4 The Marathon Murders (7 page)

Thursday morning’s paper carried the story of Harold
Sharkey’s death, but not on page one, thank the Lord. We had been saved by
major coverage of problems with
TennCare
, the state’s
medical insurance program for the poor and uninsurable. Quotes from Homicide
Detective Phillip Adamson indicated the fatal wound appeared to have been
accidental, the result of a fall during a scuffle. Kelli was identified as a
witness, but only as the granddaughter of Arthur Liggett. The reporter’s
attempts to reach her and Col. Warren Jarvis for comment were unsuccessful. The
nursing home declined to permit an interview with the retired hospital
administrator, who was described as “needing rest.” According to the news
story, police speculated Sharkey had gone to the Liggett home as part of an
investigation, though no one had any idea what it might have involved. He
appeared to have made a threatening move on Kelli Kane. The reporter came up
with little background on Sharkey, except for neighbors who said he rarely
socialized with anyone and came and went at all hours of the day and night.

“You made out about as well as
could be expected,” I told Jarvis when he called before we left for the office.

“I guess so, but I’m sure the
general won’t be too happy about it.”

I laughed. “Making generals unhappy
was something I excelled at. Of course, it doesn’t do your career a lot of
good, as I found out.”

Getting crossed with a B-52 wing
commander fairly early in my OSI days resulted in my retirement as a lieutenant
colonel, instead of achieving bird colonel status like Jarvis. The wing
commander later became the Air Force Inspector General, who was overseer of the
OSI.

“Thanks for your help on this,
Greg,” Jarvis said, his voice solemn. “Without you, I’m sure things would have
gone a lot differently, and we would be facing a lot more trouble.”

It was the most touching thing he
had said since his arrival. I was only sorry I couldn’t have done more,
particularly where Kelli was concerned. The newspaper story had gone easy on
her, though. Hopefully, she hadn’t been compromised.

“Hey, no problem,” I said. “If I
had been around there, I’m sure I’d have done the same thing Kelli did.”

“You think so?”

“Back in my pre-Air Force days,
when I was a deputy sheriff in St. Louis County, I once got in trouble for
using too much physical force.
Bruised a bunch of knuckles in
the process, too.”

His voice lightened up. “I’ve had a
reputation for being pretty scrappy myself.
But not in my
early days.
My dad was a stern disciplinarian and kept me on a short
leash. After I left home, things changed. I learned a lot about bumping heads
while playing football at the Academy.”

“Let’s hope you don’t have to bump
any more around here.”

“Amen.”

“I don’t know what it’s going to
take to get to the bottom of this Marathon business, Warren, but we need to do
it as soon as possible. We’ll check back with you later this morning.”

Jill and I headed for the office a
few minutes later. As soon as I finished shifting the daily trivia about, I
called the Chamber of Commerce and inquired if Craig
Audain
had returned. No luck there.

Jill usually answered the phone,
but she was back in the supply room when it rang a little later.

“Mr. McKenzie, this is Camilla
Rottman
,” said a cultured voice. “I’m with the Nashville
Symphony League. Your firm is a valued part of our community, and I would like
to come out and talk with you about becoming involved in furthering the
development of Nashville’s artistic excellence.”

“We already contribute to the
symphony, Miss, uh…is it Miss
Rottman
?”

“Mrs. Roger
Rottman
,”
she corrected. “I’m aware that you’re a contributor, Mr. McKenzie, but with the
new world class symphony hall going up, we need as much additional help as we
can get.”

I could hear the dollar signs
ringing up like musical notes in a casino slot machine. “I think you’d better
talk to my wife, Mrs.
Rottman
. This sounds like
something in her department.
Just a moment.”

I pressed the hold button and
turned to Jill, who was walking back to her desk. “You’d better talk to this
lady, babe. It’s a Mrs.
Rottman
with the symphony,
and it sounds like she’s after big bucks.”

Jill picked up the phone. “Hello,
Mrs.
Rottman
. This is Jill McKenzie. Some years back
my mother was a first violinist with the symphony. What can I do for you?”

Jill was the classical music
enthusiast. We attended the concerts on a mix and match basis. I was more into
jazz, though I liked a good rousing piece by somebody like Tchaikovsky or
Mahler. She had grown up with the classics, so we settled on a mixture of
classical and pops concerts. We supported the symphony and other local arts
ventures, though we stayed clear of the high society crowd that ran most of
them. With her dad, Daniel Parsons, a highly successful life insurance
salesman, Jill would likely have ended up in their ranks if I hadn’t whisked
her off to life among a different breed of jet setters. Mr. Parsons left her an
extensive portfolio of investments, which she had parlayed into a tidy sum that
gave us the luxury of doing pretty much whatever we wished.

