After my retirement from the Air Force in the mid-nineties, Jill and I had bought an RV and set out to bum our way around the country, seeing all the sights we had missed during my two-and-a-half decades in the military. We wintered in California, then summered through Idaho, Montana and the Dakotas. When the weather turned coolish again, we headed for Florida. Wanderlust took us to Mexico, where we joined a jacaranda-scented enclave of the American military retirement community around Guadalajara. But Jill soon began to long for a return to her Tennessee roots. So we came to Nashville, bought a house and settled in.
Even without my Air Force pension, I would not have had to work. Jill’s father, Daniel Parsons, was a highly successful life insurance salesman and had left her a stable of thoroughbred investments. A good businesswoman, a financial genius compared to me, she had groomed them into a portfolio that pretty well gave us carte blanche to buy whatever or go wherever we wanted. But when I heard the Davidson County DA had an opening for an investigator, I decided I had loafed long enough. I skipped the leisure pursuits and went back to work.
Things moved along fairly well at first, though some of the prosecutors weren’t totally ready for my brand of “tell it like it is.” I had developed this habit of pursuing cases wherever they led, sometimes trampling on toes that got in the way. A few of the DA’s assistants appeared a bit skittish at times, but I produced the results they wanted. Then a case came along in late summer that led to disaster. Oddly enough, it wasn’t even one in which I was involved.
Tessa Peterson, the wife of a young CPA, had disappeared. She was bright, attractive, a successful interior designer with a small son. Her husband, John, reported she had gone to visit a friend but had failed to return to their fashionable home in Brentwood, an upscale suburb that straddled the county line on the southern edge of Metro Nashville. Tessa’s car was found a couple of miles away, with no sign of forced entry, no evidence of trauma. This was easily big enough to make a lead story for the evening news, but there was more. Tessa was the daughter of Harlan Walker Blackford, president of one of the largest banks in the city. Further, it quickly developed that the marriage was going bad.
The typical reaction in a case like this is an outpouring of sympathy for the family, in this instance the husband and son. Only later, when the stories begin to unravel, does the finger-pointing begin. But thanks to the banker, John Peterson was targeted immediately. It seems that Harlan Walker Blackford had never liked his son-in-law. The lead investigator, a bull-headed homicide detective named Mark Tremaine, made no secret of his suspicions. And though young Peterson denied any connection with his wife’s disappearance, the police charged on, searching the couple’s house inch by inch and digging several exploratory holes in the yard. On an unsubstantiated tip, they dragged a small river a few miles away. They brought in body sniffing dogs and summoned a nationally known private search group that boasted a high success rate in locating victims. But no trace of Tessa Peterson was ever found.
That was no help to her husband. Detective Tremaine, who I’d had an unfortunate encounter with on an earlier case, continued to leak stories about various theories of what John Peterson might have done with his wife’s body. The news media played it big. Finally unable to take the harassment any longer, Peterson packed up his boy and headed back to his hometown of Philadelphia.
Since there was no evidence to support charges against anyone, it was not a case for the district attorney or for Investigator Greg McKenzie. But I had followed the story closely, occasionally asking questions of my police contacts. Besides my low opinion of Tremaine (which stemmed from a previous investigation, involving the butchering of a used car dealer), the situation was too reminiscent of a case early in my OSI career that had left me a tarnished item. I had investigated the murder of a Strategic Air Command wing commander’s daughter at Minot Air Force Base, up on the frozen fringes of North Dakota. She was married to a young captain, a B-52 co-pilot, who was immediately targeted as the chief suspect by the head of the base Air Police squadron. The girl’s father, a brigadier general, readily agreed with the AP commander. He hadn’t approved of the marriage and didn’t like the way the captain had treated his daughter. The general called me in and flat-out told me I had better “get the bastard, and get him fast.”
I don’t like threats. And since the OSI was an independent organization, I knew that neither the general nor the AP officer had any jurisdiction over me. Rank didn’t matter either. OSI agents wore business suits and our ranks were masked from the base population. I put it to the general this way:
“Sir, I intend to pursue this case in an unbiased manner. I’ll give your views the same consideration as anybody else’s. Now I need to get to work.”
Eventually, I proved the captain innocent, though I was never able to find the real killer. That was my second mistake. The general vowed to get even for it, but I requested a transfer to another base and dismissed the threat. It would come back to haunt me later.
At any rate, I had a gut feeling that in the Nashville case, the CPA was innocent. And I had learned many years ago to trust my instincts. But my trusty instincts failed to warn me against offering my views at a restaurant one night. It had been a retirement dinner for a friend from our church.
I pointed out some flaws in the police case, like a long delay in searching the victim’s car for evidence, and failing to follow up on leads that might have produced information pointing in another direction. And, giving the devil his due, I’ll admit I said a few things that may have been just a bit unfair to Mr. Tremaine. Anyway, I was outspoken when I said:
“That boy was hounded out of town by an overzealous Murder Squad detective. I don’t care who his wife’s daddy was, they should have spent more time and effort looking for other suspects.”
A boyish-looking guest down the table spoke up. “That’s a pretty serious charge, Mr. McKenzie. You really believe it?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “You can’t have police investigations swayed by emotional outsiders, even if it’s a big shot banker.”
