T. Lynn Ocean - Jersey Barnes 01 - Southern Fatality (28 page)

I phoned Chesterfield and learned three things.

One, after a call from one of the agents, he’d rushed home to find a ransom note in place of his wife. It appeared to be the same paper and same typestyle as Jared’s ransom note. Lolly was additional insurance to ensure the ransom money was delivered, it said. The Feebie who was stationed at the penthouse had gone down to the lobby to accept a food delivery. When he returned, a lamp was overturned, a torn magazine was on the floor, and Lolly was gone. None of her belongings were missing. I asked Chesterfield if his wife had been on birth control and he said, yes, pills. I asked him to check and see if her birth control pills were there. He returned to the phone shortly, telling me that they were not in their usual place in the top bathroom drawer. Which meant she probably hadn’t been abducted, even though somebody wanted it
to look like she had. Clothing and cosmetics could be easily purchased, but prescription drugs would be more of a hassle to replace.

Two, Melinda Hertz’s lawyer called offering some information in exchange for dropped charges. The theft and drug dealing were all done by her husband Gary, she maintained, and he had been the actual property manager. Chesterfield agreed that if her information directly led to finding Jared alive, he’d drop the charges against her. If not, no deal. The other condition was that she had to provide the information immediately. Melinda Hertz claimed that the day she and Gary had skipped out of their apartment, she was in the Bellington Complex lobby getting a newspaper and overheard a young man calling Jared on the courtesy phone. The conversation led her to believe the visitor was an old friend and that he and Jared were getting together. And no, the courtesy phone wasn’t viewed by a security camera. But
after
he hung the phone up, Melinda distinctly heard the kid mutter to himself, “You’ll enjoy Piney Place, Jared. You’ll blend right in with the trailer trash.” The kid was white, tall, and lanky with longish hair and jeans. After the jail time cleared her head of a drug-induced haze and she’d had some time to contemplate things, Melinda remembered the incident and it dawned on her that it occurred right before Jared disappeared.

Three, Chesterfield was reaching a breaking point. Controlled and together though he was, I wasn’t sure how much more he could take and I didn’t want to give him any more bad news to contemplate—at least not until I had his son safely back home. I hadn’t told him what I’d learned about Lolly.

I called Trish for an update and found that she’d finally had some luck with the tracker in Walton’s mobile phone. He’d made a call from it just minutes earlier and she managed to catch a few snippets of conversation. From what she surmised, Walton was planning to
get on a plane tomorrow and wherever he was going, he was going with someone. Even better, Trish got a reading on the GPS location of the phone. Walton was still in the Wilmington area, and my handheld GPS device could pinpoint his location—at least the location he’d been when he placed the call on his mobile phone—to within twenty feet. Bits of the puzzle were plummeting into place and a rush of charged energy filled my body and stimulated my mind. It was the same feeling I always experienced when getting close to solving a case and I thrived on it. In a flash-forward instant, I felt a sense of loss. Something I was going to miss in retirement.

After studying a map and comparing the GPS coordinates with the Piney Place neighborhood, I discovered the two overlapped. Definitely a clue.

Steaming
hot jets of water pounded the back of my shoulders and, despite the fact that it was the day of reckoning, I stood beneath the shower much longer than necessary as I visualized the various scenarios that could happen and what my response to each would be. A calming type of mental preparation I’d learned working for the government, it had become habit.

I dressed in what Ox dubbed my combat duds: black hiking boots, stretch jeans that were popular with the teen crowd and had enough assorted pockets to carry a few tools including my backup piece, and a custom designed bullet-resistant vest that molded nicely around my size Ds. The vest was covered by a plain T-shirt, and a lightweight black jacket concealed both the vest and the Glock. I’d requested Ox’s company and when we met downstairs at the bar, he grinned, even though he didn’t know my outfit also concealed a pair of sexy striped Victoria’s Secret briefs and lace-lined cami. Or, considering his mysterious powers of observation, maybe he did know.

“Planning on some action, Barnes?” He was dressed no differently than usual, although I knew he’d strapped on his carry weapon of choice, a Kimber .45 automatic. He had several weapons, if you counted the two knives that he was never without and the two hands that could kill as easily as they could comfort.

