Current Affairs (Tiara Investigations Mysteries) (22 page)
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Authors: Lane Stone
Eighteen
C
ontinuation of statement by Leigh Reed.
We had a little alone time before the car came to take him to the air field. I was in the kitchen getting a water bottle out for him. I scrounged around for cookies or anything else he might like for the flight.
“Would you like peanut butter and crackers?” I yelled up the stairs.
“Sure.” He joined me and walked to the other side of the kitchen and got a plastic freezer bag out of the drawer by the sink. My breath caught because it meant he didn’t feel like a visitor in the house. I felt truly happy. In the cupboard I got out the peanut butter and the kind of crackers he likes with it. I was struggling to open the jar and didn’t notice that he was reaching for it until our eyes met.
“I remember when you would have handed me the jar without a second thought.”
“I don’t think the new way is a bad thing.”
He went over to his canvas luggage, stopped in front of it and sighed. He took his wallet out of his pocket and his watch off and put both of those in the freezer bag. These he replaced with those in his luggage.
“Why do you do that?” Until I spoke I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath, waiting for a response to my last comment.
He slowly turned to face me. “Because I don’t want a single speck of sand to touch you,” he looked up at the ceiling, “or here.”
“I wrote to Roger Wilson’s mother.” He looked down and shook his head, but when I walked over and rubbed his back, he shrugged me off. I guessed it was still too raw.
It never doesn’t hurt.
I turned to walk back to the sink, but suddenly his arms were wrapped around me, pulling me back.
“I guess I can’t keep every bad thing from you.”
“Don’t worry. I’m tougher than you are.” I punched his arm.
“Is that right?”
“Yeah, you hold your nose when you go underwater.”
“You sleep with a night light on,” he countered.
“You look both ways before crossing the street.” He pulled me to him and kissed my forehead.
Then he let me go to talk about his travel plans for the next few days. “I’ll be in Washington, staying on the base at Fort Myers. This afternoon and tomorrow I’ll be on the Hill and at briefings in the building,” meaning the Pentagon. “On Thursday I’ll leave for London to conduct a briefing for allies.”
First I snickered. Then I started laughing with tears running down my face. He smiled. “You’re thinking about the last time we were in England together, aren’t you? I was an Army brat and a city boy, okay? I’m never going to live that down, am I?”
I still couldn’t speak. The countryside had been dotted with sheep and cattle. My husband had seen a calf in a pasture and had mistaken it for a pig, and I had said, “Yeah, it’s a grazing pig.
One of those English grazing pigs.”
My laughter died away, and I wiped my face with my fingertips. The conditions of my life at the time made this seemingly insignificant moment stick in my mind. I had been relaxed and laughing. My husband, worshipped by many, feared by many more, hadn’t known a pig from a calf, and his appendage-slash-wife had. He hadn’t caught my sarcasm either. He didn’t know that pigs don’t graze. What was wrong with that picture? Thinking about those years, I felt any consideration of telling him about Tiara Investigations slip away.
“You will meet me in London, right?”
I jerked my head up.
“Of course.”
He pulled back and stared at me.
“I said I would be there.”
“You pick our hotel.”
“How about some place in Mayfair? We haven’t stayed there in a while. Or someplace
near
a good pub. I want to go to a pub every night.”
“Well, decide. I’ll call you when I land in DC, and you can let me know then.”
I smiled, knowing good and well that he would call me before his plane took off.
Too soon, the car was there, but we took our time saying good-bye. The military flight out of Dobbins Air Reserve Base couldn’t leave until he got there, so I kissed my husband one more time. His ribbons dug into my cheek, but we wanted to stay like that forever.
Finally, I pushed him away and told him I would see him on Friday.
“I almost forgot. There was a message on the phone. Someone named Paul called to tell you that Tara had explained the note to him. She told him she was on a diet and had written the note to remind herself not to eat at some restaurant until she lost weight. Does that make sense?” I was wishing he hadn’t remembered every damn word, because again I was holding my breath.
“Paul Armistead is Tara’s boyfriend. He’s been worried about her.”
“If he worries every time Tara does something bizarre, that poor man is going to be worried all the time.”
“Do you ever worry about me?”
“Should I?”
“No, sometimes I think it would be nice, but then I remember I would rather you have your mind on keeping yourself safe than worrying about me, an adult capable of managing my own life.”
