Double Strike (A Davis Way Crime Caper Book 3) (15 page)

“Do you think, Punkin’, she was on the verge of running a raid on the production end? Do you think the Jennings killed her to stop her?”

“They may very well be involved in her death, Daddy, but I don’t think it had anything to do with the marijuana. I think it had to do with the casino.”

“Go on.”

“I think Elspeth discovered how the Jennings are winning.”

“Well, that’s the sister, right?”

“The sister has nothing to do with the game. The only thing we can pin on the sister is not reporting suspicious banking activity. The Jennings are well on their way to winning the tournament, Daddy, and I think Elspeth discovered
how
they were winning.”

“Any suspects?”

“No one and everyone. It could be a gaming technician. It could be one of the IT guys working the system behind the gaming. It could be the cleaning crew.”

For the next several minutes, I laid out my sketchy plan to follow the drug money, then try to connect anyone associated with the Strike Casino in the path of the drugs. I appreciate that my father didn’t point out what a long shot it was. At the end of my big speech, Daddy asked, “So when’s the wedding?”

*     *     *

“It seems to me, David, with all the time you spend on the streets, you would have known Thomas was involved in drugs and come to us.” They were deeply disappointed in David. They strongly questioned putting their
trust
in David. “Instead, Richard takes a middle-of-the-night phone call about our son, and I don’t appreciate it.”

Her dogs sat in her lap and glared at me. One curled a lip. The other rumbled, deep in its throat. How quickly they forget T-bone steaks.

“What do you have to say for yourself?”

One of these days.

One of these days.

“I’m sorry you have to deal with this, Mrs. Sanders.” They call it parenthood, Bianca. “And it’s circumstantial. Thomas is most likely innocent.” (Honestly, using the words “Thomas” and “innocent” in the same sentence almost choked me.) “It’s more likely that the Jennings boy is the one involved in drugs, and Thomas is only guilty of being on the same airplane with him.”

“He’s been
suspended
from school, David.”

It’s Davis. And his suspension is over tomorrow. Thank goodness.

“You’ll need to meet with the parents again and report directly back to me.”

Yes, I do need to meet with the parents again.

“Arrange something.”

Done. Quick drinks at Strike at six this evening. They wouldn’t commit to dinner with Bianca because it would cut too far into their legitimate livelihood.

“I expect you to get to the bottom of this quickly.”

#CanIGo?

“Now.” She crossed her legs the other way and leaned in. “I have a few more items to discuss with you.”

The redecorate after the remodel after the lightning strike was called Blizzard. What wasn’t blindingly white in the new and improved corner of the Sanders’ residence was mirrored. Everything hard goods was distressed mirrored. Everything soft goods was white—floors, walls, upholstery, window treatments, accessories. Bianca, no surprise, was dressed head-to-toe in black. For an hour after she finished lecturing and threatening me, I had a dark ghost image slicing through the middle of my field of vision. She went on for a while telling me I looked like a birth defect duckling with the new growth of hair framing my face—it had grown more than an inch after just four days and three bull treatments, it was fuzzy, and it did stick straight up. I could see her tiring on the subject of my hair, and knowing where we were headed, I tightened my grip on the arms of the snow-white chair. Her. Fur. Had I reacted in a timely manner, the fur could have been saved. It was—did I realize?—a limited production Valentino, no longer available in the United States, she wasn’t up to any additional cross-continental travel at the moment, she certainly couldn’t trust
me
to pick it up for her, and my days of wearing her furs were
over
. Got that, David? Over.

