Love Remains (11 page)

She thanked God every day for her mother’s parents.

Returning to the Civil War display, she stood under the portrait of Zander and Madeleine. Their love for each other had remained true through eighteen years’ separation. Zarah prayed she might one day find a love like that, too.

Chapter 8

A
fter spending Tuesday morning getting all his appropriate documentation, identification, and computer passwords—as well as meeting seemingly everybody in the large office building—and after a rather long lunch with the five other special agents in charge in the Middle Tennessee division, Bobby finally found himself alone in his small, plain, but very private office.

He turned on the computer and logged in to make sure his passwords all worked. He looked at all the icons on the desktop and moved his mouse to hover over one. He might as well start working while he had a few minutes to himself. He double clicked the icon and typed in another password to get into the unit’s proprietary search engine. For all that it had been supposedly written for the TCIU, the look and layout of the interface was almost identical to the CBI’s program.

Hopefully it would give him better information than what he’d been able to find available publicly on the Internet yesterday. He moved his hands to the keyboard as soon as the search box came up, but then he hesitated. In the six years he’d worked as an investigator, he had never before experienced the feeling of guilt over looking into a person-of-interest’s background. His left pinkie finger touched the
Z
key, but he didn’t press it.

Yesterday he’d spent several hours online searching for information on Dennis Forrester. He’d garnered enough details to put together a pretty impressive résumé for Forrester, as well as a schedule of speaking engagements from the past two years. Forrester was something of a philanthropist, his name popping up in news articles and blog posts lauding him for his donations of money and time to certain charitable organizations around Nashville—everything from the rescue mission and food bank downtown, at which he volunteered regularly, to his “generous” donations to literacy organizations and Humanities Tennessee in support of reading programs and book festivals. The more Bobby read about Forrester’s philanthropy, the more questions arose in the back of his mind. Where was all this money coming from?

What he found online about the Historic Preservation Commission had not brought him at all closer to forming any conclusions or generalizations about the agency and how it was run. They held an annual black-tie fund-raiser—he had done his best to ignore the photos of Zarah in a floor-length burgundy gown that, though covering her almost completely from neck to toe, did nothing to hide her curves—and tried to concentrate only on what he could gather from the text of the articles and blogs covering last year’s event.

In addition to ignoring the few photographs someone had managed to surreptitiously take of Zarah—he would never forget how much she hated having her picture taken, even
back then
—he also ignored the search results that linked to several editorials that had appeared in the local newspaper over the past few months disparaging Zarah over the land injunctions in question.

If he couldn’t bring himself to investigate Zarah, he needed to tell Captain Carroll and let somebody else get moving on this case. But it nauseated him to think of anybody else digging into her life and background in the detail they would need. Even though he still resented her and what she had done to him, he could not let her be exposed like that to a total stranger.

Chickening out, he typed Dennis Forrester’s name into the search box and set the computer to work finding information on Zarah’s boss.

He looked up at a knock on the open office door. Captain Carroll stepped into the small room. “Am I interrupting?”

Bobby stood behind his desk. “No, sir.”

“Good. The director stopped by unexpectedly, and I’d like you to meet him.” He motioned for Bobby to follow him.

Either the captain’s presence on this floor was an unusual sight, or everyone had decided to take this opportunity to check Bobby out. He could feel the gazes following them as they walked down the aisle between the cubicles at which the administrative and lower-level investigative staff sat. Captain Carroll led him to an elevator Bobby had not seen before, which took them up one floor and opened across the hall from a nondescript door. Swiping his key card through the reader, Captain Carroll opened the door and ushered Bobby in to what turned out to be the captain’s office.

A well-dressed, African American man—mid-fifties, right at six feet tall, between 170 and 180 pounds, and wearing what looked like a class ring from one of the service academies—stood and approached Bobby from the small table in the corner of the room, right hand extended.

“Agent Patterson, welcome to the Nashville branch of the Tennessee Criminal Investigations Unit. I was just reading the recruitment report on you. Your background is impressive, and I know you’re going to be a great asset to the TCIU.”

Captain Carroll joined them and made a formal introduction, and Bobby sat down at the table with them. He wondered if every new agent got to meet the unit’s director on his first day on the job. He had a feeling this did not usually happen.

“I understand Carroll has given you the Preservation Commission case.”

He hadn’t realized he needed to bring the case file with him. “Yes,
sir. It seems very much like several cases I handled in California.”

The director nodded. “Yes, I saw that in your file. By way of full disclosure, there is something you need to know about this case. I do not expect it to influence in any way how you choose to handle the case. But you should know this information up front.” The director bent down and pulled a file out of his briefcase. He opened it and took out a photo and a piece of paper and put them on the table in front of Bobby.

Bobby’s breath caught in his throat when he looked down at the picture. Unlike the couple photos he’d seen online yesterday, this one showed Zarah in a royal blue dress that not only showed her figure to perfection but her arms and legs as well because it was sleeveless and knee-length. She stood in the middle with Dennis Forrester to her left—Zarah stood several inches taller than Forrester—and the director to her right. She gazed directly at the camera, smiling that shy, innocent smile that had drawn him in when she was a young woman.

