Surest Poison, The

1

In a rural
county fifty miles east of Nashville, Sid Chance turned his restless gaze to
the front window. The rustic cabin perched like a stalking bobcat high on a
wooded hillside. After the rain had moved on, a few slivers of moonlight
revealed indistinct outlines of tall hardwoods that crowded the steep slope.
Though small, only two rooms, the cabin provided everything he needed. He
had found he could do without electricity or running water.

     The odor of
seafood and soy sauce lingered in the air. He had cooked supper on his camp
stove around eight, a stir fry concoction fashioned from canned vegetables
and shrimp. That was when the rain started. After eating and cleaning up the
mess—though not the tidiest of cooks, he didn’t like feeding bugs—he turned
down the oil lamps and tried to relax in his homemade recliner. It wasn’t
easy. This return to the hideaway where he had enjoyed a peaceful life for
nearly three years left him wondering if he’d made the right decision in
leaving. Going back to the type of work he had pursued for more than three
decades left him exposed to the same flawed humanity that had chased him up
here in the first place.

The warmth of dying
flames in the small fireplace soothed muscles weary from a day of lifting
rocks and toting logs.
Nature was unforgiving if you ignored her for long. Despite the doubts that
plagued him, the fire’s warmth and the lullaby of rain chattering musically
on the roof proved more effective than a Valium. He soon dozed off. He awoke
around two in the morning.

With the commitments he had made, he knew
it was time to get back to the city. He lit the stove, put on a pot of
coffee, gathered up the few things he had brought along and stuffed them
into his duffle bag. After pulling on his boots, he donned a flannel-lined
windbreaker, slogged out into the soaked underbrush and closed and locked
the heavy wooden shutters over the windows.

Back inside, the zesty aroma of Colombian
coffee pervaded the room. He filled a large mug emblazoned with a brown bear
and the initials
NPS  and
drank it slowly,
like a condemned man savoring his final cup. And, like a condemned man, his
thoughts slipped back to the source of his greatest agony, the false bribery
charge that had tainted his good name, costing him the job he hadn’t planned
to give up until retirement. Lurking in the back of his mind was the
unfinished business of putting a name to the person who had set him up.

Soon it was time to hit the road. He
snuffed out the lamps and doused the smoldering logs, slung the duffle over
his shoulder, grabbed a garbage bag and his battery lantern and trudged
downhill to where he had parked his truck. Despite efforts to clear part of
the meandering trail, it remained treacherous in the dark tangle that
remained of late summer’s erratic growth. Regardless of what it had or had
not accomplished, this brief return to the basics was over.

The patrol car
cruised slowly through the remnants of a chilling rainstorm. At the wheel
was a bored Metro Nashville park policeman more concerned about winding up
his shift
without  getting
soaked than in
looking for trouble. He found it anyway. As he watched the rain tap-dance on
the asphalt up ahead, something odd caught in his peripheral vision. Off to
one side, where everything should have been green or brown, lay a splotch of
red. His eyes snapped open wide. He braked to a stop, backed up,
swung
his spotlight around. The bright beam
picked out a sight that ruined his night. A body clothed in a bulky red
jacket sprawled beside the road.

The officer shrugged into his raincoat,
pulled on his cap, and trudged out into the shower.
A
young cop with more experience at changing diapers than in confronting
trauma on his beat, he approached the still figure with the caution of a
hunter unsure if his target was alive.
The man’s cap had fallen off,
leaving black hair matted against his head. When the officer’s flashlight
played over the jacket, he saw what appeared to be bullet holes in the
cloth.

Not pausing to check for a pulse, he
hurried back to his car and called in an apparent homicide.

East Precinct
Homicide Detective Bart Masterson
stood outside the glow of portable floodlights set up beside the road in a
secluded section of Shelby Park. Had it been daylight, he would have looked
across at the railroad trestle that spanned the Cumberland River. Though the
rain had passed, the clouds masked any hint of stars or moon and a musty
dampness lingered in the air. The chill led him to poke slender hands into
the pockets of his navy jacket. A six-footer with the tenuous build of a
scarecrow, he wore a black mustache like an inverted V. It gave him the look
of legendary Old West lawman Bat Masterson, who might well have been an
ancestor. He turned away from the indistinct tree line as a hound bayed in
the distance.

The detective stared at the prone figure
lying face down on the soggy ground. What had been a living, breathing human
being only hours ago now amounted to little more than deteriorating skin and
muscle and decomposing organs of no intrinsic value to anyone but a forensic
pathologist.
It was a sight he had encountered
way too many times, but, as with all the others, he wouldn’t rest until he
dug into every corner it took to find the killer.

The scene had been exhaustively
photographed. A technician from the Medical Examiner’s office, a short man
with tousled hair and a pinched brow, knelt beside the victim, checking the
random pattern of small holes in the red jacket still soaked from the rain.
He rolled the body onto its back and studied the front of the jacket.

“I count five entrance wounds in the
back,” he said without looking up. “Don’t see but three exits in the front.”

“Good,” Masterson said. “Maybe you’ll
find some lead.”

“Hopefully.
My guess is it was a .38.”

“Let me know when you have something
definite.” The detective turned to a crime scene officer standing nearby
with a large flashlight. “You got anything?”

“Negative. We’ll check again in the
daylight. There’s definitely no brass. He was probably pushed out of a car.”

Masterson shook his head.
“Five slugs.
Somebody damn sure had a grudge
against him.”

