The Reform Artists: A Legal Suspense, Spy Thriller (The Reform Artists Series Book 1)
Read The Reform Artists: A Legal Suspense, Spy Thriller (The Reform Artists Series Book 1) Online
Authors: Jon Reisfeld
THE REFORM
ARTISTS
A Novel
By
JON REISFELD
Copyright © 2016 by Jonathan S. Reisfeld. All rights reserved. Cover design by Jonathan S. Reisfeld. Artwork, “Eye” illustration, ©fotoflash. “Divorce” illustration © Ellen Beijers. Usage licensed by Fotolia, Inc.
Without limiting the rights reserved under copyright above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, photocopying, mechanical, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner of this book.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places or incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN-13: 978-099658782-2
ISBN-10:
0-9965878-2-9
To Zach, a young man with a big heart and an even bigger gift for writing and storytelling.
Contents
Heather Barnes pounded impatiently on the steering wheel as her red Mini Cooper raced through the residential neighborhood at twenty-five miles per hour above the posted speed limit.
When the green light suddenly turned red, she slammed on the brakes. The car came to a screeching halt, hurling her against the seatbelt and scarring the pavement with broad, incriminating tire marks.
Heather’s eyes darted everywhere looking for police cruisers. Finding none, she glanced at her wristwatch.
Six-thirteen.
I should have reported in to Tim eighteen minutes ago,
she thought, as a wave of panic overtook her.
God only knows where that twisted mind of his has gone!
Sweat poured down Heather’s forehead and into her eyes stinging them and making her mascara run. She couldn’t believe she had allowed her boss to buttonhole her on the way out the door with more questions about that new ad account.
I should have told him I’d call him from the road!
But, Heather realized, her demanding boss was now the least of her problems.
She glanced again at the red light, then at the lifeless cell phone lying beside her on the passenger seat. “Come on!” she screamed, grabbing the phone and staring at it. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” She shook the phone fiercely and whined, “Pleeease, please charge!”
Then, Heather saw it for the first time. The left side of the phone’s charging jack was slightly ajar. “Oh, my God!” she screamed, cramming it back in place. She wanted to cry, but there was no time.
Heart racing, Heather nudged the car forward, looked left, then right, and gunned it. Tires screeched, houses flew by and neighbors looked up in alarm, as she tried to make quick work of the remaining three blocks to her home.
When Heather finally pulled into a parking spot in front of her house, the cell phone suddenly sprang to life. She glared at it, threw open the car door and leapt out.
Tim, tall, thin and muscular, stood motionless in the front doorway, intently watching her.
At the sight of him, Heather instinctively slipped her right hand back onto the car door handle. Then, she thought about her two young children. She frowned, bracing herself against the coming onslaught, and ran toward her husband as if her life depended on it.
* * *
The triple murder-suicide dominated the evening news in Maryland and across the nation. At McCredie’s Sports Pub, in downtown Silver Spring, every flat screen TV offered a different channel’s take on the tragedy, which had become breaking news shortly before 7:00 p.m.
The screen facing the rear corner booth, where two middle-aged men sat nursing drinks and talking, showed James Holt, star reporter for WQDP News, standing just outside the victims’ family residence, in Rockville—site of the tragedy. Crime scene tape and flashing police cruisers littered the background.
“In the latest case of domestic violence taken to extremes,” Holt said, “Tim Barnes, a 35-year-old unemployed construction worker slit the throats of his two school-aged children, Donald, 10, and Amy, 7. Then, he raped and murdered his wife, Heather, shortly after she returned home from work. His brief reign of terror ended moments later, when Barnes shot himself in the head.”
As Holt talked, pictures of the victims, taken in happier times, flashed across the screen. Elementary school yearbook photos of little Donald and Amy were followed by a business promotional shot of Heather, a strikingly beautiful 32-year-old graphic designer with a sleek figure and dirty-blonde hair; and finally, by a family photo of Tim, a six-foot-three, tautly built man with a thick moustache and a wild mane of dark, curly hair. Tim was holding up a metal spatula as he posed, in his chef’s apron, beside the family grill.
“At 6:33 p.m. a neighbor called 911 and reported hearing a single gunshot coming from the Barnes home. Police arrived minutes later and discovered the gruesome murder scene.
