“How did Blake Culpepper get involved?”
“He’s like a lot of folks in these hills. Chip on his shoulder the size of Chimney Rock. Thinks the world owes him something better than he has, but he’s not willing to work for it.” She shook her head, pressing her mouth flat as if to suppress the anger rising in her chest. “Or maybe he just likes hurtin’ people. Seems like he works hard enough doin’ bad when he’s looking to make life miserable for somebody else.”
“Did he and Johnny ever have reason to cross paths?”
“Sure. Johnny grew up here. On our side of the tracks, you don’t get to pick and choose your neighbors. Or lock yourself up inside some gate.”
He gave her a thoughtful look that made her feel churlish for having said what she had. Maybe Blake wasn’t the only one with a chip on his shoulder.
“Johnny liked everybody, and he wasn’t one to judge. He once told me that if he had to cut people out of his life for breaking the law, he wouldn’t have any friends left.” She flipped through the list of names Dalton had compiled, names of men and women the prosecutor’s office believed were connected, either directly or indirectly, to the BRI.
“We went to school with half the people on this list. Went to church with some of ’em. Johnny probably played football with several.” With a sigh, she pushed the folder away, feeling tired and out of sync with the world around her, as if there was no place that felt like home anymore.
“What could Johnny have taken that would be worth terrorizing you to get?” Dalton asked.
“I’ve been thinking about that all morning, ever since you left. And the only thing that seems clear is that you’re the catalyst that set everything into motion.”
Dalton’s dark eyebrow rose. “I’m the catalyst?”
“Johnny died months ago. But nobody gave me a minute’s worry until just a few days ago. Why? What happened a few days ago to make Blake and his crew think Johnny had given me something incriminating?”
Dalton’s brow furrowed.
“Why did you come to the hospital that night? Why would you do that?” she asked.
“Because I thought—” He stopped short, looking down at the file, the creases in his forehead deepening.
“You thought I might know something about what Johnny took from Wayne Cortland.”
His gaze snapped up to meet hers.
“Why did you think that?” she asked. “Because you found out Johnny had been having an affair with Cortland’s former bookkeeper?”
“That was part of it,” he admitted.
“But there was more?”
He looked down at the file again, a pained look on his face as if he knew something he didn’t want to tell her.
“For God’s sake, Dalton. I’m not going to crumble if you tell me something unpleasant about Johnny.”
He took a long deep breath and slowly met her gaze. “She said he liked to take risks.”
A finger of dread scraped its way down her spine, trailing cold tremors. “What kind of risks?”
“Like sneaking her into Cortland’s office for sex.”
She looked at Dalton through narrowed eyes, almost feeling sorry for him. She could see how much he disliked having to say such things to her, his regret etched in fine lines and dark shadows all over his face. “They had sex in Cortland’s office? With Cortland there in the building?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask for details.”
“Maybe you should have.” An idea began to form, one she didn’t particularly want to have. One, in fact, that she dreaded intensely.
But it made a grim sort of sense. And it just might give them the answers they were looking for.
“Tell me where I can find the Cortland bookkeeper,” she said after a long, tense silence. “I want to meet her.”
Chapter Twelve
Working as a bookkeeper for a now-notorious crime boss couldn’t have given Leanne Dawson much of a career boost, Briar thought as she walked across the gravel parking lot in front of Pinter Construction in Wytheville, Virginia. The building housing the offices was a small cinder-block structure once painted a sunny yellow that had long since faded into a dusty dun color. The name Pinter Construction was barely legible in peeling blue paint over the front door.
Inside, there were no cubicles, only a central desk at the front and a handful of desks lining the walls. Most of those were unoccupied, save for one near the back, occupied by a dark-haired man in his forties who was typing something in a series of painfully slow pecks, and another on the right-hand wall where a slim blonde was writing something onto a notepad from time to time as she consulted a book lying open on her desk.
At the front desk, a pretty dark-haired girl in her early twenties had her cell phone perched on her very pregnant stomach and didn’t even acknowledge Briar’s entrance.
