“You first,” she said, perching on the edge of the loveseat, as far away from him as she could get and still be seated in the same room.
He sipped his wine. “What do you want to know?”
“Is your name really Matt Hayslip?”
He nodded.
“And you really live here?”
He nodded again.
“But you don’t work for Southern Utilities.” She made it a statement.
“Not really,” he agreed. “I borrowed that sedan from a buddy who does security work for them. I made the business cards on my PC.”
“What do you really do?” she asked. “Why are you so interested in us? In Parker?”
“I’m a private investigator, I guess you’d say. I really did retire from the GBI a couple years ago. Towards the end of my career there, I sort of developed a specialty. White-collar crime. Financial fraud. I worked some cases that turned out well. Put some bad guys in prison. Met some important people. After I took early retirement, I decided that was the kind of work I’d pursue. Nice, clean, white-collar crime. No homicides, no maggots, no gunplay. But it wasn’t all that easy. I’m not a CPA, not a forensic accountant. I couldn’t get any assignments.”
He glanced at her to see if she was paying proper attention.
She gave him a withering look. “Poor you.”
“Until this May,” he said. “I got a call from a guy who knew a guy who knew me. My first big client.”
“Whoopee,” she said.
“My client runs a company that provides human-resource services to firms that don’t want to handle that themselves. He does all the payroll work, taxes, benefits, all of it. He had billings of fourteen million dollars last year. He was thinking of going national, franchising.”
“I take it back,” Mary Bliss said. “This isn’t that fascinating.”
“I’m getting there,” Matt said. “A year ago, my client, Jerry, hired this brilliant software consultant. His name was Parker McGowan.”
Mary Bliss’s eyes widened.
“Parker was going to supply him with new software that would streamline all the billing functions,” Matt said. “He had impeccable credentials, referrals out the ying-yang, all of it. And things were going gangbusters.”
“Until,” Mary Bliss said.
“Until Parker McGowan disappeared. Into thin air.”
“He drowned. In a boating accident in Mexico,” Mary Bliss said.
Matt put his fingers to her lips. “Shh. It’s not your turn yet.
“Parker disappeared. But even before he disappeared, Jerry started having some doubts. Revenues weren’t what they should be. Something was off. Jerry’s a bright guy. He has good instincts. He took a closer look at his software, and he found out Parker’s little secret.”
Mary Bliss raised one eyebrow.
“Ever hear of a practice called graveyarding?” Matt asked.
“No.”
“Parker knew all about it, which kind of surprised me,” Matt said. “It’s been around a long time. I used to do it myself, back when I was a rookie patrolman. Here’s how it works. Say the lieutenant gives you a quota—write six traffic tickets today, or don’t come back. It’s a slow day. You maybe only catch two or three lawbreakers. So you take a drive over to the nearest cemetery. Find a recent headstone. Copy down the name and date of birth and death. Take a run over to the library, look up the name in the phone book or a recent city directory. Write up a ticket for the dead guy, take it back to the lieutenant. Everybody’s happy.”
“Parker was never a cop,” Mary Bliss said.
“No,” Matt agreed. “But he was a criminal. And he was real good at graveyarding. Here’s what he did. For every one of Jerry’s clients, Parker set up two or three graveyard employees. He even gave ’em fake social security numbers, and mailing addresses, all of them at post office boxes. So every pay period, those ghost employees were getting paid, and their paychecks were being sent out—to post office boxes rented by your husband.”
“I don’t believe it,” Mary Bliss said. “Parker never so much as ran a red light. He wasn’t capable of something like that.”
“Really?” Matt looked amused. “He was capable of stealing your marital assets, capable of refinancing your house and potentially leaving you and his daughter homeless, but he wasn’t capable of something like that?”
Mary Bliss pressed her lips together tightly. “He was my husband. He’s dead. I can’t dwell on the mistakes he might have made.”
“You better start dwelling on them,” Matt said, leaning forward until his face was only inches away from hers. “Because, lady, you’re making some big mistakes of your own.”
Mary Bliss stood up and paced around the room. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He stood up himself, strode out of the room, and came back a minute later, holding out a piece of paper.
She took it and looked at it. It was a picture of Parker. Grainy and black-and-white, as Charlie had described it. This one appeared to be taken outside. Parker stared straight into the camera, his dark glasses flipped up. He wore a sleeveless white T-shirt, and a chain with a medallion on it. She’d never seen Parker wearing any jewelry other than his wedding wring and a wristwatch. The front of a car was barely visible over his right shoulder. There was a time and date stamp on the bottom of the photo, indicating it had been taken the day Parker should have died in Cozumel, Mexico.
