To her surprise, the taller man said, “You just missed him.”
“Did he say where he was going?”
“No, ma'am, he didn't.”
Jess paused a moment, realizing that this was the second time in less than three minutes that an older man had called her ma'am.
“Did you see which way he went? It's urgent I find him.”
The other man answered. “He turned south on the Interstate, toward Tampa.”
“Thanks,” Jess said. She turned and ran up the stairs before she stopped, realizing that she needed one more piece of information. “What kind of car was he driving?”
The shorter fellow laughed, but Jess didn't understand the joke. “He's in a white Toyota Camry. You'll recognize it right off. The plate says FLEMING.”
“Thanks,” she said again before rushing into the chapel. She skipped the closest entrance that would have put her in the center of the melee. Instead, she hurried around the corridor to the front entrance again and pulled on Mike's arm. “Come on. We've got to go.” He didn't move immediately, so she said, “Now, Mike. Hurry up.”
Once settled into the SUV with Jess driving, Mike said, “Where are we going?” His tone was mixed. He sounded a bit peeved at missing the news occurring at the mortuary and excited about whatever adventure Jess had in store that might be better.
“Can you view your video on that camera?”
“You mean now?”
“Yes.” She had pulled onto the highway and traveled as fast as she dared in the opposite direction from the sirens headed toward Vivian. Ben Fleming had at least a ten-minute head start and she had no idea where he was going. If she hurried, she might catch him. At least she was headed in the right direction and she could improvise her plan as she moved.
Mike unfastened his seat belt and turned around to tug the heavy camera in the back seat. He maneuvered the camera until he could reach the precise location to open it and pull out the disk. He continued rummaging until he found his laptop, then settled back into the front seat with the laptop and the disk.
He popped the disk into the computer and after a few moments, the scene at the chapel was on the screen. “I don't know how much time we have left on this battery. I forgot to recharge last night.”
“That's just great.”
“Yeah?” he snapped back. “Well if I'd listened to you, I wouldn't have been filming at all, so what's your beef?”
Jess glanced briefly his way, taking her eyes off the road only for a moment. She was speeding along the Interstate, watching the road ahead for a white Toyota Camry with a vanity plate. The kid was right. What had happened to Vivian at the mortuary wasn't his fault. There was no need to take it out on him just because Jess felt angry and frustrated.
Besides, she'd done the same thing with her cell phone. It was dead as a rock. That's why she hadn't simply called Frank Temple when she first realized Ben Fleming was missing. It seemed more urgent to get on the road. Which reminded her that she needed to find her cell and plug it into the car adapter. But she couldn't do that at ninety miles an hour, and Mike was already occupied.
“I'm sorry, Mike. I didn't mean to bark at you.” She felt her eyes squinting in the unrelenting sunlight reflecting off the pavement. She reached for her polarizing sunglasses and slid them onto her face eliminating the harsh glare. Although the sunglasses improved her ability to see, they didn't conjure up Ben Fleming's car.
To his credit, the kid accepted the apology with a nod and didn't pout. “So what are you looking for? I might be able to skip right to it. And we need to be quick about it.”
“Find the spot about ten or twenty minutes before Vivian died and check to see what you have recorded,” she instructed him as she swerved to pass a slow-moving sedan.
Mike pushed a few buttons on the keyboard and moved around the mouse pad. “Got it.”
“Do you see Ben Fleming on there?”
“He's talking to you.”
She let out a breath. Okay. So far, so good. “A few minutes before he stopped me, where was he?”
“Don't know. That was close to the time we arrived and I'm panning the crowd . . . and the casket . . . and Mrs. Taylor.”
Strike one. “Do you have any footage of Vivian before she died?”
Mike pulled at his lower lip with his left hand while he continued to manipulate the laptop with his right. “Yep. There she is.”
Jess exhaled a breath she didn't know she'd been holding. “Anybody with her?”
“Let me look.” After a few moments, he reported, “I only have a few frames. She's sitting on the end of the aisle in her wheelchair and people are stopping by to talk with her. Two women and a man. I've never seen any of them before.”
Damn
. Jess slapped the steering wheel with her palm, and the SUV swerved slightly to the left and onto the shoulder. The tires made a loud noise as they ran over the ridges in the pavement to warn her she'd left the road. She glanced at the speedometer, slowed down to eighty, and moved the SUV back into the fast traffic lane.
“I'll mark this spot so we can show it to the cops. Maybe they'll use their face recognition software or something to find out who these people are.” Mike was a child of the technology age, to be sure. “Anything else you want?”
She shook her head, still unwilling to give up on Fleming as a suspect. With several of his patients in the chapel and Vivian dead, Ben Fleming had practically fled the building, heading for the only Interstate available. In her mind, that made him guilty of something. Or, Jess wondered, was she grasping at anything that might give her a reason to believe she hadn't failed Vivian today, too?
“Hmm,” Mike said. “I found something.”
“What?”
“Ta dah,” he said with a theatrical flourish, turning the camera's small screen toward her.
In it, she saw Ben Fleming's car leaving the mortuary. Mike's shot had been close enough to capture the white Camry's license plate clearly. Just as the men had told her, it read FLEMING.
She congratulated him, pretended he'd made a new breakthrough, and Mike soaked up the praise. “Hmm,” he said. “A Manatee vanity plate, at that. Did you know that white's the most popular color for passenger vehicles in Florida? They're supposed to stay cooler in the summer. And the Camry'sâ”
Mike stopped mid-sentence.
“What?” Jess asked, looking over to him.
“There! Ahead of us. A white Camry!”
