Dax had spent an hour the previous night listening to the idle chatter in Tara Beckley’s hospital room, enough time to confirm both that they’d kept his flowers and that she remained mute, but each day had the potential for new blessings, as the Team Tara Facebook page reminded him that morning, and so he checked back in after leaving Gerry Connors’s office.
The recorder he’d placed in the flower vase was of excellent microphone quality but he was disappointed with its computer interface and mobile options. He had to use the web browser to log in, and then he had to sort through multiple files that captured dialogue exchanges of longer than two minutes. He wished he’d used a better system, but Tara Beckley was only of value-added potential for Dax; she wasn’t a threat. With threats, you spared no expense. The microphones he had planted in Gerry’s office, for example, were cutting-edge, and he’d paid accordingly.
He sat in his car and updated himself on A Day in the Semi-Life of Tara Beckley. He listened to her mother talk endlessly and aimlessly, scrolled past that, found the same with the sister, and then some nurses chattering, and then…
What was this?
“Abby’s an investigator. She tells me she’s working on your behalf.”
That was the sister talking. The investigator, when she spoke, sounded nervous. Well, no surprise there—Tara’s empty-eyed stare and those tubes could be unsettling to some. Dax doubted many people had given her the kind of deep eye contact that he’d offered.
The investigator blathered on awkwardly, not saying much of interest, but then the sister said something that made Dax sit up straight.
“Nobody talked about her phone until your boss called.”
Her phone? Well, now. The investigator might be more interesting than Dax had thought.
He listened through more chatter, the investigator agreeing that Carlos Ramirez was at fault—apparently she didn’t yet know that Carlos was also in the morgue—and then carrying on about how she didn’t like Carlos’s story. Dax had to give her some credit for this because she seemed to understand the physics of it all in a way the police hadn’t, and thus she got what a colossal disaster Carlos Ramirez had been. Time-sensitive, make-it-an-undeniable-accident instructions be damned; Carlos had picked an awfully dumb way to go about the hit. Perhaps he hadn’t cared because he knew he’d be out of the country by the time anyone showed real interest. That was fine, but the mess he’d made of things reflected poorly not only on Carlos but on Gerry Connors. And since Dax worked with Gerry, there was the risk of contamination. The Blackwell brand could be damaged before he’d had a chance to re-introduce it if Gerry stumbled. You had to be careful who you worked for in this business. Independent contractors are not immune to the perils of poor management, his father had told him often.
For a hick insurance investigator, Abby was surprisingly astute. She was also scared, it seemed, which was interesting. Information and fear didn’t go together in Dax’s mind—knowledge was power, the cliché promised, and so far in his young life, he’d found that to be true. Then why was this woman so nervous?
Probably it was Tara’s dead-eyed stare. Abby the investigator kept pushing, though, almost grudgingly, as if she couldn’t help herself.
“And one of these,” Abby said, and there was a rustling sound, “belongs to him. Unless the salvage guy kept it or sold it already. Neither would surprise me.”
“I’ve wondered about her phone,” Shannon said.
Dax Blackwell rewound and replayed that portion.