Dead Last

by Amanda Lamb

  “Looks good. Sorry again that you had to shoot it alone. Like I said, there’s something I’ve kind of gotten wrapped up in. Not sure what the deal is yet. Trying my best to walk away.”

  “Heard that one before.” Buster chuckled then opened my top desk drawer to the right of the computer and grabbed a jar of peanuts, opened it and helped himself to a handful. “Maddie, don’t take on something else. I know you. Remember why you walked away from the dark side in the first place. Adam would want you to work on being as stress-free as possible so you can concentrate on the kids. Got to go. Heading out to the legislature with Virginia.”

  I couldn’t see his eye roll as he turned and walked away, but I knew there was one. Buster was unusually calm despite the disruption in his day. He was also being uncharacteristically sensitive about my delicate balancing act between sanity and going over the edge. He had witnessed my downward spiral in the months following Adam’s death, and I think he was ready for me to crawl out of the dark hole and re-enter the world of the living again.

  I was now alone in the crowded newsroom with my headphones isolating me from the white noise. I started thinking about what Buster had said about Adam. He was right. Adam had begged me to get off the crime beat years before he even got sick. He had watched me every single day as the job depleted my energy and robbed my soul of positive karma. It was like I was walking around with PTSD that flared up with each brutal crime I covered.

  Taking care of Adam was the turning point in my career. His death stripped me of any desire to cover other people’s tragedies. The last thing I wanted to do was knock on another door of the parents of a dead child. But was feature reporting really the answer? Did it give me the intensity that my personality thrived on? I hadn’t examined this question. It was as if I was afraid to think about it. I had once been in the middle of the fire. Now I was so far away from the fire I couldn’t even see it.

  I felt Suzanne’s story tugging at me, the mystery of it, the familiarity of a puzzle begging to be solved. As much as I was trying to keep it at bay, I couldn’t ignore it.

  The truth was I had been running away my entire life, way before Adam’s death, since the day Roger killed my mother.

  3

  Toes In

  I nervously stirred the foaming milk in the top of my latte, dissolving the artistic heart the barista had made on the surface. It was just a meeting, I told myself. I wasn’t committing to anything. I didn’t hear from Suzanne after I left the hospital that day. I didn’t hear from her the next day or the day after that. I assumed we were done, that whatever strange, brief relationship had developed between us out of her trauma was over, and that we were both moving on. I was relieved.

  Three days after Suzanne was released from Chester Hospital, she called. I was on my way to an early dentist appointment and told her I only had a small window of time to talk. I had saved her number in my phone so I would have the option of screening her calls in the future. I picked up this time because I felt like it was best that we have a clean break.

  “So Maddie, I’m back in the house. I didn’t know what else to do. It’s ironic that I help people deal with crises for a living, yet I can’t solve my own crisis.” She punctuated her sentence with an uncomfortable laugh that trailed off into silence.

  Suzanne went on to tell me that if she left, Tanner would surely kill her because he wasn’t about to fight her for custody of their fourteen-year-old son, Winston, or pay her alimony. She said he was cheap and possessive of his son. She also told me he had a mean streak that no one else ever saw but her.

  “You need to call the police,” I told her again. “You need to get a domestic violence protective order.” I heard my words coming out as hollow promises of safety. I knew from experience that neither the police, nor a restraining order could protect someone when an abuser was determined to harm.

  Suzanne said she knew if she reported her suspicions about Tanner, she would come across to the family court judge as a hysterical woman, someone unfit to have custody of her son. He was a doctor with an impeccable reputation as a strong, stable medical professional in the community and she was a crisis-management public relations hack with a reputation for hyperbole.

  By the end of our conversation, I had agreed to meet Suzanne for coffee so we could continue talking through this in person. Everything in my gut told me not to do it, but it wasn’t the first time I had ignored my gut.

