Isolation

by Mary Anna Evans

  Probing a little deeper and paying a search site to get more closely held information, she learned that Sly’s conviction had been for transporting drugs across state lines. If Joe ever wanted to know the name of the penitentiary where his father had served his time, Faye had the information. She found no other convictions.

  There was a bankruptcy Sly hadn’t mentioned, but there was no deceit in not answering a question no one had asked. Based on its date, the bankruptcy had occurred when Joe was six, so he might not know about it but he would have seen the financial belt-tightening. He would also have seen the kind of stress-fueled money arguments that broke open marriages.

  Sly and Patricia had stayed married twelve more years after the bankruptcy. It was anybody’s guess whether this was because they loved each other or whether it was because they were too scared to split. Maybe it was just because it was too expensive to live in two houses when they couldn’t even afford the one they were in.

  These things were sad, but they didn’t speak to the question of who killed Liz. They just confirmed that Sly was who he said he was.

  Faye closed the browser and walked over to kill some time with Nadia. The environmental chemist didn’t take many breaks but she was standing at the waterline, relaxed and holding a cup of coffee.

  “You’re willing to drink coffee so close to an environmental disaster?” Faye asked.

  Nadia laughed. “We’re outside the exclusion zone. It’s safe to eat and drink here.”

  “And breathe?”

  “Oh, yeah. Your nose is a pretty decent detector for airborne petroleum-related chemicals. Do you smell anything?”

  “Nope, but you can’t smell arsenic, can you?”

  The Spanish-inflected laugh took the edge off Nadia’s talk of nasty chemicals. “I wouldn’t worry about the arsenic, not unless we find a lot more. Gerry just wants to find out where it’s coming from, because it’s his job to make sure that we’re not missing a bigger problem nearby.”

  “Where is he, by the way?”

  “Chasing criminals with the sheriff. He was not happy to leave this job for the day, but he’s a worrywart. I can manage these people just fine.”

  Faye believed her. She asked, “Do you see a lot of sites like this one?”

  “Yes and no. I spend most of my time at petroleum sites, but this one is tiny compared to my ordinary jobs. If it weren’t so close to the Gulf, I think we could have sold the department on leaving the kerosene leak alone. But the arsenic…now that’s weird.”

  “Because of the low levels?”

  “Yeah, sort of, but I’ve seen levels like these lots of times. It always turned out that the arsenic was a natural part of the soil, but not here. The background samples came up clean. Also, when we find arsenic and it turns out not to be natural, we can usually figure out where it came from. Agricultural chemicals. Wood preservation treatment. Electronics manufacturing. Those kinds of sites are likely to be huge and heavily contaminated. Here? We just have a little spot of arsenic with no reason to be here. It’s interesting.”

  Wishing Nadia had found interesting work on somebody else’s property, Faye excused herself and focused on her tablet again. She wondered if she could be as successful at digging up Oscar Croft’s secrets as she had been at peering into her father-in-law’s past.

  ***

  Tommy Barnett hit the end button on his cell phone, hanging up on a call that had brought the possibility of financial gain. He enjoyed calls like that.

  Wilma Jakes, the worn-out hag who had operated the marina’s fueling operation for Liz, had been on the phone, saying “I have a proposition for you.”

  She might have meant to say more, but Tommy had butted in. “You’re old and ugly. I ain’t listening to any propositions from you.”

  “Well, I ain’t a hooker. You might consider giving a second chance to a girl who don’t have any diseases to give you.”

  Tommy said, “Don’t talk about Lolita like that,” but Wilma knew what she knew, and Tommy didn’t know how she knew it.

  Yeah, Tommy and Lolita had each received a course of antibiotics at the county health department, not six months before. And it wasn’t the first time. Tommy had no reputation to ruin, so having this information was of no direct value to Wilma, but knowing his medical secrets established Wilma as a woman with eyes in the back of her head. She wanted him to know that it wasn’t safe to double-cross her.

