The Survivors Club (10 page)

Tess said, “What’s your interest in this, Mr. Sheppard? Are you related to Mr. Barkman?”

“No. We’re friends. He was doing a job for me, and now I’m wondering if it got him killed.”

CHAPTER 18

Tess and Danny sat in on the interview at the Tucson Police Department midtown substation. The substation was located near the Reid Park Zoo—Tess thought this was appropriate, considering the many strange people who found themselves under the bank of fluorescent lights and in trouble. Cheryl Tedesco found a room big enough for the four of them. She rounded up sodas, water, and coffee and sat Alec Sheppard down at the postage-stamp table. Tess and Danny were strictly observers.

After her introduction on the tape recorder, Cheryl got down to it. “You told us that Steve Barkman was working for you?”

“Not officially. He was looking into something for me.”

“But you paid him?”

“I did, yes. I paid him expenses, and sent him some money for his time.”

“What was he looking into?”

“It’s a little hard to explain.” Sheppard was one of the few people who didn’t look washed out like aged cheese under the fluorescent lights. “This is going to sound outlandish. Steve was looking into an incident that happened to me a couple of weeks ago.”

“This was a job he was doing for you?”

“He wanted to do it as a favor to me, but I thought he should be paid.”

“Why would he do that?”

“We were roommates at the University of Arizona. A long time ago.”

“What work did he do?”

“He was looking for someone for me.”

“And who was he looking for?”

“He didn’t say.”

Tess tried not to react. She kept her face bland. Now Barkman was dead and the lead he was following might be dead with him. “Why didn’t he say?”

“He told me he wanted to be sure first.”

“And that’s why you’re here?”

“I wanted to see for myself if the person Steve was tracking was the guy I saw last month on a jump.”

“On a jump? What do you mean by ‘on a jump?’”

“I’m a skydiver.”

“And this guy Barkman is tracking, he’s also a skydiver?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you said you met him on a jump.”

“It’s a long story.”

It was going on five p.m. and the sun was lowering in the sky when Tess and Danny walked out to the parking lot.

Danny said, “So this guy Sheppard comes here because Steve Barkman has a hot tip on a guy who aimed his finger at him?”

“The guy aimed his finger at him right before he jumped out of a plane and his chute didn’t open. I can see why he’d come here.”

“You believe the guy.”

“What does he have to gain?”

“Hey,
guera
, if you don’t know…”

Tess knew what Danny was talking about: people who liked to attach themselves to investigations, who got a vicarious thrill from being in on what the police were doing. “He doesn’t strike me that way, Dan.”

Danny mumbled something.

“What did you say?”

“Guy bothers me, is all. What about this bullshit about a jogger putting a sticker on his chest?”

Tess had to admit that bothered her, as well. What an outlandish claim.

“If this is true,” Danny said, “it shoots the hell out of the freak accident theory. It could be the guy who threatened Sheppard—and I use the term ‘threatened’ loosely—might have objected to Barkman finding him, In a big way.”

“I think Cheryl’s going to look at Barkman in a whole new light.”

“Barkman’s death was a homicide staged to look like an accident?”

“Could have been a smart move,” Tess said. “The way it looked, we spent a lot of our time concentrating on how freaky it was.” She stood by her car, which she’d managed to park near the shade of a eucalyptus tree. “It could have happened like this. Someone was there, hanging out with him, having a beer, and noticed the light was out.”

Danny nodded. “Yeah. So. Whoever it was—and now maybe we’ll never know—pointed it out to him. Like: hey, your light’s out. And while he’s up on the ladder, the guy kicked it out from under him. But how’d this guy know falling into the coffee table would kill him?”

“Maybe Barkman hit hard and while he was out—”

“Or at least disoriented.”

“They helped him along.”

Tess knew they were thinking about the same thing: the shard of glass that went straight through Barkman’s eye and into his brain.

After Danny drove out, Tess waited a while. She watched some joggers follow the path at Reid Park, enjoying the smell of the sprinklers on the grass at the golf course.

When Alec Sheppard came out of the substation, Tess walked over to see if he’d like to go out for a drink.

They met at a bar called Badwater on Fourth Avenue. It wasn’t far from the Marriott where Alec was staying, and he told her it brought back memories of his college days. By now the sun was almost down. They sat outside at a picnic table under the lights, surrounded by a kite-string of moths. There was a lot of babble of beer-drinking patrons, but not so loud they couldn’t talk.

Cheryl Tedesco had been thorough, but Tess wanted to go over it again, in case there was a revelation she might be missing.

After some small talk, how he’d liked the U of A, what he did for a living—he’d run a company that had specialized in oil cleanup in the Gulf—Tess said, “You said Steve Barkman worked for you. But he didn’t give you a report?”

“No. He’d only been looking into it for a few days.”

“How many days?”

“Four? Five. Five days.”

“Did you talk to him during that time?”

“I thought we went all over this before.”

“Bear with me. What did he say?”

“He said he thought there was a connection.”

“What kind of connection?”

“He didn’t say. But he recognized him. He wanted to be careful because the guy had money, and he didn’t want to get in the middle of a lawsuit. Maybe he was worried about defamation of character.”

Tess said, “Could you wait a minute? I’ll be back.”

“Sure.”

Tess left him and headed for her car. She’d put a copy of
Tucson Lifestyle
magazine in the murder book, which now resided in her briefcase under the front seat of the Tahoe. In a perfect world, she’d have other, similar photos of men the same age to go with it. But who was she kidding? It wasn’t a perfect world.