Jess floored the accelerator, raising the SUV's speed to ninety-five. The wind buffeted the top-heavy vehicle. She struggled to keep the tires on the road, hands firmly gripping the wheel and eyes watching every nuance of the roadway. She closed the gap between her SUV and the white Toyota. “Can you read the plates?”
Mike looked at the sedan in the right lane just in front of them. “Not him,” he said. “But there's another. Maybe not white, though. I can't tell for sure.”
She moved up to pass the green sports car and it swerved out into her lane to pass the Toyota before ducking back in front of the slower car.
Jess pressed the brake and the SUV fishtailed. She struggled to right the vehicle, then moved up on the second Toyota, which wasn't white but silver. Mike squinted. “It's even got the Manatee plate, but nope. Not him.”
A black truck was in the fast lane in front of her doing the speed limit. Jess slowed the SUV down as a second white Toyota moved further ahead in the right lane.
“Can you see the plate on that one?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
She hit the accelerator, running up as close to the bumper of the truck as she dared. She heard a loud whining noise from the oversized tires on the truck. It was up in the air so far she could see underneath the chassis to the open air in front.
The truck continued to travel in the left lane, doing the speed limit. Jess felt like the SUV was crawling at seventy. The third Toyota moved ahead of the truck, the big tires blocking their view.
The green sports car had moved in front of the truck, and Jess hadn't seen it. She pressed the accelerator to move around the truck on the right at the same time as the sports car decided to move into the right lane out of the truck's path. Jess stomped the brake harder than necessary and the SUV swerved off to the right shoulder.
The three vehicles were traveling almost side-by-side, Jess on the right shoulder, the sports car in the middle, and the truck in the outside lane. The whining of the truck tires echoed the tightness in Jess's nerves.
The SUV tires ran over the concrete ridges warning her she was off the road again. The added grating sound was almost as jarring as the ridges under her wheels. Jess glanced over at the woman driving the sports car, who was slowing down and yelling at Jess. She couldn't hear the words, but she was sure they weren't polite. The driver of the truck was laughing, apparently having a wonderful time.
Jess sped up on the right shoulder and moved into the right lane in front of the sports car. Her hands gripped the steering wheel hard enough to bruise. The white Toyota was about half a mile ahead.
The truck continued to match Jess's speed, as if he were racing her or something. He blocked the wind gusts enough to steady the SUV and Jess accelerated a bit more. Her heart pounded a rhythm that sounded as loud as the concrete ridges under the tires a few hundred yards back.
When she closed the gap between her SUV and the third white Toyota, she saw the license plate was a standard Florida white plate with an orange in the middle. It wasn't him.
“I'd really rather not die in a car crash today, Jess,” Mike said.
She glanced down at the speedometer. The red needle was pressing beyond the 100-mile-an-hour mark. There were no other white Toyotas within striking distance ahead. She backed off the gas and the black truck kept going. In a few seconds, the green sports car had come up on her rear bumper and pressed her horn before passing on the left. The woman shook an angry fist at Jess on her way by. The white Toyota widened the gap between it and Jess's SUV.
Jess gave up. She relaxed her grip on the wheel and waited for her heartbeat and breathing to return to normal. “I guess he was too far ahead of us. You don't have a number for Frank Temple, do you?”
“No. I thought you took it, so I didn't write it down.”
“Before you close the laptop down, can you send a picture of the car with the plate to your cell phone? And then see if you can reach Sheriff Green again. We need to get someone out looking for Ben Fleming.”
“Yeah, but wouldn't you rather I sent the picture to your phone?”
Sheepishly, she admitted, “My battery's dead.”
Mimicking her tone earlier, he said, “Well that's great.”
She grinned at him and all was forgiven.
“Okay,” he said. “I sent the photo to my cell. I'll call Mac.”
A road-side sign invited her to stop at Starbucks at the next exit one mile ahead. While Mike called Mac Green, she moved into the exit lane. She was parked before Mike reached Mac and handed her the phone.
Jess got out of the car, motioning for Mike to wait inside the SUV. She didn't want him to overhear.
She spoke quickly into the crackly connection. “Mac, I think Ben Fleming had something to do with Vivian Ward's murder. He's missing. It's urgent that we find him. Can you put out a bulletin or something?”
“What evidence do you have to support that hunch?”
Jess squirmed under the penetrating question, because she didn't have much more than a seriously bad vibe. “He's always on the scene when something big is happening in the Taylor case. All of these people have been his patients since before Mattie Crawford was killed. He was with Vivian in the right time frame before she died today. When we discovered Vivian was dead, he booked out of here faster than a kid after an ice cream truck. He's smarmy, Mac. He's not right. I know it.”
Mac's silence was so lengthy that Jess wondered whether the call had been dropped. “Mac? Are you there?”
“I don't mean to be disrespectful, but what you've told me amounts to nothing more than opportunity, nothing specific that I can work with. That chapel was full of people with opportunity to kill Vivian today,” he said.
“Butâ” She started to speak into the slight delay in the static-filled transmission. Mac talked right over her protests.
“We've got a lot of things going on here, Jess, and we're spread pretty thin already.”
“You want me to call the locals, then,” she said, not waiting for an answer. “Because I will.” She forced herself to slow down. “Have you ever investigated Fleming at all? Checked into his background? Do you know he's not capable of murder?” She walked around the parking lot, seeking a stronger signal.
“We're right in the middle of a bunch of forensics tests,” he said, parrying her question. “That may give us something to confront him with.” Mac's tone was reasonable, reassuring. “Let people do their jobs and then we'll see where we are.”