Jack Davis Mystery - 01 - Shakedown (24 page)

“When did he tell you about this deal?”

“Right after he agreed to plead guilty,” she said. “He said we’d have to wait six months after he went to jail so my name would be the only one on the papers and the sales wouldn’t attract any attention.”

“Did he tell you how much to sell the car and house for?”

“He said the buyer would name the price.”

I waited a beat before asking the money question, afraid of being right. “Did he tell you who the buyer would be?”

“Not at first. He said he’d let me know when he knew. He called me a few weeks ago and asked me to come for a visit. It was the first time I’d been in a prison. It was awful. I almost felt bad that I had turned him in, but he was the one who cheated on me. So I went to see him and he said someone named Colby Hudson was the buyer. I sold him the car a couple of weeks ago and we closed on the house the other night.”

Rice’s eyes widened as she said his name, her hand suddenly covering her mouth. “Oh my God, I am such an idiot! He’s an FBI agent. I saw that on the forms he filled out. Was I wrong to sell the car and the house to an FBI agent? Did Thomas get me into another one of his messes?”

I sidestepped her question. “I can’t answer that, ma’am. Have you talked to Mr. Rice since then?”

“No.”

“Had you ever met Agent Hudson before? Maybe while your husband’s case was going on?”

“No. I mean there were a lot of agents at our house when they arrested Thomas, but I only met two of them—a man and woman. I’m sorry, but I don’t remember their names. Am I in trouble?”

Her concern may have been sincere. It may not have occurred to Rice that her husband was dragging her into yet another scheme until a police detective showed up and started asking her questions. Or, it could all be an act. She seemed too calculating a woman not to have questioned giving a sweetheart deal to an FBI agent so her ex-husband could get a fresh start when he got out of prison. I ignored her question again, sticking to my own.

“When you went to visit your husband, what was his mood like? Was he glad to see you? Was he worried or afraid?”

“He was pathetic. He whined how sorry he was and how much he missed me. All the usual crap. If he was scared, he didn’t show it. But then, Thomas was the best salesman I ever saw in my life.”

I studied Rice, not saying anything, waiting for her to volunteer something. She tugged at her top again and then checked her watch.

“Can I go now, Detective? I really am in a hurry.”

I moved my car to the curb, watching her drive away, wondering if I would know the truth if it bit me in the ass. Colby’s story that Jill Rice had called our office looking for a buyer didn’t stand up against her version. That didn’t make Colby the liar but it did mean one of them wasn’t telling the truth. Thomas Rice had offered his alternate reality, that his wife had gotten everything in the divorce and that what she did with the property was up to her. He was careful enough to tell a story that was at least technically true even if it wasn’t the whole story.

I called Grisnik to see what he’d found out about who had visited Thomas Rice and who Rice had talked to on the phone.

“His ex-wife came to see him a few weeks ago. Only time she shows up on the visitor logs,” Grisnik said.

“That fits with what she told me. Score one for her in the truth sweepstakes.”

“Rice have any other visitors?”

“He is one unpopular guy. His lawyer came to see him once right after he started serving his sentence. No one after that until his wife.”

“What about phone calls? Did Rice call anyone after we left?”

“One call to a cell phone.”

“Whose was it?”

“Phone belonged to an eighty-five-year-old man lives in an Alzheimer’s unit.”

“Why would Rice call him?”

“He didn’t. Phone was stolen. We don’t have any idea who Rice called.”

“Let’s go back and ask him,” I said.

“Too late. He hanged himself in the prison laundry. Happened last night. I just heard about it an hour ago.”

“Shit. I just talked to his ex-wife. She didn’t say anything about it. She must not have gotten word yet.”

“She’s the ex-wife, not the wife, which takes her off the next-of-kin list.”

“Someone should let her know before she reads about it in the paper.”

“You want to volunteer,” Grisnik said, “be my guest. Telling the family, even the exes, is the worst part of this job. You can have it.”

