A Murder In Passing (3 page)

Chapter Three

The Blackman and Robertson Detective Agency occupied an office suite in the Addison Court building three stories above Asheville's historic Pack Square. We had no employees. What with cellphones and sophisticated answering and call-forwarding services, we could work efficiently and effectively in and out of the office. So, with business slow, I'd gotten into the habit of drifting into the office whenever I felt like it.

I'd begun volunteering at the V.A. hospital several hours a week, and some mornings I dropped by for coffee with wounded vets from Afghanistan and Iraq. I'd appreciated the outside companionship when I underwent physical therapy, and I felt a duty to show there was life after a debilitating injury.

On the Monday morning after my mushroom adventure, I left my apartment near Biltmore Village and took the back way around Beaucatcher Mountain to the Charles George V.A. Medical Center on Tunnel Road. A cup of black coffee and a blueberry muffin would be my ticket to a cafeteria discussion where I would contribute by listening, by simply being a presence in the midst of the turmoil and uncertainty facing our wounded vets.

As I pulled into the visitors' lot, my cellphone rang. Nakayla's ID flashed on the screen.

“What's up?” I asked.

“Are you with your buddies?”

“No. Just got here. Still in the car.”

“We have a client.” Nakayla's words sparkled with excitement.

“Who?”

“A Marsha Montgomery.”

“Is she there?”

“No. I set an appointment for eleven.”

“Well, I hope it's not tracking some two-timing husband. Did you tell her that's not our specialty?”

“She said it's about a burglary and she wants to meet in person.”

I glanced at my watch. Nine-thirty. A burglary case was more interesting than anything else we had going at the moment.

“I'll take the meeting,” Nakayla said. “Just wanted you to know.”

“I'll be there, but I'm going to drop something off at the hospital first. See you no later than ten-thirty.”

The something I had to drop off were two of Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels I'd promised a young special ops soldier named Jason Fretwell. I found him sitting alone in the cafeteria, and from the clench of his jaw, I saw he wasn't having a good morning. A couple of guys a few tables away waved for me to join them. I waved back and then nodded toward Jason. They understood he needed my attention more than they did.

“Hey, Hotshot.” I dropped the books by his tray. “Here's just the thing to take your mind out of here.”

He looked up without smiling. “Hi, Sam.”

A half-eaten bowl of granola sat in front of him. I saw dribbles of milk splattered on the front of his shirt. He gripped a spoon awkwardly in his left hand. From his right sleeve projected the mechanical fingers of a prosthetic device that attached to the stump of his lower arm. Shrapnel from a roadside bomb had shredded the exposed portion of his body as he rode in the passenger's seat of an armored personnel vehicle. A sniper by training, Jason Fretwell now couldn't hit his own mouth with a spoon.

I slid into the seat across from him. “How's it going?”

“Down the toilet.” He pounded his artificial hand on the table in frustration. “I can't get this piece of crap to work right.”

I pushed the books closer to him. “Then I guess you'll have to spear these pages to turn them.”

Anger flared in his dark brown eyes. His pale skin flushed and he reached out and grabbed my forearm with his artificial fingers.

The pressure felt like a vise squeezing flesh against bone, but I held his gaze without flinching. “Go pick on someone who has two good legs.”

Jason's mouth dropped open. He stared at the alien fingers digging into my skin. Confusion swept over his face and then amazement as he marveled at the precise manipulation he'd unconsciously made. He looked like a kid whose basketball shot just swished through the net from half court. Hell, he was a kid, barely in his twenties.

“Sorry.” He released his grip, but he wasn't sorry. Suddenly, he was alive.

I shrugged. “No problem. For three weeks, I kept kicking people because I didn't know where my new leg ended.”

“And now you chase down bad guys.”

“Maybe, if they're eighty-years-old and on a walker.” I rapped his prosthetic hand with my knuckles. “Look, this device isn't ever going to be as good as your own flesh and blood. If you make that the standard, you're going to go through life bemoaning what you can't do instead of pushing yourself for what you can. I know. I've been at that crossroads and I came close to taking the path to self-pity.”