Who was he kidding? It would still work if he let it.

Wait. This was a picture of Zarah and Dennis Forrester with the unit’s director, who had his arm chummily around Zarah’s shoulders. He finally slid his eyes over to the second item that the director had put in front of him: a tax receipt for a five-figure donation to the Middle Tennessee Historic Preservation Commission. A tax receipt with the director’s name on it. Bobby’s diaphragm twisted into a knot. This was not good.

“As you can see,” the director said, “it could be construed that I have a conflict of interest in this case. I bring this to you at the onset of the investigation so that everything is out in the open and aboveboard, and so we’re clear that I will not interfere in any way with your investigation of the commission. If you deem it necessary to interview me, I swear to be cooperative and forthcoming.”

“Thank you, sir. I appreciate your honesty, and I will try to not involve you in the investigation unless absolutely necessary.”

A few moments later, Bobby found himself on the other side of that nondescript door, breathing deeply to try to ease the tension in his shoulders and back. He wished this facility had a fitness room. He’d give just about anything for a go at a punching bag right now. What had looked like a plum assignment at the perfect job was turning into what could possibly be the worst case of his life.

Zarah kicked her shoes off as soon as she walked in the door. The flats had a cushioned sole and had always been among her favorite shoes, but for some reason today they decided to start rubbing her little toes. The sandwich and cup of yogurt she ate before leaving work to teach at the community college had not stuck with her very long. If she wasn’t saving up to buy a new dishwasher, she would have stopped somewhere for carryout on her way home, since she let class out half an hour early. But she couldn’t justify the ten or fifteen dollars to buy food cooked by someone else when she had plenty at home.

Rather than create an abundance of dishes to wash by hand, she filled the teakettle with water, put it on the stove, and went to the pantry to pick out a pack of oatmeal from one of the boxes on the top shelf. She was still trying to choose between apples-and-cinnamon and raisin-date-walnut when the kettle whistled. She grabbed the packet of maple-and-brown-sugar-flavored oatmeal and shoved the pantry door closed, thinking again about how she needed to take Pops up on his offer to come rehang the door so it would close properly. As Kiki—who had encouraged Zarah to buy one of the brand-new townhouses down the street—said, she got what she paid for. The 1911 brick cottage had cost her half what one of the duplex units would cost, and she loved the original character and the privacy afforded by not sharing walls with anyone. But it brought with it all the problems inherent in buying an old house, even one that had been as extensively renovated as this one had: doors sagged and swelled, the original hard-pine floors creaked, the water pressure wasn’t great, and a few of the
windows were slightly drafty.

But it was hers—her very own, in her name—and no one else’s. She had done that. She had purchased a house all by herself. She had refused her grandparents’ offer to give her extra money for her down payment so she could afford something more expensive; but even though they had initially been hurt by her refusal, she finally led them to understand that she needed to do this on her own to prove to herself that she was a grown-up, that she could take care of herself, that she was finally independent—and deep down, that she could try to prove to her father she had made something of herself, even without his support.

She poured the boiling water into the instant oatmeal and looked around her kitchen and breakfast room. Small but well appointed, with granite countertops and brand-new black appliances—well, the refrigerator, stove top, and wall-mounted double ovens had been brand-new when she’d bought the house five years ago, but the previous owners had been forced to sell before they could afford to replace the dishwasher, too.

She filled a glass with water from the refrigerator door and carried it and the green stoneware bowl of oatmeal to the table. Using a dish towel for a napkin, she ate with her right hand and flipped open her laptop with her left to check e-mail and read her favorite online newspapers.

She almost choked on a wad of the hot, gooey cereal when she clicked the arrow to go up to the next e-mail and the computer opened a message that contained an automated request from Bobby Patterson to join the singles’ group’s e-mail list. She and Patrick were co-moderators of the automated mailing list manager, but Patrick only checked his personal e-mail account once a week—on Saturdays. She had three choices: She could leave this for Patrick to deal with on Saturday—but he usually ignored these requests because she always took care of them when they came in; she could delete it and pretend she’d never seen it; or she could be the forgiving Christian she claimed to be and approve his request.

She grumbled under her breath. Why was she the one who always got stuck having to do the good, right thing? She knew everybody at church called her a Goody Two-shoes and considered her a prude. She’d lived with that all her life. It was just the way she was built, she supposed. Even in college when she decided to try to break out of her good-girl shell, she had not been able to walk through the door of the nightclub. Everything her father had ever said to her or about her, every rule he had ever imposed came flooding in as she had stood there listening to the thumping of music and smelling the foul odor that she later discovered was a mixture of alcohol and cigarette smoke.

Flannery and Caylor had helped her break out of her shell a little at a time, taking her to places like the Bluebird Café, Douglas Corner Café, and Fido—restaurants and coffeehouses—to hear some great local bands and expose Zarah to what it really meant to live in Nashville, Tennessee. But there were still some lines Zarah refused to cross. And ignoring someone’s request to join the singles e-mail list was one of those lines.