I hung up and shook. It was a mild ripple, a reminder of the condition my condition was in. I wondered if the news of Rice’s death had triggered the tremor, a reaction to guilt over the possibility that my visit had literally scared him to death. If that was the case, I must not have felt too guilty since the tremors were short-lived. I didn’t feel responsible for Rice’s death. On that, I agreed with his wife. Rice had chosen his road. I was doing my job.

On a purely statistical basis, Rice’s death should not have been a surprise. Suicide is the third leading cause of death in prison, which sounds pretty grim until you realize there aren’t a lot of other ways to go. The rate is not as bad as in jails, where suicide is the leading cause of death. People don’t stay in jail long enough to die for other reasons. They either get out or graduate to prison.

Despite the numbers, Rice didn’t strike me as suicidal, even though he ran the gamut of human emotions when I saw him. He was a wheeler-dealer, the kind of person who would never throw in the towel, and the prison laundry was an unlikely place to give up unless he had help.

Of all the emotions Rice had displayed, it turned out that the most honest one had been fear. The only time he was afraid was when I asked him about the sale of his house and car. Though neither of us mentioned him by name, Colby Hudson had hovered over our conversation like a curse that had now come true.

I hadn’t learned anything that would convict Colby of a crime, but I doubted that the truth, whatever it was, would set him free. He’d gone on a buying binge that he couldn’t afford on his FBI salary. He was the one person who knew about the surveillance camera in Marcellus’s house and who matched the description of the man I thought I’d seen running from the murder scene, and who had been sitting at the right hand of Javy Ordonez, late of this world. I didn’t know whether he was Forrest Gump, who managed by sheer coincidence to show up at every pivotal moment in the history of this case, or whether he was the man behind the throne, but my litany of suspicion was enough to give any Internal Affairs investigator a blue-diamond woody.

I couldn’t separate my suspicions of him from my knowledge that he was cheating on Wendy. Tanja Andrija had neither admitted nor denied having an affair with him. That didn’t matter. Colby was having an affair with her even if she wasn’t having one with him.

On that score, I realized that Wendy had me dead to rights about my relationship with Kate. I had been unfaithful to Joy. I shook again, this time from shame. I was judging Colby more harshly than I had judged myself. Truth and righteousness had become silent casualties in my rationalized world.

My cell phone rang. Caller ID said it was Ammara Iverson. I was anxious to talk with her, hoping that she’d been able to get me copies of Thomas Rice’s file.

“Hey,” I said, “great timing. Any luck with the Rice file?”

“Sorry. I’ve been jammed up.”

“I know you’re busy, but the sooner the better. How’d it go with the polygraph?”

“I’m guilty of having sexual fantasies about Denzel Washington. Otherwise, I’m in the clear.”

“Good to know. What’s up?”

“Have you heard from Colby lately?” asked Ammara.

“Not since I saw him at lunch yesterday. Why?”

“He didn’t show up for his polygraph.”

“Did you try to reach him?”

“Troy tried his cell and his home phone. When he didn’t answer, Troy told Ben Yates. Yates sent two agents to Colby’s house. He wasn’t there. The lock on the back door had been jimmied. They went inside, where they found some cash and drugs. The U.S. Attorney is getting a search warrant.”

“Why? They’ve already searched the place.”

“Colby not showing up, together with the jimmied back door justified the entry into the house. Make sure he was okay and all that.”

“Are you telling me that the cash and drugs were sitting out in plain sight?” I asked.

“All I can tell you is what was found inside the house. Now that we can’t find Colby and there’s evidence of a crime, we’ve got to do a full search that no one can complain about later, if there is a later.”

Ammara let her last words hang, reminding me of our conversation yesterday.

“And what?”

She paused. I could hear her take a deep breath. “I called Wendy before I called you. Just in case Colby was at her place and had overslept.”

I started to shake, worse than from guilt, worse than from shame. My heart raced out in front of the tremors. I stumbled over my words.

“Has she heard from Colby?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t talk to her. She didn’t answer at home or on her cell and her boss said she didn’t show up to work. I’m sorry, Jack, we can’t find either one of them.”