Back at the bar, Tess handed Alec the magazine. “Would you mind looking through it?”

There was a question in his eyes, but she just nodded at the magazine. “Just flip through it.”

He stopped where she expected him to stop.

Looked up at her, his face grim.

“That’s him.”

“The man you saw at the jump center?”

“That’s him.”

“Had you met him before?”

“I don’t think so. But I meet a lot of people. I can’t say I’m absolutely sure about that. But Steve knows—knew him.”

Tess remembered at DeKoven’s office, the look on Michael DeKoven’s face when she mentioned Steve Barkman. She wondered if Barkman had made contact with him by then. “What did Barkman say about the guy he was investigating?”

“He said something about pulling the surveillance tape at the center.” He added, “Wish I’d thought of that.”

“But he didn’t tell you who it was.”

“He wanted to be sure.”

“But you were surprised whoever it was lived in Tucson?”

“A little. It’s been a few years since I got my degree. Maybe he knew me from a jump. At the time I chalked it up to making an enemy here somewhere along the line, and maybe that’s what happened—could have been when I was jumping at SkyDive Arizona in Eloy. Skydivers live in a small world. We’re always running into each other.”

“Can you think of anything that might have made the guy go off on you like that?”

He stared into space, thinking. Shook his head. “No, I can’t. But he looked at me like he knew me. When he pointed the finger gun at me, he acted like it was a big joke. No, that’s not right.”

“Not a joke?”

“It was a joke, but it was a mean joke. It was…I guess the closest thing I can describe it to is celebrating in the end zone.”

“Why do you think he did that?”

“If he found a way to sabotage my rig, then I think he did it because he knew he could.”

“You mean if you were killed.”

“Yeah. No one would ever know.”

Tess noticed that he seemed to take the idea of being killed in stride. “If it’s true, he really screwed up.”

He grinned. “I guess I’m just naturally a survivor.”

Tess said, “There’s no doubt your rig was sabotaged?”

“None. My reserve rig was up for repacking—I wouldn’t be allowed to jump without having it done. Every hundred and twenty days the rigger has to repack the reserve. It’s a safety issue.”

“You think DeKoven bribed the rigger?”

He sat back. “He didn’t have to. Since it’s a long wait, the owner of the rig doesn’t usually stick around, so all the guy who wants to sabotage the pack has to do is wait until no one’s watching, find the rig he’s looking for, and cut the cables.”

“It’s that simple?”

“Oh, yeah. He could pretend the pack is his and he’s checking it—all he’d have to do is lift the flap to the cable housing and cut the cables with wire cutters—the cables to the main canopy and the reserve canopy. No one would ever see it. The pack is sealed with a red cord and a lead seal. Extremely doubtful the pack’s owner would recheck it. There’d be no reason to.
I
sure didn’t.”

The band, a local group called the Blasphemers—they were loud and pretty good—struck up, and it was hard to talk for a while. Finally they took a break.

Tess asked him, “Did you ever meet Jaimie DeKoven?” Michael DeKoven went to Stanford, following in the footsteps of his father, but his little sister Jaimie spent a couple of semesters at the U of A.

“Who’s that—a sister? No, I don’t remember her. I don’t remember anyone by that name.” He grinned. It was an attractive grin. “I met a lot of girls in college.”

“I’m sure.”

“Did you go to college? Can you remember every guy you ever met, or even dated?”

“Nope. Not a one of ’em,” Tess lied.

Unfortunately, she remembered every single one of them. She’d pushed them to the back of the file cabinet and let the cobwebs grow. She said, “Tell me again about the tagger.”

He ran down the facts. His jog on the roof of the Hilton Atlanta. The sinking sun in his eyes, the jogger coming toward him and slapping the tag on him.

“You didn’t get a good look at him?”

“He wore a hoodie. And I was looking right into the sunset. It was just a shape, just a jogger—I didn’t pay any attention until he smacked me in the chest.”

“And you went after him.”

“Eventually, but he got a head start.”

“Height?”

“Shorter than me.”

“Sex?”

“We’ve been through this. It was dark, hard to tell, what he was wearing—a jogging suit with a hoodie.”

“I was hoping the beer goggles would help.” She glanced at the half-full beer glass at his elbow. “Quick—height.”

“Shorter than me.”

“You’re six foot one, two?”

“Two. I’d say,
maybe
, five eleven.”

“Build?”

“Slight. A jogger, or maybe more like a long-distance runner.”

“Do you think the tagging and incident in Houston are related?”

Sheppard hesitated. Then he said, “It had the same kind of feeling.”

“What feeling?”

“Like the joke was on me.”

Tess asked about the tag.

“I threw it away. I thought it was just some stupid punk playing a prank.”

“It had the number five on it?”

“Yeah, but they could have gotten that anywhere. I saw it kind of like tagging, like graffiti. Only I was the surface instead of a wall.”

“You were assaulted.”

“Yes.”

“You said it was like tagging. But you know what it makes me think of? Wilding.”

He thought about it. “But those are bands of kids, right? And they don’t just stop at assaulting somebody. They’ve killed people. So you think it was random. Some kid showing off for his friends? That I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

“Could be. Anything else you can remember?”

Sheppard looked inward. She could see him trying to come up with something. When you tried, it usually didn’t work. But then he shifted his gaze to her, and if he’d been a slot machine he would have rolled three sevens.