“Count on it, Ruth. Nice to meet you.”
That was kind of a bust, J.D. thought. She didn’t really learn anything. She thought about it for a moment, called over one of the part-time girls who worked in the store, and asked her to cover the register while she used the restroom. She went to the back of the store, past the small sign that said, “staff only,” and entered the ladies restroom. She shut the door and called Jock.
CHAPTER 18
JOCK ALGREN HAD spent the day lounging on Matt’s patio, his nose buried in a new Arabic language book about Jordanian politics. He knew he could be sent into the Middle Eastern cauldron at any moment and he tried to stay current. His world was one of violence and death and it had been that way since he had graduated from college more than twenty years before. He’d been recruited into America’s most secretive clandestine agency, undergone a year of intensive training, and was then sent into the field as a spy and sometime assassin. During his training, he had discovered that he had an affinity for languages and had become fluent in Arabic, and over the years, acquired fluency in several other languages. The Arabic insured that he would spend a lot of time in the Middle East.
Longboat Key served as his respite from the wars. He was always welcome in Matt’s house and he had developed a lot of friends on the island. It was his place to decompress and live a normal life, at least for a while. Sometimes, when he’d had a particularly rough time on an assignment, when he had survived by killing the enemy, when he felt so dirtied by his actions that he could not face another day, he would come to Longboat and drink himself into a stupor. Matt would watch over him and after four or five days of what they called the healing time, help him sober up and regain enough of himself to once again join the fight against his country’s enemies.
This was not one of those bad times. He’d had an opportunity to visit his best friend and relax in the March sun, and he took it. Soon enough, he’d be sent back into the muck that was his life as an assassin, and he’d carry the memory of this quiet time with him. He hoped it would sustain him during the battles to come.
Jock had risen in the ranks of the agency and was known as perhaps the best agent in America’s intelligence community. He had a direct phone line to the President, and although he’d only used it once, it was a mark of how he was valued in the clandestine services. Within his own agency, he reported only to the director, and everyone knew that when Jock made a request, it was to be acted on immediately.
His phone rang. The caller ID told him it was J.D. “Is Matt still bothering you?” he asked by way of answering.
She laughed. “He keeps trying. I just sent him back to Longboat. Take care of him tonight. I have a big favor to ask.”
“Granted.”
“You don’t even know what I want.”
“Doesn’t matter. You know that.”
“I’d like to get some background information on the victim and also on one of the women in the book club. I can’t use my usual police resources or I wouldn’t ask you. Can you ask some of your people to look into them? Don’t do it if it makes you uncomfortable.”
“No problem at all. Whom are you interested in?”
“A woman named Ruth Bergstrom. She lives in The Villages and is probably in her early sixties.” J.D. gave him Bergstrom’s address that she’d retrieved from the bookstore’s database. “And the murder victim, Olivia Lathom. She lived in Atlanta, but that’s about all I know. She’s about the same age as Bergstrom. The police usually have a lot of background on the victim in their reports, but this time the victim’s fingerprints didn’t match any in the usual databases.”
“I’ll have you something by this evening, tomorrow morning at the latest. Want me to email it to you?”
“Yes. Thank you, Jock.”
“Does Matt know about this?”
“It was his idea. He said you were a pushover.”
“He’s right, of course. At least when it comes to you.”
“Pshaw. Now you’re making me blush.”
Jock laughed. “Talk to you tomorrow.”
Jock called one of the computer techs at the agency headquarters outside of Washington, DC, and gave him Ruth Bergstrom’s name and address and asked for anything he could find on her and on Olivia Lathom. “She apparently lived in Atlanta or somewhere close by,” Jock said.
“I’ll get right on it,” the tech said. “The boss is standing next to me. Wants to talk to you.”
“Put him on.”
“He says if you’re secure, he’ll call you in two minutes.”
Jock hung up and sat watching the white pelicans on the far edge of the lagoon that separated Matt’s cottage from Jewfish Key. These birds flew down from the upper reaches of Canada each fall and stayed through the winter. They were quite a bit bigger than the brown pelicans that were native to this coast, and they fished by gathering in a circle and herding the fish into the middle of an ever-tightening gyre.
Jock’s phone rang. His boss. “Hello, Dave. I hope it’s not time for me to get back to work.”
“What are you doing?”
“Sitting on Matt’s patio watching a bunch of white pelicans hunt their dinner. What’s up?”
“We have a situation brewing in Tampa, and I wanted to give you a heads-up. I may need you to look into it.”
“What’s going on?”
“We’ve been getting rumblings of jihadist activity directed at Tampa. We don’t know what it is or who is behind it, but the director of national intelligence wants us to look into it.”
“Why doesn’t the DNI give it to the CIA?”
“Well, you know they’re not supposed to operate in this country.”
“I know that, but I’m not sure the CIA knows that.”
“Probably not, but we may have to take some interest in this. Do you have any weapons with you?”
“I’ve got my Sig Sauer. I probably won’t need anything else.”
“Okay. I’ll keep you updated.”
“You sure know how to ruin a guy’s vacation.”
“Maybe nothing will come of it. Tell Matt and J.D. hello for me.” The line went dead.