“Hey,” here he raised my chin so I had to look at him, “there’s no shame in having someone watch your back.”
“You’ll really retire and watch my back?”
“Yes, and I’ll watch your front, too.”
The car was in the driveway, and a lieutenant walked up to me with a big smile. “Did the yellow ribbon fall off your car? Do you want me to get you another, Ma’am?”
“No, thanks.
People might think I support this war if I have one on my car.”
“You do support the troops, right?” I could tell he wanted to dig a hole and fall in it as soon as he heard himself say this to a general’s wife.
“I do not support this war, but I support American troops.
One in particular.”
“We’re there so we can have a more peaceful world.”
“A war for peace?
By the way, I think it’s interesting the ribbons are magnetic.”
My husband jumped in the car, “She’s
gonna
blow! Get in the car and drive!” As they pulled out he blew me a kiss and mouthed, “Friday.”
I was praying that it would be so and that by then I would not have to be “available.” When the car cleared the hill I thought,
whew.
It scared me to think that I was relieved that he was gone so I could get back to my real life. I would go for a jog with Abby and think.
I remembered to tuck my cell phone into my waistband in case Victoria or Tara needed to reach me,
that’s
how back in my element I was. Our rule was that when The General was in town, they were not to use the landline.
I didn’t take the time to warm up, I ran full out. Abby looked up at me like I was crazy. Simply for me to be his wife was all he had ever asked, and I had done that as long as I could. I packed and moved and waited and walked around foreign cities, and then I started all over again. Finally, it was time for me to have a home. I used money I inherited from my grandmother and bought the house outright. I had researched Atlanta homes on the internet for months. Then I told my husband I was going home. He took leave and found me. I hadn’t made it hard. I had kept my cell phone, and when he called I gave him directions to
Hartfield
Hills and to the house. He had said, “Who lives here?”
“We do.”
“Then show me the bedroom.” And so I did. Later he said, “This is how I tell where I stand.”
Just like that, it was settled that we would be okay. I prayed we would stay that way.
Nineteen
C
ontinuation of statement by Leigh Reed.
I was jogging back to the cul-de-sac when I saw Kerry Lee sitting in a green Buick Park Avenue, looking like he smelled something bad. I didn’t like it. Where was Detective Kent when I needed him? Abby and I ran up the drive to the community swimming pool and clubhouse rather than turning onto my street. The hill is steep, but with adrenaline pumping I didn’t feel a thing. I was reaching for my cell phone and speed dialing Tara. She said she would pick Victoria up, and they would put our back-up-emergency-oh-shit plan into effect. No detective agency should be without one of those.
Mr. Lee turned on his engine from time to time, and each time I thought he might be leaving. That would have been fine with me, but he was just running the air conditioner and cooling off.
A half hour later they called back as they were entering the subdivision. I jogged back down the hill to the car. Tara and Victoria parked in a nearby driveway. When I was a few yards away, they jumped out of Tara’s car with
Stephie
and Mr. Benz tumbling out after them, and we surrounded the Buick. The dogs were already yelping.
Mr. Lee was surprised, to say the least, and started the engine to make a speedy exit. Tara tried the passenger side door and joined him in the car. Not wanting company, I guess, he jumped out. He faced forward, and Victoria was behind him. She thought he was about to attack me, so she used her best kick boxing
The car drove right over Mr. Lee’s foot. He let out a yelp. Tara, however, looked unperturbed.
Botox.
Either
Stephie
or Mr. Benz squatted and peed on Lee’s other foot. I didn’t know which dog it was, and it didn’t much matter.
Stephie
looked up at me, and I saw Tara had painted a black beauty mark right on her beard.
I expected just another pain cry from Lee, but what I heard was, “Stop, I’ll tell you what you want to know.”
I wanted to ask him to repeat it, but I stopped myself in time. “It may be too late, you’ve made her mad.” I gave Tara a quick look and added, “She’s been in trouble with the law since the day she was born,” quoting the opening song from
The Dukes of
Hazzard
and hoping it didn’t sound familiar to him.
Victoria stepped up. “We can’t always control her when she gets like this, so you better just put your head between your legs and kiss your ass good-bye.”
“Please try!” Lee begged.