*     *     *

@StrikePlayers Day 4 done, 20 lucky players left standing. #WhoWillWin? #StrikeItRich

SIXTEEN

It’s a strange phenomenon when the qualities and attributes you’re initially attracted to in a person end up being the very issues that split you apart. I’ve seen it many times. A girl I went to high school with, Candy Mobry Reese, used to stand in the middle of Banana Street on Thursday afternoons to flag down Roll Me One Rufus, a lunch wagon specializing in burritos, on its weekly Greenville-to-Selma run, so she could get a chili potato burrito. One Thursday when we were in 11
th
grade, she climbed in the food truck, married the owner/operator (Rufus, who was seventeen years older than Candy Mobry), and from that moment on, did nothing but complain about burritos—the smell, the heat, the thirty pounds she gained, life on the road chopping onions ain’t easy. The innocent burrito, the very thing that brought them together, was the very thing that ripped them apart. Candy Mobry divorced Rufus five years later. By then she’d suffered irreversible loss of tooth structure as a result of chemical dissolution from living on a steady diet of chips and salsa. The acid erosion took fifteen of her twenty-eight teeth, and it wasn’t too long before Candy had to have the other thirteen yanked out. At age twenty-two, Candy woke up in a dentist’s chair with a set of ComfyLites stuffed in her mouth she owed $23.99 a month on for the next eleven years. To this day, if you use the words “refried” or “bean” in her company, she will pop out her lower acrylic plate and nail you between the eyes with it.

Fantasy dealt with it too. Her husband was hysterical. The way Reggie sat in a chair was funny. He ate breakfast (burritos) funny. The man just thought funny. Spending time with Fantasy and Reggie could be a painful experience, because when Reggie’s there, everyone’s doubled-over. Ask Fantasy the how-did-you-know question, and she’ll tell you she’d never laughed so hard in her life. As it turns out, though, constant laughter and family life don’t always mix. When their second son, K2 was born (the boys’ names all start with K; I call them K1, K2, and K3), Reggie had the delivery room so in stitches with a story about a four-foot-long corn snake he’d rescued along the side of the road, locked in the trunk of his car, then forgot about until the next day when it crawled through the backseat ski slot and wrapped itself all over an Assistant Special Teams Coach for the New Orleans Saints Reggie was taking to lunch, that halfway through the story, Fantasy delivered K2 on the floor. She tried to get someone’s, anyone’s, attention, but her cries were drowned out by the hilarity. The obstetrician, wiping corn-snake tears from his eyes, literally dropped their newborn son on the delivery room floor. And the laughs just wouldn’t stop. Last year, Reggie took his three sons through an eye-hand coordination exercise involving a basket of clean matched sports socks and a domed ceiling light fixture. The story was side-splitting. The fire was four-alarm. The very thing that brought Fantasy and Reggie together was the very thing that repeatedly threatened to put them asunder.

So, when I tiptoed through my front door at two in the morning, having not gotten in at a decent hour, Bradley was waiting up for me. I stood face to face with the increasingly sticky situation that threatened our happiness—my job. The very thing that brought us together. My picture-perfect husband-to-be was the perfect picture of anger and frustration. He said two words. “Dammit, Davis.” He turned, marched down the hall, then slammed the bedroom door.

Our first six months together, Bradley couldn’t get enough of my job. He was fascinated by it. He wanted details. He strategized with me. He understood. He helped, tossing out legal opinions. His appreciation of my work peaked around our one-year anniversary, and since then, it’s been on a slow downward spiral. Last year, my near-miss, bullet-whizzing, and computer wizardry stories went from the “You’re amazing, Davis!” column to “You could be arrested for that, Davis.” This year? On our bumpy way down the aisle? Bradley was sick of my job—the hours, the danger, the circumvention of traditional (and by traditional I mean rational) methods of discovery and apprehension. Elspeth’s death sent him over the edge.

If Bradley presented me with an ultimatum, it would break my heart. I’d never choose the Bellissimo over Bradley, but those wouldn’t be the stakes: he’d be asking me to agree to a relationship in which he was the lead. And what would that make me?

#TheBehind

Maybe it’s my short hair causing all the problems around here.

*     *     *

I gave him his space and I took mine.

The to-do laundry was at Code Red.

#Guilty

Actually, everything under this roof was in a neglected mood. I hiked around the clothes mountains in the laundry room. Note to self: Raise hell with Erika Cleaning Woman. I found a comfy enough pajama combo in the dryer, both items Bradley’s, and left Bianca’s Rebecca Minkoff pink zip-crepe dress in a puddle on a basket full of damp towels. I was too wired to sleep after a long night at Strike, and too tired to resist biting if I got in bed and Bradley dangled any bait, so I fired up my laptop.

