Trace (TraceWorld Book 1)

by Letitia L. Moffitt

  “Did you kill Culver Bryant?”

  “No. He did that himself. I found him.”

  “And you moved him.”

  “Correct.”

  Nola wasn’t sure she believed him, but she didn’t think it would be wise or productive to question him on this. Before she could ask the next, obvious question, Vincent added, “And you are the only person who could figure that out.”

  Nola shook her head involuntarily. She wasn’t the only person, of course, but Vincent wouldn’t know this. He did know, somehow, that she was a tracist. Nola wondered how he knew, but that wondering had a lot of competition from the other questions roiling in her brain.

  Her phone beeped an incoming text message. She took a lightning-quick glance at it: Grayson. She didn’t pick it up.

  “I knew you’d come back here eventually,” Vincent continued quickly, “and when you did, you’d know Culver Bryant didn’t die here. And then you might remember your little visit to Greenbriar and what you didn’t get to see—and who kept you from seeing it. Even if you didn’t suspect me, you’d still tell the police the body must have been moved, and that would get the ball rolling on a brand-new inquiry.”

  It probably wouldn’t have done any good to explain that the police wouldn’t listen to her ever again. “They’ll find out anyway,” she said. “The autopsy report—”

  “Won’t be completed right away, and even if they do determine the body had been moved, which isn’t a given, they still won’t know who moved it. If they figure out it was me, I can simply say I didn’t want his body to be found by Lynette or Grayson because it would have upset them. Even if they don’t buy it, it’s a risk I’m willing to take. There’s too much money involved.”

  “Look,” she said, barely knowing what she was going to say next. “If I’m ‘working out a deal with you,’ I need information. I don’t work for the police anymore. I work on my own.” As soon as she’d said this, she realized it was true. Now she had nothing to lose by pushing forward. “You moved the body. Where did you find him?” She already knew the answer to this but figured it was wise not to let Vincent know everything she did.

  “His brother’s house. Where he was sure to be found immediately. All I did was delay that a little.”

  Nola hesitated. “Why did you go to see him in the first place?”

  “Culver called me that night. He sounded, well, terrible. I don’t know how else to describe it. At first he mostly seemed upset about his wife, that she’d found out about Lynette, that Lynette was pressuring him to go away with her, that he didn’t want to hurt either of them, though he was most concerned about hurting Maureen. But then he suddenly said, ‘And I know about Greenbriar.’ Before I could say anything, he added, ‘Make it right, Kirke,’ and hung up. I tried calling him back, but he had turned his phone off.”

  “I knew I had to talk to him right away, so I drove over to Grayson’s house. I remembered he was supposed to meet Lynette there. As soon as I pulled into the driveway, I saw that Culver’s car wasn’t there but the garage door was closed, and I heard an engine running. And I knew what had happened.”

  Nola took a deep silent breath. “And so you went in and found him dead?”

  Vincent looked her straight in the eyes. His tone was level when he said, “Yes.” But in the few seconds of silence before he had answered, Nola understood something about what had happened that night. Vincent found Culver dead, yes, but that was because he waited so that there would be a greater likelihood that Culver would be dead.

  She had no way to prove this. The neighbors had been questioned and nobody had seen anything, because nobody had been looking. And Nola certainly wasn’t going to ask Vincent. He would deny it. Who would admit to such a thing? If he did admit it, Nola would know she was in serious trouble. He wouldn’t tell her everything unless he thought it didn’t matter what she knew.

  When she didn’t react, he continued, his posture a little more relaxed. “You want to know the funniest thing about all this? Cars. Too many of them, too few of them, none of them in the right place. Once I drove Culver’s body out to Greenbriar I’d be stuck there, and I couldn’t innocently call someone to pick me up without them wondering what I was doing out there without my car—which would be back at Grayson’s place. So I took a chance—a good one, I knew—and went over to see Maureen.”

  Maureen Bryant was in on it?

  “I don’t know much about Maureen—nobody does,” he said. “Even Culver always said she would keep her secrets to the grave. But all that means, I figured, is the one thing Maureen wants more than anything else is privacy. So I made a deal with her. I said I’d keep quiet about the fact that Culver had killed himself right after she confronted him about Lynette, so she wouldn’t look like the cold, cruel bitch the press would no doubt make her out to be. I also said I’d keep certain other potential scandals from seeing the light of day. For her part, she drove me to Grayson’s, then drove out to Greenbriar to pick me up after I’d set everything up.”

  So that’s how it happened. The only question remaining was why. “About Greenbriar. Rumor has it”—she held her breath again—“corners were cut without accounting for difference in cost.”

  Vincent did not seem particularly surprised by her saying this, which was a relief. But her relief faded as he spoke. “It’s a whole lot more than that. Bryant’s no sap. He wouldn’t have killed himself for something so trivial. Anyway, he knew about that a couple months ago.” A tight, humorless smile flickered across his face. “You know, you actually figured it out, and you didn’t even realize it. Still puts you one up on the cops.”

  Nola gave him a blank look.

