Split Second (34 page)

W
HEN SHE GOT
back to the inn where she was staying, Michelle eyed the box in the back of her truck. It contained the files on Bob Scott they’d retrieved from Joan’s room at the Cedars. She carried it up to her room thinking she might go through it again in case Joan had missed something. As she sorted through it, she discovered that Joan’s notes were in the box as well.

The weather had seesawed back to chilly again, so she stacked pieces of wood and kindling in the fireplace and ignited them with matches and rolled-up newspaper. She ordered some hot tea and food from the inn’s kitchen. After what had happened to Joan, when the tray arrived, Michelle kept a sharp eye on the server and one hand on her pistol until the person left. The room was large and furnished in a graceful yet sumptuous style that would have made Thomas Jefferson smile. The cheery fire enhanced the serene atmosphere; all in all it was a cozy place. However, despite its amenities, the room’s steep cost would have forced her to check out by now had not the Service offered to pick up the tab for her meals and lodging at least for a few days. She was certain they expected a substantial quid pro quo—namely, a reasonable solution to this jagged and maddening case. And they were no doubt aware that she—along with King—had helped develop most of the promising leads so far. Yet she was not so naive that she didn’t realize that paying her lodging bills was a good way for the Service to keep tabs on her.

She sat cross-legged on the floor, hooked up her computer to the very new-looking data phone line in the wall behind
the reproduction eighteenth-century writing desk and went to work on King’s unusual request. As she’d predicted, the answer to his query wasn’t on the Secret Service’s database. She started making calls to Service colleagues. On the fifth try she found someone who could help. She gave the man the information King had given her.

“Hell yes,” said the agent. “I know because my cousin was in the same damn prison camp, and he came out a skeleton.”

Michelle thanked him and hung up. She immediately dialed King, who was home by this time.

“Okay,” she said, barely containing her glee, “first you have to anoint me as the most brilliant detective since Jane Marple.”

“Marple? I thought you’d say Holmes or Hercule Poirot,” he shot back.

“They were all right, for men, but Jane stands alone.”

“Okay, consider yourself so anointed, Miss Smart-ass. What do you have?”

“You were right. The name you gave me was the name of the village in Vietnam where he was held prisoner and then escaped from. Now, can you tell me what’s going on? Where did you get that name from?”

King hesitated but then said, “It was scratched on the wall of the prison cell in the Tennessee bunker.”

“My God, Sean, does that mean what I think?”

“There was also a Roman numeral two scratched in after the name. Sort of makes sense. It was his second POW camp; I guess that’s the way he was looking at it. First Vietnam, now Tennessee.”

“So Bob Scott was the prisoner in that cell, and he left the inscription as a way to say so?”

“Maybe. Don’t forget, Michelle, it could have been left as misdirection, a clue we were meant to find.”

“But it’s such an obscure one.”

“True. And there’s the other thing.”

“What?” she said quickly.

“The ‘Sir Kingman’ note that was pinned to Susan Whitehead’s body.”

“You don’t think Scott could have written it? Why?”

“A number of reasons, but I still can’t be sure.”

“But assuming Scott isn’t involved, who the hell else is out there?”

“I’m working on it.”

“What have you been up to?”

“I had some legal research to do at the UVA law library.”

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

“Yes.”

“Care to fill me in?”

“Not yet. I need to think about it some more. But thanks for verifying that info. I’ll talk to you soon… Miss Marple.” He clicked off and Michelle put down her phone, not very pleased with his declining yet again to take her into his confidence.

“You help a guy out, and you think he’ll return the favor, but nooo!” she complained to the empty room.

She threw some more wood on the fire and started rummaging through the box of files and Joan’s notes.

It felt a little awkward reading over the woman’s personal comments on the case, considering she might be dead. Yet Michelle had to admit Joan kept meticulous notes. As she worked through them, she began to have a greater appreciation for the woman’s skill and professionalism as an investigator. Michelle thought about what King had told her about the note Joan received on the morning of Ritter’s murder. The guilt she must have carried all these years, though, seeing a man she cared for being destroyed while her own career rocketed onward and upward. And yet how much could she have really loved him if she chose not to speak up, in effect picking her career over her feelings for Sean King. And how must King have felt?

What was it with men anyway? Did they have this dominant gene that made them have to act noble when it came to suffering, however stupidly, as some woman walked all over them? Certainly a woman could pine over a guy just as hopelessly. And too often members of her gender fell for the bad boy who would break their hearts and even sometimes their heads. Yet a woman
would have just cut her losses and moved on. Not the boys, though. They had to keep ramming their big pigheaded selves into a wall no matter how cold the heart lurking underneath the blouse and breasts. God, it was so frustrating that a man like King could be taken in by a woman like Joan.

Then she caught herself and wondered why it mattered so much. They were working a case together, that was all. And it wasn’t like King was perfect. Yes, he was intelligent, sophisticated, good-looking, and had a witty sense of humor. But he was also more than a decade her senior. And on the negative side he was moody, aloof, occasionally rude and at times condescending. And he was so damn neat! To think that she’d actually cleaned out her truck to please—

She suddenly blushed at this frank admission and quickly refocused on the papers in front of her. She studied the warrant filed against Bob Scott that Joan had found and was the only reason they’d discovered the cabin and empty bunker. Yet from what King had just told her, the conclusion that Scott was behind all of this had become a lot more tenuous.