The laptop I drag from work to home and home to work is a thirty-two gigabyte with a one terabyte hard drive, plus turbo boost, so it operates at speeds up to three-point-four gigahertz. It had 10/100/1000 gigabit Ethernet LAN, so it will work fast and anywhere—Narnia, Hogwarts, Middle Earth, the Regent Beachfront Luxury Condos in Biloxi, Mississippi. The operating system is your standard Microsoft issue, but I had it loaded with all sorts of goodies. Like ShareWork. In simple terms, ShareWork makes comparisons. Type in apples and ask the software to compare it to oranges, then the program comes back with attributes they have in common. (Trees.) I hacked it years ago. I went to the source code, found the compiler, and broadened the fields. Next, I programmed it with a Magic 8 Ball feature that merged the data, then took a lucky guess at what it all meant. Bottom line, I super-sized ShareWork. So when you enter apples in one field and oranges in the other, then shook the Magic 8 Ball, the program returns thousands of Sangria, smoothie, and fruit salad recipes. With the upgrade, I could enter huge amounts of data for detailed comparisons. I could upload lists, embedded tables, kitchen sinks, images, PDFs, then ask ShareWork to compare it to a different set of statistics/files/data, and if the two sets of information had any commonalities, if they crisscrossed anywhere, the software would find it.

I uploaded the memory card from Brianna Strother’s computer. Then I uploaded the memory stick from Elspeth Raiffe’s computer. I asked ShareWork to compare everything from the two sets of data and find anything that was remotely related. Like
Match Game
. A show Granny Dee loved when I was little. (#GeneRayburn) After ten minutes, ShareWork popped up a clock. Based on the uploads, give it four hours for results. Which I didn’t mind. Four ShareWork hours were the equivalent of four hundred manual hours. Which I didn’t have.

I turned out lights until the only hint was the glow of my hard-at-work laptop on the dining room table. It was new moon. It was pitch black. I made my way down the long dark hall to fix things with Bradley and ran smack dab into him as he was on his way to fix things with me.

“I don’t know what you’re afraid of, Davis.”

(This was hours after we went bump in the night.) (In the hall.)

We were nose-to-nose and whispering. “I’m not, Bradley. I’m not afraid.”

“You are. You know I would never ask you to quit your job. Never. If and when we have a family, if
you want to work, and that’s your decision, I think you should have a more supervisory position like Jeremy’s than the in-the-trenches job you have now, because it’d be safer. Or you might want to think about cutting back to just the Bianca end of your job. But again, Davis, that would be up to
you
.”

I could do a job more like No Hair’s. All day long. Full-time Bianca? No way.

“I think something’s bothering you,” Bradley said, “and whatever it is, you’re avoiding it by throwing yourself into Elspeth’s murder like you’re the only one who can get to the bottom of it. And you’re doing it, I think, to keep from dealing with whatever’s bothering you.”

“Why are you saying all this, Bradley?”

“Because while you’re intent on clearing up the divorce, you’ve said nothing about getting married.”

(Really? I hadn’t?)

“And I’m not the only one working the Elspeth case.”

“You’ve gone total Lone Ranger on this one,” he said. “When’s the last time you talked to Fantasy? Gotten her take? Delegated anything? What about Baylor? He always has a fresh perspective, yet you’re intent on doing everything yourself.”

Oh, dear.

“So,” I could barely hear him, “I don’t think it’s because you want to be the hero, Davis. I think it’s so you can avoid dealing with whatever it is you don’t want to deal with.”

“Where’s this coming from, Bradley?”

“My heart, Davis.” He ran a finger along my baby-fuzz hairline. “It’s coming from my heart.”

*     *     *

Happy! Happy! Happy! Happy Wednesday Morning @StrikePlayers! 10 more out, semi-finals tomorrow. #StrikingItRich

*     *     *

“Richard and Thomas left for New Hampshire at seven this morning. He’s meeting with Thomas’s advisors and such.”