The car had rolled off his foot, and Tara shifted to park and put the emergency brake on. Victoria gave the dogs the sit command.
“Tell you what, we’ll take you to the hospital, and you talk. If you stop talking, we stop the car. As long as you talk, we drive.” I thought it was a fair bargain.
“Does she have to be in the car? I want to know.”
“No, but she’ll be following us, and if we pull over she’ll intervene.
Understood?” Victoria sounded tough.
“Yes, let’s just go.”
I opened my front door and let the dogs inside while Victoria situated Lee in the back seat of his car. She drove, and I sat in the back seat with him. As promised Tara followed us in the Hummer. He told quite a tale on the way to Gwinnett County General.
I began to question him, “Did David Taylor do any work on a Chinese satellite program?”
“The Chinese?” he sounded truly surprised, then a light came on. “He wasn’t really involved with the Chinese. He called what he was doing the China Program. CINA is the acronym. It stands for corrective, intentional, negative application. Uh, is that your cell phone?”
“Yeah, I’m sorry. Would you excuse me? I need to answer this.” I saw it was Tara on my caller ID, as well as in the rear view mirror.
“It’s me! Be sure he’s telling the truth.”
“How?”
“Tell him what my Dad always told me, ‘You know you go to hell for lying just like you do for stealing.’”
I looked over at him. “You know you go to hell for lying just like you do for stealing.” He just stared at me.
Victoria was concentrating on her driving but spoke up. “Was the signal emitting from the Backpack UAVs detonating the IEDs?”
He grunted in the affirmative.
“Does this CINA program correct it?”
He grunted again.
We were doing pretty good replacing our incorrect assumptions about China, but we knew we should stop while we were ahead and let him talk. ”I figured his program caused it, why shouldn’t he spend his time correcting it? Then one day out of the blue, Kelly Taylor phoned me.”
Victoria and I were stunned. Maybe more experienced private detectives wouldn’t admit that, and to our credit, we kept our mouths shut. Had we been that wrong about her?
He had met Kelly at a company dinner, and she called him the next work day. “She knew about the flaw in the program and wanted it kept quiet. Her husband, on the other hand, planned to report it to the Pentagon. She said if The Peachtree Group paid her a substantial amount of money, she could guarantee he wouldn’t report it. I didn’t know if she was acting on behalf of her husband or shaking us down was her plan. She said her husband’s career would be ruined even if his corrective patch worked, and our company would go under. There she may have been right.
“Look, I don’t want The Peachtree Group paying settlements and losing the contract, but I’m first and foremost concerned with casualties. The controllers are never far from a Backpack UAV, and when the IED is powerful enough, there are casualties.” He had stopped looking at me sometime during the speech, and he kept his eyes on the cloth back of the front seat. “Finally, I decided to meet with Taylor and find out if he was in on it or not. He was shot that night.”
“If you didn’t kill David Taylor, who did?”
“His grieving widow.
I saw her.”
We left Mr. Lee at Gwinnett County Medical Center. As I led Victoria away, she was still thanking him profusely for helping us, and Tara was apologizing for the broken bones in his foot. Tara said she would pay his hospital bill, and Victoria left the Tiara phone number for him to call if he needed anything.
Anything at all.
“Do you think he was telling the truth?” I had waited until we were in the parking lot to speak.
Victoria rubbed her forehead. “Remember, one of the hidden files on that disk was a chart of when and where IEDs exploded, and there was a Backpack UAV close enough to either film it or be destroyed by it. At first David Taylor thought a satellite signal might be the cause, but when he tried to correlate the explosions with which satellite was passing overhead, there was no match. That much fits.”
“I wonder if any other communications network systems have been affected. Victoria, did you see any mention of the Joint Tactical Radio System? JTRS is the acronym, and Jitters is what it’s called.”
“I don’t remember seeing any of those terms.”
“It’s a radio and data system for all the service branches. How about Blue Force Tracking System, or
“Nope.”
I shook my head. “We should have figured out this had nothing to do with China. Remember when Kelly Taylor said neither she nor David had ever traveled outside the country? Wouldn’t he have gone to China to negotiate the contract?”
“Nothing to do with China?”
We forgot Tara wasn’t in on what Kerry Lee had said during the car ride over, including accusing Kelly Taylor of murdering her husband, and we caught her up.