  Her witchy voice slithered out of his phone again. “About my proposition.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I’m thinking that you need that marina running again, or your maintenance business is shot. And I need it running again, or I’ll never put another gallon in another boat. I’m also thinking that there’s not all that much money in fueling up boats or fixing their motors. We should think bigger.”

  “I said I was listening. But if you know so much, you know I’m looking at jail time. Or a big fine from the environmental people, at least. And there’s some that’s trying to say I killed Liz.”

  “Lucky you. You got me on your side. I’m willing to lie my ass off to say you didn’t do it.”

  Tommy liked the sound of this, but he only said, “Why would you do that?”

  “We need to buy Liz’s place off the bank. Nobody else wants it. I think we can get it cheap and I think we can make money with it.”

  “What part of ‘Maybe I’m going to jail’ didn’t you understand?”

  “First of all, I can get you off the top of the sheriff’s list of suspects for Liz’s murder.”

  This would be nice if Wilma could make it happen. “I said I was listening.”

  “I live right by the marina. I see what happens there. I can tell the sheriff that I saw a real big man hanging around the parking lot at about closing time on the night Liz died. I’ll say I’ve been afraid to speak up, because I live alone right here next to where she got killed.”

  Tommy was five-foot five in his work boots. He was built like a fire plug, but he wasn’t a big man. He saw the value in this offer.

  “Nobody’s questioned me. Not the police. Not the environmental people. Nobody,” she went on. “So it ain’t like I’m changing a story I already told.”

  “Seriously? How did they miss you?” Tommy had thought they questioned everybody, and Wilma’s house was right next door to the marina. She should have been high on the cops’ list.

  “It’s damn shoddy detective work, if you ask me. Granted, maybe they didn’t come to my house because it looks like nobody lives there. Well, maybe I let it look that way on purpose. Maybe it’s a good way to get the cops to keep their distance. Anyway, if I tell them about my imaginary big dude, it’ll get ’em off your back long enough for ’em to find the one that really did it. It wasn’t you, was it?”

  “No! Hell, no.”

  “Well, then, let’s move on to your other problem, which we need to solve if you and me are going to go into business together.”

  Tommy had that sick feeling he got when he was missing something. “My other problem? You mean that environmental dumping charge? How you planning to solve that one? They’re talking big fines. They’re talking jail time. I never thought dumping a little waste oil now and then was that big a deal when I was doing it.”

  “That shows how brilliant you aren’t. If it wasn’t that big a deal, people would have been dumping their own waste oil, instead of paying you to do it. You got anything left that you didn’t get around to dumping?”

  “As of yesterday, no.”

  “You got records of how much you dumped and who you did it for?”

  “Now, why would I keep something they could use against me?”

  Tommy thought Wilma should be happy with that answer, because she had availed herself of his services on occasion. Sometimes a customer had spilled a gallon of something that she’d soaked up with ki
tty litter. Why would Wilma want to pay to get rid of the stinking kitty litter? And also, every now and then, she had to empty a tank and the sludge that came out of the bottom needed to disappear. Any business dealing with petroleum had waste sometimes. If Tommy had kept a list of his clients, she would have been on it, so she should be glad that he didn’t.

  “I ain’t a lawyer, Tommy, but it seems like maybe you could’ve spread the blame around if you’d kept records. But it’s too late, so never mind that. You still got a chance to spread the blame around. Tell ’em that you was working for Liz. Tell ’em she paid you a little salary and kept the rest of the money. Liz did a big cash business in the bar and the bait shop. If she’d been running a dumping business on the side, it would have been easy for her to hide it, don’t you think?”

  “You think I should tell ’em that I was the little guy? Took all the risk, didn’t make much money?”

  “It’s worth a shot. And I’ll back you up.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re going to put all our money together in one big pile and put in a bid on the marina. The bank don’t want it. Nobody else wants it. It’ll need to be in my name, so the law can’t tap it to pay your fines, but I’ll pay you a fair share. Thirty percent.”