  When she walked into the coffee shop, I couldn’t believe this was the same woman I had seen in in the hospital. She looked exactly like her pulled-together self in her Facebook profile picture. Her long black, sleek hair fell halfway down her back and cascaded over the front of her shoulders. Her snug, red wrap dress fit her curves impeccably. She strode across the restaurant in black patent stiletto heels. When I wore high heels, I looked like I was walking on a high wire between two skyscrapers. She looked like she was walking on the red carpet at Fashion Week in Paris.

  Across Suzanne’s left arm was a black cashmere wrap. Over her other arm was a large silver bag that looked like it was big enough to fit a small car. Her outfit was punctuated by a statement piece, a massive black braided rope necklace that looked like it must weigh fifty pounds.

  “Hope I’m not late, Maddie,” Suzanne said with what appeared to be a freshly lipsticked smile. Her pale skin was flawless. Her long, black eyelashes looked like something out of a mascara advertisement. They had to be extensions, I thought. She glanced down at her phone in her hand. “Just seven minutes,” she said to no one in particular referencing her tardiness.

  “No worries. How are you, Suzanne? How are you feeling? You look great!”

  “Still tired. A few knots on my head, and those darn scrapes on my knees are taking forever to heal. Otherwise, pretty good. They found nothing in my system in the first toxicology screen, but I told them I wanted a full in-depth panel done. That takes about sixty days, and they’re making me pay for it out of my own pocket. Insurance won’t cover it because it’s not deemed medically necessary.” Suzanne waved her hand in the air as if to say, jerks. “But I need to know what I am up against. Sneaky bastard. I’m still convinced there was something in my water. I didn’t just fall for no reason.”

  “So you’re home. Is that a good idea? I mean, do you feel safe?”

  “No, it’s not a good idea, Maddie, but I don’t have any other good ideas right now. He’s acting all sweet. But I know he’s full of crap. I found something in his phone that I think may explain some things.”

  Suzanne slid her phone across the table so it was facing me. She hit the picture icon and pulled up a screenshot of a text. It read See you at noon. Can’t wait. It was followed by three heart emojis and signed G6.

  “Well, that could be an affair, no doubt. It is suspicious, but we don’t know anything for sure. And Suzanne, in my experience, there are plenty of men who cheat on their wives, but that doesn’t mean they’re killers.”

  “True, but you don’t know Tanner. He’s an all-in or all-out kind of guy. When I first met him, he was in medical school. He was engaged to this little mousy thing. They had even put down a deposit at the country club for their wedding reception. He dropped her in a nanosecond when he decided he wasn’t into her anymore and would rather be with me. He did it the day the wedding invitations were postmarked. That should have been a big red flag for me. But I was in love, or lust, or some youthful combination of the two, and I couldn’t see it. But now I do. If he’s done with me, he’s done with me.”

  If Tanner really was a complete narcissist in the way Suzanne was describing him, maybe he was capable of harming her. What if I had the power to stop that from happening? What if someone had helped my mother get away from Roger? Would she still be alive? I didn’t want to live in the land of what if anymore.

  “Suzanne, what can I do to help?” I heard the words tumble out of my mouth, like it was an out-of-body experience. I was hovering above the table, looking down at myself with this woman getting r
eady to say yes to something that would most certainly take me down a complicated path.

  “I knew you were the right person to talk to.” Suzanne reached across the table with both hands and grasped my right hand firmly, not letting go. It was uncomfortable to be touched by this woman I barely knew.

  “I know you’re a reporter. I recognized you the minute I saw you standing over me that day of the race, when I was lying there battered and bruised in the street. Later when I thought about it, I decided it must be a sign, having you come into my life in that way, in that very moment when I really needed someone with a clear head like yours.”

  “I wondered how you knew my name, how you got my cell phone number.”

  “I called the station and Janie gave it to me. She’s so sweet. I told her I was an old friend of yours and was in town for a few days and absolutely needed to connect with you.”

