Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers (9 page)

The second one did the talking.

He said, “Can I see your identification, please?”

“What is this about, Officer Leach?” Kim asked him. When he didn’t reply immediately, to make a clear audio record at the very least, she said, “We are FBI agents. Why are you holding us at gunpoint? What is going on here?”

He stood with his hand out, palm up. They handed the wallets to him. He took them, read them, refolded them. “If my dispatch says you check out, you can be on your way. It’ll take a minute, if you want to sit down.”

“What’s this about?” Kim asked, and was ignored, for the third time.

“Finish your pie. Mary makes great pie.” He took the ID wallets and returned to the cruiser. Rain settled on the brim of his hat while he opened the driver’s door, before pouring onto the ground when he ducked his mass to enter the vehicle. He left the cruiser’s door open while he used the radio.

The first Officer Leach remained in position, shotgun pointed. Looked like a Browning A-5, weighing about eight pounds. Even if he could bench press 80% of his body weight, his arms had to be getting fatigued by now. Yet the shotgun didn’t waver.

No one sat. No one ate pie. They waited. About ten minutes later, the second Officer Leach returned. He handed their ID wallets back.

“It’s OK,” he said to his partner. “You can put the gun down.”

The first Officer Leach lowered the shotgun.

“Will you tell us what’s going on now?” Kim asked again.

The second Officer Leach’s manner was professional and matter-of-fact. “Everything checks out with you two. GHP is aware of you now. We’ve got your rental in the system. We’ll be able to find you, wherever you are. You understand?”

“Mary needs to close up,” Leach continued. “She’s already late for her boy. She’ll feel better if we wait for her. So you two run along now.”

“Sure, no problem,” Gaspar said, hostility apparent. He gestured for Kim to precede him. They exited the diner, made it to the Traverse through the ceaseless rain. Gaspar unlocked the doors and settled behind the wheel and started the ignition. Kim bent inside the vehicle, reached into her bag and pulled out her camera. She ignored the deluge to snap pictures of the GHP cruiser, its plate, and both Officer Leaches. The burly brothers were braced side by side, facing the parking lot, watching through the windows. Mary stood dwarfed between them.

Before Kim entered the Traverse, she opened the hatch and pulled out her laptop case. She stowed it on the front floor, then climbed into the navigator’s seat.

“What the hell do you suppose all of that was about?” Gaspar spoke first, after he flipped on the heat, and pointed the Traverse’s nose toward the exit.

“You’re asking me?” she said, teeth chattering with cold and receding adrenaline. “I’m thinking this entire day is a crazy nightmare caused by too much schnapps.”

“Yeah, well, easy for you to say. You’re not out a hundred bucks.”

“Plus the eight dollars change from my twenty, that’s the best tip Mary’s had this week, I’m sure.”

He scowled at her. At the driveway’s exit, he asked, “Which way, Ace? Margrave or Atlanta?”

“I’m pretty tired of Margrave right at the moment. How about you?”

“I was hoping you’d say that.” He turned the Traverse north and headed for the Interstate. Their wet clothes coupled with the Traverse’s blasting heat put fog on every inside window. Gaspar reached over to flip on the defroster. Cold air blew hard across the windshield and Kim started to shiver again.

“You could have asked for your hundred back, you know,” she told him, huddled into her wet jacket as far away from the blasting defroster as she could move.

“Oh, I’ll get my hundred back. Don’t you worry. Cubans are not as harmless as we look.”

#

“Drugs,” Gaspar said, after they’d put ten minutes of pavement behind them. “Meth, most likely. Black must have been dealing, at least. Maybe cooking, too.”

Kim took her phone out to check she’d terminated the recording application, and remembered her aborted internet search.

Gaspar said, “They’ve had a couple of big drug busts around here. I told you I’d been to Margrave before. I was on two busts that took down some Mexican cartel cocaine. Meth is a big problem in rural areas, too. More likely to be Meth.”

