Risking Trust (19 page)

Michael found a space at the end of the Jewel parking lot. The place was a madhouse and even if they found the kid, with the store this busy, he probably wouldn’t be able to talk.

“What’s the plan?” Roxann asked.

Michael cut the engine. He had no right to drag Rox along on this, but she was the only one who’d recognize Bryce.

Plus, he had to agree with her that he couldn’t be the one to approach this kid. Michael’s picture had been all over the news and nobody would willingly discuss his dead ex-wife with him.

“You and Vic go in. See if he’s around. I’ll wait here.”

She bobbed her head and reached for the door handle, but Michael grabbed her hand and wound their fingers together. “Relax. It might be nothing.”

She squeezed his hand. “It might be something.”

Michael grinned. “Let’s hope.”

“Hey, lovebirds, can we move along here?”

After a brief wait in front of the customer service desk, Roxann spotted Bryce coming around an aisle end-cap. He was not the same kid she’d met a couple of weeks earlier. His confident stance had morphed to a slump and his neat, sandy hair was a tangled mop. What happened?

Her shivering from the frigid temperature in the supermarket—at least that’s what she told herself—increased and she rubbed her hands over her bare arms.

“This is him,” she said to Vic.

“Showtime.”

When Bryce saw Roxann, he hesitated and she imagined him combing through his memory to place her.

Her palms started to itch.

Yep, they were on to something. Her fear melted away and they stepped up to Bryce, introduced themselves and explained what they wanted.

“What would I be doing at the Jewel if I worked in the mayor’s office?” he asked.

“Look,” Vic said, his six-foot-five frame looming over Bryce. “We know you worked in the mayor’s office, so stop dickin’ around. All we want is information.”

Roxann wasn’t sure scaring the you-know-what out of Bryce was the way to go, but she supposed Vic had more experience with this type of thing. She laid a hand on Vic’s arm to quiet him.

“The
Banner
is doing a story on the mayor and we need some corroboration. Can I ask you a few questions?”

Bryce looked at Vic then back to her. “I don’t know anything.”

“You don’t know what we want yet,” Vic said.

The kid turned to Vic, who outweighed him by an easy sixty pounds. “Fuck you.”

Wow.
All righty then. Roxann slid in front of Vic before he made ground meat out of Bryce. She did her best desperate blonde girl routine, widening her eyes, silently pleading with him to talk to her.

“Bryce, please, I won’t use your name.”

He thought about it. Glanced around. “I have to get back to work. I need this job.”

“I own a newspaper. I can give you a job. A better one than stocking shelves.”

That got his attention.

He angled back toward the courtesy desk where the middle aged woman standing behind it eyeballed them with the energy of a gossip columnist at a celebrity DUI hearing.

“Hold on a sec.”

Bryce dragged himself to the wannabe gossip columnist and Roxann turned to Vic. “No man can resist a begging blonde. You all think with the wrong body part.”

He laughed. “You’re a witch.”

“Yeah, but I got it done.”

“I’m on break,” Bryce said to Roxann without even a glance at Vic.

“Great, we’ll buy you a pop.”

The three of them sat at a small bistro table in the market’s café. Vic, off to the side, straddled his chair and appeared relaxed, but Roxann knew he’d be dissecting every word.

“There’s not much I can tell you. My internship was up and I left.”

“Why did you leave before the end of the semester?”

Bryce shrugged. “I wasn’t into it anymore.”

“Really? You seemed excited about the job when I met you at the PBA fundraiser. Did something happen?”

Bryce stole a glance at Vic, who was doing a fine job of looking completely uninterested. “The place is fucking weird.”

“Watch your language.”

This from a guy who considered it his personal mission to find a good use for the F-word.

“Sorry.”

She cleared her throat, shot Vic a scathing look. “Bryce, I know you don’t want to be involved in this, so let me tell you what we have and all you need to do is agree or disagree. I only need a second source.”

She didn’t have a
first
source, but Bryce didn’t know that and, after Vic’s admonition, he seemed ready to wet himself.

He scanned the café. “Okay.”

“I assume you’ve heard about the Alicia Taylor murder?”