I had some reservations about Blackford, too, after a run-in with his other son-in-law over a prosecution I thought was malicious. A guy in his thirties with a real attitude, Pat Intermaggio operated a fleet of eighteen-wheelers that hauled equipment and scenery for traveling music acts that put on big productions around the country. He tried to charge a truck salesman with fraud when what was involved appeared to be an honest mistake. He may have had grounds for a civil suit but it was no criminal act. I convinced the assistant DA of it and the prosecution was dropped, much to the chagrin of Mr. Intermaggio and his father-in-law, Blackford.
The morning following that retirement dinner, the newspaper blared at me with this headline in large bold type:
“DA’s man blasts police on Peterson disappearance.”
Too late, I discovered the young dinner guest was a newspaper reporter. Detective Tremaine was livid, the police chief was appalled, Harlan Walker Blackford was apoplectic and the district attorney invited me to resign or be fired. Blackford, it seemed, was one of the DA’s staunchest backers.
It was the start of something big . . . and ugly.
Chapter 4
The wake-up call came early. The only light in the room oozed from a glowing bedside clock that displayed an ungodly hour. I reached over and grabbed the phone. “Hello.” No one answered, of course. A computer had rousted us.
I put the phone back on its cradle and leaned over to nuzzle my face against Jill’s hair. It had a fresh, familiar smell that always delighted me. I’ll confess I’m not past casting a roving eye but nobody will ever take the place of Jill. Despite occasional problems between us, I had remained faithful throughout thirty-plus years of marriage.
“Wake up, babe,” I said. “We’ve got a long day ahead.”
She began to stir. She was never one of those wake up, jump-out-of-bed types. Occasionally I brought a cup of coffee to the bedroom when I wanted to let her know she had sl
ept long enough.
As I bent down to kiss her, she mumbled, “You need a shave.”
“I’m headed for the shower,” I said.
The “need a shave” quip had become a routine since early in my retirement. I told her that if we were going to be RV vagabonds, I should look the part and grow a beard.
“No man with a beard is going to sleep in my bed,” she said.
I grinned. “You wouldn’t really kick me out of bed, would you?”
“Try me.”
A fuzzy face lost its appeal.
After showering and dressing, we turned to last-minute packing. The beds sagged under the weight of our suitcases as we poked in our dirty clothes.
“What do you want me to do with this Dead Sea doodad?” Jill asked. She pulled the box out of her carryon.
“I don’t have room in my bag,” I said. “It’s already full of your stuff.”
She dropped it back into her bag. “I guess I’m stuck with it then,” she said.
“I’ll carry your bag if you want me to.”
“I’ll manage.”
The tour company’s requirement that we be at Queen Alia International Airport three hours before flight time must have been one of those bureaucratic things. Some Muslim plot to pester the infidels. The home base of Royal Jordanian Airlines looked deserted when we arrived. After going through a passport check, we had to haul our luggage over to the airline counter. I had marked our bags with business card-size ID tags, which had been quite adequate on the way over. But the ticket agent pushed a new set toward me, along with a felt-tip pen.
“Big letters,” he said.
I frowned and looked around. “I haven’t noticed anybody else doing this.”
“Big letters,” he repeated.
“Why the hell do we need these?” I asked.
When he began to mutter in Arabic, I gave up. I filled out the tags and he lashed them securely to the hand grips.
I got the definite feeling that Jill and I were being singled out for special harassment, though I had no earthly idea why. But, finding myself running low on gum, I gave up and joined the others upstairs where the boarding areas were located. The terminal was typical of one in a mid-sized American city, but the concourses lacked the bright colors found Stateside. We sat and chatted and roamed the corridors until our flight was finally called.
The gate area was crowded with Arabs and Westerners. Most of the native women had some sort of scarf over their heads and a few wore the flowing black chadors with everything covered.
“I’m afraid I wouldn’t make a very good Muslim,” Jill said.
“Me, neither,” Wilma Gannon said. “I’d feel suffocated in all that garb.”
She and Jill were bare-headed, dressed in dark slacks and light-colored sweaters.
I smiled. “And you’d have to do whatever old Sam told you to do. The men really do rule the roost over here.”
Sam walked up with hands jammed into his jacket, a frown on his face. “Bad news. I’ve been talking to one of the airline people. When they were preflighting the aircraft, a fuel system warning alarm malfunctioned. The electronics specialist who handles it has gone into Amman. They’ll have to wait for him to get back to fix it.”
“How long will that take?” I asked.
“Who knows? I’d say we’ll be cooling our heels for at least another couple of hours.”
We were two hours late when we finally took off in the twin-engine Airbus for the journey across Europe to our intermediate stop at Amsterdam. I spent most of the flight reading. Hours later, when we left Schiphol Airport, the pilot gave a long discourse in Arabic and then advised in English that our route would take us over England and Scotland before heading across the Atlantic.
“Your folks must have been from Scotland originally,” Wilma said. I was sitting between her and Jill.
I nodded. “My dad came over early in the century. He worked as a master brewer for Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis, where I was born.”
