4 The Marathon Murders (4 page)

After getting no response to our knocks at the houses
flanking Arthur Liggett’s, we headed across town to Gallatin Road. With Jill
complaining of the tummy rumbles, I stopped at one of a dozen assorted
restaurants in the area around
RiverGate
Mall in
Madison. I had no objections, of course, since the pressure of a difficult case
always ratcheted up my appetite. Jill could be counted on to call my hand if I
tried to overdo it.

We chose one of those places where
the patrons tossed peanut hulls on the floor. I hated crunching through all
that litter but knew the food would make up for it.

Wrong.

After we were seated, Jill glanced
at the menu,
then
tilted her head. “Why don’t we eat
light and I’ll fix us something good for supper.”

I’d been thinking about a nice
chunk of prime rib, but with my private gourmet chef making such an offer, I
couldn’t refuse. While we waited for salads and half a sandwich, Jill targeted
in on the problem at hand.

“After talking to his sister,” she
said, “do you still think somebody with an interest in those papers got to
Bradley?”

I leaned back in the booth and
crossed my arms. “Let’s consider the alternative. I suppose if he left his
sister’s in a rage, he might have been mad enough to toss his cell phone out
the window. But he has a responsible job and sounds like an intelligent man.
Doesn’t strike me as something a normal person would do.”

“I suppose not. Other than that
cell phone and his not being home last night, though, we really don’t have
anything to suggest that something out of the ordinary has happened, do we?”

“We have a strong hunch, but
hunches have to be backed up with facts. Let’s reserve judgment until we get a
good look at his house. If we don’t find anything there, we can check the
hospital or the sheriff.”

I got high marks for not ordering
dessert, and we headed toward Trousdale County around two. The sun beamed down
like the red-hot eye on an electric stove, but my trusty Jeep’s air conditioner
proved adequate to the challenge. By contrast, the passing parade of luckless
cows had to get by with only their tails for fans. Most clustered under shade
trees like Fourth of July picnickers or tested the waters of nearby ponds.

We made it to Walnut Grove with no
delays. Pulling into Bradley’s driveway, I noticed the not-too-distant sky
seeded with cumulus clouds that had blossomed into towering thunderheads.

“Typical August build-ups,” Jill
said. “Not a good time for flying.”

Holder of a commercial pilot’s
license she had used in her charter air service, Jill still owned a Cessna 172
that she flew regularly, sometimes on McKenzie Investigations business.

In the daylight, Bradley’s
double-wide looked much more inviting. The neatly kept lawn bordered on a
walkway lined with multi-colored rows of impatiens and begonias. Beige drapes
covered the windows. I wondered momentarily about that but noted the house
faced westward. We also kept our drapes closed against the afternoon sun. I saw
no vehicles around the place.

As we headed across the concrete
walk toward the front door, I noticed the drapes at one window had been left
with a small gap at the bottom.

“Let’s check this out,” I said,
moving toward the window.

Jill walked up behind me as I
peered inside. “Look at this, babe.” I motioned to her.

Staring into the living room, we
saw a straight chair turned onto its side. Papers lay scattered about the
carpet. Except for the overturned chair, it resembled the shambles we had seen
at Arthur Liggett’s.

“Oh, my God,” Jill whispered. “This
doesn’t look good at all.”

I pushed up the bill of my Titan’s
cap. “That’s for damned sure.”

I hurried to the door and banged on
it. After waiting a few moments, I took out my handkerchief, covered the knob
and gently turned it. The door opened. I took a step inside and looked around.
Other pieces of furniture appeared to have been shoved about and papers,
magazines, books, anything that might have provided a hiding place, littered
the floor. A range hood light had been left on in the kitchen. Its glow
illuminated a dark, rusty splotch on the carpet in the doorway leading from the
living room.

I turned to Jill. “Stay right here.
This has the look of a crime scene. Let me check closer on one thing.”

I walked carefully across to the
doorway and squatted beside what appeared to be a bloody spot just outside the
kitchen. If there had been blood on the vinyl floor, someone had cleaned it up.
I didn’t venture any farther. The implications left me with a deepening unease.
Our case was about to get out of hand. As I turned toward the front door, I
spotted another item that stopped me. A heavy wooden walking stick topped by
what looked like a doorknob lay on the floor. There appeared to be blood on it,
too.