  “And I put up thirty percent of the money?”

  “No, you put up fifty percent of the money. Maybe sixty, if you keep talking. I can do this without you. It’d be hard, but I could round up the money. You, on the other hand—Tommy, you can’t get nothing from a bank while you’ve got those fines hanging over your head. You need me more than I need you. But think about the money to be made. Liz wasn’t a bit of good at running a business. She was too nice. You and me, we could rake it in.”

  “I want a bigger cut.”

  “Tough shit.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Having consulted the Internet, Faye now knew that Oscar Croft had earned every cent of his money. A reporter had quoted him as saying, “I grew up in the house my great-great-grandfather built in 1852. It was drafty and the roof leaked, but we were glad to have it. It stayed in the family until my father lost his job at the hardware store. By that time, I had my building supply business, so Father came to work for me, but we couldn’t afford to keep the house in the family. Three years later, I could have afforded any house in Ashtabula, any house in Ohio, maybe. But that one was gone, torn down to make room for a highway exit ramp. I’d give anything to have it back.”

  He’d gone on to describe its mid-nineteenth century woodwork and its plastered walls, and the historic preservationist in Faye had almost liked him. She stopped liking him when she probed a little deeper in Oscar’s Internet persona and got a look at the news coverage for his sexual harassment suit. It had been quickly settled and a gag order meant that the truth was bottled up forever inside Oscar and his accusers, but he would always be a man who had been accused of rubbing himself all over women who depended on him for a paycheck.

  “Innocent until proven guilty,” Faye reminded herself. Then she read that Oscar’s wife of thirty years had left him as soon as the suit was settled. He might or might not have been guilty, but the person who knew him best had behaved as if she believed the accusers. Or maybe Oscar was just a garden variety son of a bitch whose wife had been waiting for an excuse to walk out. There was no way to know.

  In the years after the divorce, websites of lifestyle magazines based in the big Ohio cities—Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati—showed an unbroken stream of photos of Oscar at formal fundraising galas, wearing bespoke tuxes as he got ever older and his dates got ever younger. And ever blonder. Faye wondered how he’d managed to find a historical tour guide who wasn’t just young and pretty, but also blond.

  A casual web search for Delia’s name turned up the website for her business, Journeys of Self-Discovery. The site was very simple. If Faye had to guess, she’d say that Delia had built it herself, but it didn’t look amateurish.

  Delia was a historian, and historians tend to possess writing skills, so her company’s stated philosophy was straightforward: “They say you can’t go home again, but they’re wrong. I can take you there.” This statement was backed up by photos of Delia with happy customers who had given her quotes like, “Delia found a half-brother I didn’t know I had!” and “I was adopted, but now I finally know where I come from. I can’t tell you how much peace that gives me.”

  A photo of Delia did its part to sell her services. It is useful to be beautiful. But the photo was taken in a library where Delia sat behind a computer and surrounded by paper. It said, “I’m not just eye candy,” while also saying, “If you care about how your tour guide looks, this face hasn’t stopped any clocks lately.”

  Next to the photo was a bio stating that she had studied for her PhD at Ohio State. Having a PhD of her own, Faye recognized this to be code for “I took a bunch of classes, but I never finished my dissertation.” In other words, she was letting people think she had a credential she didn’t. This seemed a little underhanded for a woman who cultivated an image that said, “I’m wholesome and sweet. Is there an illegitimate child or a convicted murderer on your family tree? Was your great-aunt abandoned in an asylum? Trust me with your family’s darkest secrets.”

  Delia gave Faye only an instant to feel judgmental about her shaky credentials as a historian, because the next sentence in her website bio said, “When I lost my husband, I couldn’t face the stresses of academia, so I started this business. Five years later, I couldn’t be happier, and my clients seem happy, too. Let me take you on your own journey of discovery.”