Briar stepped up to the reception desk. “Is Leanne Dawson here?”
The pregnant girl looked up in surprise. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I need to speak to Leanne Dawson. Is she here?” For a brief dizzying moment, it occurred to her that this girl could be Leanne. And if she was pregnant—
But to her relief, the dark-haired girl just waved a hand in the general direction of the slim blonde on the right. “She’s over there.”
No offer to let her know Briar was coming. Which, she supposed, might work in her favor.
She crossed to the desk where the blonde continued jotting down notes, her hair covering her face like a curtain. Briar cleared her throat, making the woman jump.
“Leanne Dawson?” she asked.
The woman swept the shiny blond curtain away from her face, giving Briar a good look at the woman her husband had been sleeping with.
She was a pretty woman and, to Briar’s bemusement, at least five years older than Briar herself, with clear blue eyes and lightly tanned skin that contrasted pleasantly with her straight wheat-colored hair. She was slim but well proportioned, with full breasts and long legs, displayed modestly enough by her tailored blouse and well-cut slacks.
“I’m Leanne Dawson. May I help you?”
Her accent was Southern but light and well modulated. An educated woman who hadn’t lived in the hills her whole life, Briar thought. Had that been part of the attraction for Johnny, beyond Leanne’s position as Cortland’s bookkeeper? Had he enjoyed being with someone so obviously different from the little hillbilly girl back home?
Stop it,
she scolded herself silently.
“My name is Briar Culpepper.” She wondered as she gave her maiden name whether or not Johnny had told Leanne Dawson anything about the wife back home. If he had, Leanne showed no sign of recognition. “I’m a police officer in Bitterwood, Tennessee, looking into the murder of John Blackwood.”
Leanne’s expression shifted at the mention of Johnny’s name. Bleakness darkened the blue of her eyes, and her lower lip trembled slightly as she waved at an empty folding chair on the other side of her desk. As Briar took a seat, Leanne said quietly, “I don’t know anything about his death.”
“But you knew John Blackwood.”
“We were...friends.”
“You were a little more than friends,” Briar pressed, feeling pretty terrible for pushing the other woman this way without revealing the truth about herself. And if Logan’s life hadn’t been at stake, she probably would have come clean and asked for the woman’s forbearance. But she couldn’t afford to alienate Leanne Dawson until she asked the questions she wanted answered.
“Officer—”
“Call me Briar.”
“Pretty name.” Leanne smiled slightly before the expression faded into gloom again. “I’ve talked to so many people about him. I don’t know what more to say. I made a really awful mistake. Not just where Johnny was concerned, either.”
“I understand from your earlier statement to Ridge County prosecutor Dalton Hale that you and Johnny engaged in your liaisons in Wayne Cortland’s office.”
Beneath her tan, Leanne blushed deep pink, making Briar feel like a complete creep. “Only a few times.”
“Did you go into the office together always? Or was Johnny ever alone there without you?”
Leanne’s gaze darted up to meet Briar’s. “Why?”
“We’re trying to establish if Mr. Blackwood ever had access to Cortland’s office unattended.”
Leanne licked her lips, looking down at the open ledger that lay on the desk in front of her. As if suddenly realizing the company’s books were laid bare to Briar if she wanted to look, she snapped the book closed and folded her hands on top of the book. “I made the mistake of giving Johnny liberties I shouldn’t have.”
“Including allowing him to go into Wayne Cortland’s office unescorted? Maybe to wait until you could safely sneak away?”
Leanne lowered her face to her hands. “He made it seem so exciting. Fun and dangerous.” She dropped her hands and looked at Briar, her expression stiff with embarrassment. “I don’t attract exciting, dangerous men. He made me feel so alive.”
Briar felt a hard, hot ache in the center of her chest, but to her surprise, it had less to do with her own feeling of betrayal and more to do with her sympathy for Leanne Dawson’s obvious sense of shame and regret.
