Die Like an Eagle (14 page)

If Ms. Nondescript was from out of town, I was probably wrong in my assumption that she was the mother of a kid on one of Biff's teams. Of course, that raised the question of why she'd been at the field and the town square—but with any luck, Ideen would know.

Luck was definitely on my side today. Ideen was out in her front yard, weeding.

“Morning,” I said. “Your flower beds look lovely.”

They really did—her azaleas were blooming, and she had beds of daffodils, tulips, and a host of other flowers whose names I didn't remember, though you wouldn't catch me admitting it to Mother. Of course, Ideen's flower beds always looked lovely, mainly because weeding them gave her a perfect excuse for keeping an eye on everything that happened on her block.

“Yes,” she said, with a complacent smile. “They are starting to shape up, if I say so myself. Big doings at the town square.”

“Yes.” I definitely didn't want to get trapped into giving her a recap of the whole ceremony. “I expect your guest's told you all about it.”

“Not a whole lot.” Ideen shook her head. “I'm sure she will when she feels up to it. Migraine. I'm a martyr to them myself, so I know better than to badger her at a time like this.”

“Oh, dear,” I said, trying to include Ideen as well as Ms. Nondescript in my sympathetic look. “And so terrible to have one when she's traveling—because no matter how comfortable your surroundings, it's always better to be home when you feel unwell.”

Actually, I couldn't imagine a more uncomfortable place to be unwell in than Ideen's bed and breakfast. It was a vintage bungalow from the 1920s, complete with striped awnings over all the windows and painted aluminum furniture on the porch. It still looked much as it had when Ideen's grandmother had turned it into a tourist home during the Depression; I suspected the mattresses and plumbing hadn't been updated since. But Ideen preened at the implied compliment.

“Does she need any medical help?” I went on. “Because I could talk Dad into stopping by if she does.”

“Thank you,” Ideen said. “I'll suggest it. Because if you ask me, Edna—that's her name, Mrs. Edna Johnson—doesn't know much about taking care of herself. Didn't bring any medicine—I don't go across town without my headache pills, and here she came all the way up from Richmond and left them behind. And I'd have offered her mine, but—well, I know better than to tell a doctor's daughter about the dangers of taking someone else's prescription medicine.”

“Richmond?” I echoed. “That's only what—an hour and a half away. Odd that she'd be staying overnight so close to home.”

“She's job-hunting,” Ideen said. “Had an interview yesterday afternoon at the college, and driving in traffic sets off her head, so she decided to stay here for a few days and see if she could arrange a few more interviews. Apparently she forgot about so many places being closed for Founder's Day Weekend.”

“Not something you'd expect a Richmonder to know,” I pointed out.

“Yes, but she used to live here,” Ideen said. “She worked for the Pruitt's bank up until they fired her a couple of years ago, and she couldn't find any work closer than Richmond. But she loved it here and is hoping to move back.” She glanced over her shoulder as if to make sure her guest hadn't crept up to eavesdrop on us. “I don't think that first interview went well. She took to her bed when she got home yesterday afternoon at five or six—didn't even want a bowl of soup or a cup of tea—and suffered for hours. I checked on her a couple times an hour, and it was nearly two a.m. before she finally said that yes, she was starting to feel better, and thought a cup of weak herbal tea might help her fall off to sleep.”

“Poor thing,” I said, trying to imagine enduring both a bad headache and Ideen's well-meant but intrusive sympathy for eight or nine hours.

“And this morning didn't help—finding out that an old friend had been murdered.”

“Shep Henson was a friend of hers?”

“No, Biff Brown,” Ideen said. “But we first heard it was Biff, and she was that upset—her son was on one of his teams. Not that it was much of a relief when she heard it was Shep instead of Biff. She knew him, too. She wanted to go down to the town square—she seems to have thought it was more of a memorial to Shep.”

“There was a moment of silence,” I said.

“Set her head off again, going down there,” Ideen said. “When's the funeral happening?” Ideen never missed a funeral.

