Love Remains (9 page)

Bobby closed his umbrella and shook off as much water as he could while waiting for someone to buzz him into the building. He turned at the sound of footfalls slapping against the wet pavement behind him.

“You must be Patterson.” The stocky African American man lowered his umbrella in the protection of the awning above and extended his right hand. “Chase Denney.”

Bobby shook the man’s hand. “Robert Patterson. But everyone calls me Bobby.”

Chase pulled out his ID badge and slid it over the reader beside
the door. With an electronic beep, the door unlatched. Chase pulled it open and motioned Bobby to enter ahead of him. “We’ll have to see about getting you a key card today, though it’s unlikely with everyone arriving at the same time on Tuesday you’d have to wait out the rain to be let in.”

From the front lobby, he was pretty sure he remembered his way to the captain’s office, having been escorted there on the several interviews he’d had as well as the meeting Friday to complete his paperwork and migration of information from the California bureau. He was glad he didn’t have to rely on his memory, however, once he followed Chase through the labyrinthine corridors to a small conference room on the third floor.

The captain and three other men were already seated at the round table when Bobby and Chase entered. Captain Carroll stood to shake Bobby’s hand and introduced him to the others. Bobby shook hands all around and worked to commit the other agents’ names to memory.

“Agent Patterson’s area of expertise with the CBI was investigating fraud cases with businesses as well as government agencies. A new fraud case has come to my attention, and I believe Agent Patterson’s experience makes him the perfect person to lead the investigation.” Carroll opened the thin dossier in front of him.

“It has been brought to the unit’s attention that members of a government agency might be misusing their legal oversight abilities in real estate dealings for personal gain. Permission to open a case just came through, and we need to hit the ground running on this one—otherwise I wouldn’t have called you in on a Sunday afternoon.” Captain Carroll began explaining the evidence already collected.

The case summary piqued Bobby’s interest. It sounded similar to a couple of real estate fraud cases he had handled in Los Angeles. Nothing like starting a new job with something familiar.

Captain Carroll picked up a remote control. Bobby shifted his chair so he could see the projection on the screen behind him—a land-tract map of Nashville. Along the north side of the Cumberland
River east of downtown, two large tracts of land were outlined in red. If Bobby remembered correctly, that area was residential with homes at least as old as those in Belmont and Green Hills.

“This is the parcel that is of most concern to us right now. You’ll need to go back into the agency’s land acquisitions and zoning applications to see if anything raises a red flag.”

Bobby leaned forward. “What fraudulent activity is suspected?”

Captain Carroll seemed impressed by Bobby’s simplistic question. “When a tract of land like this comes on the market and is rezoned commercial, someone at the agency requests an injunction against any purchase or development of the land, supposedly to give the agency time to go in and survey the property. The value of these two tracts of land in the four months they’ve been under injunction has dropped considerably.”

Bobby turned to look at his new boss. “So we’re thinking they find a valuable piece of land, stop development on it through the agency, wait until the property’s value bottoms out, drop the injunction, and buy it cheap?”

Carroll nodded. “Something like that. That’s what we want you to find out.”

“I assume the agency’s records are public?”

“Public, and on record at the Tennessee State Library and Archives. I expect you will want to spend part of your day Tuesday down there looking into it.”

Bobby vaguely remembered a high school field trip to the state library. But as a sixteen-year-old jock, the idea that the dusty old place that stored the records of the state government going back more than two hundred years might one day hold valuable information for him had never crossed his mind. Back then, he had been so focused on the dream of playing professional football, as his father had, that he paid little attention to anything other than football. But then he had been arrested….

Carroll was still talking. “…agency makes monthly reports to the
Metro Council budget committee and quarterly reports to the state senate’s budget committee.”

Though most people would find it tedious, Bobby actually enjoyed investigating government agencies—there were always more records, meaning a longer paper trail, giving him more points of access, a greater understanding of how the agency worked, and, usually, lots of evidence. “Are they completely government funded?”

Carroll looked down at the dossier. “Not entirely. The majority of their funding comes from state and local government, but they also have plenty of federal and private grant money—and they do tons of fund-raising.”

“Is there any evidence that any of those monies have been embezzled or used in the improper purchase of any of this land?” Only through great effort did Bobby stay seated. He was so anxious to start this investigation, he wanted to be on his feet, headed out the door to start.

“Add that to your questions-to-be-answered list.” Carroll laced his fingers above his head and stretched as if they’d been meeting for hours already. “I figured this would be right up your alley, based on cases you closed in California. Sounds like you’re eager to get going.”

Bobby shrugged. “It’s been a few months since I’ve had an active case.”

“Understandable. And that’s why I wanted to bring you in today, so you can have tomorrow to formulate a plan and come up with the list of resources you might need—as well as determine if you believe this case is prime for covert infiltration.”

