After a brief meeting, I ate a light lunch of a green salad and glass of water at the La Bou on Howe. By now, my head was clear, and I felt my usual self. It was another foggy, cold day, the kind of day that made you pray for rain or sun. Anything but another day of fog and its soul-sapping dreariness. I was tired of the fog. The drive from La Bou to Fair Oaks Boulevard was just five minutes. Parking took a little longer, so by the time I walked into the Bate Real Estate office, it was almost two thirty.
The waiting and reception area were small, with only two guest chairs and a side table with several magazines fanned across it. A comely young receptionist was just sitting down at the desk carrying a mug, the string and paper label from a tea bag draped over the side.
“Can I help you?” she asked as she settled in to her seat.
“I’m looking for Garrett Bate.” I added a smile to the pleasant tone I’d affected.
“He’s in a staff meeting right now.” She pointed to my right. Through a glass partition, I saw about fifteen men and women seated around a conference table. At one end of the table, Garrett was standing, running a PowerPoint presentation.
“Will it be much longer?”
“I’d say another hour. Would you like to come back, or would you like me to set up an appointment?
“I’ll wait.”
She didn’t seemed pleased by me sitting ten feet away in one of the guest chairs as she drank her tea, though I kept my attention focused on Garrett in the next room. About ten minutes later, he finished his presentation. He turned off the projector with a remote and returned to his seat when he saw me through the glass. His face went ashen. He stood up, started to sit again, then stood straight up a second time. He said something in the direction of his mother at the other end of the table, and headed for the conference room door.
“What do you want?” he asked in an angry whisper when the door had closed behind him.
He stood over me as I flipped through a home and garden magazine. I let him stand there for several seconds. “You seem surprised to see me. I suppose I can’t blame you for that.”
“I, I…What do you want?”
“I’m thinking of redesigning my home office. What do you think of this style?” I turned the magazine so he could see the page. “You’re in the business. You must’ve seen some very nice home office designs in your time.”
“I think you should leave.” He looked over his shoulder to see how much of this the receptionist was getting.
“I think we should go to your office. Unless you want to have this conversation right here.”
His face was still frozen in shock. He looked into the conference then back at me. “Fine.” He pivoted and started walking. I followed.
His office was in the back, past a cluster of open-air cubicle workstations and three enclosed offices. Amanda Bate commanded the largest office, in the far corner, while Garrett occupied the second largest office next to it. He shut the door behind us and closed the blinds covering the narrow window next to the entrance. He didn’t sit and didn’t offer me a seat.
“Cat got your tongue?” I asked.
“I don’t know what you’re doing here or why, but you can’t just come into somebody’s workplace unannounced—”
“Oh, cut the pretenses, Garrett. We both know you tried to kill me last night. And by that look on your face, you can’t understand why I’m not dead.”
“What?” He feigned ignorance, but he didn’t pull it off.
“Stop! Let me tell you what I know.” I made sure he was listening to me before I continued. I spoke slowly, making sure the gravity of each word sunk into him. “I met your dad yesterday up in Salem. Nice guy, your dad. Then I met your brother. Your identical twin brother, Jake. So, while I’m still up in Oregon, I’m betting Jake calls you, tells you a guy name Ray Courage came to visit. You figure I might be putting things together. About how maybe you had your brother stand in for you at the real estate awards while you were up in Tahoe. You can’t take that chance. So you break into my house and mess with my furnace.”
Garrett stood there, implacable, offering no objections, no false outrage.
“By the way, you should get a new MO. This furnace thing is so yesterday. Or should I say, so two years ago.”
“Fuck you.”
“Clever comeback.” I took a step closer to him, to within an arm’s length. “Let’s jump to two years ago. You’re upset that your wife wants to divorce you. Or, at least, you’re upset that doing so will cost you a bundle of money. You can’t just shoot her. Or do anything else that would point to you. So you decide to come up with what you think is the perfect crime.”
“You think you’re so sure about this. But you don’t know. And you sure as hell can’t prove it.”