  Very young widows carry a certain kind of tough memory. Car wrecks. Soldier husbands killed in the line of duty. Rare and quick cancers.

  Whatever her story was, Delia had found a way to move ahead. At the moment, she was moving ahead by putting herself in close proximity to a man who had been accused of some pretty serious things. Faye hoped Delia was as smart as she seemed, because she herself wouldn’t be anxious to go on an extended business trip with Oscar.

  ***

  While walking from Oscar’s rental house to his car, Rainey checked his phone and saw that he had a voice mail. He hit the phone’s touch screen. A high and reedy woman’s voice said, “My name is Wilma Jakes and I can meet you at the marina any time you want to talk. It’s where my business is. Was. Ain’t been much business since Liz got killed. I want to talk to you about what happened to her. I don’t know who killed Liz, but I do know somebody that didn’t.”

  Steinberg was studying his own phone, but Rainey didn’t wait for him to finish reading his e-mail. “We need to get back to the marina.” Then he hit the button that would return Wilma’s call so that he could tell her to meet him at the marina in an hour.

  Steinberg, still reading, said, “Damn straight, we need to get back to the marina. I need to find Tommy Barnett.” After a quiet moment spent staring at the little screen, he slid the phone in his pocket. “I sent some divers out to retrieve the cans of waste that I watched Barnett throw overboard. They just sent an e-mail to say that that they found the spot easy, even without the GPS coordinates I gave them. It’s marked by a long oil slick heading out toward the islands. And while they were out there? They found another big slick marking the spot where somebody threw some more crap into the Gulf. They’re pretty sure it just happened. Is Barnett really dumb enough to keep doing this?”

  Steinberg backed out of the parking slot much faster than necessary and slammed the car into gear. Rainey thought this was hot-tempered behavior for a scientist.

  “I’m not sure it’s a question of dumb,” he said to the angry scientist. “It may be a question of desperate. It may be a question of a man trying to get rid of something he can’t let anybody see.”

  “Hazardous waste? Or evidence of a murder?”

  “Maybe both. Maybe we’re really lucky that some of the stuff he dumped has floated to the su
rface. Maybe that slick is leading us to something else Barnett is trying to hide. Tell your divers to take a lot of pictures. And tell them to bring us everything they see that doesn’t belong under the water. Every last thing.”

  Pulling up his own e-mail, Sheriff Rainey saw that Faye Longchamp had overloaded his inbox. Each message contained a link that highlighted something sketchy about Oscar Croft. He would have been annoyed that she’d e-mailed him five times to give him information that was in the public record, but this would have been unfair. One of those e-mails told him something he didn’t already know.

  Rainey needed to speak to the detective in charge of the Internet arm of the investigation of Liz’s murder. He needed to tell her that an amateur was doing a better job than she was.

  Rainey had known about Oscar’s sexual harassment charge since the day he started this investigation. He also knew that the timing of the man’s divorce made his accuser look like the wronged party.

  He had known about the high-profile lawsuit that had threatened to sink Oscar’s business, too. His detective had gotten him a stack of details about the supplier who had sued Oscar’s company for a fortune, claiming in vain that the man had cancelled a big order and refused to pay for the hefty expenses incurred before the cancellation. Oscar had won that fight, but was it because he was in the right or was it because he hired a bunch of expensive lawyers?

  His detective had also done a good job of running down information on the driving-under-the-influence incident that had drawn a slap on Oscar’s wrist, because that’s how seriously drunk driving was taken in the disco years. She had not, however, found out about Oscar’s other divorce, and she had not investigated the important difference between Ohio divorce law and Florida divorce law.

  In both Ohio and Florida, two partners can dissolve their union with a graceful, no-fault dissolution, but angry Ohioans have another option that Rainey would call the take-no-prisoners approach. They can opt for a divorce that airs the wronged party’s grievances and makes sure that they are always available to curious eyes.