“I’m having a hard time believing that she was involved in her husband’s business.”
“Remember, she took a while to come to the door after the shooting,” Victoria said.
Tara clicked the doors open. “It was the guy the dogs were tracking that killed David Taylor!”
“There’s just one problem with that theory.” I climbed in the backseat.
“What’s that?”
“Our dogs have no idea how to track.”
“Okay. It was the guy our dogs were chasing to see if he had a chew toy in his pocket. Better?”
I turned around to scan the other cars on the road. “Hey, where is Detective Kent?”
Tara checked the mirrors. “You’re right. We haven’t seen him since this morning when he got his pedicure.”
“We need to tell him all this. Troops are close to Backpack UAVs.” I got my cell phone out of my new
Delvaux
handbag.
“When did you get this?” Tara shrieked.
“My husband gave it to me. Our anniversary was yesterday.”
“
Oooh
!”
“And he wrote ‘I wish we were together every time I see your face’ on the card.” I finished dialing Detective Kent’s cell phone, but there was no answer. “Let’s go to the station.”
Tara turned onto Highway Twenty, heading southeast to the precinct office at the Mall of Georgia. “So the part about David Taylor’s product is consistent with what we know, but does it track with what we know about Kelly Taylor?”
I closed my phone. “I fault her for blaming anyone she can for anything that happens to her. But as far as being a murderer, I can’t believe anyone raised by Beatrice would go so wrong.”
“She seems isolated and lonely but not a traitor to her country or an embezzler,” Victoria said.
“Or a husband killer.”
Tara was clutching the steering wheel so hard her knuckles were white. “Relocating for a hubby’s career has made a lot of women do crazy things. I’ll give you that. My sister used to pull the Jehovah’s Witnesses right in to her living room by their neckties. It’d scare the
bejesus
out of them. Anyway, Kelly has such a sweet way of looking at the world.”
We stopped talking as we traversed the parking lot of the Gwinnett County police station.
I looked around for the Ford Escort but it wasn’t there.
“He’s not here right now,” the good-looking young officer at the desk told us. Actually, he was addressing Tara, who was leaning over said desk.
“Did he say where he was going?”
“He was going to check on the local parks, take some paper work over to the
Hartfield
Hills City Hall and then take care of some personal business.”
“Would you ask him to call Leigh when he returns? He has the number.”
We sat in the Hummer and discussed our next move.
“Leigh, where to?”
“Going to check out the parks? We know which one. Detective Jerome Kent is up to his old tricks.”
“What if he’s not at Buford Dam? Maybe we should pay Kelly Taylor and Beatrice a visit first,” Victoria suggested.
“Good idea,” I said. “Let’s do that first. I’d like to talk to them.”
Tara pulled her cell phone out and dialed the number. After a brief conversation she hung up. “Beatrice answered. Kelly’s not there. She went to Buford Dam for a walk.”
We looked at each other, and Tara put the Hummer in gear. She laid rubber as we left the police parking lot. I’m not sure that was the best idea of the day, but no one followed us. They probably thought it was one of their officers. To get to the dam we had to drive all the way through
Hartfield
Hills.
“Victoria, do you still have those mall photos in your bag?”
She rummaged through and handed me the envelope. I looked closer, and I didn’t stop looking when I found Kent in the photo as we had that morning. “Here’s Kerry Lee watching Kelly and her brother.”
Tara speeded up. “You mean Savannah Westmoreland, don’t you?”
“But, why …?” Victoria started. “I mean, if he wanted to get away from her, why was he following her?”
We would have to finish the conversation later because we were at Lake Lanier’s West Park. I heard voices and sprinted down the trail, trying not to slide on the pine straw. Vic and Tara were right behind me.
The couple stood by the lake. Kelly was facing Detective Kent. He glanced away from her, a look of confusion on his face. While his head was turned, she pulled out a small handgun.
A shot rang out, and Detective Kent’s mouth opened in shock. He fell forward toward Kelly, who started screaming. I mean loud, too. That young lady has got some lungs on her. He fell onto her, and she slumped under his weight, dropping her gun.
I ran over and picked it up. It was cool to the touch. I looked over at Victoria and Tara. We saw the hole in his shirt, and we realized at the same time that he had been shot in the back.
A fine piece of detective work there.
