterior.”
“That’s what they always say about killers:
He was such a quiet guy.”
He was such a quiet guy.”
“Whoa, now you’re starting to sound crazy. We don’t know that anyone killed Elise other than Elise. I’m no private investigator, but I’ve been in enough investigations to know that often the thing that seems obvious in the beginning isn’t what happened at all. Hopefully I stopped questioning Brandon in time that he still trusts me. I’ll have other chances to talk to him.” I looked out the window. “This isn’t the end.”
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
BY THURSDAY AFTERNOON, A week after I got shot, I was feeling pretty good. Rob Morrow had called and made a date for dinner Saturday night, the wound on my side was practically closed, and I seldom needed anything stronger than ibuprofen for the pain in my finger. Kacey and I were at the gun range, and I was practicing shooting with my left hand.
When I was a kid, my dad insisted that I learn to shoot with both hands. When I was a teenager, he even occasionally made me shoot left-handed in local juniors’ tournaments, primarily because that was the only way I could get any real competition in my age group. It had been years, though, since I’d done much left-handed shooting. For the first time since I taught her to shoot, Kacey was beating me.
She was not being a gracious winner.
I hadn’t been outshot since before I entered the Secret Service, and I wasn’t taking it particularly well, even though the score was close. So I was glad when my cell phone vibrated in my pocket and broke things up. I set down my .357 Sig , took off my hearing protectors, and hit the button on the phone. Officer Ferrell’s nasal voice was easy to recognize.
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