“So he made a game of your relationship. And part of that game was doing something crazy and dangerous. Like having sex in your boss’s office?”
She nodded, a tear sliding down her cheek. “Sometimes it would take a half hour to get away. I was so afraid Mr. Cortland would go in there and find Johnny, my heart would be beating a mile a minute by the time—” She stopped, dashing the tear from her face with an angry stab of her knuckle. “All that time, he had a wife and I didn’t know it. I guess that’s what made it feel dangerous for him, huh?”
Briar looked down at her own hands, at the faint ring of pale skin on her left ring finger where the ring had been until Johnny’s death. “Did Mr. Cortland have a safe? Or a drawer or file cabinet nobody else was allowed to access?” she asked.
“You know, that prosecutor asked me the same question, but I didn’t remember—” Leanne paused, then started again. “It might not have meant anything. But there was a drawer in Mr. Cortland’s desk that he used to always keep locked. Not that unusual—he might have kept personal items there. People do, you know. But just the other day, I remembered that he stopped locking the drawer a few months before the explosion.”
The explosion that had blown Wayne Cortland to his eternal reward, Briar thought, along with several other people, some of whom may have been innocent pawns in Cortland’s games. Leanne was damned lucky she hadn’t been one of them. “Was that before or after Johnny’s death?”
“After,” Leanne answered after a moment of thought.
If it was right after Johnny’s murder, Briar realized, it was possible that Cortland had figured out what Johnny was up to. Had he sent someone to kill Johnny and retrieve what her husband had stolen?
Whoever he’d sent after Johnny clearly hadn’t found what he’d been looking for, or Blake and his boys wouldn’t be trying to kidnap Logan as leverage to get their hands on what Johnny had stolen.
So where, exactly, had Johnny hidden his bloody secrets?
“How soon after Johnny’s death did he stop locking that drawer?” Briar asked.
“I don’t remember.” Leanne gave Briar a troubled look. “Do you think Johnny took something from Mr. Cortland’s office?”
“Do you?”
The other woman looked down at her hands, her brow crinkled with thought. She had neat, well-manicured hands, Briar thought, darting a quick look at her own work-worn hands with their short, uneven nails and the occasional ragged cuticle. Johnny must have looked at this woman and seen everything Briar wasn’t.
Maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe their marriage had failed not because Johnny wouldn’t grow up but because they’d grown in different directions.
“I wondered if he took something,” Leanne said quietly after another moment of silence. “The last time I saw Johnny, he told me I should look for another job. When I asked him why, he said he had a feeling something bad would be going down at the sawmill. He wouldn’t tell me what. Wouldn’t even tell me why he thought so.” She shook her head slowly, tears glistening on the rims of her lower eyelids. “The day of the explosion, I’d taken a day off work to go for a job interview. This job, as a matter of fact.”
No wonder Dalton had focused on Leanne Dawson as a person of interest. The coincidence of her being off work that day, and looking for a new job, at that, would have raised his suspicions.
“You were very lucky,” Briar said.
“I know. I still can’t believe it sometimes. Any of it. Mr. Cortland always seemed so nice and...ordinary.”
“That’s how it works sometimes.” Briar couldn’t stop herself from asking one final question. “Do you think Johnny loved you?”
Leanne’s sharp blue eyes snapped up to meet Briar’s. “That’s a strange question from a police officer.”
“I know. Forget I asked it.”
The other woman’s eyes narrowed. “What did you say your name was?”
“Briar Culpepper.”
“Oh, my God.” Leanne’s eyes widened with horror. “You’re his wife. Aren’t you?”
Briar tried not to react, but her skin was already crawling with regret. She shouldn’t have come here and pretended she was just another police officer.
“What, did you want to see what I looked like? See how I compare?” Leanne was crying now, soft silent tears spilling down her cheeks. “Do you want an apology? Because I’ll give you one. God knows, I owe it to you.”