While Jill chatted with Lady
Camilla, I got on the other line and called Wes Knight at the newspaper.
Happily, I got his voice mail.

“Hi, Wes,” I said. “This is Greg
McKenzie.
Got your message about Kelli Kane.
Also saw
the story this morning.
Too bad about Sharkey, though it’s no
great loss to the profession.
I’d heard Miss Kane was in town and wondered
who she was. Sorry I don’t have any more info. See you around.”

What I meant was I didn’t have any
more info for him. I hoped that would hold him off for a while. I had just
gotten on my computer when Jill hung up and walked over.

“That was Camilla
Rottman
. You were right. She’s raising money for the
Schermerhorn
Symphony Center and wants to drop by. I told
her we were awfully busy, but we’d give her a few minutes. I’ve been thinking
about making a donation in memory of my mother.”

“Sounds fine to
me.”
I rarely argued money with the treasurer. “When’s she coming?”

“In about half an
hour.
I told her we had to be at a meeting at eleven.”

I puzzled over the possibilities
for finding some other place to be in half an hour but hadn’t come up with any
acceptable ideas when Mrs.
Rottman
arrived. She
walked in looking regal, attired in a stylish pink suit with matching high
heels and purse. The sultry August morning hadn’t left the slightest blemish on
her attractive, tanned face. A small woman with silky blonde hair, she had the
look of many hours spent on the golf course or tennis courts. The gold earrings
that showed when she swept her hair back could have been carved out of a
bullion bar.

She grasped my hand and squeezed it
warmly.
“Mr. McKenzie, how nice to meet you.”

Up close, faint crinkles around the
pale blue eyes told me she was somewhat older than I had first thought, though
all that makeup made it difficult to tell just how much.

“Nice to meet
you, Mrs.
Rottman
.”
I finally managed to
retrieve my hand and turned to my partner. “This is my wife, Jill.”

Jill shook her hand and showed an
equally sweet smile, though I had doubts of its total sincerity. She didn’t
care for people “who put on airs,” as she called it.

Mrs.
Rottman
took a seat and looked around at the office, which I’ll admit provided little
to impress anyone. “If you don’t mind my asking, what do private investigators
investigate?”

“We do work for attorneys,
insurance companies, private individuals,” I said. “We’re called on to find
people who’ve disappeared, track down heirs,
do
basic
background investigations.”

“I read something in the newspaper
about the murder of a private investigator. Is that something you’d get
involved in?”

“That’s a job for the police, Mrs.
Rottman
,” Jill said. “If we encounter something involving a
crime like that, we promptly turn it over to law enforcement officers. As a
matter of fact, that’s what we’ll be doing in a little while when we leave
here.”

Our visitor looked around, eyes
widened. “That sounds exciting.”

I smiled. “Exciting is not a term
we normally use. Most of what we do you’d probably call boring.”

“You’re just being modest.”

“I haven’t been accused of that
lately,” I said.

“But I’ve seen detectives on TV—”

“Welcome to the real world, Mrs.
Rottman
. Being an investigator involves a lot of routine
leg work, asking questions, digging around with the computer.”

Jill had reached her limit with the
small talk. “I’m interested in donating to the symphony hall in memory of my
mother. Tell me a little about how the gifts are handled.”

Mrs.
Rottman
spread out a copy of the plans and talked about different areas of the project,
what was available for memorial contributions. When she had finished her
presentation, Jill surprised her— and me—with the announcement that McKenzie
Investigations would pledge $25,000 toward the new symphony hall.

After a quick elevation of her
eyebrows, Mrs.
Rottman
resumed her carefully
controlled demeanor. “That is very generous of you, Mrs. McKenzie. On behalf of
the symphony, I want to thank both of you for this gift. I would like to invite
you to a small party my husband and I are hosting tomorrow evening for new
contributors. I hope we can count on you to join us.”

Jill glanced at me. I wasn’t one
for schmoozing with the upper crust, but she deserved recognition for her
civic-mindedness. “Unless something unforeseen crops up with the case we’re
working on, I see no reason why we can’t make it,” I said.

Mrs.
Rottman
smiled broadly. “Excellent. We look forward to seeing you.”

After showing her to the door, I
walked back to Jill’s desk. “That was a very generous thing for you to do,
babe. I’m proud of you.”

She gave me a muted smile. “If
you’d known my mother, how much she loved the symphony, you’d realize this was
just a small token of what she would have done.”

Jill was only fifteen when her
mother died. It was a traumatic time in her life. After that, her father became
overly protective, which was the main reason he and I had never been too
chummy. She showed her independence by defying him until he gave in and
accepted our intent to marry. I had long ago learned, particularly when she got
into the air charter business, that she would let nothing stand in the way of
achieving whatever goals she set for herself.