“Where did you get this?” she whispered, handing the photograph back.
“It was taken at an ATM machine in Macon,” Matt said. “The one I showed Charlie was taken in Columbus, the day before. Parker McGowan. In the flesh. Looks pretty lively to me.”
“It’s somebody else,” Mary Bliss said. “It has to be.”
“It’s him,” Matt said flatly. “He had accounts in banks all over the state. We’ve found three so far, all in the names of those ghost employees he created. There are more too. We just haven’t tracked ’em all down yet. All together, we figure he ripped off Jerry and his clients to the tune of about four hundred thousand dollars.”
“He, he couldn’t,” Mary Bliss said, faltering.
“He did,” Matt said. “He’s a thief. And I aim to catch him.”
She shook her head. “I still don’t understand. You’re not with the police? What do you want from me?”
“I’m not a cop,” Matt repeated. “My client doesn’t want the police involved. Not yet. He’s shut down the graveyarding operation, notified his clients that he was defrauded, and has made restitution. He wants what I want. Parker McGowan.”
“I don’t know anything,” Mary Bliss said. “I had no idea. Parker never talked to me about business.”
Matt grabbed her wrist. “You must know something. He must have said something, left a note, some records, something.”
She yanked her hand away. “Leave me alone. I told you. I don’t know anything. Parker’s dead. I’m sorry he stole from your client. He stole from me too. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
“Let me help you,” Matt said. “Drop this insurance claim. Trust me. If I figured out it’s bogus, the insurance people will too. My God, this is a felony theft, Mary Bliss. You could do real jail time. Is that what you want? Parker’s gone, you’ll be in prison. What will happen to your daughter then?”
She felt tears rising in her eyes, but she blinked them back. She was tired of crying, tired of feeling helpless, of being trapped.
“Trust me,” Matt was saying. “Let me help you. Tell me the truth. I’m gonna find Parker, and when I do, we’ll make him pay. For deserting you, and Erin. For lying and stealing. He’ll pay for all of it.”
She was so tempted. Let somebody else take care of things. She wanted to go work in her garden. Paint her kitchen, read a book. She wanted to be taken care of.
What had her mama told her when they’d gone down to Florida to bury her daddy? Nina had held her hand tightly all through that brief service but never shed a tear. The preacher who preached her daddy’s funeral gave them a ride back to the bus station. He acted like he liked Mama, wanted to give her money for dinner. A love offering, he’d called it. “Let me know if I can help,” he’d said before letting them out at the station.
Nina had just nodded, her face expressionless. “The Lord helps them who help themselves,” she’d told that pastor. Her mama watched the car drive away. “We’ll do for ourselves now,” she’d told Mary Bliss. “Don’t never depend on somebody else to take care of you, sugar. Trust in the Lord, and then you just take care of yourself, and things will work out fine.”
“You want to help me?” Mary Bliss asked Matt. “Leave me alone. You say you care about me. If you do, you’ll tell your client what I already told you. Parker is dead.”
“He knows Parker’s not dead,” Matt said, impatient now. “He’s seen the pictures, seen the banking records. Parker is out there, somewhere, living the high life. You saw that picture. He’s on permanent vacation. While you’re pawning your family silver and hiding from bill collectors. He’s laughing at us. Laughing at you. Because he fooled everybody. The liar.”
“Who’s the liar?” Mary Bliss asked, whirling around. “You know about the silver? You’ve been following me? For how long? Have you had my phones tapped too? All of this,” she said, sweeping her hand around the room, “all of it was part of your game plan. You thought I knew something. Had something you wanted. So you went after it. You pestered me and petted me. You knew I was vulnerable. And God help me, I was. Another five minutes here and I would have been naked. I would have done anything you wanted, just to have somebody hold me and touch me.”
“That’s not what this was about,” Matt said. “I was telling the truth about caring for you. I started out looking for Parker, yeah. But then I met you. In that damned wet nightgown of yours. You’ve been lying through your teeth since the day we met, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t stay away. And then, tonight, you called. I knew something was up. You were the one who came over here, lady. You knew exactly what you were doing.”
“No,” Mary Bliss said. “I didn’t understand the kind of person I was dealing with. But now I do. You’re like every man I ever met. It’s all a game to you. Like with Parker. You’re like him, aren’t you? Because you’ll both do whatever it takes to win.”
He didn’t have an answer for that. She found her purse in the kitchen and walked straight out the front door without looking back.