I stepped outside and closed the
door.

“What did you find?” Jill asked.

I told her about the blood and the walking
stick. Then I pulled out my cell phone. “I’m calling the sheriff.”

I punched in 911 and soon had the
dispatcher. I identified myself and asked to speak to the sheriff.

“Sheriff Driscoll isn’t here.”

“Is there somewhere I could find
him? I have some important information I need to get to him.”

“You’ll have to head out to the
lake then, around Pine Cove. That’s where he and most of the deputies are.”

“Has there been a drowning?”

“Right.
And a car in the water.”

It wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
“Do you know what kind of car?”

“They said it was an old
military-style Jeep.”

Following the dispatcher’s directions, we headed back to
Highway 25 and turned toward Hartsville. After half a mile, Old Highway 25, a
narrow two-lane road, angled off to the right and wound through green swaths of
pasture and woodland. Jill quizzed me as I drove.

“If
it’s
Bradley’s Jeep, how did it get from his house to the lake?”

“Somebody could have driven it
there with him tied up in back.” I was already stewing over the possibilities,
certain in my mind that the Jeep in the lake was Bradley’s and his body was
inside.

“How did the driver get back?”

“It would have taken two people,
one in another car.”

“So we’d have a murderer and an
accomplice.”

“Looks that way.
You’re thinking like a detective, but let’s not get too far ahead of
ourselves.”

We soon crossed a bridge where a
rain-swollen creek fed into the end of the lake. After passing several
scattered houses, we turned onto Boat Dock Road, then Boat Dock Lane. We finally
found the gravel road that was unmarked except for a crude sign nailed to a
tree. From there it was downhill the rest of the way to the lake. Not far past
a small frame house that seemed to have been squeezed into the heavily wooded
area, two white patrol cars sat at the side of the road. Just beyond, a narrow
trail led through the trees. Looking around at all the tall evergreens, it
wasn’t difficult to see why this area had been named Pine Cove.

I pulled off as far as I could and
parked behind one of the patrol cars, which had Metro Sheriff painted on the
side, along with Hartsville/Trousdale County. Although the smallest county in
the state area-wise, and one of the least populated, Trousdale had established
a metropolitan form of government a couple of years ago with its county seat,
Hartsville. We heard voices coming from the lake as we got out.

“Looks like a small clearing back
through the trees,” Jill said.

“Yeah.
And
what appears to be a tow truck backed up to the water.” I checked the ground as
we walked past the patrol cars. “I hate to tell you, babe, but this trail looks
wet and rough.”

The rain must have hit this area
before we arrived. After some unpleasant experiences traipsing about muddy
scenes in dress shoes, Jill had learned to keep a pair of walking shoes in the
Jeep. I waited while she changed.

Fresh tire tracks plowed through
the soft ground, leading us past knee-high weeds and an occasional mud puddle.
After passing a few towering oaks and sycamores that provided a leafy canopy overhead,
we saw two other white police cruisers off to the side.

A hefty man in a tan uniform and
white hat stood near the water, bellowing and waving off a couple of power
boats out in the lake. “Get those damn things away from here!”

A choppy wake washed up near the
shore.

Approaching him, I called, “Sheriff
Driscoll?”

He
turned,
a frown on his tanned, leathery face. I took him to be late fifties, a muscular
man with a fringe of gray peeking out beneath the hat brim.

“That’s me,” he said. “Who would
you be?”

I introduced Jill and myself and
handed him a business card.

“Got a license?”

I showed that to him, also. “We’ve
been looking for Pierce Bradley the past couple of days. I was told you had a
Jeep in the water here, and I just wondered—”

“It’s Bradley,” he said. “Why were
you looking for him?”

“He had some papers he was supposed
to bring to a client of ours.”

“Well, if he hadn’t driven that
fool Jeep into the lake, he might have given them to you.”

Judging by that description, the
sheriff thought Bradley had accidentally blundered into the water. I wasn’t so
sure.

“Sheriff, there’s something you
need to know,” I said. “We just came from Bradley’s house. We found the door
unlocked. When I looked inside, there appeared to be some blood on the carpet
in the living room. I also saw a large walking stick with possible blood
stains. The place looked like the scene of a struggle, with furniture knocked
around.”