I also knew she wanted to get to
the bottom of this Marathon Motors case every bit as much as I did. She put the
focus back on it when she asked, “Isn’t it about time we headed on over to the
TBI Headquarters?”

Housed in a modern brick building only a few years old, the
TBI Headquarters occupied a secluded spot in the Inglewood suburb. Though it
could be seen from Ellington Parkway, a major route between downtown Nashville
and Madison on the northeastern edge of the county, Tennessee’s version of the
FBI required a circuitous approach. Jill and I drove past the Tennessee Highway
Patrol station, curved around a hill and turned into the large parking lot
beyond an unmanned gate.

Three stylized antennas stood in
line, reaching skyward like church spires, as if to lead visitors toward the
front entrance. The building had three-story wings on either side, with an
atrium in the center. We walked past the glass-walled entrance and stopped at a
large window fronted by a counter. A uniformed officer sat at a computer behind
it.

I spoke through the small opening
above a curved slot in the counter.
“Greg and Jill McKenzie
to see Agent Wayne Fought.”

“Is he expecting you?”

“Yes.”

“Could I see your identification,
please?”

I dropped our PI licenses into the
slot.

“Answer the phone on the counter
when it rings,” he said.

We retrieved our licenses, scooped
up the visitor badges and moved over to the phone to wait.

“Do you suppose he’s tied up in a
meeting?” Jill asked after a few minutes.

“I imagine he’s checking with the lab
boys on the evidence they brought in yesterday.”

When the phone finally rang, I
answered it.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Agent
Fought said. “I’ll be right down.”

A couple of minutes later, he
appeared in the corridor beyond a bullet-proof glass wall to the right of the
officer’s station. He opened the door and beckoned to us.

“Come on in. Do you have any
weapons?”

We both shook our heads. “I never
carry unless I’m expecting trouble,” I said with a hint of a smile. “This looks
like a pretty secure place.”

“You said you’d been here before.
You know the drill.”

I did. All the employees wore
badges hung around their necks. Every office had a small box beside the door
with a series of lights. Flashing the badge in front of the box triggered the
door to unlock, if the badge permitted entry to that area.

Fought turned to Jill as we
entered. “Would you prefer to take the elevator or the stairs?”

“We’ll walk,” she said. “Greg needs
the exercise.”

That brought a grin as he directed
us to the open metal stairway, which took us to the second floor. Here the
center atrium was open to the curved roof. Banquet type tables lined the area,
which was used for large meetings or social functions. He led us to a door on
the left that led into the Criminal Intelligence Division, which included
special agents like Fought who investigated political crimes and assisted local
law enforcement agencies.

After walking down a gray-walled
corridor carpeted in blue, we entered a room with a large conference table. The
agent ushered us to chairs at one end and set a recorder in front of us. He
explained that he would normally take separate statements, but since we were
professional investigators and had been together the whole time in question, it
would be simpler and just as effective to let us collaborate. He went through
the usual routine of giving the date, time, location,
who
was present.

He began with a general statement,
then
asked, “How did you become involved in a search for
Pierce Bradley?”

We described the Marathon Motors
papers and how Bradley had contacted Arthur Liggett, promising to bring them to
him at the nursing home. When I came to the part about the cell phone found on
Carey Lane, Fought leaned forward.

“Do you still have it?”

I reached in my pocket, pulled the
phone out and laid it on the table in front of him. “It was handled by several
people before I got it,” I said, playing down any forensic value. “My theory is
that he may have been conscious enough to throw it out when they were driving
him away from his house. He hoped somebody would find it and start looking for
him.”

That’s what happened, though it did
him little good since he was already submerged in the lake at that point.

Fought put the
recorder on pause.
“I’ll ask the medical examiner if that’s possible. We
wondered about the empty cell phone scabbard hooked to his belt.”

“Have you gotten a report on the
cause of death?” Jill asked.

“Only a
preliminary one.
Blunt object trauma could be the cause, although
they’re looking into the possibility of drowning.” He took the recorder off
pause. “What happened when you went to Bradley’s house looking for him?”

I described our fruitless visit on
Tuesday night,
then
told him about my call to
Bradley’s sister Wednesday morning and our return to Walnut Grove that
afternoon. After repeating the information I had given him verbally beside the
lake, I followed up with our questioning of Bradley’s neighbor, Jackie Varner.

“When was this?” he asked, brow
furrowed.

“While we were
killing time yesterday, waiting on your crime scene investigators.”

“And she thought the visitors drove
a small sports car with a rakish sweep to the front end?”

“That’s right. I can’t say how
reliable that observation was, but at least it’s a place to start.”

He paused a moment before saying,
“Is that your complete statement?”

I looked around at Jill, who
nodded. “Yes,” I said.

He switched off the recorder and
leaned back in his chair. “Thanks for coming in. I’ll let you know if we need
anything else from you.”

