T. Lynn Ocean - Jersey Barnes 03 - Southern Peril (22 page)

“I have another question.”

“I couldn’t be more surprised.” Rapid keyboard clacking sounds. “Does my time
on this particular question
pay?”

“It’s one question, Soup. Good grief.”

He told me that lawyers charge for their time, even for single questions that come over the phone.

“Then get a law degree,” I said. “Listen, I’m in front of a desktop PC at Argo’s restaurant. I need to find out if there are audio files on here. What do I do?”

Soup wanted to know what type of audio files.

“There’s more than one kind?”

“Next time I come to the Block,” he said, “I’m bringing friends. And we’re going to order lots of shrimp and whatever the fresh catch of the day is, and a boatload of bottled imports.”

“Fine,” I agreed.

He gave me detailed instructions as to what to do on the desktop, and we went back and forth for five or six minutes when I came across a drop-down list of files that ended with “.aif.” The letters stood for audio interchange file format, Soup explained. Like I’d actually remember that in ten minutes.

“There are about twenty or twenty-five files with that same extension, and each one is titled by a date, I think,” I said. I double-clicked on one to open it, but nothing happened.

Soup asked if I had Internet access. I asked Morgan. Morgan told me to click on the little Internet Explorer icon. I did. In a few seconds, the World Wide Web lay at my fingertips.

“Send me an e-mail with all the files.” Soup gave me an e-mail account address to go to, along with the password to get in. “This account will handle large file sizes, so you can probably send them to me all at once.”

I did as instructed, and after four attempts, Soup had received all the audio files I’d found on Morgan’s computer.

“I’m headed to your place,” I told my hacker friend.

“Bring me soup, then. Whatever their soup of the day is. And beer. I’m about out of beer.”

Soup is an ex-fed who got tagged with the nickname because he always eats soup when he works. He’s something of a soup aficionado. On the way out, I cautioned Morgan to keep up his normal routine but to stop listening to the Green Table. Unless the doctors came back. He agreed.

I collected my father and Fran, signed the tab, and left Argo’s with a self-adhesive wireless microphone and three Styrofoam containers. The bug had come from the underside of the top panel of the wooden hostess stand. Whoever had placed it could only be listening from the road or the parking lot in front of the building. And since its battery remained good, it had to have been installed recently. The to-go containers held a catfish-and-mango-lime soup and a “midnight” snack for Spud and Fran. I forced myself not to think about why they might need a midnight snack.

We cruised back to the Cape Fear Marina, navigation lights cutting through the darkness, Spud and Fran debating the merits of their bananas Foster flambé, prepared tableside for dessert.

“If I want burnt food,” Spud was saying, “I can light something on fire at home, for crying out loud.”

Concentrating on the water, I tuned them out and wondered what Ox was doing and if he’d been thinking of me as much as I’d been thinking of him.

Still driving the
bodymobile, I see,” Soup said when he let me into his place.

“The price was right.” I handed him the container of soup and a six-pack of Coors Light. “Besides, it grows on you. Great sound system.”

Although it was well past eleven, Soup’s place was brightly lit and buzzed with energy.

A mixture of genuine retro and modern tech, it held a U-shaped command center in the living room. Monitors, printers, computers, and a plethora of electronic stuff connected by a highway of wires and cables were placed strategically so he could wheel his desk chair to position himself in front of anything. Each time I visited Soup’s place, the screens were flatter and larger, the computers smaller, and his collection of gadgetry bigger.

“Those files you e-mailed were taped conversations.” He held up
a stack of stapled papers. “I used a voice recognition program to translate them into text documents, so you’ll see a few strange words and punctuation marks.”

While Soup made food appreciation noises over the Styrofoam container of catfish-and-mango-lime soup, I sat down with my bounty. The top of each page was labeled with the audio file’s date and total length. The conversations spanned a seven-month time period, and all took place before Morgan relocated to Wilmington. Before his father died. Which indicated that Garland had likely put the Green Table’s bug in place for a specific purpose. He was the only person who had access to Argo’s small office, and rumor had it that he always kept the door locked. Fanning through the conversations, I saw that they were all of the Divine Image Group doctors. Either Garland suspected them of something or he planned to blackmail them. Odd, since everyone said that they’d been family friends with Garland and Rosemary for years. On the other hand, people say that best friends make the worst enemies.

Flipping back to the first conversation, a brief one that didn’t reveal anything other than a discussion over that day’s plastic surgeries, I noted that it took place mere weeks after Rosemary died. Interesting.

Soup twisted the caps off two bottles of beer and gave me one. “Excellent soup. The spice is perfect. And whoever would have thought of pairing catfish with mango?”

“The chef at Argo’s.”

“I’d like to meet him,” Soup said, meaning it. Skilled hackers and creators of appetizing chowders were his heroes.

I scanned each stapled stack of paper and was fast-forwarding through their headers when the doorbell sounded.

“You expecting anyone?” Soup asked. I told him I wasn’t.

A video screen displayed a man standing outside his door. The
doorbell sounded again. Soup did something to make the outdoor camera zoom in on the visitor’s face. Brad stood there, hands stuck in his pockets.

“Crap,” I said. “My DEA buddy. He must have followed me.” Unless he’d put a tracking device on the hearse. Bastard.

“You want me to let him in?”

“If we don’t, he’ll sit out there and wait for me.” I rubber-banded my stack of transcripts and put them on the floor with my handbag, facedown.

“Plenty of ways to get rid of your boy,” Soup said, wicked grin stretched across his face. “Like, for example, I could hack into the local police dispatch, pop in a description of Brad and his vehicle, and code it with, oh … something like soliciting a minor. At a rest stop. Yeah, that’ll work. Then we place a 911, using one of my voice modification programs. We’ll make it a female caller, with a European accent, like a tourist. A frantic mama can say that a man just exposed himself to her daughter at this location. She stopped to get directions at the convenience store. She gives an exact description of Brad and his vehicle.” Soup nodded to himself. “Then we sit back and watch the light show outside my window.”