No Hair’s Tie of the Day featured the Superman shield. It was nine in the morning, and we were in his mancave of an office, each with a cup of Coffee of the Day from Beans, the coffeehouse in the lobby. After one sip, I wanted to pull my gun out and shoot it. Baked Alaska. (#Ridiculous) (#Nasty)

“Did Bianca go with them?”

“She thinks she did.” No Hair polished off his coffee and looked at mine inquiringly. I pushed it over. Be my guest. “So lay low until mid-afternoon,” he said. “If she sees you, she’ll know she didn’t bother to attend her only child’s disciplinary hearing.”

“I’m a terrible mother.”

“That you are, Bianca,” No Hair said, “but you’re good with a computer. What’d you come up with?” He peeked at his watch. “We have sixty hours before the feds take over and this place closes.”

“So far, a bunch of nothing, but maybe a little something.”

We locked brains.

“You think you have something?”

“Maybe.”

“Who?”

“It’s not a who,” I said. “It’s a what.”

“Okay, Davis. What?”

“Chairs.”

No Hair looked to the heavens and shook why-oh-why hands.

“What do you need?” he asked.

“Time at my desk.”

“Okay,” he said. “One more thing before you go.”

“What’s that?” I began collecting my things.

“You knew when we hired Levi we’d be working with him.”

“I didn’t think it was a good idea then, No Hair, and I don’t think it’s a good idea now.”

“Get used to it.”

*     *     *

My casino career, to date, had me answering to two men. Two men I trusted, respected, and, at the end of the day, cared about. Throw Bianca into the mix, who, at the end of the day, I’m not so sure I care all that much about, and I had one too many bosses. We worked around the former casino manager, Ty Thiboduex, not for him, and in my opinion, that’s the way it should be. Internal Affairs doesn’t brief the Chief of Police every morning, because invariably, the Chief’s going to hear something that hits too close to home—his training officer’s name, who would never take a bribe, or his buddy’s son’s name, who would never steal from the evidence lockers—and the next thing you know, the whole system is compromised. The checks and balances are gone. I say keep Special Forces special.

Mr. Sanders was the one who suggested, with Mr. Thiboduex retiring and Levi Newman coming in, we should make our team available to him. I didn’t like the idea at all. I presented my argument, was voted down, but a compromise was reached: We wouldn’t have to report to Levi Newman until after the Strike It Rich sweepstakes. Which, at the time, meant I could get good and married before I became the casino manager’s whipping girl, and we all know how that turned out.

I didn’t like the casino manager position in the first place. I think it’s structured for failure. One man responsible for how profitable the casino is, every employee on the casino floor, and every casino patron. There are several conflicts there. Have one person responsible for the employees, another for the patrons, and charge them both with profitability. As it is, I can’t see how a casino manager wouldn’t lean one way or the other: he’s either going to lean in the direction of the player, slighting the employees, or the other way around. Give a casino manager an investigative team, and his ultimate responsibility for how his casino performed would go away—he’d have someone to blame.

Me.

I can’t understand why anyone would want the job in the first place. Christmas off? Forget it. A home with a yard? No. A family? Vacations? Never. If you are the only thing between a casino owner and profit margins three hundred and sixty-five days a year, you live on site, you’re on call, you’re in the fire all day every day, and you’re lucky to get to the casino manager’s residence for even a few hours of sleep at a time. (Down the hall from Jay Leno’s place.) Casino managers had an attitude too: I make a million dollars a year, therefore I am gold. You, spy girl, wouldn’t have a job if it weren’t for me. Which brings us to the upside of being the casino manager at the Bellissimo: the million. What kind of person trades their life and everyone in it for a big title and money they don’t have time to spend? The kind of person I don’t care to work for.

I didn’t like anything about it.

I guess I’d better get used to it.

*     *     *

I had the office to myself. Fantasy, having passed out liquor until closing time again last night, would check in around two for her gold spray tan (back by popular demand) before another shift in a bikini and gold heels. Baylor, who’d been working during the day keeping Little Sanders busy, then working the Strike shift at night, probably hadn’t even rolled over yet, but would be in around the same time. I probably should sit down and talk to them both.

And I probably should grow my hair back.