The vein at Bryce’s temple began to throb and Roxann cut her eyes to Vic, but he either didn’t notice it, or he wanted her to feign not noticing.

“I read about it.”

Leaning in, she focused on him. “I think you more than read about it. I think you know something about the relationship between Carl Biehl and Alicia Taylor.
I
think you know why Alicia was murdered.”

Bryce shook his head so hard it should have flown off.

Vic held a hand out. “Calm down, kid. Nothing’s gonna happen to you. Tell us what you know and we’re outta here.”

“I don’t know anything.”

Vic sat straighter. “Do I look like a schmo?”

Bryce slumped in his chair and Roxann had a vision of something very large and criminal weighing him down. Maybe her crazy hunch was about to pay off because a burst of energy slammed her. She folded her shaking hands on the table. Part of her wanted to wrap this obviously terrified young man in a hug. The other part wanted to get on with it and catch a murderer.

“Bryce, I can help you. I have connections in the city. If you tell me, I’ll get you whatever help you need.”

After a deep breath burst free, Bryce dug his fingers into his forehead.

Come on. Crawl out on a limb with me.

“The night before that lady got killed,” he said, and Roxann nearly levitated from her chair.
This was it.
“It was late, everyone had gone home. I was working on a project for Mr. Biehl at his secretary’s desk.”

“Was Carl there?” she asked.

“Yeah, but he was in the john. His cell phone rang. Then he got a text. Right after that, his
private
line rang. I figured it was his wife or something, maybe an emergency, so I picked it up. I mean, it seemed like someone really wanted to get him. It was a woman and I asked her name so I could tell him. They always told us to ask who it was and, I didn’t want to get in trouble for picking up his private line in the first place.”

“Who was it?” Roxann pressed, trying to keep him on track.

“She said her name was Alicia.”

Hot damn.
“No last name?”

“Just Alicia. I put her on hold until Mr. Biehl came back. I didn’t know who she was, but I figured she was someone important because she had his private number. He tore me a new one for picking up his line, shut his office door and took the call.”

“That was it?” Roxann asked. “Did you hear the conversation?”

She wanted to take notes, but feared any movement would break the momentum and she hoped Vic could fill in anything she might forget.

“I heard him yelling. I couldn’t hear all that much, but he was pissed. I’d never heard him yell that way and I was curious. I went into the office next door to see if I could hear anything. Figured it wouldn’t hurt. I wish I’d stayed away.”

“What was he saying?” Vic asked, his voice soft as if he’d morphed into an understanding guy.

“I heard him tell her she was trash. He said some really nasty stuff. I’m not real comfortable repeating it.”

Roxann nodded. “I understand, but it’s okay.”

Bryce hesitated, looked at Vic and then Roxann again. “Um…well, he was just telling her she was a whore and um…well, something about letting herself be used.”

Roxann heard Vic shift, but dared not look at him. Why bother? She knew what thoughts plagued him. She had the same ones and dreaded Michael’s reaction to them. But still, this was a breakthrough. A big one.

She pushed past the sickness swirling inside her, needing to hear this. “Did he say who used her?”

“No. But they were going at it. He told her to never call him again and not to contact the mayor.”

“The mayor? What did he have to do with it?”

Bryce shook his head. “I don’t know, but after Mr. Biehl hung up, he must have called someone else because I went back to the desk and saw his private line lit up again. I went into the office to see if I could hear anything because, dudes, this is the stuff you see on TV. I should have been smarter and left. Anyway, Mr. Biehl was telling the person that Alicia was putting pressure on him about the Wingate thing.”

Roxann, ever-so-calmly, shifted to Vic. “The Wingate thing?”

He shrugged.

“That’s all I heard,” Bryce said. “Anyway, the next day was when that lady got killed. I guess Mr. Biehl figured I’d overheard the call because he came to me a few days later and said he’d told the police about her calling the office that night. He said they might want to talk to me.”

“What else did he say?”

“Just that he’d cared about her, that they were friends and had a fight. He didn’t want me to think he’d ever hurt her. It didn’t sound like he cared about her that night on the phone. The next day I was offered a job in the mayor’s office.”