“You’ve got this identical twin brother. This lets you be in two places at the same time. Except for one thing. He’s got this scar on his chin. He can’t pass for you with that. So you both grow those god-awful chin beards so he can cover up his scar. Then you’re identical again.”
He was listening closely to every word, seeing how far I could take this.
“But I was watching the tape of that awards ceremony on YouTube the other night—thanks for the tip on that by the way—and noticed he wasn’t engaged at all with his colleagues at the dinner table. That makes sense because he couldn’t have the kind of inside conversations that only friends and colleagues can. He didn’t even know Gracie Nixon, Real Estate Agent of the Year, was sitting next to him.”
The color was returning to his face, and he pressed his lips tightly together as something started to smolder in his eyes.
“Then your brother gives a very entertaining and humorous speech, surprising everyone in the room. Seems you’re not the comedian he is. After all, he’s Salem’s open-mic comedy champion for three straight years. I’m surprised he agreed to help you kill your wife, though. What was in it for him?”
He smiled, his face transformed from its previous anger to satisfaction. He knew I couldn’t prove any of it. He seemed proud that someone had recognized his brilliance in planning and committing a crime no one could prove.
“I told him I was playing a practical joke on someone and needed to be somewhere else while this friend of mine had to think I was at the awards. He didn’t ask any more questions than that. Afterwards, he might have suspected something, but we never talked about it.”
“I could check the airlines to see if he booked a flight down here, before and after the awards ceremony.”
“Don’t bother. I was way ahead of you on that. He drove down.”
“You’re a sociopath. You’re proud of what you did. Look at the smug look on your face.”
“Bitch had it coming.”
I leaned my face to within inches of his. “I’m going to the cops with this. They’ll go after your ass. Even if they don’t, Tiffanie’s parents will have enough for a wrongful death lawsuit. The burden of proof there is much less than in a criminal trial. The publicity alone will destroy you.” I backed off and let that sink in. “But you’re lucky. Because I’m willing to keep my mouth shut about everything. About your twin brother and the switcheroo, all of it, for a measly fifty thousand dollars.”
“You can’t be serious. You don’t have shit. I’m not paying you a dime. Those security cameras at the hotel have me in that hotel that night. And my friends will testify that I was with them up until that point.”
“I have to admit, that was pretty clever. Jake saying he was too drunk to drive and had to stay at a hotel. Just so he could be caught on the security cameras to establish your alibi. Brilliant.”
“Thank you. I thought so, too. He was sleeping in a nice two-hundred-fifty-dollar hotel room, while that bitch was dying with her lover boy.” He laughed to himself, no doubt picturing his wife’s lifeless body.
“About that. How could you be sure he was inside the house that night?”
“I didn’t know if he’d be there at all. I was just trying to k
ill her. But the fact he was there was a bonus. He had it coming.”
“One thing I haven’t figured out is where you spent the night. Did you stay up in Tahoe?”
He shook his head. “No, I drove up early that evening, went in and did my thing on the furnace when they were out to dinner, and was back in Sacramento by ten that night. I parked my car five blocks from my house and snuck back home. No one saw me.”
“You knew the police would look for a hired hitter, didn’t you? That’s why you sent Tiffanie’s rings to her parents. So they couldn’t speculate that you’d sold them to pay your hit man.”
“Just being thorough. I would like to have sold off those rings and had a nice vacation. That would’ve been sweet justice, but it was more important to cover all my bases.”
“I still want my fifty grand, or I’m going to the police.”
“You’re a pain in the ass. And you’re not getting squat.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Yeah, dead sure. And a word of warning—I may have failed last night. But it won’t happen again. You’d better look over your shoulder from now on.”
I started to smile, even affecting a chuckle.
“What’s so funny?”
I reached into the breast pocket of my shirt and pulled out my cell phone. “These things are amazing. You can take photos with them, send texts, e-mails, and do pretty much everything you can do on a computer. Ten years ago, none of this was possible. I remember when you had a home phone and a television with five channels. Now, you can carry a thousand times more than that in your pocket. Amazing. Hell, you can even transmit and record entire conversations.”