I sighed. “Soup, just let him in.”

“My way would be much more entertaining.” Soup opened the door. I introduced the two men. Brad scanned Soup’s place, taking in all the electronics.

“What do you want, Brad?” I think my hands were on my hips.

He said something about driving by and seeing my hearse and stopping by to say hello.
Yeah, right.
I’d have known if he’d followed me. My government-conditioned brain has been trained to maintain a high level of awareness. Doing so is second nature. Which meant that Brad had probably attached a GPS device to the corpse caddy. It made perfect sense that someone in his position
would do so. But the fact that he’d gotten away with it pissed me off.

I dug through my handbag, found the microphone I’d removed from Argo’s hostess stand, and held it out. “This what you’re looking for?”

He pocketed the quarter-size device without looking at it.

“I’ll return the tracker you put on my car, too, soon as I locate it. Sometimes, though, I accidentally drop and smash those little GPS thingies. So you might want to go get it yourself and save me the trouble of removing such an expensive gadget.”

Brad’s arms moved without purpose for a few seconds before he folded them across his chest. “You do realize that you’re interfering with an ongoing investigation?”

“I’d never do that.” I made a show of imitating his stance. “As I told you before, I’m merely doing a favor for a friend.”

We eyed each other, playing the who-will-blink-first game.

“Jeez, you two,” Soup said. “Go get a room already.”

I blinked first and threw my gaze on Soup. “What are you insinuating?”

He looked at the ceiling, as though everything were obvious. “Nothing. Never mind.”

“A hotel room might be fun,” Brad said.

“Sure, if I swept it for audio and video first.”

“It’s been real.” Soup herded us to the door. “Not so fun, though.” He claimed he had piles of work waiting, but I think he just wanted Brad out of his place. Even though Soup used to be a federal agent, he’s leery of active uniforms and undercovers. They make him uncomfortable.

Seemingly not offended, Brad said that pancakes would be good, and I agreed to join him at a twenty-four-hour diner. Like I needed pancakes. Or live conversation from Brad at midnight.

Sitting
across from each other in a corner booth at the Waffle House, Brad and I continued to eye each other like two wary tigers thrown together in a cage. Territorial. Stubborn. The same species, but not always hospitable to its own kind. Something about him got under my skin, like an unseen chigger that itched just enough to be irritating.

“Why have you been listening to the Argo’s hostesses?” I asked. “And from where, just out of curiosity.”

“Nearby house,” he said. “Weekly rental. My team has been rotating shifts during restaurant hours. Main phone line is hot, too.”

I should have known. “Learn anything interesting?” I asked. As if he’d tell me.

He chugged some coffee. “We know who is eating at Argo’s and how many people are in their party every evening.”

“Wow.” I stirred cream into my coffee. “Your information-gathering skills are phenomenal. Do you keep a spreadsheet of the chef’s nightly specials, too? Maybe a breakdown by entrées from land or sea?”

Our banter went on until the food arrived: his tower of pancakes and my egg sandwich. His looked better.

“Tell me, Jersey Barnes …” He poured syrup on the stack for a full ten seconds, until the little glass syrup pitcher was half-empty. “Are you this abrasive with everyone you encounter, or just me?”

I finished a bite of sandwich before answering and took my time to do so. “Nope, not everyone. Only con men.”

“I’m a con man?”

“If I recall, you are the one who suggested that we work together on this Argo’s thing. Said we could share information, help each other out. Yet all you’ve been doing is keeping tabs on me. You’re
certainly not sharing.” I drank my coffee. Ate a bite of egg sandwich. “You want to get something for nothing. Which makes you a con man.”

Brad burst out laughing. “My grade-school teachers always noted on report cards that I didn’t play well with others.”

At least he didn’t take himself too seriously. I gave in to a smile. “I don’t really have a good reason to stay mad, do I. You’re just doing your job.”

He stuffed a forkful of soppy pancake in his mouth and nodded. “Right. And I don’t really have a good reason to stay mad at you, either, do I.”

“Nope,” I said. “But there is
something
about us that rubs each other the wrong way.”

He wiped syrup from his lips, stared at mine. “Definitely something.”

We finished our food and coffee, and Brad agreed to remove the tracker he’d put on the corpse caddy. He put money on the table, telling me he’d expense the meal. “Next time you want to expense a meal with me,” I said, “how about a lobster dinner?”

He asked what I’d learned at CC’s Hair Boutique.

“Well, crap.” I threw up my hands. “I start to like you a teensy bit, and you go back to being a jerk.”

The waitress returned with change, and we walked out to a brightly lit parking lot. Brad retrieved a Swiss Army knife from his Murano, got on his back, scooted beneath the front end of my hearse. “Go easy on me, Jersey,” he said through a grunt. “We both want the same thing.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

He rolled from beneath the hearse, straightened up, brushed himself off. Held out the tracking device to prove he’d removed it. “We both want to figure out who’s the entrepreneur behind this prescription drug ring and put him out of business.”

I showed him my cocky smile. “Nice pep talk, Brad. Translation: Your girl didn’t get a thing from CC’s hair place, did she.”

He did the lopsided grin. “Nope. Except she got her roots done, whatever that means. Went back two days later for a haircut. Expense-reported both.”

I found my keys and climbed into the wagon. “Let’s meet tomorrow and I’ll tell you everything I learned at CC’s—where, by the way, Alex took care of my split ends. Forty-two dollars for a wash, cut, and blow-dry.” I held out a hand, palm up. “Plus tip.”