“Makes sense.” Kim pulled out her laptop. She didn’t need a secure connection now. Just normal service would do it. She opened a search engine, typed in “Beverly Roscoe,” and waited.

“Am I boring you?”

“Germans can do two things at once, Agent Gaspar,” she said. He laughed and some of the tension in her shoulders melted. “Drugs; meth; cooking; dealing. See? I was listening.”

“The place was too empty. Roscoe said Black had lived there twenty-five years. Even the most diligent minimalist would accumulate more stuff than that place had in it over that length of time.”

“You’re thinking someone ripped him off? Took everything out of the house before we got there?” The signal was weak and intermittent at first. She lost the connection a couple of times before one caught and held.

Gaspar continued, almost as if he was thinking aloud. “The guy who beat the crap out of that mailbox was having some fit of rage. Could have been a meth head. Hard to work up that level of frenzy otherwise.”

“True.” The search engine returned a surprisingly long list of articles containing Roscoe’s name. Several pages. Each page had to load individually, and the loading was slow.

After a while, Gaspar said, “And Mrs. Black.”

“What about her?” The connection was lost again. Kim tried four times before it reestablished.

“Way too hot for that house. And way, way, way too hot for that dude.”

Kim laughed for the first time since Officer Leach had pointed his shotgun at her. “Leave it to you to notice.”

He looked over, raised his right eyebrow, and adopted a fake Spanish accent. “The phrase ‘Latin Lover’ mean anything to you, Helga? Did I mention that I have four daughters, and a pregnant wife?”

“I got that, Casanova.”

“Damn straight.”

“Yeah, yeah. You’re irresistible, even to the murderously hot babes. What else?” The long list of entries for her search terms was organized by the LIFO method: last in, first out. The articles at the top were shorter pieces with very little useful content. She flipped through the pages as quickly as the intermittent connection allowed.

“Besides the obvious, you mean?”

“One man’s obvious is another woman’s obtuse.” She was on page ten of the list. Nothing helpful so far, but she kept reading, hoping for a glimmer of something.

Kim felt the Traverse’s speed slow. Flashing lights proclaimed road construction ahead. Outbound traffic from Atlanta was barely moving. Inbound traffic moved slightly faster.

Then it stopped altogether.

“Okay, including the obvious, then.” Gaspar slid the transmission into park and moved his right leg as if cramping had returned. Again, Kim would have asked about the leg, but she didn’t want to go down another contentious road.

Gaspar said, “Whoever shot Mr. Black knew where to put the bullets. The two shots to the head would have done the job. The other five were pure vengeance.”

She looked up from the screen. “For what?”

He considered the question for a while. Finally he said, “Now that’s the sixty-four dollar question, isn’t it?”

“That, and why the Leach brothers ran us out of town.”

“You think the two are related?”

“The Leach brothers?”

He shot her the
Oh please
look he’d learned from his teenagers. “Black’s murder and our close encounter with the Leach brothers.”

“You think they’re not?”

“I see what you mean about being obtuse,” he said.

Traffic began to move again, but barely. Kim’s internet connection remained strong for five miles. Long enough to download four large articles before she lost the signal again. She scanned the pieces quickly, seeking new facts.

When the construction zone ended, the road widened to four lanes again, and Gaspar punched the Traverse back to eighty miles an hour. The cell signal cut out. Kim barely noticed, so engrossed was she in the
Atlanta Constitution
article she’d pulled up.

“Are you reading a novel over there or what?”

“Strictly non-fiction,” she said.

“Interesting?”

“Well, I think I know why Mary the waitress freaked out when you gave her that hundred dollar bill.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

They headed for Hartsfield Airport, south of the city. Gaspar chose a Renaissance Hotel and parked the Traverse within easy sprinting distance of a side entrance. He said, “Is this OK? They’ve got a bar and a restaurant, which most of these airport racks don’t have. We wouldn’t need to go out again tonight.”

