Designed to Kill (3 page)

“Tim was going down there primarily for some kind of party last night, wasn’t he?” Jill asked.

“Right. But he wasn’t sure exactly when he’d be coming back.” There were some problems he needed to look into, he had told me when I gave him the key.

Jill twisted onto her right side and swung a silky smooth leg over mine. That was a come-on if I’d ever seen one. Rotator cuff surgery may be disabling for some things, but not the important ones.

“If he needs to stay a while longer, he can use the front bedroom,” she said in her most persuasive tone. This lady could charm a dragon. She’s been practicing her magic on me for more than thirty-five years. “Tim won’t be in our way, and we shouldn’t be in his.”

Obviously, there was plenty of space for the three of us. I knew Gulf Sands would be a nice place for Jill to continue her recuperation, though she still faced at least a couple of more months of getting her arm pulled and stretched and elevated and rotated by PT’s (an acronym for Painfully Thorough, she contended), a regimen that took around an hour twice a week.

“I’m sure Dr. Vail would take a dim view of your missing a bunch of therapy sessions,” I said.

She shrugged. “I’ll just have to find a rehab center near Perdido Key.”

Before I could come up with a counter to that, the phone rang. I reached for the bedside table and answered.

“Greg?” a tentative voice asked.

I was fairly certain who it was, though he sounded under considerable stress. “Sam?”

“Yeah. I’ve got some terrible news.”

He hesitated, a reluctance that was not at all like the normally upbeat and talkative Colonel Samuel Gannon, retired Air Force command pilot. “What is it, Sam? Anything we can help with?” I was really getting concerned now.

“It’s Tim.” I could hear him draw a deep breath. “He’s dead.”

I looked at Jill, shocked. “What happened?”

2

Tim’s wife, Tara Gannon, was a short, attractive woman with long black hair and dark, inquisitive eyes. However, when she met us at the front door of her modest two-story brick house, those normally lively eyes blinked red-rimmed and hollow. And though she had always appeared neatly dressed, her pink shirttail hung outside her jeans in back.

She spoke in a dull, lifeless voice. “Thanks for coming.”

Using her good arm, Jill gave
Tara
a consoling hug.

“How’s the shoulder?”
Tara
asked with a bit more animation.

“It’s coming along fine, thanks,” Jill said. “I’m so sorry about Tim.”

I took
Tara
’s hand and squeezed it. I’ve never been good at dealing with situations like this, where people close to me are involved. As an Air Force criminal investigator, I sometimes had to question family members after tragic deaths, but since they were usually complete strangers, I was able to approach the task with a dispassionate objectivity.

Noting the homey smell of wood smoke, I looked around and saw flames licking up from charred logs in a brick fireplace below a mantel lined with ceramic bric-a-brac. Books, games and toys had been stacked beneath a nearby window. Through a gap in the drapes, a pointed shaft of sunlight spilled onto the carpet. Sam and Wilma sat on the sofa, consoling fifteen-year-old Tom, thirteen-year-old Ted, and the “baby,” Tony, just turned eleven. The boys’ faces were tear-streaked. They did not look up at us.

“Is there anything at all we can do for you?” I asked, dropping down in a chair beside Jill.

“Just being here to support us is all we could ask,” Wilma said. She was tall and thin like her husband, with bouffant white hair. She sheltered young Tony in a comforting hug. “Your kids aren’t supposed to go before you do.”

Sam unfolded his lanky frame from the sofa. “Let’s go try some of
Tara
’s coffee, Greg. She just brewed a fresh pot of decaf.”

As I followed him into the small kitchen with its curved breakfast nook, I noticed the slump in his shoulders. Sam had retired as a bird colonel, first flying combat missions in
Korea
, last assigned to monstrous transports like the C-5. My OSI career had, thanks to my somewhat perverse nature, stalled out at the rank of lieutenant colonel.

He nodded toward a table beside the bay window. “Sit down and I’ll get your coffee.”

I sat and gazed out at the yellow leaves falling from a large maple in the fenced back yard.

After Sam had placed the mugs on the table and sat down beside me, he shook his nearly balding head. “I still can’t believe it. Tim had no reason to kill himself.” He looked across at me, his brow rumpled. “But that’s what the officer claimed.”

“You said it was a sheriff’s deputy?” That was about all I had gotten out of him on the phone.

“Yeah.”

“When did he call?”

“It was around seven-thirty. He called
Tara
. A Sergeant Payne, I believe.”

