Wounded Animals (Whistleblower Series Book 1) (6 page)

But there were no signs of struggle, no break in, and Paul’s wrists and throat had been slit. There was no murder weapon. And where would she run if not to her sister’s or her parents’? Pregnant, fleeing without a car?

And the note next to the body would make no sense at all if Grace had written it.
Ask Kareem why
. Ask Kareem why this man was dead? How would the magic man from the bar know anything about it?

A thought struck me and I called Grace’s boss. He answered on the second ring.

“Candle?”

“Hey Rodrick, it’s me. Grace’s husband,” I said, then immediately felt stupid. He knew who I was. We’d had endless discussions about fantasy football over drinks at barbecues at various people’s houses.

“It’s a little early to be calling,” he said.

“I’m sorry about that, but it’s important.”

“Go ahead, buddy. Tell me what’s on your mind.”

“Do you know where Grace is?”

“At home, I assume. She called in sick the last three days. Said it was the flu or something. Is she not at home?”

“No, she’s not. The last time you talked to her was three days ago?”

“Well, actually no,” he said. “We texted. We’ve been texting every day, just keeping in touch. Did she go to the hospital?”

I ignored his question. “Have her text messages been weird, as in not like the kinds of things she would say?”

A few seconds ticked by. I thought I heard a copier whirring and beeping in the background. “Nope. Everything seems on the up and up to me. Regular old Grace stuff.”

I sucked up the foamy dregs of my beer and dropped the empty bottle in the recycling bin. Watched some snow tumble from a tree branch in the backyard.

He wasn't being honest with me, and I could tell. I didn’t like the hesitancy in his voice. “That’s what I figured. If she calls, please let me know.”

“For sure. If there’s something I can do to help, please let me know, okay?”

I thought about answering Rodrick’s question, but couldn’t make the words come to my lips. I mumbled something, then ended the call. I was nowhere closer to finding her, and her boss was hiding something.

***

I told the cleaning crew to let themselves out when they were done, then went outside to check out Grace’s car. Her set of keys was missing from the bowl by the front door, but she kept a spare key in one of those magnetic boxes, hidden under the front of the car. Lucky for me, the box was still there.

Her car was a mess. Nothing out of the ordinary for Grace, but there was so much junk that I had to step back and think about which area to search first.

Her work stuff flooded the front passenger seat. Grace was an account manager at a company that made closed captioning software, and she’d left a pile of sales contracts two feet high in the front seat. As I flipped through them, I thought more about her boss Rodrick’s strange tone when he said everything was on the “up and up.” What a weird phrase.

I couldn’t find anything useful amidst the junk. Papers, folders, pens and pencils, lots of empty chocolate candy bar wrappers.

The back seat contained more personal things like empty cloth grocery shopping bags, an endless amount of receipts from Whole Foods, Target, Pottery Barn and various clothing stores. I studied the dates on the receipts but couldn’t find anything within the last few weeks. Maybe if she’d been shopping somewhere while I was gone, I could get some kind of clue. Then I almost laughed when I realized how silly that was. If she had bought organic lettuce at Whole Foods two days ago, what would that tell me?

I also found a collection of yoga mats. Why did she need more than one? I mainly used martial arts classes for my physical release, but Grace was the yoga, Pilates, and spin class type.

I stood back and shut the door, feeling worse than I had when I’d started. Felt foolish for thinking I’d find some big clue hiding in her car.

I put the key in my pocket, then clicked the key holder into its magnetic hiding spot, and then hopped in my car and left the neighborhood. Her boss’ strange words had been enough that I felt an impulse to drive over to her work and check him out. Maybe if I could look him straight in the eye and hear his story, I might believe it. Or he might crack.

She worked in the Denver suburb of Littleton, so I spent a good amount of time staring at the windshield over the next half hour. Instead of listening to music, I puzzled through the events of the last few days, but everything seemed to circle around and leave me no better than where I’d started. Tried not to think about the dead trainee in my bathroom, but his slashed neck and wrists pulsed in my head every few seconds. Blood on the tile. What a terrible waste of life, and for what?