“You recorded this?” He pursed his lips and brought a hand up to his mouth.
I nodded.
“Doesn’t matter.” His composure returned quickly.“ Nothing I said can be used against me.”
“You didn’t hear me. I didn’t just record it. I was transmitting it to someone. Someone with a court order.”
“You’re bluffing.”
Beyond his closed door, we could hear loud voices and a woman yelling. A few seconds after the commotion started, Garrett’s door burst open, and the office filled with cops.
I held Garrett’s gaze, his eyes filled with hatred, when the police cuffed him and read him his rights. He finally broke eye contact with me as a cop patted him down.
“Have a nice day,” I said to him, and I walked out of the office.
Twenty or more employees stood in hallways, cubicles, and at office doors in stunned silence, watching the events unfold. I saw Royle approaching.
“Did you get everything?” I asked, holding up my phone.
“Yep. Once Sac PD books him, they’ll transfer custody to us in a couple of days.”
I walked out to the cold grayness towards my car. Inside, I dropped my head into my hands and rested my forehead against the top of the steering wheel. I stayed like that for more than an hour, letting the afternoon fade away until the outside cold seeped inside my car, chilling me to the bone. I started the engine and drove off. Tomorrow would be different for me. It wouldn’t be different and better, or different and worse. It would just be different.
The past four days became a scrambled mess in my head, as if someone had put all my thoughts and emotions into a blender and turned it on high. I knew better than to try processing it all as I drove. It couldn’t be done. To get a sense of what had just happened, and its far-reaching effects on me and everyone else, might take weeks or months. Or I might never know what I felt about bringing a killer to justice while his victim still lay dead.
The only thing I knew for sure was that there was no turning back.
The End
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Also by R. Scott Mackey
In the Ray Courage Mystery Series
Courage Matters
Rookie Private Investigator Ray Courage is asked by "Stockbroker to the Stars" Lionel Stroud to investigate an employee who's been acting suspiciously. Ray soon learns that not everything is as it appears at Stroud's firm. When his investigation uncovers a possible Ponzi Scheme orchestrated by Stroud himself, two people are murdered and Ray becomes Suspect Number One.
Courage Resurrected
Ray Courage’s wife Pam died thirteen years before in a car accident. Or did she? Ray receives e-mails from someone claiming to be his dead wife, accusing him of attempting to kill her and vowing revenge. As he deals with the possibility that his wife is still alive, he tries to find who’s behind the threatening messages. As he does, Ray must outrun the police and elude a murderous predator.
Courage Stolen
The Monarch Project could revolutionize the energy industry, eliminating the need for foreign oil, dramatically reducing greenhouse gases, and creating a clean sustainable energy future for generations to come. But all this is at risk when someone steals the project and demands $20 million for its return. Ray acts as the bagman in an effort to secure the project's return. Events become more complicated when two murders ensue. Working against an Asian street gang, eco-terrorists, greedy corporate executives, and a band of academics who seem incapable of telling the truth, Ray and his sidekick Rubia seek to unravel who's behind it all.
Acknowledgments
My thanks go to Jennifer Oberth of Indie Books Gone Wild for her terrific job editing this book. She helped me refine the story, fixed some awkward constructions and outright errors, and generally improved the manuscript from start to finish.
Also from Indie Books Gone Wild, Jo Michaels did an outstanding job proofreading the final manuscript. Any errors remaining in this book are mine and mine alone.
I would also like to thank cover designer Karen Phillips, who took the time to create a terrific design that reflects the character, story, and setting of my novel. Thank you for helping me create a better experience for my readers.
About the Author
Scott Mackey lives in Northern California, where he writes both fiction and non-fiction. His first book, Barbary Baseball, achieved critical acclaim from baseball historians for its quality research and writing.
Visit his website at www.rscottmackey.com
Courage Begins: A Ray Courage Mystery Novella (Ray Courage Private Investigator Series Book 1) Page 6