Dave Kendall was the director of Jock’s agency and the man who had recruited him when he was a senior in college. Dave knew that Matt and J.D. were the only family Jock had and he was comfortable with Jock sharing everything with them. Both had been thoroughly vetted by the agency and given what amounted to high security clearances. It was an unusual arrangement, but then Jock was an unusual agent, and it was in the government’s interest to keep him happy.
CHAPTER 19
AS I APPROACHED the Cortez Bridge to Anna Maria Island, I was sorely tempted to pull into Tyler’s Ice Cream Shop. They make the best ice cream I’ve ever put in my mouth, but like the binge drinker or the potato chip lover, I can’t eat just one. Scoop, that is. If I stopped in, I wouldn’t be able to waddle back to my car until I’d eaten myself sick. J.D. would not be pleased. And somehow, she’d know.
I drove on, feeling very virtuous, enough so that I decided I deserved a pizza from Ciao’s tonight. I called Jock to see if he agreed. He did, and I ordered the large with everything on it. Well, I left off the black olives.
I swung by Ciao’s, and was greeted in the kitchen by my old buddy Bill, another Tiny’s habitué. “Your pie will be ready in about five minutes, Matt. I hope J.D.’s going to help you eat this thing.”
“She’s out of town, but Jock’s got dibs on half. You about ready for the season to end?”
“Oh, yeah. Don’t get me wrong. I like the busy season and I’ll miss the tips, but it’ll be nice to take a breather.”
“I gotcha.” We chatted about absent friends, which, on our island, peopled with so many older retirees, usually meant someone who had left us for the great beyond.
A large pizza box was set on the counter by one of the cooks. Bill looked at the little label and handed it to me. “Tell Jock I said hello,” he said. I assured him I would, and drove the two
miles to my house.
Jock was on the patio, his nose in a book. He must have heard me come in. He joined me in the kitchen. “Smells good.”
I put the pizza in the middle of the table and opened a beer for myself and an O’Doul’s for Jock. “So how have you wasted your day?” I asked him.
“Doing some work J.D. sent my way. Looking into Olivia Lathom and Ruth Bergstrom. I’m afraid I crapped out on one of the jobs,” he said. “Olivia Lathom is a cipher.”
“I didn’t know J.D. had given you marching orders. I told her to call on you if she needed help. I didn’t think you’d mind.”
“Not at all. You know that.”
“J.D.’s going to be disappointed. She thinks you walk on water.”
“I do, sometimes. We found out a lot on the other woman.”
“Other woman?”
“Yeah. Ruth Bergstrom.”
“Boy, she’s a hard case. Tell me about her.”
“She was born Ruth Donnelly in a little burg outside Montgomery, Alabama. She grew up there, graduated from high school, moved to Atlanta, and got a job as a secretary in a law firm. Two years later, she married one of their clients, a man named Jake Bergstrom, who was almost twenty years her senior. They had three children in quick succession and when she was thirty, her husband divorced her and got custody of the children.
“Apparently, Mrs. Bergstrom had developed a bad problem with prescription drugs. Her husband put her in rehab twice, once out at the Betty Ford Clinic in California, but nothing took. She wound up doing some time in the Georgia women’s prison that used to be located in Milledgeville.
“It looks like she almost stayed straight after she got out. She went back to Atlanta and took some waitressing jobs. There was one incident where the police were called because the restaurant manager suspected her of stealing money from the till, but they couldn’t prove it, so the case was dropped. Somewhere along the line she met and married a man named James McNeil. She kept the Bergstrom name for some reason and got a job as an assistant in a public library. She stayed there until she retired with a small pension.
“McNeil had done an Army tour at the tail end of Vietnam and then stayed in the National Guard. He retired as a master sergeant and started getting his pension when he turned sixty. His civilian job was as a meat market manager at one of those big warehouse stores. He ended up with a pension from them and took his social security when he turned sixty-two. So did Ruth.
“They sold their house in Marietta and used the proceeds to buy a house in The Villages. He plays a lot of golf, and she seems to be the neighborhood busybody. Like a lot of the people in The Villages, they’re not rich, probably not even well-off, but they’re getting by.”
“What happened to Ruth’s children?”
“They stayed with their dad until they were grown. They seem to be doing well, and we don’t think they ever had much contact with Ruth after the divorce.”
“But now you’re telling me that you can’t find my murder victim?”
“Actually, we found her. I mean, she is famous, a national best-selling author and all, but we can’t get anything on her. We don’t even have fingerprints, except for the ones the Sumter County medical examiner sent to the state.”
“That didn’t get any hits,” I said.
“Yeah. I know. J.D. said she had grown up wealthy in a high-dollar zip code in Atlanta. The Fulton County property records did show us that a Lathom family lived in Buckhead during the time that Olivia would have been a child, but the family moved out of that house thirty years ago.”
“Where did they go?”
“Some people with the same name showed up at about that time in a small town in South Georgia. Douglas. They moved into an assisted living facility and died some years later. The records show they were survived by two sons, but not a daughter.”
“Do you think Olivia Lathom might be in the witness protection program or something like that? It seems odd that she just pops up in her early forties.”