I parked outside Grace’s office building, a dilapidated two-story brick shack nestled in the middle of a maze of a business park. When I exited my car, I heard my keys jingle. My hands were shaking. I hadn’t realized I was nervous until then, but now that I had, my pulse skyrocketed with each step toward that front door.

“Get ahold of yourself, Candle,” I whispered.

Inside, soothing jazz muzak greeted me in the lobby. From behind a desk, an emaciated woman with massive eyeglasses smiled at me.

“Good morning, sir, can I help you?”

“I’m here to see Rodrick McGuire, please.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

I stared at my hands, still a little shaky. “No, it’s about one of his employees, um… I’m Grace Candle’s husband.”

Her mouth dropped into a toothy smile and her eyes shot wide open, raising the big glasses up off her nose. “Oh my, you must be Tucker. We’ve heard so much about you. How is Grace? She feeling any better yet?”

Interesting. Grace almost never talked about work, except the occasional story about some coworker driving her crazy and how much busywork Rodrick was piling on her desk. “She’s fine. On the mend, I guess you could say. I’m in a bit of a hurry, so can I go in and see Rodrick, please?”

She got out from behind the desk and then pressed a keycard against a box next to the door. The door beeped and unlocked, then she held it open for me and waved me inside. “He’s in his office, in the back on the right. Tell her we’re all praying for a swift recovery.”

I walked inside and surveyed the layout. They had a cube farm setup, just like my office and the IntelliCraft office in Dallas, but they had only two sets of cubes with one long row between them. I paced myself going down the row, glancing in each one to find Grace’s cube.

She was four cubes down and on the right. I recognized a framed picture of her parents. Grace had kept it from our old apartment, and I’d always wondered what had happened to that picture. Her cube was nondescript and much better organized, compared to her car. A couple pictures of her parents, a close friend from college, and two pictures of us: one during our honeymoon in Costa Rica and another of us at a Broncos game. I remembered that game. The Broncos had played like shit and I didn’t feel like smiling in the picture. I could look at my face and see the smile wasn’t genuine.

I heard Rodrick laughing and looked over the cubes at the corner office in the back. I exited the cube farm and rounded the corner to see him chatting with some woman. He was behind a desk, and she was in a chair facing him.

I clenched my fists and walked to the edge of his office. Leaned in and caught his eye.

He started. “Oh, hey there. What are you doing here?”

I took a few uneven breaths, trying to calm myself. I couldn’t form the words I wanted to say.

The woman in the chair turned to face me. She was beautiful, tall, shapely, wearing a form-fitting dress. I noticed some flush in her cheeks. This was not Rodrick’s wife, I had met that woman before. What was he doing here with her, in his office?

I couldn’t say why, but at that moment, I despised him. The look of surprise on his face registered as false as my smile in the photo at the Broncos game.

“Is everything okay with Grace? There’s not something wrong, is there?”

“You tell me, Rodrick,” I said.

He cocked his head, an uneven smirk crossing his face. “I’m sorry, buddy, I don’t follow. What am I supposed to tell you?”

“I’m not interested in playing games with you. Where is my wife?”

The woman in his office shifted in her chair. “Should I leave?”

Rodrick reached a hand across the desk and patted her on the shoulder. “No, dear, you stay right here.”

I didn’t like the way he touched her, so I took a step inside the office. “That’s not your wife, Rodrick.”

“I know it’s not, obviously. This is my sister. Why are you coming in here with that tone? What’s going on with you?”

The woman frowned at me and I felt a stab of shame all through my chest. That had been a bad call. But it didn’t change the fact that I knew Rodrick was hiding something. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

He stood up and rounded the desk. I stepped back and then realized that my hands were instinctively out in front of me in a judo fighting stance.

He looked down at my hands, then sighed. “I’m not sure what you’re referring to, but there isn’t anything I haven’t told you.”

We were out in the main room now, among the cube farm. I caught a few people staring at us out of my peripheral vision.