He gave me a grim look. “Are you an
ex-cop?”

“Retired Special
Agent in Charge with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.”
I
said it casually. Say it in a formal manner and it sounds pretentious, a
turnoff.

He glanced back at the card, eyes
widening. “McKenzie. You the guy was involved in that Federal Reserve
chairman’s murder case a few months back?”

I nodded. “That was me. It got sort
of hairy there at the end.”

The sheriff lifted his hat and
swiped a hand across his brow. “I read the newspaper reports. A friend in
Nashville told me you had a lot more to do with solving the case than the
stories told.”

“Maybe I’d better hire your friend
to handle my public relations,” I said, grinning.

A diver’s head cleared the surface
of the lake, his face mask glinting in the sun. “Hey, Sheriff,” he yelled. “I
got the chains hooked. She’s ready to go.”

“Listen up, everybody,” Driscoll
called out. “I don’t want anybody touching anything else. We’re treating this
as a crime scene. I’ll get on the phone to Wayne Fought.
Looks
like we got ourselves a TBI case.”

He spoke on his cell phone for a
minute, then sent one deputy to secure Bradley’s house and ordered another out
to the road to stop anyone attempting to come in. A third deputy brought out a
roll of crime scene tape and began to cordon off the area. When Driscoll
appeared satisfied everything was being done to secure the scene, he walked
back to where Jill and I stood.

“Tell me more about your interest
in Pierce Bradley,” he said.

I explained about the papers found
at the old Marathon Motors Works and Bradley’s failure to bring them in Monday
night.

“That’s ’cause he probably wound up
in the lake here Monday night,” Driscoll said.

He grinned at the surprised looks
Jill and I gave him.

“Pretty good detective work, huh?
Actually, a fisherman reported seeing the vehicle in the water this afternoon.
It triggered one of those moments of enlightenment with one of my deputies. His
mother lives just up the road. She had told him about hearing cars going in and
out of here late Monday night. She thought it sounded like two going in and
only one coming out. He figured it was fishermen and the other one didn’t come
out until after she’d gone to bed.
But looks like she was
right in the first place.”

That dove-tailed
with Jill’s speculation on a murderer and an accomplice.
Could it have
had anything to do with the Marathon papers? I decided to press for the
sheriff’s take on possible explanations.

“If it turns out to be something
other than an accident, do you have any idea who might have wanted him dead?”

“Oh, yeah.
I could probably come up with several. I’d hate to think any of them really did
it, but I wouldn’t rule anybody out.”

Jill broke her silence. “Would his
sister, Mrs. Cook, be one of them?”

Driscoll frowned, his eyes alert
beneath the brim of his white Stetson. “What do you know about her?”

“Greg talked to her earlier today.
She indicated they’d been having some trouble. She said the last she saw of him
was when he stormed out of her house Monday afternoon.”

“Interesting.”
He turned to me. “How much do you know about Bradley?”

“Very little,” I said. “Just that
he was a supervisor for Allied Construction.” I watched him ease his holster.

“No use standing around here,” he
said. “Come on over and sit in my car while we wait for the TBI agent and his
crew. They should be on the way.”

As we walked over to his car, he
told us about Bradley’s service as an A-10 pilot in Desert Storm. I’d had a
little contact with Warthog crews during my OSI career. They were a daring lot,
flying low level close air support of ground forces.

I let Jill take the passenger seat
next to the sheriff, while I lounged on the prisoner side of the divide.

“When did he get out of the Air
Force?” I asked.

“Around
ninety-two.
His father had a large farm west of Hartsville. Had a big
tobacco allotment, plus a sizeable herd of Black Angus. Pierce came back home
and helped his dad for a few years. He bought a Piper Apache and put in a
landing strip on the farm. He’s helped me out several times when we needed some
air surveillance.”

“How long has he been in the
construction business?” Jill asked.

Driscoll listened to a burst of
radio traffic squawking over his portable. “I think he went with Allied
Construction in the late nineties,” he said after a moment. “Pierce was
planning to buy into ownership of the company. He got that double-wide in 2000
and moved off the farm.”