“Why didn't you?”

“Because a woman without an arm yanked my chain.” I didn't tell him the woman was Marine veteran Tikima Robertson, Nakayla's sister, and that her interest in me was part of the actions that led to her murder. “She bluntly told me to get off my ass and on with life.”

Jason nodded. He studied the curve of his prosthetic fingers. “I'll never be able to shoot again.”

“Yeah, and you'll probably never be able to salute without knocking yourself in the head.”

He straightened his mechanical fingers, brought his hand just above his eyebrow in one smooth movement, and shouted, “Yes, sir!”

A smattering of applause broke out from adjacent tables. Evidently, our exchange had drawn an audience.

Jason held the salute but he couldn't hold back the broad grin.

***

A victory is a victory, whether solving a case or helping a young soldier through a crisis of hopelessness. So, my encounter with Jason Fretwell did as much for me as for him.

I entered the offices of Blackman and Robertson light of heart and ready to impress our potential client with my deductive skills. Maybe I'd solve the case from an armchair in our conference room, besting Sherlock Holmes and even his smarter brother Mycroft.

“Good morning, my love.” I stepped across the threshold into a room not unlike Mycroft Holmes' Diogenes gentlemen's club. An Oriental rug covered most of the hardwood floor. Two brown leather armchairs sat opposite a matching sofa. We'd designed the decor to project the air of stability and trust. Like we'd been in business over a hundred years. At least that's what I told Nakayla. Actually, I pushed for the purchase because we could get the furniture for a huge discount off the showroom floor and the sofa was long and comfortable enough for me to lie down and nap.

The conference room was the first area a visitor entered. A door to the left led to my office, a door to the right went to Nakayla's. I found her at her computer, staring at an online newspaper.

“I said, ‘Good morning, my love.'”

She swiveled her chair to face me. “You have to be more specific as to who you are. So many men love me I didn't know what to say.”

“How about ‘Sorry, I'm taken.'”

“Okay. As long as I'm not taken for granted.”

“Never.” I leaned over and kissed her on the lips.

She kissed me back, and then looked at me quizzically. “No alcohol on your breath. I would have sworn you and the boys had been passing a bottle.”

“I'm drunk on life.”

“So that's why you fell on your face Saturday.”

“Way to rain on a guy's parade.”

She laughed. “The rain was going to fall sooner or later.” She gestured to her computer monitor. “I forwarded you the updated stories about Mr. Bones that ran in this morning's Asheville and Hendersonville newspapers.”

Sunday's papers only reported that a human skeleton had been found on the North Carolina–South Carolina border, probably because newspaper staffs on Saturday and Sunday were skeletal themselves. Even the Internet had been quiet last night as the law enforcement agencies from the two states must have agreed to limit details so early in the investigation.

“Has Mr. Bones got a name?”

“Not yet. The remains are staying in Greenville, South Carolina. That county's population is about four times the size of Henderson County and they have more lab resources.”

“They'll probably keep the case unless circumstances bring the investigation back across the state line.”

“You made the papers.”

“I did?” Suddenly I was more interested in the journalistic quality of the reporting. “No one ever called me.”

“That's because the person who locked up Friday forgot to forward the phones. There are five messages on the machine from reporters wanting to talk with you.”

“Oh.” Of course, I was the person who neglected to forward the phones. I waited for Nakayla to rub my nose in it, but she gave me a pass.

“Actually good publicity,” she said. “Both articles describe you as Asheville's most famous detective. They make it sound like you went looking for the body.”

“Who am I to argue with the press?”

“Who are you to argue with anybody? Just go read your clippings. The mysterious Marsha Montgomery will be here in less than thirty minutes.”

I did as I was told and closed the door to my office. Not that I had a need for privacy but because my office was always a mess and we shielded it from a client's curious eyes.