Bobby pressed his lips tightly closed and ran his knuckles along his jaw. He had made the decision to leave California not just to be closer to the family but also because he was tired of the isolation and deception necessary to work undercover. Yet he did have the experience necessary to do it, and maybe that was why God had brought him here. Even so, it could be problematic that he had already told a couple dozen people he would be working for the TCIU.

Captain Carroll clicked the remote and the projector turned off. Bobby turned his chair square to the table again.

“So, are we talking…environmental group?” Bobby pulled a pen out of the inside pocket of his sport coat and slid the brand-new legal pad someone had been thoughtful enough to put on the table closer to take notes and start jotting down questions.

Carroll shook his head. “Sadly, no. We couldn’t make your first case with us that easy. It’s the Middle Tennessee Historic Preservation Commission.”

Bobby wrote the agency’s name at the top of the page, frowning. Something about that sounded vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t put his finger on it immediately.

“I will have my secretary make you a copy of the file before you leave this afternoon, though it doesn’t contain much information. There are two people we are especially interested in investigating. The first is the agency’s director, Dennis Forrester. Undergraduate degree in civil engineering from the University of North Carolina. Worked as a city planner and zoning official in several places for the first twenty years of his career, then must have gone through a midlife crisis because he moved to Nashville and went back to school to pursue his graduate degree in historic preservation at James Robertson University. He’s been the director of the commission for going on ten years now. We will need to look into his financials, because he seems pretty well-to-do for someone who’s been the head of a government-funded nonprofit agency for that long.”

Bobby started a list of actionable items under Forrester’s name down the left side of the page. He drew a line down the middle. “And the other person of interest?”

Carroll looked down at the file and frowned, thumbed through a couple of pages, then flipped back to the beginning of the file. He turned to call for his secretary over his shoulder. “I seem to be missing a page from my notes, but I have some of the pertinent information here. If I recall, the person’s title was assistant director and senior
preservationist. Um…let’s see…oh, here we go. Bachelor’s in history from Vanderbilt; master’s and PhD from Robertson, and all in six years.” Carroll’s secretary stepped into the room. “Julie, I’m missing the page on—”

The middle-aged woman handed him a sheet of paper. “I saw it sitting on my desk just as you called for me. Sorry about that.”

“Not a problem. Thank you.” The secretary left, and Carroll looked down at the page. He frowned. “Looks like there’s a typo on this. I’ll get her to fix it before she makes you a copy of the file. Okay. Says here the assistant director and senior preservationist is named Dr. Sarah Mitchell.”

Bobby’s heart dropped into his stomach. That was why the name of the agency seemed familiar. “Sir, is the first name spelled with a Z?”

Carroll looked down at the page then up that Bobby in astonishment. “How did you know?”

Bobby thought he might be sick. “It’s not a typo, sir. Her name
is
Zarah.”

Carroll rocked back in his chair. “Do you know her? Should I assign this case to someone else?”

With every fiber of his being, Bobby believed in Zarah’s innocence. But he had seen far too many assistant directors and vice presidents thrown under the bus and convicted of crimes perpetrated by their superiors to let someone else handle this case. “No, sir. I want this case.”

Chapter 7

A
nd that’s why we live in Nash
ville
and not Nash
borough
. Because during the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, we didn’t like the British, but we did like the French. So they changed the settlement’s name to the French
ville
rather than the British
borough.”

Zarah looked over the group of homeschooled children. Ranging in age from four to late teens, it was hard to gear her regular talk on Nashville’s history toward one end of the spectrum without either totally confusing or totally boring the other. However, she was starting to lose all of them.

“Who here has ever heard of David Crockett?”

Eyes lit up, hands flew into the air. She could always reel them back in with Davy Crockett—though they weren’t necessarily always thrilled to learn that the “King of the Wild Frontier” wasn’t nearly as glamorous as the TV shows and movies made him out to be.

Zarah continued the educational tour of the small museum that took up the entire first floor of the Middle Tennessee Historic Preservation Commission’s building. Now that everybody was back in school, she would have one of these field-trip groups to entertain and try to teach something at least once a week until Thanksgiving. She had learned over the years to structure these types of instructional lessons much
differently than how she taught the students in her adjunct Tennessee History class at the community college, which was also different than the Middle Tennessee History Seminar she taught at James Robertson University. The good thing about the pre-college school group tours of the museum was that she had no homework to grade afterward.

Dennis hadn’t been extremely happy to see her this morning. But as long as she remembered to not take deep breaths—which cut down considerably the number of coughing spells she had—everyone seemed to believe her when she told them she was feeling better. And, after spending the day yesterday with Caylor and Flannery sunning herself beside the pool at Caylor’s grandmother’s house, she really did feel better.

Besides, the last thing she needed was to spend any time alone; no sooner had she gotten home from spending time with the girls Sunday evening and yesterday, than thoughts of Bobby filled her mind. What was he doing back in Nashville? Why had he come to Acklen Ave. when he most likely knew she would be there? What did he want from her? And could Flannery really find some good-looking hunk of a man who would deign to be seen in public with Zarah just to make Bobby jealous?