“There’s one other point I didn’t want
to mention on the tape, because it’s pure speculation at the moment,” I said.
“Our client was tailed yesterday by a man we think had an interest in the
missing papers in Bradley’s possession. That adds to our belief that this
murder may have had something to do with our case.”

“Mr. McKenzie, I spoke at length
with Sheriff Driscoll yesterday about Pierce Bradley’s background. We have
several areas of interest to look into.”

I didn’t like the dismissive way he
moved his hands. “The sheriff gave us similar information,” I said,
“specifically Mrs. Cook and two men he’d had altercations with.”

“Yes, and the circumstances of the
crime—nighttime, a secluded location likely known only to someone familiar with
the area—tell me the person we’re looking for is a local.”

I couldn’t argue that point, but
the circumstances also indicated an accomplice had been involved.
An accomplice who could be local, or from anywhere.

“Have you had a chance to question
any of them yet?”

Fought eyed me like a biology
teacher contemplating a frog. “I’m not sure how far I should go with you,
McKenzie.” With the formalities over, he had dropped the “Mr.” tag.

“We’re quite willing to share
anything we have,” I said, leaving off the implicit question of why can’t you
do the same?

“Sheriff Driscoll filled me in on
your background. I know several guys at Metro. I talked to the lead
investigator in that Fed Chairman murder case. He gave you a glowing
recommendation, said I could trust you.”

He referred to Phil Adamson. After
our talk yesterday afternoon, I hadn’t been so sure he would still feel that
way.

“On the other hand,” Fought
continued, “another source said you were really bad news. I should avoid you
like a night shift on New Year’s Eve.”

“You must have talked to Detective
Tremaine
or one of his buddies. I made some remarks about
him a couple of years ago I shouldn’t have. They were made in private but
showed up on page one of the morning newspaper. It was a miscommunication that
got blown all out of proportion.”

“Tell you what. You bring me some
solid evidence tying Bradley’s murder to your Marathon auto
case,
I’ll put our full resources on the trail of your missing papers.”

“Fair enough,” I said, though at
the moment it sounded like an invitation to climb Mount Everest and bring back
a snowball. “You haven’t told us who you’ve talked to so far.”

He gave a sigh of resignation. “I
went with Sheriff Driscoll to Patricia Cook’s house last night to inform her of
her brother’s death. She appeared genuinely shocked, broke into tears. I agreed
I’d try to hold off any further questions until after the funeral.”

“When will that be?” Jill asked.

“Not until the ME turns the body
loose.”

I leaned an elbow on the table and
thought about the murder scene. “Have you come up with anything from the Jeep?”

He considered that for a moment,
then
made a decision in our favor. “They’re working on it
now in Forensics. Come on. We’ll go down and take a look.”

The right side of the building
housed TBI’s extensive crime lab. We walked down to the ground floor where
three vehicle bays equipped with suction devices provided the techs with a
place to thoroughly examine anything on wheels. A tractor-trailer cab sat in
the largest bay. We found two guys going over Bradley’s Jeep with their version
of a fine-toothed comb. Evidence bags sat around for placing trace evidence
they collected.

“What have you got, Larry?” Fought
asked a burly man with a large black mustache.

“Not a lot that will likely do us
any good. Two days underwater doesn’t leave much to go on. Any exposed fingerprints
are gone. We found a few papers in what passes for a glove box that weren’t
soaked through. Apparently these old military vehicles weren’t equipped with
glove boxes, but somebody had fashioned one that closed pretty tightly. We’ll
send them up to the fingerprint folks.”

“The water probably washed away any
fibers, too,” Fought said.

“There’s plenty of mud and silt.
And a couple of small items that were wedged in beside the seat.
A matchbook, for one.
Also, we found a piece of
stainless steel tubing on the floor behind the front seat. I’ll send it
upstairs to see what they can make of it.”

“Okay, thanks. I’ll check back
later.”

Agent Fought escorted us back to
the main entrance. On the way, I asked about the two Trousdale County men who
had been involved in fights with Pierce Bradley.

“They’re on my list to question.
The sheriff provided names and addresses.”

He didn’t volunteer anything
further, and I didn’t ask. I knew I could get it from the sheriff.

I shook his hand as we reached the front
door. “I hope you turn up something soon. We’ll get back to you the minute we
track down any kind of link.”

He smiled and nodded to Jill. “Nice
meeting both of you.”

Out in the parking lot, she looked
around, shading her eyes from the sun. “He seemed like a nice enough man, after
he finally came around. Don’t forget to thank Phil Adamson for that.”

“Yeah.
I
wish I had something to give Phil in return.”

“Like what?”

“Like what Harold Sharkey was after
when he knocked on Kelli’s door.”

I wished even harder when we got
back to the office and found a message to call our favorite homicide detective.