I rolled my chair away from the cluttered desk to the side credenza where I kept my computer. I'd forgotten to turn that off as well and the screen glowed to life as soon as I moved the mouse.

I first followed Nakayla's link to the Asheville newspaper story. It was in the regional section and simply stated that skeletal remains of an unidentified man had been discovered in the woods near Tuxedo on the North Carolina–South Carolina border. The report said the preliminary forensic analysis conducted in Greenville, South Carolina, determined the deceased had been an adult male who may have died between twenty and forty years ago. No law enforcement authorities were quoted.

The article touted me as the man who found the remains. I was described as one of the top private investigators in the state with a reference to the successful solution of the high-profile murders of Tikima Robertson and Asheville police detective Roy Peters, the case that brought Nakayla and me together. The reporter speculated I might have uncovered the remains as part of an investigation, but that I had been unavailable for comment. Just as well, I thought, since it saved me detailing the headfirst plunge into the rotten log.

The article in the
Hendersonville Times-News
landed on the front page below the fold and offered more details. Deputy Overcash was quoted saying, “The investigation will be jointly conducted by the Henderson County and Greenville County Sheriff Departments, given the skeletal remains were found within a few feet of what might be an inaccurate marking of the state boundary. We are particularly concerned if the deceased turns out to have been a Henderson County resident.” To my relief the deputy downplayed my role saying, “Mr. Blackman happened upon the remains while on an outing with the Blue Ridge Mushroom Club. The discovery was accidental and Mr. Blackman isn't involved in the investigation.”

However, despite Overcash's accurate statement, the newspaper article went on to give a one-paragraph profile of me, highlighting the case Nakayla and I solved the previous year that was triggered by a death on the mountain behind the historic farm of poet Carl Sandburg. I was again lauded, this time as one of the top private detectives in the South, a statement Nakayla saw as good publicity and Deputy Overcash probably saw as an incentive to run me over with his patrol car.

Both the Hendersonville and Asheville stories had one glaring omission: neither mentioned the discovery of the slug. That wasn't bad reporting, it was withheld information. I understood the play. Why tip someone off that the police were looking at a homicide?

At the scene, Nakayla and I had been advised by one of the Greenville deputies not to give any details to the press, but no one had specifically mentioned the bullet. I suspected the decision to leave the nature of the investigation vague had been made at a higher level than Deputy Overcash and his counterparts from South Carolina. ID the remains first and then look for suspects and motives before the public, and thereby the guilty, realizes the case is a full-blown murder case. That's the way I'd have played it.

A single rap sounded on my door. I clicked out of the article. “Be right there.”

“Keep your seat.” The door swung open and Hewitt Donaldson entered. He held his ever-present mug of coffee in one hand and a curled newspaper in the other. “I just came to bask in the glow of the best detective in the friggin' galaxy.”

Hewitt was Asheville's top defense attorney and his offices were next door. In his sixties and a product of the Sixties, the former hippie-turned-Perry Mason relished any case that went up against the system. He'd championed so many underdogs he could have started a kennel club.

“You're the one to talk about glow. You're hurting my eyes.”

Hewitt's orange and red flowered Hawaiian shirt looked like it was powered by a nuclear generator. I was surprised he wasn't followed by a swarm of honeybees.

“You can borrow it. I hear mushrooms grow in the dark. With this shirt, none of them will be safe from your amazing detecting skills.”

“Can it, Hewitt. If you must know, I tripped and found the skeleton by accident.”

He looked at his newspaper. “So, the story's correct? I thought surely the mushroom gig was a cover to get you on the property.”

“Nope. The galaxy's greatest detective is also the galaxy's greatest klutz.”

“That's much more believable.” He took a sip of coffee, clearly relieved the world order had been re-established. “Still, your fungi knowledge could come in handy. I have this case of athlete's foot needs investigating.”

“As often as your foot lands in your mouth, it's probably spread to your tongue.”

Hewitt laughed, and I knew for once I got the best of him.