We ordered food more as a necessity for body fuel than a social pleasantry. While we ate boiled shrimp and hush puppies, I brought him up to date and told him that there had better be some action soon, or else Chesterfield had hired the wrong woman. Ox agreed that Piney Place was where we needed to be.

I touched his arm. “Put on your vest before we go, okay?”

“Worried about me?”

“I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

“Ditto, Jersey Barnes.”

When we Climbed
into my car and went in search of Jared, the evening was growing dusky and would soon go dark. In the electronic dimension, SIPA transfers to Chesterfield Financial’s system were drawing to a close.

“Thanks for coming along, Ox.”

“You’re welcome,” he said simply.

Piney Place turned out to be a rental community of single and double-wide mobile homes. Just on the other side of the bridge—the one leading south on Highway 17—the area was heavily wooded, giving the illusion of privacy between the postage-stamp lots. Most yards were landscaped with layers of pine straw in lieu of grass. As we canvassed the neighborhood, there was little activity other than some teenagers gathered in one backyard passing a cigarette between them, and the occasional bluish, flickering glow
of a television through a window. With the exception of a man taking his poodle for a walk from behind the wheel of a golf cart, the streets were empty.

We spied Walton’s white Mustang convertible parked in the dirt drive of a nondescript double-wide with rotting white lattice boards covering the crawl space where vinyl skirting otherwise would be. A real estate sign, indicating the home had been for rent, rested against a tree. We parked in the street.

Communicating with our eyes and hands, we agreed that I’d take the front door. Ox vanished into the backyard. In the distance, a small dog yapped but other than pulsing, tinny music emanating from a cheap radio, there were no sounds coming from the trailer. Heading in with my weapon drawn, I found the front door unlocked, noiselessly entered, and crouched against a wall. A stale cloud assaulted my nose. It reeked of cigarette smoke and the odor of someone who hadn’t bathed in a long time. The front door opened into the living room and Walton sat on the sofa, facing me. His half-nude body was leisurely stretched out, face aimed at the ceiling, eyes closed. A female knelt on the floor in front of him and her head of short blond curls methodically moved up and down between his legs. Nobody else was in sight.

Trying to ignore the distraction of two people having sex twelve feet away, I studied what I could see of the rental. Aside from empty beer cans and wadded-up remnants of fast-food meals, the place was tidy. To my left was a small dining area that led to a kitchen. To the right was a hallway with three doors. One was open and revealed a bathroom. The remaining two were closed and I assumed them to be bedrooms. I also had to assume who the bobbing head belonged to, even though I could only see the back of it. I may have found the mystery woman.

Seconds later, Walton’s eyes flew open and revealed a mixture of bewilderment and pleasure as he registered my presence at the
same time an orgasm overtook him. When the woman turned to see what Walton looked at with such wide eyes, I discovered that the head of white-blond curls did in fact belong to Lolly.

Keeping my back to the wall, I stood and aimed the gun at her but kept my peripheral vision on Walton, just in case he was a cold-blooded killer, too. “Stand up, Lolly.”

Looking almost comic, Walton got up and scrambled to get back into the pants that were discarded on the floor. Resembling a veteran prostitute, Lolly slowly wiped her mouth with the back of a slender hand and stood to face me with a slow smile. She was fully clothed in a solid black pantsuit and sandals and made sure that she kept herself behind the kid. She knew I wouldn’t shoot her if there was a risk of killing Walton in the process. For that matter, she knew a person with morals wouldn’t shoot an unarmed woman.

“Why, hello, Jersey,” she said. “You’ve found our little love nest. I do hope you won’t tell Samuel. It’d just break his heart.” The voice was no longer pouty and sweet. Instead, it was deep, the words perfectly enunciated. The eyes were darker than I remembered, more intelligent, more calculating. To give Ox time to do whatever it was that he was doing, I played her game. I was in no particular hurry.

“Lolly, Lolly, Lolly. To think you were worried about your husband cheating on you,” I said sadly.

She brushed the hair from her face and casually reached for her purse that rested on an end table.

“Hold it!” I said. “That’s a no-no.”