“I am standing with Penelope Trask, a neighbor and friend of Heather’s. Penelope, did you know or suspect that Heather and her children were in any danger?”
“Heather, yes,” Trask said. The plump redhead, who looked to be in her late twenties, repeatedly rubbed tears from her eyes. “But she denied it. Several times, I saw big bruises on her arms, and once, she even had a black eye.
"‘Is Tim doing this to you?’ I asked her the last time. Heather nodded and began to sob. She said Tim had become insanely jealous. ‘You’ve got to get out of there,’ I told her. ‘It’s not safe!’”
The two men in the booth watched the report and grimaced.
“Cassie,” the older one said, signaling his waitress, a skinny, energetic fortyish brunette with hair pinned up in a hot mess. When she looked his way, he continued. “Another scotch on the rocks for me and a Tom Collins for my friend, here.” Then, he quickly lowered his right hand, which had begun to shake, and slipped it below the table.
“Sure thing, hon!”
The older man turned to the Tom Collins drinker. “What a mess, huh?”
“It doesn’t get much sicker than this.”
“No.”
They both shook their heads.
Then the Tom Collins fan continued. “So, are you cancelling the Face Off?”
“Why would I do that?” The older man’s voice grew clipped.
“I don’t know.”
“We go forward. You be there, tomorrow, when he gets on the train. This guy needs us now more than ever. And, like most, he’s probably clueless. His picture’s in here,” he added, tapping a manila envelope lying before him. He slid it toward his companion with his left hand.
“This makes our work so much more difficult,” the Tom Collins drinker said.
The older man stared at him. “So, what’s your point? Is this suddenly about how tough
we
have it?”
His companion thought for a moment. “No. I guess I don’t have a point. Forget it.”
“Already did.” Then, he looked up and smiled. “Here come our drinks!”
Cassie put their new drinks down and collected their empties. “Will you be wanting another round, Mr. Hannah?” she asked.
“No, this should do it,” the older man said.
At that, Cassie smiled and turned away. The two men raised glasses and clinked.
“To the Face Off,” Hannah
said.
“To the Face Off...and all that follows.”
The incident occurred at the D.C. Metro’s Farragut North stop, as Martin Silkwood boarded the northbound train for his return commute to Maryland. It ended as quickly as it began, and no one—save the participants—seemed to notice or care. But it would forever change Martin’s life.
Martin had entered the subway car at the head of a surging crowd that heaved and pressed against him with the dumb force of an enormous beast. He was pushing back and maneuvering toward an empty seat, when a casually dressed man, with the look and bearing of a drill sergeant, suddenly sprang up, lurched forward and rammed into him.
“Watch it!” the man barked, his steel-gray eyes underscoring the challenge.
Martin recovered his balance, if not his senses, and pushed back hard. “No, you watch it!”
For an instant, the two squared off. Then, as a faint smile appeared on the stranger’s face, his right arm shot forward, palm out, catching Martin square in the diaphragm. Martin doubled over in pain, gasping for air, as the stranger grabbed his arm and drew near.
“I already have watched it, Martin,” he said under his breath. “Now, it’s your turn.” Then, he turned up the collar on his beige windbreaker and slipped out the door, disappearing into the crowd.
Martin struggled to breathe as he dragged himself toward an empty seat. He swung his left arm wildly to clear a path and steadied himself by grabbing onto a nearby handrail with his right. When he finally reached the seat, he turned around and gingerly dropped into place.
As he did, Martin felt something in his left pants pocket. Hand shaking, he dug in and retrieved a tiny video disk in a slim vinyl case. The disk was silver, unmarked and small—only half the diameter of the videos Martin normally played on his home entertainment system.
“Huh,” he grunted to himself between steadily decreasing, but uneven, chest heaves. He flipped the disk over in his hand several times. He had no idea what it was, why the stranger had given it to him or how he had known his name.
After a few moments, Martin put the disk away. He decided he would deal with it later, when he got home, but try as he might, he couldn’t get this latest incident out of his mind. Martin kept wondering if it somehow fit into the disturbing chain of events that had begun to unfold the previous Friday night, when he had returned home to an empty house—without Katie, the kids or the dog. All he had found was a brief note, in Katie’s handwriting, lying on the kitchen table.