“No idea,” I said. “I don't think they can schedule it until they find out when Dad's releasing the body. But I'll give you a call if I hear.”

“I'd appreciate it.” Of course, the odds were she'd hear before I did, but my offer seemed to please her. “If they're having it soon, Edna might just stay over, but if they put it off till after the holiday, she'll probably just go home as soon as she feels well enough to drive.” She glanced over her shoulder again. “Frankly, I suspect she wants to ask Biff for a job, or at least a reference, and she can't very well bother him about that at a time like this, now can she?”

“Of course not,” I said.

I noticed that Ideen seemed to be distracted by something down the street. I glanced that way and saw a stout lady I recognized as one of Mother's garden club cronies trotting briskly down the street and waving to Ideen—and giving me a chance to escape.

“Well, I'll leave you to your weeding,” I said.

“Thanks,” Ideen said. “And I'll try to talk Edna into seeing your dad.”

I continued down the street in the direction I'd been traveling—no sense letting Ideen suspect that I'd been shadowing her guest. I was just turning the corner when I heard the garden club lady's voice. “Ideen, you should have been there for the ceremony!”

I rounded the corner and set out in the direction of the town square.

I made my way back to the town hall, went inside, and took the elevator up to the third floor, where I had a small office not too far from Randall's.

“Wasn't expecting to see you quite this soon,” I said to my desk. It declined to reply, so I had no idea whether it resented the interruption to its peaceful four-day weekend or welcomed the company on a day when the town hall was so quiet that dropping a pencil seemed to echo all up and down the corridors.

Though not quiet for long. Outside, in the square, the choir struck up “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” My window looked down over the square so I cracked it open a bit, the better to hear the singing, then went back to my desk and turned on my computer.

While it started up, I noted in the appropriate page in my notebook the date and time of my latest attempt to reach Biff. I had a whole page dedicated to documenting my attempts to reach Biff. Was it insensitive to call about business on a day when he might be busy making funeral arrangements for his brother? Well, if it was inconvenient, he could always ignore it, the way he'd ignored my previous fifty-seven calls.

I noticed something new in my in-basket and found, to my delight, that Phinny had dropped off the information I'd asked for about Biff's clients. Perhaps I should have chided him for falling back into his workaholic ways, but then again, maybe he'd disobeyed my instructions not to bother until next week because he thought this could be related to the murder. And for that matter, it could well be that he already had most of the information from fulfilling the chief's earlier request.

I glanced down the report, which showed all the construction permits Brown Construction had filed in Caerphilly County in the last seven years. I made a note to ask Phinny, just out of curiosity, if he'd only gone back seven years for any particular reason. My organized side would have gone for either five or ten. Maybe he felt seven was lucky. Or, more likely, Biff had only been doing business in Caerphilly for seven years.

And it wasn't a very fat report, actually. Either Brown Construction was a pretty small-time operation or he was doing most of his business someplace else. Clay County, for example—which would make sense, since he was originally from there.

I poked around in the various official databases until I came up with Biff's home address and jotted it in my notebook. Then I grabbed my file on the town square renovation project. I made sure it contained a copy of the contract and that the contract included the business address of Brown Construction. A quick call to the number Caroline had given me showed that both of the tracking devices she'd planted on Biff were now out at that address. Which didn't guarantee that Biff was there—he could have other jackets and other vehicles—but I figured the odds were good.

Of course, now I had to find transportation—my car was at home, and Michael was probably on his way there with the Twinmobile.

I pulled out my phone and texted Randall.

“Taking the Behemoth if that's okay,” I said. “Official business.” The Behemoth was an old but serviceable pickup that Randall kept in the courthouse parking lot for times when he got tired of driving the sedate and respectable sedan he'd adopted as his official mayoral vehicle.

“Keys on the hook,” he texted back.

I entered Biff's office address into my phone's GPS program, tucked the file into my tote, and after tidying my desk again—because I suspected it enjoyed being tidy—I picked up the keys from their hook on the wall of Randall's office and set out.