“What did he tell her?”

“He said they had found Tim’s body in his car at a national park. It was near The Sand Castle project.”

“The
Gulf
Islands
National Seashore?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“The entrance is just beyond The Sand Castle. It’s about a mile from our condo.” I took a sip of coffee, not tasting it, thinking of Tim. “What time did they find him?”

“I don’t think he said. Or if he did,
Tara
was too shaken to remember.”

“Did he tell her anything else?”

“He said Tim’s gun was found on the floor.”

I’d had experience with a number of suicides. I had seen cases where the victim still clutched his weapon and others where the gun had fallen beside him. I might mention the use of “his” and “him” here is not male chauvinism, something I’ve been guilty of on occasion. It’s just that for some reason, most suicides by firearms are men.

“They’re sure it was Tim’s gun?” I asked.

He looked down at his coffee mug, turning it slowly with his long fingers. “I don’t know. But I do know he kept a gun in his car.”

“Really?”

He shrugged. “I have no idea what in particular precipitated it. He told me a couple of months ago that he had bought a pistol
—
it was similar to the one he was issued in the Navy. He said he was concerned about crime in the area.”

“What area?”

“His office. Seems I recall maybe a carjacking or a holdup around there. He never mentioned any specific threat.”

“A lot of people carry guns these days.”

Sam nodded. “I had noticed a subtle change in him the past few months, though I doubt it had anything to do with the gun. But something seemed to be bothering him. I can’t say if it was personal or professional.”

I could hear the pain in his voice, see it in the tautness of the skin across his jaw. Sam and I had been friends for three years now. Along with our wives, we belonged to the same Sunday School class at
Gethsemane
United
Methodist
Church
. I wasn’t sure about Sam’s motivation, but I had wound up there following a long siege of coaxing by a wife who had developed persuasion into a fine art. Anyway, the Gannons and McKenzies had traveled to the
Holy Land
the previous November. That trip led to a fateful incident that nearly cost Jill and me our lives and no doubt resulted in her shoulder injury. As I sipped the coffee, I also recalled how it had prodded me back into the smoking habit I was struggling to kick.

At this point, I wasn’t sure what to believe. Most of what Sam had said certainly pointed to the likelihood that Tim Gannon had killed himself. But I didn’t want to discount Sam’s feelings. And years of training and experience had taught me one unforgettable lesson: few things are ever as simple as they first appear.

3

I took a long swallow of coffee before going on.

“I didn’t know Tim really well,” I said. “Just what I’d seen of him a few times at your house, and when we had everybody over at our place. And, of course, the times we arranged for him to use the condo. But he seemed very intelligent and likeable and...well, a sharp young guy with a lot going for him.”

“Exactly.” Sam warmed to the subject. “His business was doing great. He had added several new people for this
Sand
Castle
project. And he was determined to make New Horizons Architects and Engineers a major consulting firm. You know the story behind that condominium, don’t you?”

I shook my head.

“Remember that big church he designed and engineered in
Franklin
?”

I nodded, recalling the classic facade with its soaring columns and towering steeple. We had driven by the church, located in the next county to the south, shortly after our move to Hermitage, a suburb on the eastern edge of Metropolitan Nashville named after President Andrew Jackson’s historic mansion.

“Tim won an architectural award for that church,” Sam said, “and was written up in a national magazine. The article mentioned that he had also done a seven-story apartment building. The developer of this high-rise condo in
Florida
read about it and invited him to submit a design idea. They wound up choosing Tim for the job, both the design and the engineering. It was quite a coup. The total cost of the project was something over twenty million dollars.”

“Must have been a pretty big leap for Tim.”

“Definitely.” Sam got up and headed for the kitchen counter. “How about a little more coffee?”

I nodded, quietly gauging my friend, the stress of his loss.

When Sam came back with the steaming pot, I asked, “Wasn’t Tim a bit intimidated by the size of the project?”

“The boy had no fear. Some of his engineer friends thought he was over-extending himself, but he staffed up for the job. It was what he had always said he wanted to do—get into big-time construction.”

I scratched my head thoughtfully. “He was a former Navy pilot, right? Why’d a hotshot Top Gun type give that up to go into the construction field?”

Sam spread his hands. “That Navy business was something he got carried away with in college. Wilma had a brother in
Knoxville
who steered him toward the
University
of
Tennessee
. Tim had graduated from high school at sixteen. He was exceptionally bright. Really ambitious, too. He insisted on studying both engineering and architecture.”