Sighing, she retrieved a tube of lipstick from atop a rickety end table and taking her time in twisting up the stick of color, applied a layer of cherry red to her lips without the aid of a mirror. “I had to know if he was, Jersey, because I want a divorce and could have used that as cause.” She fluttered her lashes demurely at a stunned,
motionless Walton. “Nothing compares to the endurance of a twenty-one-year-old.”

“Why’d you marry him to begin with?”

“Oh, it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long, long time,” she said flippantly and when she moved to replace the lipstick on the table, she grabbed Walton into a bear hug against the front of her body, turning him into an even better shield.

“Don’t worry, darling. She won’t shoot you,” she cooed into his ear as she reached into the handbag on the sofa behind her and removed a revolver that was pointed at me. The heeled sandals made her nearly a head taller than Walton and I felt certain that I could immobilize her with a shot to the shoulder before she got a round off at me. Or kill her with a shot to the head. Knowing Lolly, though, she’d have just enough psychotic energy to shoot either me or the kid on her way down. I went the safer route by waiting to see how things played out, but didn’t drop my armed stance. It was a standoff.

“What are you doing with a pistol, Lolly?” Walton sputtered. “Are you crazy? You said nobody would get hurt!”

We both ignored him.

“I’m curious,
Lisa,”
I said, emphasizing her real name, “why did you really employ me to begin with? You knew Samuel wasn’t having an affair.”

“Oh, I see you’ve caught on to me. Well, that was just a distraction. When Bill told me he was dating a detective-type, I figured that the cheating-husband front would confuse things a bit. Make a more interesting story for the cops after I disappeared. You just happened to be convenient.”

“Convenient
and
free,” I mused. “Huh. So where are you headed from here?”

“To a beautiful tropical place. To live happily ever after with my gorgeous man.” She let out a long laugh that finished like an
ugly snort and I wondered who she was referring to as gorgeous. Surely not Walton.

“And kidnapping Tared?”

“Another distraction,” she said, momentarily releasing her grip on Walton to place the strap of her handbag over a bare shoulder. The other hand, the one gripping the revolver, remained steady. Ignorantly, Walton remained in place in front of her. “Besides, I’ve been kidnapped now, too. I wonder if Samuel has told my mother?” Her head tilted slightly with the question.

“You’re going to let your own parents think you’ve been kidnapped?”

Her eyes narrowed and squinted with instant anger. Her thumb slid across the top of the hammer, cocking it. I readied myself to fire and zeroed in on her facial expressions. I’d only have a fraction of a second to beat her to the pull of the trigger, when and if she chose to pull hers. Most likely, when.

“I said
mother
, you moron. Not mother and father. I don’t have a father. Samuel Chesterfield took my daddy away and left us with nothing. Nothing!” Her voice rose to a screech. “He thinks he can just screw people over and destroy families? Go on his moneymaking merry way, living in luxury—while I’m living in a roach-infested apartment? Sharing a pullout sofa with my sister? Watching my mother drink a bottle of vodka a day after Daddy killed himself?”

For a split second, her body shook with rage and just as suddenly, she calmed. Enjoying the moment, she wasn’t yet ready to fire the gun.

“What about Darlene? Was her overdose your handiwork, too?”

“That was just to irritate Samuel. He relied on her to keep his schedule straight.” Lolly smiled, shrugged. “Besides, she never treated me with the respect I deserved.”

I kept my sights on Lolly but threw a question at the senator’s son. “You’re in on all this, Walton? I figured you to be smarter than that.”

“Despite his miserable attempt at a higher education,” Lolly said, “Walt is really quite the genius. I discovered that when we met at one of his daddy’s boring fund-raisers. The rack of lamb was delicious, but the conversation on the verandah with Walt was even better.”

The gun, a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver, remained pointed at my chest from her stance behind Walton and it occurred to me that Lolly was the driver who’d shot at me while I was jogging. She was also the disguised person who tried to shoot me through the car window as I sat on the side of the road, taking notes from Soup. I was close enough to see the rounds snuggled in the gun’s cylinder, but I wasn’t close enough to disarm her before she had time to react by shooting me. I wanted to keep her talking and luckily, she wanted to talk. She was enjoying bragging.