“I don’t want an apology. I believe you when you say you didn’t know he was married. I sometimes think Johnny didn’t really understand that fact himself.” Briar made herself meet the other woman’s red-rimmed eyes. “I’m sorry to have come here like this. I’m sorry I wasn’t up-front about who I am. But you have to understand—there are people who believe Johnny took something potentially incriminating from Wayne Cortland. Very dangerous people who are willing to go after my son to get that information back.”
Leanne’s tears kept falling, but her expression shifted from despair to horror. “Someone’s gone after your son?”
“Twice, at least. And I don’t know what Johnny took, if he took anything at all. Or where he would have hidden it if he did.”
“And you think
I
know?”
“I don’t know. I was hoping, I guess.”
Leanne pulled a box of tissues from her desk drawer and blotted her cheeks. “You’re putting a lot more importance on my relationship with Johnny than either he or I did.” She took a deep breath and lifted her chin, meeting Briar’s gaze. “I knew it was a fling. I knew it was reckless, but he made me feel good, you know? Desirable and maybe a little dangerous myself.” Her mouth curved in a self-conscious smile. “I know, me? Dangerous? But that’s how he made me feel. Like I could take on the world single-handed. It was an addictive feeling.”
Briar’s stomach squirmed with sympathy. That had been Johnny’s most potent attraction for her, too, at least when she’d been younger. He’d had the verve and style of a bad boy without really being very dangerous at all. The most harm he’d ever done to anyone was all emotional, and even then, Briar thought, he’d never meant for it to happen.
He hadn’t meant to break her heart. Or Leanne Dawson’s. And if she was honest, her heart wasn’t nearly as affected as her pride.
“You never had any suspicions about Wayne Cortland?” she asked Leanne. “That his business might be a front for something illegal?”
“Of course not. I wouldn’t have worked for him if I had.”
She sounded honest, Briar thought. There was nothing in her tone to even hint at deception. Wayne Cortland had played the part of the honest businessman very, very well. It was why he’d gotten away with his crimes so long in the first place.
“Thank you for your time, Ms. Dawson. I appreciate it. And again, I’m sorry for not telling you who I was up front.”
Leanne shook her head. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help.”
Briar had gotten halfway to the doorway when she heard footsteps coming up behind her in a rush. She turned on her heel so quickly that Leanne nearly rammed into her headfirst.
The other woman took a quick step back, wobbling for balance. “Sorry,” she said. “I just thought of something. I don’t know if it means anything to you—it didn’t to me. But that day Johnny told me to look for another job, I’d made a joke about stocking my pantry while I could in case the winter turned out to be a lean one. And he said he never had to worry about stocking his pantry. He had so much stored away folks were starting to think he was a doomsday prepper.”
Briar released a soft huff of laughter. “If he’d had to stock things away for himself, he’d have starved.”
“I never thought him one for gardening,” Leanne admitted. “I was just sitting here thinking about that conversation and it struck me you must have been the one who stocked that pantry he was talking about.”
Briar nodded. “Is that the strange thing you remembered?”
“No, it’s what he said after that. He said, ‘It’s amazing how many different things you can store in a Mason jar.’ And then he winked at me and headed off on his truck route.”
Briar felt a little tremor run up her spine.
“Do you think that means anything?” Leanne asked.
Briar kept her expression neutral. “I doubt it. He’s right—there are all kinds of things you can put away in a Mason jar. He was probably just trying to sound naughty and secretive.”
Leanne’s curious expression shifted to a mixture of fondness and regret. “That was Johnny, all right.” Her face reddened. “I’m sorry. I guess you’d know that a lot better than I did.”
“Do me a favor, Leanne, okay? Stop beating yourself up about Johnny. The only thing you did wrong was fall for his lines. You weren’t the first girl to do that, you know.”
“Thank you. And I hope you find what you’re looking for and that everything goes well for you and your son.”
Briar smiled again and turned back toward the door, trying not to let her suddenly energized legs break into a run as she headed out into the waning daylight.