T. Lynn Ocean - Jersey Barnes 01 - Southern Fatality (26 page)

We broke free of heavy traffic and Ox stepped on the accelerator. “Is Trish still keeping an eye and ear on the senator’s beach house for you?”

“Far as I know. I haven’t heard anything from her lately. But I usually never do, until she has something worthwhile.” Trish was good at what she did because nobody ever suspected that she was an investigator. Just like me, she could play the ditzy, helpless female role to a tee. Unlike me, she could happily do surveillance for days.

“I think you’ll be hearing from her soon,” Ox said.

On cue, my mobile rang. The incoming number on the display told me it was Trish. I eyed him, wondering how he knew. He shrugged, as though making a prediction that metamorphosed into fact was no biggie.

“Hello?” I said into the flip-phone.

“Two women paid a visit to the Ralls kid at the senator’s beach house about half an hour ago. They arrived together in a white Buick LaSabre. Both were maybe in their late thirties, one bleached-blond and the other had on a floppy hat so I couldn’t tell what color her hair was. I didn’t get a great look at either one of them through the binoculars,” Trish reported.

“What else?” I asked. She wouldn’t have called unless there was more.

“What’s weird is that the car isn’t in the senator’s driveway even though there is plenty of room. It’s parked three doors down, in front of a vacant rental house.”

“You get photos?”

“Of course I got photos. And a read on the plate.” Trish recited the number to me. “Incidentally, Jersey, my boyfriend tuned up this clunker van of yours. You owe me forty-seven dollars for parts. Labor was free.”

“I imagine it was. You think you could find yourself a nice home-security expert next, Trish? Because I’m going to be updating my security system at the Block by adding cameras.”

“It might help if you actually turned your security system on.”

“For your information, I’m going to start activating the system every night.”

“Good. For
your
information, I date men because I’m attracted to them. Not to get work done.”

“Right. Does your Honda have that new sunroof yet?”

“It’s actually called a
moon
roof, thank you very much.”

“I’m on my way there,” I told her. “Can you stay put and keep your eyelids up?”

“Nothing I’d rather be doing than your surveillance,” she said.

“That’s because you’re so gloriously good at it, Trish. See you in twenty minutes.”

Since Ox was already driving us back to the Block, I asked if he
wanted to take a detour. Like an insurance policy, he was good to have along, just in case. Twice before, I’d asked him to join the Barnes Agency as a partner, and twice he’d graciously declined. He didn’t need the money, he said, and besides, who would run the Block? Despite not wanting to officially be on the agency’s payroll, he willingly jumped in to help whenever I asked—and sometimes when I didn’t.

“Happy to detour,” Ox said. “Where we headed?”

“Senator Sigmund Ralls’s beach house, where his son Walton lives.”

He made a few turns and pointed the Benz in the direction of Wrightsville Beach. “The one who got kicked out of the Citadel and is into computers?” Like Spud, Ox had been kept up to date on the Chesterfield case.

“That’s the one. It seems he’s had a visit from a couple of women. But oddly, they parked three houses away.”

“Two women who didn’t want to be seen at the house,” Ox thought aloud.

“Not your typical partying teenagers. Who are they?”

“Good question.”

“Can’t you summon the spirits?”

“They’re on break.”

I reached Dirk on his mobile phone and he obliged my request for a tag check. The Buick was a rental. Either the women had flown in from out of town, or they were locals who didn’t want to be seen in their own vehicle. Which didn’t narrow things down at all.

The short drive to Wrightsville Beach was dotted with sleepy residential communities and remnants of farmland that were now overgrown with wild vegetation, and the peaceful afternoon sped past while I sat deep in thought. It had rained the night before and the roadside trees, freshly bathed, glowed a healthy green.
Even the tall, skinny Carolina pines sparkled and seemed to wave as we passed. We were just crossing the Intracoastal Waterway bridge that led to the beach when Trish called again.

“Miss me?” I asked in greeting.

“The women just came out of the house and the blonde is walking like she’s wasted. She can barely stand up … hang on, let’s see what they’re doing,” Trish said, reporting a live play-byplay. “They’re walking to the Buick. The boy isn’t with them. You want me to follow them if they leave? Oh, wait. Hang on. The one in the hat just helped the wasted one into the driver’s seat and shut the door. But she’s not getting in on the other side, she’s walking off. Crap, the car is pulling out.”