In high school I had considered a career in the Air Force but put the decision on hold when my parents died in a plane crash on the way to my graduation from the University of Michigan. Four years later, after trying my hand at law enforcement as a St. Louis County deputy sheriff, I signed on with the OSI. I carried with me the main lesson I had learned from my father, that being assertive was a major part of being a man. It had not always stood me in good stead. My rise in the Air Force had stalled once I reached the rank of lieutenant colonel, thanks to my assertiveness with the Minot AFB wing commander. I was probably lucky to have made it that far. But by the time my name came up on the promotion list for full colonel, the general had added a few stars, as had his Air Force Academy roommate, who was now serving as The Inspector General of the Air Force. The old bomber pilot couldn’t touch me, but the OSI worked directly for the TIG, as the Inspector General was known. The old buddy system stopped me dead in my tracks. I continued to serve as a DetCo, or Detachment Commander, responsible for all kinds of investigations, but the ladder I was climbing had collapsed waist high.
The sun had dropped to the horizon by the time we departed Scottish airspace, and from there to New York it was the longest twilight I had ever witnessed. Outside the window, the sky glowed red for hours. But it was fully dark when we landed at Kennedy International and made our way down to the baggage carousel.
The moving platform twisted around from the point where the bags were funneled up from below. We spread out beside it, a curious mixture of Middle East and West. Sam and I staked out a spot nearby, while our wives stood back and searched for signs of their luggage.
The bags were slow in coming. As we waited and watched in vain, Sam shook his head.
“Mohammed must be down there feeding them onto the belt,” he said. “Looks like most of them belong to the Arabs. I don’t think anybody in our bunch has theirs yet.”
I looked around at the thinning ranks of Jordanians and the cluster of obviously American or European passengers still waiting. “This is ridiculous,” I said.
Nearly half an hour passed before the Nashville-bound bags began arriving. The last coughed up were the American Tourister pullmans with large “McKENZIE” nametags. But that wasn’t the end of it. As I lifted our bags off the belt, I saw the locks were missing. I had put small laminated padlocks on the two checked bags, connecting the zipper pulls. As I explained to Jill, it was strictly to discourage honest people. A thief would simply use a knife and help himself. Or, in this case, simply do away with the locks.
“Shit, we’ve been had,” I said.
Jill stared at me. “What do you mean?”
“Somebody pilfered our locks. And no telling what else.”
“How would they get them off?”
“Wire cutters, probably . . . or a bolt cutter. Check yours and see if you find anything obvious missing.”
We unzipped our bags and rummaged around but couldn’t tell that anything had been taken. Spotting an airport security guard, I waved him over and explained about the disappearing locks.
“That’s not the normal thing,” the officer said. “You normally find a bag slashed. What’s missing?”
“A quick check didn’t show anything,” I said. “But I thought the tampering ought to be reported.”
“Where are you headed?”
“Nashville.”
“I suggest you report it to the airline when you get there. They should at least reimburse you for the locks.”
I led Jill toward the customs checkpoint. “The damned locks didn’t cost enough to fool with the paperwork,” I said. “When we get to Nashville, though, we’d better dig a little deeper and be sure nothing’s been taken.”
“What would they take, unless they’re into dirty clothes or souvenirs?” She had a look of exasperation.
“They want money or jewelry, something that can easily be fenced.”
“Well, they sure didn’t find any in my bag.”
That was true. We use credit
cards wherever possible, and our extra cash and travelers checks were stuffed in a small leather pouch I kept tucked inside my waistband. As for jewelry, Jill never carried anything expensive on a trip like this. That was asking for trouble. I decided whoever rifled our bags had come up empty handed. But just the idea of somebody tampering with our stuff was enough to raise my hackles. If I could’ve gotten my hands on him, I would have demonstrated some of the karate training I had taken in my early years with the OSI. That is, if the old joints still worked. This would require a serious siege of gum chewing, maybe even half a pack.
Then I looked at the two large name tags and began to wonder.
Chapter 5
Our route took us through Atlanta. By the time we landed in Nashville and trudged to the baggage claim area, it was well after eleven. I tried to figure how much time had elapsed since the phone call had awakened me in Amman. Somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-six hours? During my stint with the OSI, I had learned to exist on minimal sleep, but age was eroding my capacity to endure marathon wakefulness. I don’t sleep well on airplanes. In fact, I don’t do anything well on airplanes. Except for a couple of catnaps, I had been wide-eyed the whole trip.
The Gannons’ son, a wiry, younger version of his dad, met us beside the carousel. An architect-engineer who lived near his parents, he had picked up his father’s minivan and come to the airport to take them home. He would drop Jill and me off on the way. We lived only a few miles apart.
“Do you plan to go through your bags before we leave here?” Sam asked. I had told him about the missing padlocks during the wait in Atlanta.
I shook my head. “It’s too late and everybody’s too tired for that. I doubt if anything’s missing anyway. Maybe a wooden camel.”
Wilma grinned. “I’ve got plenty more.”
Sam looked at me. “Why do these women get so carried away by little figurines?”
Secret of the Scroll (Greg McKenzie Mysteries) Page 3