Of course, Biff's place of business was about as far from the center of town as it could be and still be in Caerphilly County. Although from what Randall said, most of it wasn't technically in Caerphilly County at all. When I turned off the Clay Swamp Road onto the driveway beside the Brown Construction Company sign I was only a mile or so from the Clay County line. I was already tired of driving the Behemoth by that time, but the road was in such horrible repair that I was glad not to be risking my own axles. The Behemoth seemed to relish the rough ride. Clearly Biff didn't want to make it easy for clients to visit his place of business. The road's mud and grass surface had plainly been slashed out of the swamp not too long ago, and the trees along either side, choked with Virginia creeper and poison ivy, looked as if they were plotting to take it back any time now.

I finally emerged from the woods into a cleared area bisected by a tall chain-link fence topped with razor wire. The placement of the fence seemed somewhat arbitrary, since almost as many ramshackle vehicles and rusty bits of unidentifiable equipment and debris lay outside the fence as inside. The gate was closed with a chain and padlock. There wasn't anything like a sign to tell you this was Brown Construction, but enough of the equipment had been painted the same color as Biff's porta-potty, with the word
BROWN
stenciled on in flaking white paint, that I figured I was at my destination.

I pulled the Behemoth up close to the gate and looked around for something resembling a doorbell or an intercom. I felt curiously reluctant to get out of the truck. I honked the horn and then flinched at the sound and scanned the clearing around me and the edge of the woods, more than half-afraid … of what? Not the distant barking that informed me Biff kept one or more dogs on his property. After life with Spike, our eight-and-a-half-pound furball, the canine world held few terrors for me. In fact, although by the sound of his bark this beast was probably considerably larger than the Small Evil One, the familiar sound of a dog snarling himself into a frenzy added a curiously homey touch to the otherwise forbidding landscape.

“This whole place is as creepy as its owner,” I said aloud. Saying it made me feel slightly better. But it also made my reluctance to leave the safety of the Behemoth seem more reasonable. Biff struck me as the sort of paranoid person who wouldn't trust dogs alone to protect his domain. There could be well-camouflaged booby traps. Or, more sensibly, security cameras that would reveal my presence.

And if they did, so what? I was here on legitimate business.

I spotted what looked like a buzzer of sorts—at least it was a button with a hand-lettered sign saying
WAIT HERE FOR ENTRY
over it. I pulled the truck closer to it, got out, and pressed the button. A loud buzzing sounded somewhere back in the complex, and the dog's snarling reached new crescendos of fury. Apart from that, no response. After several minutes, I pressed the button again and held it down longer. Still no response, except from the dog, and a sort of thudding noise that suggested perhaps he was hurling himself against something. Just in case it was something in bad repair that stood between him and freedom, I got back into the truck.

I studied my surroundings through the windshield. I even pulled out my phone and took a few random pictures. If I'd been admitted past the padlocked gate, I'd have crossed half an acre of vehicle- and equipment-littered gravel parking lot to arrive at one of the ugliest and most dilapidated buildings imaginable. It was a huge hulk made of sheet metal, cinder block, and faded wood, and looked as if it had been built hastily and out of spite, and then abandoned to fall apart in well-deserved solitude.

Not exactly a good advertisement for Brown Construction's building and maintenance skills. Or maybe too accurate an advertisement. Would it hurt to tidy up a bit? Maybe plant a few daffodils to soften the edges?

The chain-link fence disappeared into the woods in either direction, and as far as I could see, on either side of the huge building and behind it, the fenced-in area was filled with untidy piles of building materials, rusted hulks that might be either outdated equipment or scrap metal, abandoned-looking vehicles, and unidentifiable detritus. Well, Randall did say Biff was running a scrapyard along with his construction business. Though it looked more like a graveyard for unwanted machinery and lumber. I spotted a couple of porta-potties in even worse condition than the one he'd brought to the ball field, which I wouldn't have imagined possible. And a few of the cars or trucks, inside or outside the fence, looked as if they might be capable of running if someone did a little repair work on them instead of leaving them to rust with their older siblings.