I squirmed closer to the window and
tugged at my collar. The sheriff had left the windows open, but despite the
shade of the forest I’d have sworn a layer of hot coals had been dumped on the
roof. “Any idea what the trouble was between Pierce and his sister?”

“Their mother died shortly after he
moved out. Mr. Bradley passed on earlier this year. The old man left the two
kids equal shares. Pat wanted to sell the place and get the money. Her
husband’s a banker. But Pierce didn’t want to sell. I don’t think he wanted to
give up that airstrip. She said he could buy her out, but all his money was
committed to getting a chunk of Allied Construction. I understand she
threatened to go to court and force the sale.”

“That’s probably what the argument
was about at Mrs. Cook’s place Monday afternoon,” Jill said.

The sheriff spread his hands.
“Could be.
Pierce was a personable guy, but he’s always had
a hot temper. I had to save his ass, pardon the expression, when he got in a
fight with the manager at Cumberland Farm Supplies. The man got a little too
aggressive over money he claimed Pierce’s father owed. On another occasion,
Pierce got in a scuffle and broke a guy’s arm after he caught him messing
around his airplane.”

“Sounds like any number of people
could have harbored a grudge against him,” I said.

“Right.
And there’s another possibility I hadn’t thought of until now. I can’t tell you
anything about it because it concerns an ongoing investigation that involves
other agencies. Could have been retaliation for some of that aerial spying I
told you about.”

I didn’t like the sound of that.
Too many complicating factors could make it difficult to get the sheriff or the
Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to give much thought to our problem.
Particularly since we only had a strong hunch, no solid evidence, that could
tie the missing Marathon papers into Bradley’s death.

Driscoll was a likeable guy,
bordering on garrulous, as were most politically-minded sheriffs. He regaled us
with several of his escapades and was well into a tale about how he’d busted a
family with a meth lab in their barn when my peripheral vision caught a man
walking down the trail. I saw him heading for our car. Jill and I followed
Driscoll as he climbed out to greet the new arrival, a man about my height,
five-ten, with a bit less around the middle than me.

“Hi, Wayne,” the sheriff said. “You
made good time.”

“I was just finishing up some paper
work in Lebanon when you called. I headed right up 231.
Didn’t
take long.
Say you have a body in the water?”

This was obviously Wayne Fought,
the TBI agent. He looked around forty, dressed in a short sleeve sport shirt
and khaki pants, a
Glock
40 holstered at his belt. He
had the blunted nose of a boxer and almost black eyes that showed no emotion as
he gave Jill and me the once-over.

“It’s a fellow named Pierce
Bradley,” said Driscoll. “He’s pretty well known around Hartsville. The diver
says he’s still in his Jeep where it landed.”

“You said it looks like murder.
What makes you think that?”

The sheriff turned toward us. “You
need to meet the
McKenzies
.”

He made the introductions and I
shook the agent’s hand, getting a firm grip and a wary eye in the process.

“They’re private investigators out of
Nashville,” the sheriff said. “I’ll let Mr. McKenzie tell you what they saw.”

I briefly related our interest in
Bradley and told Agent Fought what we found at the house on Carey Lane.

His forehead furrowed as he asked
in a voice that snapped, “Did you touch anything inside the house?”

“No. I used a handkerchief on the
door knob. I moved carefully across the living room and only looked at the
blood stains. I’m a retired Special Agent in Charge with the Air Force Office
of Special Investigations. I was likely handling crime scenes while you were
still in diapers.” No way to win friends, but his patronizing tone had grated.

The look I got said it all. Of
course, I could have smudged any fingerprints on the doorknob, but the chances
of lifting usable prints in a situation like that are slim.

If Fought was impressed by my
professional credits, he did a good job of hiding it. He looked around the area
and turned back to Sheriff Driscoll. “I knew your boys had already beaten a
path down here. I hope they left us some undamaged tire tracks.”

“I’d have secured the area from the
start,” Driscoll said, “but I thought we were dealing with a simple accident.”

Fought glanced at
his watch.
“Our investigators are on the way from Nashville. Probably be
close to five o’clock before they get here.” He turned to Jill and me. “It’s
our version of CSI. We call it a Violent Crime Response Team.”

“You have a great crime lab,” I
said. “I visited your headquarters when I did a stint as an investigator for
the DA in Nashville after I retired.”