I briefly reconsidered the idea of heading off to Reed’s funeral, then just as quickly dismissed it. I didn’t mind running into the police and the news media; hell, by now I ought to be used to it. But his kids were going to be there and his relatives and friends, and there were bound to be those who would be, shall we say, distressed at my presence.
Shall we say, might take a notion to beat the crap out of me.… Do the words lynch mob have any bearing on this situation?
I quickly typed up my notes on the conversation with Erica Benedict and printed them, then stuck them in my file. In this business, sometimes you go on instinct even when past experience shows you that instinct can get you in a lot of trouble. This time my instincts told me that this was worth going after. It was like looking at a crowd of people in the fog. The wind shifts and one or two faces pop into focus for a moment, and then it shifts again and you see another face, but now the first two are clouded back over. But you take the memory of one face and tie it with the memory of another and eventually you figure out why the crowd has gathered.
Why would R. J. Reed even think of taking over Spearhead? Spearhead Press had made him rich, richer than any deal he might have dreamed of. He’d gone for the Big Lick and gotten it. The man had an ego, but wouldn’t life as a famous bestselling author satisfy him? Why would he even want the headaches of running a publishing house? Take the money and run.
And how was he going to do it? Travis Webber and Karl Sykes owned all the voting stock in Spearhead Press. Or at least I thought they did.
Once again, I thought, shift happens.
In the meantime, I remembered that there was yet another story in the afternoon paper describing a murder I’m supposed to have committed. Maybe I should read it, just to stay current with things. I once heard someone say there’s no such thing as bad press.
I’m not at all sure about that.
The radio in the Mustang had a bad habit of periodically dying for no reason and then coming back to life when I least expected it. For the past day or so it had gone comatose on me and no amount of knob-twisting or dashboard-slapping would get sound out of it. I was on my way back across the river, en route to Lonnie’s place to reconnect with his computer, when I got jammed up on some road construction on the Victory Memorial Bridge. It was nearly four o’clock and the traffic was thickening by the moment.
A Hispanic guy in an orange vest with a walkie-talkie lowered a pole with a stop sign on the end and the line of cars came to a halt. I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. I hate to sit in traffic. Maybe it’s having to pay for the wasted gasoline; hell, I don’t know. I only know I’ve got one nerve left and this was getting on it.
Five minutes or so later the guy held the walkie-talkie to his ear, then raised the pole. We crept forward and as I got onto the bridge, I saw a large steel plate covering what I guessed was a hole. The car in front of me lurched as it went up on the thick plate, then bounced again as it came off the other side.
I had the car in first gear and eased slowly up on it. When I dropped off the other side, the radio popped loudly, then came back on with a blast.
“Jeez,” I yelled, reaching for the volume knob before it did any permanent hearing damage.
“This is Sean O’Brien,” the radio voice said, “for WMOT-FM news. Our top story this afternoon is the proposed shake-up at the Metro Nashville Medical Examiner’s office. Sources within the mayor’s office report that a deal is underway that would turn over the operation of the medical examiner’s office to a private company.”
“Holy cow,” I whispered, turning the volume back up and hoping the radio would stay on.
“The mayor’s office is reportedly in negotiations with a new company that was recently formed among several local forensic pathologists. That new company—ACA, or Autopsy Corporation of America—would take over a newly reorganized medical examiner’s office on a contract basis. ACA officials, who refused to speak for attribution, claimed the company can run the medical examiner’s office more efficiently and save the taxpayers money, while at the same time making a profit for company stockholders.”
“Yeah, right,” I muttered. “Republicans, no doubt …” My old boss at the newspaper had a wonderful term for it—anal accounting. You decide what numbers you need, then you pull them out of your ass.
“Dr. Henry Krohlmeyer, the embattled head of the Metro Medical Examiner’s Office, was unavailable for comment and sources within the mayor’s office would only confirm that discussions with ACA are underway. In the meantime, the Davidson County Grand Jury continues to look into allegations that the office is plagued by mismanagement.”
I crossed the river into East Nashville, cut left for a block, then pulled into the parking lot of the Shell station on Main Street. I fished a quarter out of my pocket and dialed. When the answering machine came on, I tried to sound as calm as possible.
“Marsha, it’s me. You there?” I waited a moment. “C’mon, damn it! Pick up!”
There was a click and then her voice, flat-lined, lifeless. “Yes.”
“Hi, it’s me.”
“Hi, babe.”
“You’ve seen the news.…”
“Heard it. Kay called.” Marsha was sleepwalking, big-time.
“What is this Autopsy Corporation of America crap? They gonna hang out a sign that says ‘Autopsies R Us’?”
She didn’t react; I’d hoped for at least a chuckle.
I tried again. “Look, why don’t I come on over?”
“No,” she said. “Not necessary. I’m okay. Really.”
“No, you’re not. I can tell.”
“I saw the afternoon paper. You’re the one who ought to be not okay. Did you see that article?”
“I read it. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it’d be. It only reported the family’s allegations. The cops explicitly said there was no indication of foul play and they were just investigating.”
“And you take that as a good sign?” A little life came into her voice.
“It could be worse.”
“I’m the one that should be worried about you,” she said. “Look, I’ve got to go. That fellow’s coming to look at the Porsche in a few minutes.”