“She’s not in any of the protection programs. We checked. And we’d know if she was part of that.”
“Did you get anything on her?” I asked.
“Not much. She worked in the Fulton County public library system for part of her adult life. There’s nothing on her before she went to work there about twenty years ago. We believe that’s where she and Ruth Bergstrom met. As far as we can tell, she never got married, never worked anywhere but the library, or traveled very much. She did have income from some pretty savvy stock market investments but she didn’t live too high on the hog. The stocks produced enough to pay her living expenses and make the mortgage payments on a small house she’s lived in for the past twenty years, but her principle was diminishing.”
“Ruth Bergstrom said she was a widow.”
“If she was married, we missed it.”
“Okay, what else?”
“Lathom started writing mystery novels a few years back. She self-published two of them and developed a respectable following around Atlanta. Then, recently, out of the blue, her latest book debuted on the New York Times best-seller list and took off.”
“That’s the one we think she stole from Esther,” I said. “Where the hell did she spend the first forty years of her life?”
“Is that important to the case?”
“I don’t know, but if I don’t find out, especially now that I know she was off the grid for about two-thirds of her life, it’s going to drive me nuts. Maybe there’s some connection in her early life that brought about her murder all these years later.”
“Our nerds only had time to do a cursory search. We’ll stay on it, but it’s a puzzle. So far. Our guys are the best in the world, Matt. They’ll turn up something.”
But, as it turns out, they didn’t.
CHAPTER 20
THE EISENHOWER CENTER is a place of homage, not so much to Ike as it is to the men and women who served in the military during World War II. The Villages’ residents who fought in the war had donated many of the pictures and memorabilia that were prominently displayed. It was a place, J.D. thought, that would make veterans feel at home.
Judy had driven them over in her golf cart, and they were directed to a room near the front door that could accommodate the dozen or so women who usually showed up for the meetings. J.D. was introduced to several of the women who welcomed her to the club. They were interested in why she was in The Villages and if she planned to move there permanently.
J.D. told them the shortened version of the story of her life in the Army and in Miami and the woes of her divorce. It seemed to satisfy everyone’s curiosity. Ruth made her way through the crowd and welcomed J.D. “Glad you could make it,” she said. “Let’s find a seat.”
The women were gathered in a small seating area that consisted of two sofas and several chairs. J.D. and Ruth took an empty sofa and another woman joined them, with J.D. sitting in the middle. Ruth introduced the newcomer as Kelly Gilbert.
“Nice to meet you, Jade,” Kelly said. “Where’re you from?” Like in much of Florida, that was an icebreaker question. The state is a place for newcomers. In 1980, the population was something over nine million people. Today, it tops twenty-one million. Everybody is from somewhere else and the ritual inquiry into a person’s antecedents is not considered rude.
“I grew up in Miami, but I’m an Army officer and have lived all over the world. Most recently, in Miami again. I’ve been stationed there for the past three years.”
“That sounds exciting. What brings you to The Villages?”
“Judy Ferguson is my aunt and I needed to get out of Miami for a while. She invited me to come stay with her. I had some leave time built up, so I took her up on her offer.”
“And how are you enjoying our little community?”
J.D. laughed. “Love it, but I wouldn’t call it little anymore. Have you been here long?”
“My husband died, and I moved here about three years ago.”
“Oh, I�
��m sorry to hear that.”
“Thank you. The loss gets easier, and I’ve found a new life. My first husband died years ago. He was killed when a dump truck blew a stop sign and killed him. I got a settlement from the accident and a couple of years later married a lawyer from home. He’d never been married before and it turned out to be a really good marriage. Better than my first one. He sold everything and we moved to Orlando to live out our lives in the sun. Two years later, he had a heart attack and died. He left me everything he owned, which, as it turned out, wasn’t a lot. But it was enough to take care of me for the rest of my life. I sold out, moved here, bought a pink golf cart, and settled in with my dog, Mugsy.”
“Did you know Ruth’s friend, the author?”
“No. I’ve heard Ruth talk about her, but I never had the pleasure of meeting her. She wrote a great book, though.”
The woman who’d been introduced earlier to J.D. as the president of the club stood and said, “Okay, ladies. Let’s talk about this book. Who’s first?”
After the book discussion, punch and cookies were served. J.D. had enjoyed hearing the women’s different observations about the story. They were all positive. J.D. had bought and read Beholden as soon as she learned that her aunt Esther had written it. It was a good book, intricately plotted and sprinkled with sharp dialogue and bits of humor. She also found a digital copy of one of Lathom’s earlier books and thought it was awful. A little digging turned up the fact that both books Lathom had previously written were self-published. She wasn’t surprised that no self-respecting publisher would put them on the market. A lot of self-published books were wonderful pieces of work, and some even became best sellers. Lathom’s was definitely not one of those.
J.D. had restrained herself and did not take part in the discussion of Beholden. She was afraid she might slip up and reveal a deeper interest in the book than her assumed personality, Jade Conway, would have. She’d also told some of the women she’d met in the store earlier that day that she hadn’t read the book. She sat quietly, her cop’s eye trained on the women of the club, one of whom might be the killer.
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