And still, it was
his
cabin, and the arrest warrant had been issued against him for a weapons violation. She looked at the document more closely. What exactly was the weapons violation? And why had the service of the warrant failed? Those answers unfortunately weren’t apparent in the documents.

She gave up in frustration and continued perusing Joan’s notes. She came across another name that gave her pause. For her, the fact that Joan had drawn a line across the man’s name, ostensibly writing him off as a suspect, wasn’t in itself conclusive. For though she probably wouldn’t admit it to anyone, she was as confident about her investigative abilities as King was about his.

She said the name slowly, drawing out the two syllables of the last name. “Doug Denby.” Ritter’s chief of staff. Joan’s notes said that after Ritter’s death, Denby’s life had actually taken a turn for the better with his inheriting land and money in Mississippi. Because of that, Joan had concluded he couldn’t be
their man. But Michelle wasn’t that confident. Were some phone calls and general background information undertaken by Joan’s people enough? Joan hadn’t gone down to Mississippi to see for herself. She’d never laid eyes on Doug Denby. Was he really in Mississippi playing the country squire? Might he be instead around here somewhere, waiting to kill or kidnap his next victim? King said that Denby had been thoroughly upstaged by Sidney Morse on the Ritter campaign and come to resent him deeply. Maybe Denby had come to hate Clyde Ritter as well. What connection might he have had to Arnold Ramsey, if any? Or Kate Ramsey? Had he used his wealth to orchestrate some sort of revenge-filled campaign? So far Joan’s inquiries hadn’t answered those questions.

Michelle took a pen and wrote Denby’s name under the one Joan had scratched out. She pondered whether to call King and ask him what he remembered about the man. Maybe she should take these notes over there and force him to sit down and work through them with her. She sighed. Maybe she just wanted to be around him. She was pouring another cup of tea and looking out the window, where it was clouding over and looking like rain, when her phone rang.

It was Parks reporting in. “I’m still in Tennessee,” he said. He didn’t sound happy.

“Anything new?”

“We’ve talked to some folks who have homes nearby, but they were no help. Didn’t know Bob Scott, never seen him, that sort of thing. Hell, I think half these people are felons on the lam themselves. The place did belong to Bob Scott. He bought it from the estate of an old fellow who lived there about five years but, according to this fellow’s family, didn’t even know the bunker was there. And the place was wiped clean. No clues other than that earring you two found.”

“Sean found it, not me.” She hesitated and then said, “Look, he found something else.” She told him about the name of the village in Vietnam that had been scratched on the wall of the other prison cell.

Parks was furious. “Why the hell didn’t he tell me that while he was down here?”

“I don’t know,” she answered, then thought about King’s withdrawal from her. “Maybe he’s not into trusting anyone right now.”

“So you’ve confirmed Scott was a POW there during Nam?”

“Yes, I talked to an agent who knew the whole story.”

“Are you telling me somebody came down here, took it over and made him a prisoner in his own home?”

“Sean said it might have been a trick, to throw us off.”

“Where is our brilliant detective?”

“At his house. He’s following up some other lines of inquiry. He’s not really communicative right now. Apparently he wants to be alone.”

Parks shouted, “Who cares what he wants? He might have cracked this whole case by now but isn’t telling us squat!”

“Look, Jefferson, he’s doing his best to find out the truth. He just has his own way of doing it.”

“Well, his way of doing it is really starting to piss me off.”

“I’ll talk to him. Maybe we can meet later.”

“I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be down here. Probably won’t be done until tomorrow. You just talk to King and make him see the error of holding out on us. I don’t want to find out he’s got some other evidence I don’t know about. If he does, I’m going to slap him in a cell that looks a lot like the ones you two saw today. You understand?”

“Perfectly.”

Michelle clicked off and pulled the phone line from her laptop out of the wall, winding it back up and putting it in her case. She stood and went over to the other side of the room to get something from her knapsack. So preoccupied was she that she didn’t see it until it was too late. She tripped and fell. Rising back up, she looked at the oar with an angry expression. It was half under the bed, along with all the other junk from her truck. So stuffed was the underside of the bed that her possessions kept falling out, turning her bedroom into an obstacle course. This
was the third time she’d tripped over something. She decided to do something about it.

As Michelle waged war against her junk, she didn’t know that her entire conversation with Jefferson Parks had been captured by a tiny mass of circuits and wires. Inside the housing for her phone lines lurked another device very recently added and of which the owners of the inn were unaware. It was a state-of-the-art wireless surveillance device, so extraordinarily sensitive that it could capture not only conversations in the room or while Michelle was on the phone but anything spoken by the other party to the phone conversation.

A half mile away from the inn a paneled van was parked along the side of the road. Inside, Buick Man listened to the conversation for the third time and then shut off the tape. He picked up his phone and made the call, talking for some minutes and then ending with, “I can’t tell you how disappointed I am.”

These words sent a chill down the spine of the person to whom he was speaking.

“Do it,” he said. “Do it tonight.”

He hung up and looked in the direction of the inn. Michelle Maxwell had finally made it to the top of his list. He quietly congratulated her.