The Sixth Man (17 page)

“Sounds like a plan,” she said doubtfully.

“I had some fun last night, too.” He explained to her about Carla Dukes and his run-in with the man following her.

“What is going on up there?” she said in an exasperated tone.

“More than we initially thought, that’s for damn sure.”

An hour later Michelle was free to leave. She picked up her truck and followed Sean to the Boar’s Head, where they ate some dinner.

“So how’d you bust me out?” she asked.

“I basically vouched for you. So if you run my ass is fried.”

“I’ll try to hang around this hemisphere.”

“I explained everything about Bergin’s death in Maine and our investigation to the prosecutor. He’s a reasonable guy who knew Bergin well. He agreed that it’s highly unlikely you had anything to do with plotting Hilary’s death. I told him we were doing our best to find out who killed him and part of that investigation led us here. He’s definitely on our side on that.”

“Okay.”

“But the strange thing is that he didn’t know Bergin had been murdered. Someone is keeping a tight rein on the media, that’s for sure.”

“FBI has the muscle to do that,” she said.

Sean nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking, too. And I presume Hilary didn’t go blaring it around. And Megan left to come to Maine right after she found out.”

“Guess it’ll come as a shock to a lot of people then. And now with Hilary dead, too.”

“And the letter you found in Bergin’s files? Agent Murdock asking for information about his client? That’s pretty unusual.”

“Oh my God, I didn’t tell you the best part.” Michelle plunged her hand in her pocket and pulled out the page from the car warranty booklet. She explained to Sean where she’d found it. “Guess if he ever went out to visit her, he’d drive. So the car was a logical place to keep the address.”

“Kelly Paul. Okay.” He checked his watch, pulled out his phone, and pecked in the number while Michelle dug into her fish and chips.

“Kelly Paul, please?” said Sean. He paused. “Right, this is Sean King. I’m working with Ted Bergin on the Edgar Roy case. Hello?”

He put the phone down.

Michelle swallowed a bite of breaded halibut. “Hung up on you?”

He nodded. “Guess she is the client.”

“So it is a woman?”

“Sure sounded like one. She asked who it was. I told her, and click.”

“Do you think she knows Bergin is dead?”

“No way to tell.” He studied the paper. “If I’m remembering correctly this address is about four hours from here in Southwest Virginia.”

Michelle drank down her iced tea. “Let me get a big coffee and we’ll hit the road.”

“Hold on. It’s probably not smart for you to leave the area right now. The police will want to talk to you again at the very least.”

“Then you’re not going either. We split up and each of us almost gets killed.”

“Okay, you’ve got a point. Hang on.” He punched in a number on his phone.

“Phil, Sean King. Look, do you have time to talk tonight face-to-face? Say around eight? Great, thanks.”

He clicked off and motioned to the waitress for the check.

“What are you going to do?” asked Michelle.

“Throw myself on the mercy of the prosecutor’s office to spring you from the confines of Charlottesville. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll mortgage everything I have to post bail.”

“I thought you only had to put up ten percent.”

“Right now, ten percent of just about anything would tax my personal finances. Private investigation is a feast-or-famine business. And I’m not even sure we’re going to get our travel expenses reimbursed now.”

“And if that doesn’t work?”

“I’ll stuff you in a bag and sneak you out. One way or another we’re going to see Kelly Paul.”

“Think she has all the answers?”

“Actually, just
one
answer would be a nice change of pace right now.”

W
HEN
S
EAN LEFT
the meeting with the prosecutor he was smiling.

Michelle, who was waiting for him in her truck, looked at him inquiringly. “I take it the meeting went well?”

“He’s pigeonholing the arrest for now. No court hearing. No bail. You’re free to go, in my company.”

“You must have done some sell job.”

“Well, that and the fact that the cops found the slug that almost hit you.”

“Nice. What was it?”

“Remington .45 ACP full metal jacket.”

“Not the round that killed Bergin then. An FMJ at contact range would have blown right through his skull.”

“And it wasn’t the guy I spotted in Maine. He couldn’t be in two places at once.”

“They haven’t done the post on Hilary yet, right?”

“Not yet. But I think when they do, they’ll find a .45 round in her.”

A half hour later they were heading toward the home of Kelly Paul in Michelle’s Land Cruiser after Sean turned in his rental. They rode Interstate 64 over to 81 and took that south. Hours later, about thirty minutes before they would have crossed over into Tennessee, they exited the highway, drove west for a few miles, and passed through several one-traffic-light towns. Ten minutes after leaving the last such hamlet, Michelle slowed the truck and looked around before glancing at her GPS screen.

Sean looked at his watch and yawned. “Nearly two in the morning. If I don’t get eight hours of sleep soon my head is going to disintegrate.”

“I slept fine in jail.”

“No surprise there. I’ve seen your bed. The one in jail is probably softer.”

“I never heard you complain when you were
in
my bed.”

“Other priorities at the time.”

“How do you want to do this? The GPS says she’s down that road coming up on the left. All I see here are fields. You think she lives on a farm?”

Sean gazed out the window. “Well, that’s a cornfield over there.” He pointed to the right. He glanced to the left. “Not sure what that is. But it’s definitely a farm of some sort. I can’t even see a house.”

As they pulled closer Michelle spotted the mailbox. She hit her high beams. “Nothing on the mailbox, but this must be the place.”

“Kelly Paul and Edgar Roy. What’s the connection?”