  “That day you came to see Greenbriar, you mentioned the factory. I told you we had soil and water tests done and the reports were available for inspection. That was all true. The thing is, I made sure the ones available to the public didn’t include results for trichloroethylene.”

  Chemistry had never been a subject Nola enjoyed or excelled at. Every molecule sounded the same to her. And yet, something about that word rang a bell with her. She’d seen it in some news item recently. “Is that . . . TCE?”

  Vincent smiled again. The more he did that, the more discomfort Nola felt. “You know what it is?”

  “There was something about it in the news the other day. Factories use it for cleaning machinery, I think. And it . . .” She trailed off, remembering something else: it was linked to cancer. She hoped Vincent would take her cut-off sentence as uncertainty rather than uneasiness.

  “Right again. It’s basically an industrial solvent. They used it in the factory to clean the computer parts and then basically dumped it down the drain. The ground’s saturated with it, and what’s in the ground has made its way into the water and will make its way up into the buildings sitting on it. It’ll take years to clean and a whole lot of money.”

  “How did you find out about this if the reports didn’t test for it?”

  “Another good question. The cops really should have listened to you, though it’s lucky for me they didn’t. After Culver discovered my little ‘accounting errors,’ he started to wonder if there weren’t other things that slipped his notice. He found a document stating that the factory had reported a spill of a couple thousand gallons of TCE in the late ’70s. He got his own tests done, from a different company—not the one I paid. He got the results the day before he ‘disappeared.’”

  Nola could imagine what Culver’s feelings had been the day he got the results of the TCE test. His pet project was a staggering disaster. His trusted business partner was anything but trustworthy. His mistress had gotten the idea they were running away together, which, if it had ever been possible, was impossible now; Culver would not abandon his duties. And then the final blow: his wife, whom he loved, according to Grayson, had found out about his infidelity and now hated him.

  She also remembered Grayson’s saying that Culver’s mother had died of cancer and that it hit Culver hard. It wasn’t
hard to imagine the man’s horror upon realizing that people who moved into those pretty new houses might also die this way. “Weren’t you worried that moving the body to Greenbriar might call attention to all this stuff?” she said. “Wouldn’t it seem like he killed himself because of something connected to the project?” Which, in part, was exactly what had happened.

  He nodded, and now he looked even more respectful of Nola.

  Great, the cops think I’m an idiot and the bad guys think I’m brilliant. The typical backasswardness of Nola.

  “It was a risk, but I didn’t have much choice,” he said. “I had to move quickly once he was dead, and Greenbriar was the only place I could think to move him where it wouldn’t be obvious he was moved. Later on I realized this might work in other ways. If the truth about Greenbriar ever came out, it would seem like Culver acted alone—so long as I could find all communication regarding the reports. That’s why I needed time. I had to erase all traces of it, all evidence that he and I had known about the spill. Now we can still sell the houses, and if someone finds out in the future, we can’t be easily sued.”

  Nola stared at him. “You’re kidding me. You’re going to try to sell the houses?”

  “I have to sell the houses.”

  How do you figure that? She knew what Vincent would say: there was too much money at stake. She stared straight ahead, watching the police tape fluttering around the house, and for a moment she was at a loss for what to say next. When she did speak, she limited her question to the minor details. “You said you made a deal with Lynette. What was that about?”

  Now Vincent actually chuckled. “I had heard she went storming into the police station making a big scene. With another person, that would be enough to ensure nobody ever takes her seriously again, but Lynette has a habit of getting her way. I didn’t need her big scene to repeat itself to the point where people started listening to her, so I paid her a visit earlier this evening. I told her, basically, that I’d get her a nice cut of Greenbriar profits if she just shut her mouth about Culver.” Vincent’s smirk suddenly turned nasty. “She just about fell to the floor and spread her legs open, she was so excited.”

  “Did she tell you about . . . me?”

  “You mean that whole trace business? No, I didn’t get that from Lynette. I got that”—now his smirk was wry—“from Grayson.”

  She nearly did a double take. “What?”

  “Well, who else? The guy’s got a whole damn scrapbook of articles about it, including a bunch about you. I found them when I went through his house. Yes, I searched his house while he was out. I had to. It was the last place Culver was alive and I knew he trusted his brother. I thought it was quite possible that he might hide copies of the report there. I didn’t find anything, even though I went through the place twice, but the second time, I found out about you.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw the light gleaming off the face of her phone, and she wondered what Grayson’s text said. She stopped wondering immediately when the other corner of her eye noted something shift ever so slightly in Vincent’s posture. His stance seemed aggressive suddenly, as if he were poised to pounce. Even though her door was locked and he couldn’t get at her, still her pulse raced. Keep him talking, she thought, even while she wondered what she hoped to accomplish by it. “Does anyone else know about the soil and water reports? Did you tell Maureen or Lynette?”

  “No. To each of them I just said I needed to smooth over some issues. I figured the fewer details they knew the better, in case one of them decided to turn rat—though Lynette’s too self-interested to care, and as for Maureen, a Southie girl would probably rather die than rat to the cops. She didn’t ask for details—unlike you.”