The women hadn’t been in the house long enough for one of them to get stumbling drunk, and smoking pot wouldn’t make somebody lose that much physical coordination. And why had the mystery women arrived together but left separately?

“Are you in a position to block the car?”

“No, she’s already moving.”

“Stay with her then, would you?” I asked. “Call the Wrightsville Beach P.D. Tell them you’re behind a dangerously drunk driver and see if you can get some blue lights on her. We’ll go check out the beach house.” Although the Wrightsville Beach Police Department was a small one, an officer could get to any location quickly since the island was only about four miles long.

“Will do,” Trish said and hung up.

Minutes later, Ox and I found the beach house empty. We circled several blocks surrounding the senator’s summer getaway, and found the sidewalks empty as well. There was no sign of Jared or the mystery woman in the floppy hat. I shot Ox a look of frustration, hoping for a dose of his spiritual intervention, but none was forthcoming. He shrugged his shoulders and said something witty about me having to actually make use of my investigative
abilities. I wondered if he somehow already knew the outcome, but didn’t want to let me in on it. He caught me studying him and raised an amused eyebrow.

“You think me and my guiding spirits are withholding on you?”

I didn’t have a chance to reply because my mobile rang and an out-of-breath Trish was on the other end. I put her on speaker-phone. The Buick had run a stop sign, been clipped by an intersecting concrete truck, and crashed into a light pole. A cop had pulled in behind the car just in time to witness the accident. Trish stopped along with the cop and was inspecting the scene as she talked. Emergency Medical Services hadn’t yet arrived, but Trish was certain the driver no longer had a pulse.

“At least now we have a place to go where we’re sure to find a clue,” I said, thinking that it might be easier to view a dead person with Ox by my side.

“Clues are good,” Ox agreed.

Heading to the accident scene, our thoughts were on Jared. He was running out of time.

Trish, Ox, Soup
, and Spud were gathered around my kitchen table sharing a box of early morning Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Oddly, Spud kept glancing at his watch. I wondered what he was masterminding, but had more important things to concern myself with at the moment. The calendar had rolled into a new month and my nerves were taut.

It was July first. SIPA transfers would begin flowing at noon and continue throughout the day. Social Insecurity would awaken on cue and its tentacles would snake out to amass a fortune. In response, Soup’s planted code would quietly place the funds back where they belonged. It would all occur in an electronic battlefield, quietly, invisibly, discreetly. But Jared’s battle would take place in a more tangible arena. We had to find out where, and do so soon.

There was no need to study the photographs Trish had taken in front of the senator’s beach house yesterday because, despite all the blood at the accident scene, I had immediately recognized the dead woman. It was Barb Henley. Jared Chesterfield’s surrogate mom. The angry, bitter one who had been blackmailing him for petty change. I was perplexed. What was Barb doing in town, and more importantly, how did she know the Ralls family?

Trish and I had been politely questioned by both the Wrightsville Beach cops and a detective from New Hanover County Sheriff’s Department. I refused to say why I’d employed Trish to watch the place, but cooperated in passing along the fact that Barb Henley had been in the senator’s beach house just prior to the car accident, and that she’d been there with Walton and another, unidentified woman. Thanks to Trish’s meticulous record keeping, I was able to supply the exact times and photographs.

A surge of scandal-fueled curiosity rippled through the police department immediately after it became known that the prominent senator from Georgia, Sigmund Ralls, might be involved in what was presumed to be a lethal party scandal. It made no difference that the senator and his wife were out of town at the time, attending a fund-raiser.

The press had gotten access to supposedly confidential blood-test results, which showed that Barb Henley’s body held lethal amounts of cocaine and PCP, more commonly known as angel dust. A speculating morning news reporter surmised that Barb Henley didn’t die from crash injuries, but rather drugs obtained at the senator’s house. Walton Ralls was wanted for questioning but had seemingly vanished. Nobody, including his shocked parents, knew of his whereabouts.

“Somebody give the dog a bite of doughnut, for crying out loud,” Spud said. “He’s drooling all over the place.”