Every day, I get better results from bending over double with a hair dryer and a round brush so when I stand up and shake my head, what’s left of my long hair points to my nose and chin—think Victoria Beckham—covering the new growth, but I want to be able to pull it back, out of my face. I miss my ponytail. So before I hit the computers, I loaded my head up with noxious bull goo. I dug through the accessory drawer in our dressing room and came up with a knit snow hat. It never snows in Biloxi. I don’t know why we even have this hat. It was powder blue with a pompom on top, ear flaps, and long knit ties tipped with tassels. The hat contained the smell and was absorbent, so it kept the rest of me bull-free. Not to mention I looked perfectly gorgeous.

I went from the dressing room to the bullpen, where I gathered pizza boxes and fake beer bottles—the décor of Little Sanders. I bagged it all and tossed it out the door. I disconnected all things Xbox, and tossed it all in Baylor’s little closet. I went back and got the stupid bean bags we’d all tripped over a hundred times and stuffed them in there too. I brewed a pot of non-Alaskan coffee. Having taken care of things in two of our three rooms, I opened the office door and woke up the computers. Now. I rubbed my hands together, mad-scientist style. To work.

*     *     *

ShareWork matched a shipping manifest filed with Gulf Container Cargo submitted by one Melanie Turner York on Brianna’s computer with a UPS delivery confirmation signed by the same Melanie Turner York on behalf of a Fort Payne, Alabama, chair manufacturer, Have A Seat, which it found on Elspeth’s hard drive. It ran Melanie York back through Brianna’s data and found her name listed on an APIS (Advanced Passenger Information System) manifest filed with the FAA as a passenger on 0821MS, a Pilatus PC-24, the same private plane listed in an incident report filed by the DEA office in Bedford, New Hampshire, naming the Brewster-Exeter Academy for Boys in Haverhill, New Hampshire, as the location of the incident. Included in the report, a (non-minor) student’s name, Quinn Jennings, which pulled a match with Jennings Tree Farms in Lickskillet, Alabama, which sent the software flying to TuscaloosaNews.com’s photo attributes under a Roll Tide Crazy feature naming Melanie Turner York and Missy Jennings Roll Tide Crazy Fans of the Day. The matches zigzagged for seventeen computer screens and somewhere in the middle, ShareWork pulled a link to a DVD collection that guaranteed I’d never miss another putt or my money back. On sale for $49.99.

Nothing’s perfect.

I wiggled my fingers in the air, squeezed my eyes closed, then clicked the Magic 8 Ball icon. I watched data fly until ShareWork came back with a flashing name. The name popped up sixteen times in Brianna’s evidence and twenty-three times in Elspeth’s, and neither had flagged it, acted on it, or for all I could see, even noticed it.

I sat perfectly still until I reached for the phone. I dialed.

“Have A Seat. This is Melanie.”

“Hi, Melanie. I need to speak to Walter Shaefer.”

“Mr. Shaefer’s not in.”

#GotHim

“Can I take a message?”

“No,” I said, “but maybe you can help me. I bought a chair from you and it’s broken. How do I get a refund?”

The line went dead.

#Bingo

I spun my chair around in surprise when the office door banged against the wall. Fantasy was wearing an open trench coat, a gold bikini, fuzzy pink slippers, and she had my ex-ex-husband Eddie the Ass Crawford by the ear. “Look what I found.”

“God almighty. Is there a skunk in here?”

“Shut up, Eddie. What are you doing here?” Then I asked Fantasy, “Have you ever seen this man?” I held up Walter Shaefer’s picture.

Eddie made a very derogatory comment about my headgear. Fantasy kicked him out the door and into the bullpen with a fuzzy slipper to his rear end. “No,” she said. “Wait. Maybe. He looks familiar.”

*     *     *

“Your sister is dating a doctor.”

“So I heard.” I was on one sofa; Eddie sat as far away from (the scent of) me as possible on the other sofa. His stupid legs were slung over the arm. He was stretched out and propped on an elbow. “Is that why you’re here, Eddie? To fill me in on Meredith?”

“I’m here to talk about us.” Eddie Crawford sucked his teeth.