He reached out to put his hands on top of my hands. “If there’s some kind of problem between you and your wife,” he said in a low voice, “I’m afraid I don’t know anything about it. I’m really sorry, buddy, but I don’t know where she is. Like I told you, she called in sick, and that’s the last I heard about it.”

I felt so ashamed and idiotic at that moment I wanted to run out of the building. Maybe I was unreasonable. Maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe he wasn’t. One thing for sure, though, I had made a total ass of myself by storming in here and accusing Rodrick of hiding something from me.

“I’m sorry,” I said in a gravelly tone, my eyes low and cumbersome.

He ducked down to meet my eyes. “Hey, now, it’s okay. If there’s something I can do to help, you be sure and let me know. Maybe you should get on home. She’s probably waiting for you there.”

I nodded, defeated. With my head down, I walked back through the cube farm and out the front door, not looking at anyone.

When I got back in my car, the weight of my actions pulled at me. I wanted to scream and cry and get drunk and forget about all of this. But I didn’t have any choice. I had to press on, and the next logical step would be to get the cops involved.

CHAPTER NINE

Shelton’s business card in hand, I dialed the phone number. My heart pounded and I braced myself against the counter in my kitchen.

An operator came on with a warbling greeting, then said something unintelligible. She followed with, “how may I direct your call?”

“Uh, Detective Stan Shelton, please.”

“Of course, sir. One moment and I’ll connect you.”

My phone squawked with a series of beeps and clicks. Finally, I heard a connection. “Shelton here.”

“Detective Shelton?”

“Speaking.”

“Detective, this is Tucker Candle. We spoke yesterday evening.”

“Of course, Mr. Candle. What can I do for you?”

“I’m not sure if it’s been twenty-four hours yet or not, but I think I need to report my wife as missing.”

“Didn’t come home last night, did she?”

I closed my eyes. Hearing those words come out of his mouth drove a dagger into the middle of my chest. Above all, I wanted to avoid a repeat of the emotion-driven scene at her boss’ office. Keep cool, be logical, follow all the right steps. “No, she didn’t come home and I haven’t heard from her in several days. I’m worried something has happened to her.”

“Most of the time it’s nothing, but if you’d like to file a report, we can do that. Why don’t you come down to the station on West 46th? I’ll get the paperwork started and we can finish it together.”

My lips felt shaky, but I forced the words out. “Thank you, detective.”

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll find out what happened. Just keep a level head and don’t do anything rash.”

I hung up the phone and caught a good whiff of my armpit, which was plenty ripe. Hadn’t showered since yesterday morning in Texas. I didn’t think Detective Shelton would care, so I threw on a coat, grabbed my keys, and headed out the door. I hadn’t bothered to check the bathroom to see what the cleaning crew had done in there.

Traffic seemed light, which made sense since it was between the morning and lunch rushes. I wasn’t used to being on the roads at this hour. I’d already called my boss first thing and requested the day off. When I gave her a vague and made-up explanation why, she hadn’t seemed to care much, other than a mild annoyance that she would have to wait to be debriefed on the new trainees. I wouldn’t have expected anything less from her.

The cop station was a brick building next to the street, big flags waving in the breeze out front. The idea of walking in there and setting the official process of a missing persons report in motion filled me with dread. It would mean she was actually gone. There would be cops looking for her, money spent on an investigation. So many things out of my control.

I parked along the curb and spent a few seconds breathing deeply while looking at myself in the rearview mirror.

“You can do this, Candle. Get out of this car and do what you need to do.”

My foot felt heavy on the ground. I didn’t want to go inside, and I couldn’t say why. This was the right thing to do. This was the next logical step to finding my wife and unborn son.

The flags in the breeze rippled, and the ropes clanged against the flagpoles below. Clouds parted, and the sun peeked out. The doors to the station in front of me were dark and grim. Something wasn’t right.

As I started toward the building, a car screeched to a halt behind me. The squeal of tires and smell of burning rubber wrecked my concentration. For a second, I forgot where I was.

Before I could get a good look at him, a man jumped out of the passenger seat, then stepped behind me. He was lightning-fast and I barely registered his movements. One second, I’d been alone, and then the next, a man was towering over me.