“I tried, Marty. Really, I did,” it read. “I’ll contact you when we get settled.” That was the last time he had heard from any of them.
Martin spent all night Friday calling around to Katie’s friends. (He used to consider them his friends, too, but now he knew better.) Had they seen her and the kids? Did they know anything about where she had gone or what was up?
Some of them, the nice ones, apologetically said they couldn’t discuss it. They had promised Katie to keep her whereabouts a secret, but they said everyone was safe, not to worry. Others, her “true sisters,” uttered startled, indignant gasps at the mere sound of his voice and then hung up the phone.
The nastiest, most self-righteous ones said things like: “Really, Marty! Haven’t you caused enough trouble already? Leave her alone!”—or—“If you call here again, I’m going to report you to the police! Do you understand?” both of which were followed by a sudden resumption of the dial tone.
Martin couldn’t believe these were the same women who had welcomed him and Katie into their homes for years on end, the same women who had joked with him, occasionally flirted with him, and who, once or twice, seemed to forget themselves and sent him signals he wisely chose to ignore. And, he wondered, where were their husbands—his
supposed friends? Only one of them ever picked up the phone to say anything to him at all, and it went something like this: “Hey, Marty, I was sorry to hear about you and Katie. Let’s grab a beer sometime soon.” And then, when his wife realized he was speaking to Martin, “Oops, got to go now,” and again the damned dial tone.
Martin wondered what Katie had been telling these people and how they could possibly believe her without first hearing his side of the story. But these thoughts quickly evaporated as Martin grasped, for the first time, the full impact of Katie’s decision. Disillusion turned to anger, fear and finally desperation as Martin realized that, in leaving him, Katie had stolen nearly everything that gave his life meaning: his children, his marriage and his home life. Of the three roles Martin dutifully performed each day, those of husband, father and breadwinner, only the later remained.
Katie had left the one thing she couldn’t take: Martin’s senior partner position at the accounting firm of Findley, Feldman and Santori. Martin had earned senior partner status through years of hard work, self-discipline and self-sacrifice. While he drew some personal satisfaction from this, he found accounting work, in general, to be rather dull and unfulfilling.
Martin had long ago realized that he did his job, day-in and day-out, primarily to pay the bills. His partner’s salary made possible the life and future he had been building for himself, Katie and the kids. Now that his marriage appeared to be unraveling, Martin felt the wind go out of his sails. He wondered where he would find the motivation to continue to put in the long hours and to suffer the painful deprivations that life on the road, as an auditing team leader, demanded.
Deep down, Martin sensed he only had one option. Somehow, someway, he would have to get his children back in his life. He could not accept the harsh new reality Katie was forcing upon him.
Despite this realization—or perhaps because of it—Martin had a hard time accepting the fact that his marriage to Katie was over. In the first place, her timing made no sense to him. Yes, they hadn’t been getting along that well lately, but only a few months earlier, when the trouble started, Katie had agreed to see a marriage counselor with him. They hadn’t even attended their first session yet!
Why would she ‘throw in the towel’ now? Could she really just walk away from our marriage − especially after starting a family and bringing two new lives into the world? Good parents—and Katie and I clearly are that—good parents don’t just ‘bag it’ when the going got rough, do they?
The next day, Martin gained further insight into the depths of his problems, when an ATM machine rejected his debit card. The joint household account that previously held $9,600 now claimed to have insufficient funds to cover his one-hundred-dollar cash withdraw.
As these thoughts once more flashed through his mind, Martin’s stomach began tying itself up in knots. He hated feeling this way, and since all he could do for now was spin mental wheels, he redoubled his efforts to put his troubles out of his mind. He decided to focus exclusively on his accounting work. That usually helped.
Martin began by taking stock of preparations for the upcoming Great Plains Company audit and by mentally reviewing the members of his newly formed auditing team. Martin always handpicked his auditing crews. The following Thursday they would all fly out of Dulles airport to Chicago for an extensive review and compilation of the food processing giant’s books.
There was so much to do. Gradually, ever so slowly, Martin slipped back into the endless sea of accounting management minutiae, and soon he found himself back in that numb, safe place his work often provided. Before he knew it, the train had reached his suburban Maryland stop, and he was crossing the parking lot to his car.