Roxann’s legs went numb. “
Really.
”

“Yeah, a Poly Sci major in his junior year getting offered a job as one of the assistants to the mayor’s chief of staff. You know what it would take for me to get that job? A lot more than bustin’ my ass as a free intern. It didn’t seem right, so I got out of there. Mr. Biehl called me once after that to see if the police had contacted me and it freaked me out.”

“Did the police contact you?”

He shook his head. “No.”

No surprise. To protect the mayor from further scandal, Max would have made sure no one called Bryce.

“Are you wondering if Carl and the mayor had something to do with the murder?” Vic asked.

Bryce shifted to Vic, his mouth slightly open. “Wouldn’t you?”

What the hell was taking so long? Michael, tired of waiting, opened the car door, but didn’t need to go anywhere because Vic and Roxann rushed out of the store. Neither of them spoke and he took that as a bad sign.

Shit.

He pulled the car up, Roxann hopped in front and Vic in back.

“Bingo,” Vic said

Michael pulled into traffic. “Bingo what?”

Roxann reached over and squeezed his arm. “Alicia called Carl’s office the night before she was killed and they argued.”

Something akin to a two by four hit him in the gut and a rush of air escaped. “Wait. I need to pull over.”

He pulled into a gas station and parked. Instinctively, he knew parts of this conversation would be painful and he didn’t want to risk Roxann and Vic’s lives because he couldn’t concentrate on his driving.

He listened as Roxann relayed Bryce’s story with Vic filling in the parts she’d missed. He’d been faithful to Alicia until the day they’d separated and hearing about her exploits humiliated him, but now he had a solid lead. A sliver of something—hope maybe—solidified inside him. “We need to get on this Wingate thing.”

Roxann already had her phone in hand. “I’m calling Phil.”

Michael turned to Vic. “You believe this kid?”

“Yeah. He was crappin’ his pants. He knows he’s in some shit, but he doesn’t know what it is. He’s broke and scared.”

Broke and scared. Michael had encountered that scenario before and it still haunted him. This kid had some bullshit luck. All he wanted was experience and he wound up in the middle of a murder.

Maybe Michael could do something about that.

While Michael merged into traffic, Roxann relayed the conversation to Phil via speakerphone so she could jot notes and talk at the same time.
Don’t miss anything. Get it all down
. Could her brain actually hold anymore? She just wasn’t sure.

“I have to stop at the cash machine,” Michael said, hooking a right into a bank parking lot on the corner. He got out and walked to the machine.

Roxann hung up with Phil and waved her phone in Michael’s direction. “He’s stopping for money now? What’s that about?”

He took the money from the slot, grabbed a deposit envelope from the stack on the machine and stuck the cash into it. He wrote something on the envelope, put it in his back pocket and returned to the car.

“Mikey, Mikey, Mikey, what’re ya doin’?” Vic asked.

“Shut up.”

At that moment, Roxann may have been the only English speaking person in a foreign country. She became more confused when Michael pulled onto Bryce Cooper’s street.

“We don’t know jack about this kid,” Vic said.

“You just said you believed him.”

“He could be a good liar.”

“Then you’re losing your edge.”

What were they
talking
about?

Michael parked in front of the house, walked to the door and stuffed the envelope under Bryce’s door.

Roxann turned to Vic. “Did he just do what I think he did?”

“Yeah. Christmas came early I guess. Don’t say anything, he’ll pop a vein.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Pop a vein?”

“The money!”
Idiot
.

“Oh. Probably because someone gave him a foot up once.”

Michael had given a stranger a handful of cash. She had no idea how much it was, but it didn’t matter. The idea that he wanted to help this young man, despite how much it must have hurt to hear about Alicia’s actions, filled Roxann with a sense of wonder. She shouldn’t have been surprised. He’d always been generous with material things. It was the emotional stuff he got stingy with.

Michael jumped back into the car.

“You didn’t need to do that.”

He shrugged, put the car in gear and hit the gas. Clearly, he didn’t want to discuss it. Well, that was fine.

His phone rang and he glanced at the ID. “This should be good.” He hit the button and held the phone to his ear. “Hey, Arnie…Now?…Could they give me a little goddamn notice?…Right…I’ll meet you there.”