“Why don’t I just come over?”
“No,” she said firmly. “I mean it.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “Call you later?”
“Sure. If you want to.”
“Yeah, I want to.”
“Bye.” She hung up. I stood there holding the phone, staring off into the space where the abandoned Genesco factory used to be a few years ago before they tore it down and turned it into an urban park. Broken beer bottles and other assorted forms of trash littered the area.
“Yo, man, you done wid’ dat?”
I turned. Tall black guy—baggy shorts, Bulls jersey, red bandanna—glared at me.
“Sure,” I said, hanging up and backing out of the guy’s way. I went back to the car and sat for a minute or so, trying to figure out what to do next. Nothing much came to me, but after a while I started the car and pulled away. Sitting parked in this part of town was a clear message that you were looking for trouble, and I already had plenty of that.
By the time I got home, the news media had given up and left. It was too close to their deadlines for the six o’clock news to get anything useful out of me. I pulled into my driveway, got out, opened the garage door, then parked the Mustang inside. Ordinarily, I’d have just left it in the driveway, but on this particular evening, I preferred to leave no evidence that I was home.
As I walked up the driveway to the steps leading up to my apartment, Crazy Gladys peered out through a slit in the Venetian blinds. I caught a glimpse of the movement in my peripheral vision, stopped, and turned slowly to glare at her. Just as my eyes caught hers, the blind closed and she was gone.
I shook my head, disgusted with Crazy Gladys and the world in general, then headed for the steps. I stopped at Mrs. Hawkins’s back door and peered in. Her furniture was still there, which meant the rev and his wife hadn’t been by. Given the events of the past few hours, I decided I was being entirely too accommodating to them. I made a mental note to have the locks rekeyed; then they’d have to work around my schedule to get their stuff out.
Serves ’em right, I thought. They can stand a little inconvenience, given that they’re trying to have me sent away for a murder I didn’t do and that wasn’t committed in the first place.
I turned, walked down the driveway to the mailbox, and retrieved a small stack of envelopes. The electric and gas bills were there; I had two of them to cover now, oh, joy. And there were several catalogues for Mrs. Hawkins. Nothing else, which was fine with me.
In the back of my mind, I was still running around in circles trying to connect the dots between what I’d learned from Erica Benedict and from my research. The names—Sirius Corporation, Spearhead Partners II, LLP, and the mysterious Harvest Moon Corporation—danced around in my head. There had to be a way to tie them all together, and something told me that when all the dots were connected, the portrait of a killer would emerge. Nobody kills the goose that lays the golden egg without a reason, and R. J. Reed had laid the biggest golden egg any of them had ever seen. Somewhere in all this mess, there was an answer. But where was it? How could I find it?
I threw my coat on the kitchen table and walked into my bedroom. The shoes went in the corner and the shirt flew magically across the room and draped over the easy chair. I sprawled on the bed, popped a tape in the tape player, and punched the button.
The Jim Cullum Jazz Band’s cover of Louis Armstrong’s arrangement of “Potato Head Blues” filled the empty spaces about as well as anything else I’d ever found. The sweet double cornets wailed away while the clarinet wove its way in and out seamlessly. Every time I think there’s no reason to keep pumping, I plug something like this in and think, Yeah, it’s worth hanging around another day.
I stared at the ceiling and smiled, listening to the brass crescendo after the other solos. I think the thing I’ll hate most about being dead—whenever that happens—is the silence. Darkness doesn’t bother me, but an eternity without “Potato Head Blues” is unfathomable.
I unbuckled my belt and undid my pants, then raised my legs to pull them off me. When they were upside down in midair, the pockets emptied themselves. A wad of change, keys, burglar-alarm remotes, a single guitar pick—don’t ask me where the hell that came from, except that everyone in Nashville seems to carry one—and little hunks of fuzz rained down on me. I muttered an appropriate epithet, then rolled onto my side to scrape the junk into a pile on the bed.
In the middle of the mess was a single silver key separate from the ones on my key ring. I picked it up and studied it for a second.
“Where the hell did you come from?” I asked out loud. No answer was forthcoming, so I lay back on the pillow and stared some more at the ceiling.
Lonnie’s? No, that was the tubular Chicago Ace Lock key, and that one was on my key ring already.
Extra key to my office? The house?
“House,” I whispered, and jerked upright in bed. It was a house key, all right, but not my house key.
It was the key to R. J. Reed’s house out in Williamson County. I reached into my pants, grabbed my wallet. Inside, in the compartment next to two twenties, was a folded yellow Post-it note. I unfolded the slip and read the series of numbers. They were the codes to the burglar alarm and the front gate.
I’d just been thinking about all the missing pieces, all the information I still needed.
R.J.’s office. They’d just finished burying him. He wouldn’t care.
“You’re out of your mind,” I whispered.
But I was still under retainer to Victoria Reed, with the charge of finding the man who had murdered her husband. I needed information and the only place I could get to that might have that information was R. J. Reed’s office. I was her employee; I’d explicitly been given permission to go on the property last Saturday night. She hadn’t told me not to go back. I could stretch it and claim implicit permission.
Some stretch.
“This is insane,” I said out loud. Then I reached for my pants.