I pinched off a piece of glazed doughnut and fed it to Cracker,
who had shoved his snout into my lap. As I often did when a case had me stumped, I’d called for a brainstorming session with the few people I trusted implicitly. Our small group of assorted genius collectively mulled through the facts and assumptions. Quite a bit had transpired in a two-week time period.

It seemed only days ago that I’d officially retired and was meeting Bill for dinner. He had introduced me to an old college friend, Lolly, who engaged me to find out if Samuel Chesterfield was having an affair. He wasn’t, but his firm’s computer system was infested with the Social Insecurity virus. His accountant was killed. His son was kidnapped. His assistant died of an overdose. The alleged kidnappers arranged to collect their ransom cash at Fort Fisher tomorrow, a day
after
the SIPA transfers. Barb Henley was dead. And the Feds were still treating the case as a kidnapping.

“This virus is going to fire up in a few hours,” I told the assembled group, “and won’t finish doing its thing until late today.”

“At which point, they will have no more use for Jared Chesterfield, if in fact he was kidnapped and not in on the whole thing from the beginning,” Trish said.

“Either way,” Ox said, “they won’t need him anymore.”

Between mouthfuls of sugary doughnuts and coffee, we considered all angles and made zero headway with the original conundrum I’d been working on since Chesterfield handed me a retainer check: where was Jared Chesterfield?

Dirk appeared at the door and rapped his knuckles against it twice before letting himself in. “Spud, you’ve got to be more careful about where you and your poker pals park the Chrysler.”

A veil of red appeared beneath Spud’s tanned face and his jaw froze in mid-bite of a lemon-filled.

“Lucky for you I was dropping by to see Jersey, and came the back way, through the alley,” Dirk continued. “I just caught somebody trying to steal your car! He looked suspicious, so I
questioned him. He said he’s a friend of yours, but I didn’t recognize him so I ran his name.” Dirk reached for a jelly-filled. “Turns out he has a prior for auto theft.”

Veins pulsed in Spud’s forehead and his ears glowed a bright shade of red. His lips moved for several seconds before words came out. “Damn it!” A string of curses spewed forth, entwined in an unintelligible, rambling sentence that ended with, “Oh, for crying the hell out loud!”

Expecting a much different response—a thank-you perhaps—Dirk raised his eyebrows at Spud.

Trying not to laugh, Ox spewed some coffee. At first, it was a grin that displayed even, white teeth beneath olive skin. Then it turned into a deep chuckle that became a full-blown laugh erupting from his midsection as the weight of his body tilted the kitchen chair to rest on its rear legs. It was unusual to hear Ox laugh uncontrollably and Trish couldn’t resist joining him. Soup sat back and Cracker sat up to watch the developing scene unfold.

I glared at Spud with disbelief. “What have you done now?”

“Rainbow said this guy would know what he was doing! I paid him three hundred bucks! And gave him my spare key so his thief wouldn’t waste time trying to hot-wire the dad-blasted thing.”

“You know Rainbow?” I asked.

“Paid who three hundred bucks?” Dirk asked.

Already having figured it out, Ox and Trish doubled up laughing and got Soup going, too.

Spud stood and waved his arms around like a maniac. “Of course I know Rainbow! Everybody knows Rainbow!”

It was news to me. I thought only gamblers knew Rainbow.

Losing his balance, Spud sat back down to keep from falling over. “I paid him three hundred bucks to have this guy steal that piece-of-crap sedan of mine. He said it would be taken to one of
them chop shops where they cut it up for parts. So I could be rid of the thing and get my insurance money!”

“I’m not hearing this,” Dirk said, polishing off his doughnut. Cracker sidled up next to Dirk, gave him a pitiful starving look, and was rewarded with a pinch of sugary treat.

“Do you realize how much money this car has cost me?!” Spud yelled at nobody. “A lot! It’s the car from hell! From hell, I tell you!”

Dirk cleaned his sticky fingers with a napkin. “I take it you’re still trying to sell your car, Spud?”

“How can I sell it when nobody wants it?”

“Let me get this straight,” I said to my father. “You paid Rainbow to have a thief steal your car.”

“When I put it out there for the hoodlums to steal, they took it for a joyride and returned it. You need a job done right, you hire a professional.”