  Janie. Of course. I should have known. I made a mental note to talk to her yet again about giving out my cell phone number to random people who called the news desk.

  “But Suzanne, you know I don’t do crime reporting anymore. I’m a feature reporter. I basically cover lost cats and dogs that rescue people from wells.” I gave a nervous laugh. I still didn’t believe this nonsense was really my job.

  “Maddie, I get it. I’m not talking about a story. I’m talking about my life. You were a crime reporter, so you have the skills to help me investigate this situation on the down-low so I can figure out what I’m dealing with and get out safely.”

  “Suzanne, I’d be glad to help in any way I can, but why not hire a private investigator, someone more qualified than me to help you unravel this situation? You need someone who can help you gather real evidence that will help you in family court with your son’s custody situation.”

  Suzanne rolled right over my suggestion, like she didn’t hear me.

  “Like an idiot, I ignored my mother’s sage advice. She’s a lawyer. Against her advice I co-mingled our finances a few years after we were married. He sees everything I do, from a financial standpoint. I can’t buy a goddamn pair of shoes without him knowing. He really doesn’t care about things like shoes, but I’m pretty sure he would notice me paying for the services of a PI.”

  I shook my head and stirred my coffee that was now lukewarm. I heard Buster’s voice in my head telling me not to dip my feet in the pool any deeper than they already were, to just get up and walk away. But then I pictured my beautiful mother, a woman I never really got a chance to know. I thought about Winston, a little boy who could possibly be in danger, and I knew I had no choice but to help Suzanne.

  “I’ll do it. Where do we start?”

  “How about we find out who G6 is?”

  O

  No good reporter gets scoops from public sources. Sure, there are things you need to check in order to get the basic details for your story—court records, arrest records, search warrants. But the real meat comes from insiders who trust you enough to share information with you confidentially. For me, that person was Kojak.

  He was an old-school cop with a cropped beard and not a lick of hair on his head. He always wore wire-framed glasses perched on the tip of his nose. I suspected that he didn’t really need them to see as much as he thought he did, but he kept them there, balanced on the end of his nose just in case. Because he was a detective, he dressed in plain clothes, but his badge and service revolver were always on the left side of his belt just beneath the flap of his jacket, where he could reach them quickly.

  Sometimes, for fun, I would ask him to open his jacket just so I could see the badge, like they did on the crime show dramas on television. This usually caused both of us to deteriorate into guttural laughter.

  “How do I know you’re a real cop?” I would say.

  “Take a look at this, ma’am. Does this look real to you?” He would respond haughtily.

  “Actually, it kind of looks like the badge my photographer got at Target when he dressed up like a cop last Halloween.” I snickered.

  Kojak’s real name was Tommy Flick, but because of his bald head and his proclivity for Tootsie Pops ever since he quit smoking, everyone who knew him well called him Kojak in honor of his namesake, the popular television detective from the 1970s.

  Most of the time, we spoke by phone instead of in-person. Even though Oak City was growing exponentially, it still had a small-town feel, and a crime reporter eating lunch with a detective on a regular basis would surely create talk. He didn’t tell me everything, but he never lied to me. Most importantly, he warned me when I was going down the wrong path and told me to keep going when I was on the right one.

  “So she thinks he might kill her, but she won’t go to the police?” Kojak said when I told him about Suzanne. I had started from the beginning, from the race until my most recent interaction with her at the coffee shop. While I relayed the story to him over the phone, I could see my face in the giant mirror above my couch as I paced, full of nervous energy, around my living room.

  “What do you think?” Kojak said.

  I knew he sensed something off in the tone of my voice. He knew me that well.

  “I don’t know. It’s hard to tell if she’s yanking my chain because she’s lonely and needs a friend, or if she’s just a little bit nuts, or if she’s really scared and telling me the truth. But she does seem credible to me. I don’t want to take a chance if she is telling me the truth and might be in real danger.”