There are things we know and things we don’t want to know. When what we know is too hard to handle, we convince ourselves that we can box it up, stick it someplace we can forget about, and then, magically, we won’t know it any longer. Then we protect ourselves with a lie—what we don’t know can’t hurt us.

I have never forgotten the pain of losing Kevin. It had hardened into a callus around the unhealed hole in my heart. But I had put away the unspeakable immobilizing fear and the cold rush of primal panic that swept over me when I first learned that my neighbor had taken him. That’s what I had hidden in the box that Ammara had just opened and it reentered my system as swiftly as snake’s venom.

Wendy wasn’t a young child and Colby Hudson wasn’t a sexual predator. She might have gone shopping and he might have gone fishing. They might have eloped. Someone might have planted the drugs and cash in Colby’s house. Anything was possible and nothing was certain except that I was scared, as frightened as I’d been that day in Dallas.

The disappearance of a child always mobilizes action. Everyone can identify with the child’s vulnerability. There are no gray areas, only outrage and a secret, shameful gratitude of those who join in the search that it wasn’t their child.

It would be different with Wendy and Colby because no one knew whether they were victims or suspects, though Ammara’s unspoken subtext implied that the Bureau believed that Wendy might be the former while it was more likely that Colby was the latter. Colby’s status would be confirmed when the paperwork for his purchase of Jill Rice’s car and house was discovered in the search of his home.

It wouldn’t take long for Troy Clark to run the same traps I had. He’d find out that I had used a phony ID to visit Thomas Rice and that Rice died less than twenty-four hours later. He’d trace my Detective Funkhouser alter ego to Marty Grisnik, who could only give me so much cover without getting his tit caught in the wringer. And he’d find out that I had braced Jill Rice. He’d lock up Thomas Rice’s file before Ammara could copy it and I’d end up answering questions about withholding information and obstruction of justice, shakes or no shakes.

While all that was happening, Wendy would be slipping farther away. She would be only one of several priorities, probably at the bottom of the list until there was hard evidence that she was a victim of something.

When Kevin was taken, I had had the full resources of the federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies in one of the biggest cities in the United States. They and I did everything we could as fast as we could and it still wasn’t enough. This time I was alone and relegated to the sidelines, unable to control the investigation or, for that matter, my own body.

I tried to dial Joy’s phone number, but I was shaking so much I couldn’t get it right. I slammed the phone onto the car seat, cursing all that was holy and more that wasn’t. I hinged forward, smacking into the steering wheel, anchoring my arms around it until the worst had passed.

I raised my head. The street in front of Jill Rice’s house was deserted. It was small consolation that my outburst had gone unnoticed. My breathing slowed, keeping pace with the decreasing aftershocks in my torso. When my hands steadied, I tried Joy’s number again, searching for a way to tell her that our nightmare was back.

She answered on the first ring, her voice light, almost playful.

“Jack,” she said. “I guess you survived the radiologist.”

“Perfect attendance. Do you have a key to Wendy’s apartment?”

Joy always said I had two voices, with and without my badge. She hated the badge voice, said it was indifferent.

“What’s the matter?”

“Wendy didn’t go to work today,” I said, taking it one step at a time.

“Did you call her apartment or her cell?”

“I didn’t. Ammara Iverson did.”

“Why was she calling Wendy?”

Intuitive anxiety had elevated her pitch half an octave, her voice quivering. I imagined her sitting up, spine stiff, running one hand through her hair before grabbing on to something solid.

“She was looking for Colby Hudson. He didn’t show up to work, either.”

Joy forced a laugh. “Oh, you don’t think they ran off and got married, do you?”

My answer caught in my throat, held there by another spasm, escaping with a stutter. “I wish they had, but it doesn’t look that way. When Troy couldn’t find Colby, Ben Yates sent a couple of agents to his house. They found some things that didn’t belong there and now they’re looking for both Colby and Wendy.”

“Oh, my God, Jack! If Colby did anything wrong, the Bureau can’t think Wendy had anything to do with it! That’s absurd!”