It was still
dark
when Sid Chance pulled off
I-40 at the Old Hickory Boulevard exit. He turned his vintage brown pickup
toward Madison, a rambling middle-class suburb on the northeast side of
Nashville. A big man, every bit of six-six, he had a headful of black hair
and a short beard to match, both laced with threads of silver. The last time
he had glanced in a mirror, the glower he saw made him think of a troll. He
recalled an old admirer saying he looked like a Hollywood hero when he
smiled. He wasn’t so sure. He hadn’t done all that much smiling in recent
times.

Though most of the area’s workers
remained asleep or just getting started on breakfast, traffic moved at a
moderate pace on the circumferential highway. After crossing the Cumberland
River, Sid took the cutoff north to Gallatin Pike, Madison’s Main Street.
His office, a grudging requirement of his new life, occupied a corner in a
glass and stone building near RiverGate Mall, anchor for the community’s
primary shopping area. One strip center after another lined both sides of
the street, deserted mini-cities at this time of day.

He glanced at his muddy boots and smudged
jeans as he ambled toward the front of the building. He needed a shower and
clean clothes, but that could wait. He figured his chances of encountering
someone now little better than those of holding a winning lottery ticket.
Nobody was fool enough to come in at this time of day except a habitual
early riser, something he’d been since service with Army Special Forces in
Vietnam. That’s where he learned to exist on a minimal amount of sleep.
Inside, he turned toward his office and glanced at the “Sidney Chance
Investigations” sign on the door. It brought one of his infrequent grins.
How cool would it have been if they had named him Random instead of
Sidney.

The answering machine chirped its
practiced greeting as he walked in. Welcome back to what most people would
call the real world, he thought. Maybe a few more months of civilization
would rekindle his appreciation for the marvels of modern technology. Right
now they seemed more an annoyance. A computer glitch that had gobbled up
three days of painstaking work was the kicker that sent him back to the
cabin for a cooling off period.

He found six messages on the machine. Two
from Jaz LeMieux wanting him to return her calls, two from guys he didn’t
know and doubted he wanted to, one from a process server, and one from a
lawyer seeking his help. He played that one again.

“This is Arnie Bailey, with the law firm
of Bailey, Riddle and Smith. Jasmine LeMieux highly recommended you for a
job I need done. She said you were good at finding missing persons. This is
a little different, however. It’s a missing company. My client faces a major
financial disaster if we can’t find the organization involved. It’s a
chemical pollution case around Ashland City. I’d appreciate your calling me
as soon as you can.”

He glanced at his watch. It was way too
early to call a lawyer, even somebody who sounded as anxious as this one. He
decided to go home and shower, eat breakfast, then come back and have
another go at it. No doubt the calls from Jaz related to Bailey’s problem.

Sid lived in the ranch-style brick house
his mother had called home for twenty-five years. She died around the time
his career as a small town police chief crashed and burned. The house stood
near the river at the end of a quiet street in a neighborhood of mostly
young couples and a few retirees. The sky had begun to brighten by the time
he pulled into his driveway, though dirty gray clouds seemed to hang within
arm’s reach.

He reveled in the soothing spray of the
shower. It drummed against his back like a masseur’s fingers, easing some of
the troubled thoughts that had knotted up his mind on the drive back from
his hillside retreat. Despite a lot of jury-rigging, he had never come up
with a reliable way to get a hot shower in the backwoods. He dressed and
settled into the compact kitchen for breakfast. As he poured milk onto his
cereal, the phone rang.

“Glad you finally decided to answer.” Jaz
LeMieux’s voice had an edge.

“I just got home a little while ago.”

“From where?”

“The cabin.”

“Don’t you answer your cell phone?”

“When it’s turned
on.”

There was a pause. “I think you’re
reverting to your mountain man persona, Sid.”

He said nothing.

“Have all my efforts been wasted?”

“I did a lot of pondering last night,” he
said. “But I came back.”

At first he had credited his financial
mentor, Mike Rich, with the responsibility for luring him out of
self-imposed exile. Lately he had begun to lean toward Jaz.

“Have you talked to Arnie Bailey?” she
asked.

“I went by the office around 5:30 and got
his message off the answering machine. What’s the story?”

“You’ll have to get the details from
Arnie.”

“He a friend?”

“He’s a good guy. He’s done legal work
for us.”

At forty-five, she served as chairman of
the board of Welcome Traveler Stores, a lucrative chain of truck stops her
father had founded. She was also a sharp, attractive, persuasive woman who
knew how to get what she wanted. Sid wondered how much pressure she had put
on the lawyer.

He settled back in his chair. “Bailey
says you told him I was good at finding people.”

“You are. You’ve navigated those
databases like an old pro.”

“Fine, if the computer would quit eating
the results.”

“I told you I could fix that.” Jaz held a
computer science degree as well as an MBA. She knew the inner workings of
the machines as well as arcane methods of mining the Internet’s secrets. “Is
that why you went traipsing back up the mountainside?”

“Partly.
There were other issues.” Sid rumpled his brow. “Bailey mentioned a
pollution case.”

“There was a story in the paper, but I
didn’t get a chance to read it. Do you plan to call him?”

“Yes. But I doubt he’d be around this
time of day.”

“I know he gets to his office early.
Maybe not this early, but he likes to be well prepared before court opens.”

“Okay, Jaz, I’ll talk to him. That’s a
promise.”

“Good. Let me know what he says.”

Sid placed the portable phone back onto
its base. Despite occasional disagreements, he couldn’t help but like her.
She had no reason to continue pushing him other than a belief that it was in
his best interest. Jaz had been the key to his entry into the PI business.
With his background, he had slipped into the role as smoothly as pulling on
a pair of comfortable sneakers. He found running investigations for private
clients a convenient and, so far, profitable way to stay involved in police
work. About the only drawback had been a feeling that sometimes Jaz’s
efforts skirted the boundaries of his independence.