The rain had stopped about fifteen miles earlier, but the air was still heavy with moisture and small lakes had collected in every low spot. The temperature had dropped after the storm, too. Kim was exhausted. Gaspar looked as bad as she felt.

“Sure,” she said. “Perfect.”

He got out of the Traverse and limped to the back and lifted the hatch. They pulled out their bags. She wheeled hers inside, but he carried his. Macho man. She sighed, too tired to deal with him.

They registered, and they requested and received second floor billets close to the emergency stairwell nearest the Traverse. Then they went up in the elevator to adjacent rooms.

“Let’s meet for dinner,” Kim said. She checked her watch. Six o’clock now. “Maybe eight thirty?”

She wanted a nap, and a shower, and then some time to work. She’d acquired a lot of data.

“I’ll knock on your door at eight thirty,” he said.

“Perfect.” But almost before she got the word out, she felt the boss’s cell phone vibrating in her front pocket. After three tries, she swiped her key correctly and released the lock. She pushed the door open with her hip, wheeled her bags inside, closed the door, and lifted the phone to her ear. By then it had vibrated seven times.

“Otto,” she said, breathless. Out of habit she walked through to the bathroom and pulled back the shower curtain. No crawly bugs. No surveillance. No ambush.

“I didn’t expect you to be back in Atlanta so soon.”

The implied question stopped her room inspection cold. And at first it confused her. Then she realized the cell phone must have an active GPS monitoring chip in it. She wasn’t surprised, exactly. She was used to being monitored while on duty. Knowing someone was watching her had always made her feel safer. Serious things could happen to agents out of electronic range. Unfixable things.

But she didn’t feel reassured right then. She felt unsettled. Mostly because she hadn’t worked out what she would tell him and what she wouldn’t yet. She looked at herself in the bathroom’s vanity mirror. Did she sound as bedraggled as she appeared?

She stood up straight, squared her shoulders, looked her reflection in the eye. She imagined that he was on the other side of the mirror, watching her; that he saw what she saw as they talked. She tried to create a positive impression.

He asked, “You’re making good progress, then?”

“Just the opposite, I’m afraid.” She’d stick to the fiction he’d given her about this assignment until he tasked her otherwise. Or until she figured out his real agenda. And the truth was that she’d learned almost nothing about Reacher that she hadn’t known before she arrived in Margrave.

“How so?” he asked.

“Chief Roscoe was called to a homicide, so our interview was cut short. We’re going back tomorrow.”

“Was she cooperative?”

Translation: he’d known Roscoe wouldn’t be cooperative.

“She didn’t have time to tell us much. She said Reacher had been arrested and charged with murder back then. She was the intake officer. That’s how she met him. She said he wasn’t guilty. She said he saved her life.”

“Does she know where he is?”

“She said not.”

“You believe her?”

Kim thought about Roscoe’s reaction to Reacher’s photograph, to learning he was alive. Roscoe wasn’t faking then, Kim was certain. “I do believe her. Yes.”

She listened to a few moments of silence; waited for him to state his pleasure.

“Who died?”

“Sorry?”

“Roscoe’s homicide.”

Had she been wrong? Did he truly not know? She tamed her puzzled mind, now persuaded he was testing her. But immediately wondered: testing her for what?

“Margrave Police Sergeant Harry Black.”

“Who killed him?”

Kim thought about the question on its merits and his motivation for asking. She decided she was too tired to think along two tracks at once. “I’m not sure.”

“Why?”

She took a deep breath. She hadn’t meant to reveal her assumptions until she’d been over everything and settled it in her own mind. But there was no possibility of evading him, even if she’d wanted to.

He knew where she’d been. The cell had been in her pocket from the time she left her apartment. He monitored her movements, and Gaspar’s too. And, if she was right, he’d sent her to Margrave to be his eyes on the ground at that homicide scene. This was really what he wanted to know. Failure was not an option. She had to deliver. But deliver what?