  “I understand,” Kojak replied sympathetically, his skepticism temporarily displaced. He was one of the few people other than Adam who knew about my mother. One day, in an emotional moment, I slipped up and told him the story when we were talking about domestic violence case. It only happened one time, and we never talked about it again after that. I knew this was because Kojak respected my privacy and didn’t want to pry.

  Right now I sensed that my mother’s story was the elephant in the middle of our conversation. His voice shifted from the normal hard edge as he teetered on to something softer. “So what do you need from me?”

  “I just need to know what’s really going on with this guy, her husband. Is he really a bad dude? Is he having an affair, beating her, plotting to kill her? Is he a sociopath who plays the good doctor during the day and then comes up with ways to murder his wife at night? Or is he just a run-of-the-mill bad husband, and she’s a paranoid woman who believes he’s trying to kill her? “

  “Wow, that’s a long list, kid,” Kojak said with endearment. Even though I was not much younger than he was, he always called me kid. I think it had a lot more to do with my level of enthusiasm and his perception of me as sometimes being naïve than it did with my age. There weren’t many people I would let me call that, but he was an exception to many of my rules.

  “Not really. Just need you to run him down. See what you can find out about him. You’re so good at that type of thing.”

  “Okay. Flattery will get you just about anything you want. You know that.” He chuckled. “Name, age, place of employment?”

  “Tanner, probably late thirties, doctor.”

  “Tanner is the last name?”

  “Actually, first. His wife’s name is Suzanne Parker, but I’m pretty sure they don’t have the same last name. Not sure where he works or what kind of a doctor he is.”

  “Wow, that’s pretty specific. I’ll just Google that crap and I’m sure I will come up with something right away.” He snorted sarcastically. “Can’t you get a little more out of this chick? Would sure make it a whole lot easier to get the goods on this guy if we had a better starting point.”

  “I know it’s not a lot to go on, but it’s all I’ve got. I’ll try to get more out of her. I’m sure she will tell me whatever I want to know about him. I’ve just kind of been hanging back and not asking too many questions because I was trying not to get involved. But here I am—involved.”

  “Okay. For you, kid, and you only, I’ll check him out. But I’m not making any promises. You’re not giv
ing me a whole lot to work with here.”

  “I know, but if anybody can figure something out, you can. I mean, how many Tanners can there be in Oak City? Oh, and there is one more thing. He might be having an affair with a woman who calls herself G6, like the jet plane.”

  “Well, that certainly narrows it down. I’ll just post something on Facebook about that and see if one of my friends can round her up. What kind of a woman calls herself G6 anyway?”

  “Well, it’s a jet, right? So someone fast, intense?”

  “That was a rhetorical question. I know exactly what kind of a woman calls herself that.”

  I pictured his smirk over the phone, his glasses dipping precariously close to the end of his nose, about to fall off. I turned and caught a glimpse of my face in the mirror and couldn’t help but smile myself.

  O

  “Maddie, this one has your name all over it!” Janie perched her hands on her tiny hips in a confident posture. Her Airpods were half-cocked as one bulged out over the top of her right ear and protruded through the mass of tight, blond curls that framed her thin, freckled face. Sometimes she wore a full headset with two earpieces and a tiny microphone that made her look like she should be in a control tower landing planes.

  “What if I told you a man was saved from a potentially killer shark, by a school of dolphins?” Janie’s dark brown eyes got wider and her hands flew from her hips like she might be trying to swat away a fly or do some wild interpretive dance to music that only she could hear.

  “Wow,” I said, hardly able to hide my disinterest.

  “So it happened in Florida, but the guy lives here in Oak City. And here’s the absolute best part.” She stopped and looked around the busy newsroom, where no one was paying any attention to us, yet she acted like she had a secret just for me and leaned in closer. “He’s got frigging video of the whole damn thing. He was wearing a GoPro. So all you have to do is interview the dude and get his video, and voila, add water and stir, and you’ve got an amazing story!”