  Nola marveled at his mastery of euphemisms. Fraud was “smoothing over issues,” and the potential for an entire community to be subject to a known carcinogen for the foreseeable future wasn’t so much a tragedy as a “scandal.” She was so stunned by his coldness that she almost missed the threat in his voice on the last two words he’d said.

  He continued in that same tone. “Maureen and Lynette both understood: nobody needs to be hurt here if everyone just keeps quiet.” He stared hard at Nola for a moment. “But you aren’t going to do that, are you?”

  What could she say? Horrified disapproval must have been written all over her face. There was no way she could even pretend to be indifferent about this. She had never been someone who actively took stands on issues or joined protest rallies; there were a few years she hadn’t even bothered to vote. This was different. She was standing face-to-face with greed and—as melodramatic as it sounded—evil. The land under those houses was saturated with toxic chemicals and he knew it, and he was going to pretend he didn’t know it so he could sell the houses for a tidy profit to unsuspecting buyers looking for an affordable place to live. How in the world could she not react, even to save her own life?

  Because now her life was at stake. She had been right about the bulge in that pocket. Being right so often, she reflected, was not doing her a lot of good.

  16

  She had been around guns quite a bit in her job, but she hadn’t realized until that moment that she’d never seen one drawn for potentially immediate use until now. The fact that the hand that pulled out the gun was shaking made it worse. She knew she was far more likely to get shot by accident than by design. Vincent Kirke was not a coldblooded killer. As a desperate man on the verge of panic, however, he wasn’t much safer to be around. He might not kill without hesitating beforehand and regretting it afterward, but he was still a man who would sit in his car waiting for his business partner to die.

  “Vincent,” she said quietly, “don’t do this. You haven’t committed any serious crime as far as Culver’s death itself is concerned. There’s no reason to take on this kind of risk. Maureen already knows, Grayson doesn’t care, and Lynette—well, Lynette obviously stopped caring for the right price. I won’t say anything about moving the body. There’s no point.”

  “And Greenbriar?”

  She continued in what she hoped was a calming voice. “I won’t say anything about that either. But you have to, Vincent. You know someone’s going to find out. TCE’s been in the news. People know about it. If you say it was an honest mistake—”

  “No one will believe that. Because it wasn’t an honest mistake. And even if that were true, all the money sunk into the project would still be lost.”

  “Vincent, you have to let me go.” She couldn’t quite think of a reason to give him just then, but she hoped that statement alone would suffice. Supposedly, she’d learned, it often did. Ask to be let go and most of the time the request is granted.

  It didn’t work this time. “Stop talking, please, and get out of the car. Slowly. And put your hands where I can see them. Don’t reach for the phone. I can shoot you through that window before you could ever get the car in gear or call for help.”

  Nola remained still. Movement of any kind, even at his command, was more likely to agitate him than stillness, and she was safer in the car than out despite the fact that he could shoot and kill her through the window. She could duck, shift into “drive,” and try to get away. The chances of that ploy’s succeeding were a lot better than the chances she’d have if she were standing out in the open.

  Her resistance seemed to flummox him for a moment, and the expression on his face might have been comical if he hadn’t been pointing a deadly weapon at her. Nola had no idea what kind of gun it was—her familiarity with firearms didn’t extend all that far—but given Vincent’s taste for quality, she doubted it was some cheap handgun. It looked solid and heavy, like it could do some damage.

  “Get. Out. Of. The. Car,” Vincent said. He’d obviously meant it to sound like a command, but there was an edge of pleading in his voice. This was far from reassuring to Nola. His hands were shaking noticeably, and even in the cool night air sweat slicked his face. He was anxious and desperate. Anything could happen. She had t
o make her move now.

  At that moment, they were suddenly both blinded by light.

  Another car had turned a corner and appeared behind them on the Greenbriar grounds, halting abruptly fifty yards away. Nola looked at it and recognized it instantly: Grayson’s car.

  “Out!” Vincent shrieked at Nola and slammed the muzzle of the gun against her window. Nola had no choice. She unlocked the door, and Vincent yanked it open, pulled her out, and threw her to the ground.

  She fell on her side, skinning her arm on the asphalt but otherwise unharmed. She stayed down, unmoving, at Vincent’s feet, trying to make sense of what was happening—and to figure how she could control what happened next. They both fixed their eyes on Grayson’s car. “You, too, Bryant!” Vincent shouted. “Get out of your car right now. Don’t stop to phone the cops. Now.”

  Grayson got out, but he wasn’t alone. The passenger-side door opened as well, and Maureen Bryant emerged.

  “Vincent,” she said quietly. “Stop. It’s too late. I told them already. I told the cops we moved the body.”

  Nola glanced up and saw Vincent’s jaw drop open. “Why the fuck did you do that?”

  “Why the fuck did you cover up Greenbriar?”

  Nola stared at Maureen—cool, unflappable Mrs. Culver Bryant, dressed in muted earth tones and wearing a poker face, was showing right now what she seldom showed to anyone: hers was not an aristocratic cool but one born of tough years in Southie.

  Vincent still looked stunned, but Nola could tell his presence of mind was returning. “How did you find out about that?”