“Well, she might be family. Paul might be her married name.”

“Or maybe there’s no family tie,” replied Sean.

“But like you said, there has to be something there. Otherwise how could Bergin rep Edgar Roy just based on this Kelly Paul person saying to do it? Wouldn’t there have to be like a power of attorney or something?”

“Ideally, yes. But apparently Roy lost his mind
after
he was arrested. So presumably he couldn’t sign off on a POA after he became incompetent.”

“We don’t know exactly when he zonked out. He was arrested. There must have been court proceedings. Bail, competency hearing, his being sent to Maine.”

Sean nodded. “You’re right. He might have hired Bergin before he went silent. But if so, why all the secrecy about the client? Why no billing or correspondence record? And then there’s Murdock’s letter and Bergin writing Kelly Paul’s name in his car warranty book.”

“So do we sit out here all night or go knock on her door?”

“Knocking on someone’s door at this hour in this place might result in buckshot wounds to our person. I say we pull off the road, stretch out, and get some sleep. I definitely could use it.”

“We should take turns being on watch.”

“Watching for what? Cows?”

“Sean, we were both almost killed yesterday. Let’s be prudent.”

“Okay, you’re right.”

She said, “I’ll take the first watch. I’ll wake you in two hours.”

Sean tilted his seat back and closed his eyes, and a few minutes later his soft snore wafted through the truck’s interior. Michelle glanced over at him, reached in the backseat, pulled out a blanket from the floorboard, and placed it over him. She stared back out the front window, alternating this with glances in the side mirrors to check on anyone creeping up on them from the rear. Her hand dropped to the butt of her gun and stayed there.

Sean yawned, stretched, and blinked himself fully awake. Sunlight stared back at him. He jolted up and looked over at Michelle. She was tapping a tune on the steering wheel and sipping on a bottle of G2.

“Why didn’t you wake me up?” He checked his watch. It was nearly eight.

“You were sleeping like a baby. I didn’t have the heart.”

He noted the blanket she’d put over him. “Okay, your drastically heightened sensitivity factor is really creeping me out.”

“I got plenty of sleep in jail. I’m fresh and now you are too.”

“Okay, now that makes more sense.”

His stomach grumbled.

“Want me to run over and pick some corn?” she said with a smile.

“No, but do you have a power bar in that pile of crap in the back? I’m afraid to put my hand in there.”

She reached back, snagged one, and tossed it to him. “Chocolate fudge. Twenty grams of protein. Knock yourself out.”

“Any activity from Kelly Paul?”

“No cars in or out and no sightings of any humans, though I did see a black bear and what I think was a beaver.”

Sean rolled down the window and sucked in the clean, chilly air. “My bladder is telling me I need to do something.”

Michelle pointed to a spot across the road. “I already did my business.”

He was back in a few minutes. “I think it’s time we had our face-to-face with Kelly Paul.”

Michelle started the Land Cruiser. “Okay, but let’s hope there’s some coffee in the house.” She turned down the gravel road. “What if Paul won’t talk to us?”

“Then I think we have to insist. We came all this way, after all.”

“And we tell Paul about Bergin?”

“If Kelly Paul hired Bergin, then his death might make her more likely to help us. How all of this connects to what happened in Maine I don’t know. But I have to believe that unless Bergin had some dark secret in his past, his death and his secretary’s death are connected to Roy. And that means Paul is connected too.”

“Despite what you said earlier I could have been the one to kill Hilary Cunningham.”

“Is that the real reason you didn’t sleep last night?”

“She was an innocent old lady, Sean. And now she’s dead.”

“If you did it you sure as hell didn’t mean to do it. Someone was shooting at you. You shot back. That’s instinctual. I would’ve done the same thing.”

“She’s still dead. What do they tell her kids or grandkids? ‘I’m sorry, she’s dead because she was accidentally shot’? Come on.”

“Life is not fair any way you cut it, Michelle. You know that and I know that. We’ve lived that stuff too often to recognize it any other way.”

“That can’t stop me from feeling guilty. From feeling like a piece of shit.”

“You’re right, it can’t. But keep this in mind. Somebody brought Hilary Cunningham to that house against her will in all likelihood. And if you did shoot her I don’t believe it was accidental, at least on their side.”

“What, you mean they wanted me to shoot her?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Hilary might have known something that certain people didn’t want to get out. And if you shoot her then the police are all over us. That puts us out of commission, or so they think.”

“If that’s the case these are some pretty sick people we’re up against.”

“We’re always up against psychos, Michelle. It’s what we do. But I want these sons of bitches more than I’ve wanted anybody else.”

T
HE HOUSE WAS A WHITE SINGLE-STORY
clapboard with a black shingle roof in need of replacement. The porch was wide and inviting, with a couple of beat-up-looking rockers moving slightly to and fro in the breeze. The sun was coming up to the left of the house, but the reach of a monster oak blanketed it in shadows.

The front drive was more dirt than gravel. The lawn was cut short, there were a few flowers in pots, and a rooster strutted in front of the Toyota as Michelle braked to a stop. The bird cocked its head in their direction, rustled its feathers, gave the pair a withering one-eyed gaze, and crowed as they got out of the Land Cruiser.

The edge of a chicken coop could be seen sticking out from behind the rear of the house. Beyond the coop a red barn rose up about a hundred feet from the house and at an angle to it. A clothesline hung in the right side yard, and the few garments strung on it lifted lazily with the dull movement of air.