Finding Sheila

by Anne Hagan

  “Really?”

  The Deputy DA colored slightly and pointed at the University of Virginia Law School diploma hanging on her wall. “I can also run some interference here with my boss and the commissioners; buy you some time. Please keep me in the loop. Don’t let me be blindsided by anything. I need to know everything that’s going on. I’ll be judicious with what I tell to whom, but this is the FBI’s case and I don’t want to be caught in their cross-hairs.”

  “I guess I should own up, then.” Mel pursed her lips and looked across Andrea’s desk at her trying to figure out how to approach what she was about to tell her.

  “Don’t you hold out on me!”

  “Okay, you asked for it. Here it is: Dana is still in Tennessee, working things from that end.”

  Andrea crossed her arms over her chest and looked at Mel with a wary eye. “Working things, how?”

  “She hasn’t gotten a lot, mind you, but she’s been to places the FBI hasn’t touched.”

  “Like where?”

  “Like inside the Tennessee Prison for women to talk to Ford’s cell mate.”

  “Seriously? The FBI hasn’t been there?”

  “Not to our knowledge.”

  “Just…just wow. Okay then…I can’t even wrap my head around that.”

  “Unfortunately, there’s more.”

  Mel spent the next several minutes filling her in on the things Dana had found and on what she, herself knew while Andrea took notes.

  “I don’t know if any of this helps me with Virginia but I’m starting to get the picture that there’s a lot more here than meets the eye.”

  “Collusion between the prison and…and the local hospital, maybe?” Mel asked.

  Andrea half shrugged a shoulder. “Nothing I could say with any conviction or evidence, but if it walks like a duck…”

  “So, when will you start prodding your contacts?”

  Andrea glanced at the government issue wall clock hanging above her door. “It’s nearly 3:00 PM on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving so Friday if the FBI doesn’t find her first, and frankly I’ll be lucky to catch anyone of value to us in the office before Monday.”

  “Thanksgiving…throwing a wrench into things since the 1600’s.”

  “Will Dana be home for it?”

  Mel just shook her head. “It’s not likely. What about you? Not going anywhere since you’re pulling duty here?”

  “I don’t really have any ties here. I’m an only child. My mom and dad are no longer with us…long story. Most of my extended family is spread around Maryland.”

  “How about dinner with the Cranes, then?”

  “No, no. I couldn’t impose like that.”

  Mel waved her off with the flip of a hand. “It’s not an imposition, but if you’d rather spend Thanksgiving with your adoring stalker?”

  “Sold! What time should I be there, and where am I going?”

  Chapter 22 - Turkey Day

  Thursday Morning, November 26th

  Thanksgiving Day

  Nashville, Tennessee

  Dana sat at her laptop, bleary eyed, scrolling through page after page of a public and private records and databases. A brighter picture of Theo Lundquist was starting to emerge. She still lacked access to his financial records, but she didn’t need them to see the trail of his purchases was vast, yet it only went back a couple of years. About the time he dropped out of his BSN program. She smacked her forehead repeatedly. Where does the money come from? Think! Think! He’s got to be a key to this somehow and wherever he gets his money, has something to do with it…

  Switching gears, she tried to research public records of other kidnappings, looking for patterns, links, anything that stood out. Nothing seemed connected.

  She got up and stretched then went to the window and looked out on the morning unfolding outside. It seemed calm, almost peaceful. Nashville seemed quiet early on Thanksgiving morning with none of the usual weekday hustle, bustle and traffic, she noticed.

  Traffic…traffic. Dana turned from the window and stared at the pile of paperwork stacked on the desk. She thought of Theo, absent from Sheila’s transport run on a day when a massive traffic accident left his dispatch company shorthanded and pushed area medical facilities to capacity.

  She walked back over to the desk and picked through the pile of paperwork until she found Cherryman’s files. In them, she found exactly what she expected to find; the ambulance company report from the company that delivered Raeanne Cherryman to Saint Thomas Hospital after her accident was TSA, the company Theo and Caleb worked for. Just a coincidence? How many ambulance companies are there in Nashville?

  She hopped on the Internet and Googled them. As she suspected, there were several, but TSA had dispatch units all over town and in a couple of the major suburbs. She remembered Avery Nix then. So taken aback had she been by Doctor Rutledge’s board certifications and telling Mel about them, she hadn’t gone on and researched the criminal history for Nix.

  She’s from Nashville and knew that CO, whom I’m betting doesn’t live too awful far from where he works. Maybe she has medical records for Saint Thomas. Dana dug around in her go bag for the flash drive she’d forgotten all about after all her subterfuge in getting it. Running into Caleb and Theo had set her on a whole different track.

  When she found the drive, she popped it into her computer and was surprised to find it more than half full. There were dozens of pages of test results and physician’s notes on Sheila Ford, some things that were in her prison file, and some that were not. “Everything should have been, shouldn’t it?” Dana muttered to herself. She wasn’t from here. Sloppy record keeping for the convicts. So much for making it easier on attorneys.

  She always sympathized with what attorneys had to go through because her ex-husband, light years before her coming out and her marriage to Mel was an attorney, a very successful defense attorney, albeit for white collar criminals.

  Deciding to forgo digging more into Sheila’s paperwork for the moment, she skimmed through everything looking for anything on Avery Nix. She didn’t have to look very hard. Nix had a few pages in the file where she had visited the ER and had some follow up after breaking her arm in an accident three years before. She’d been a passenger on a motorcycle that had been forced off the road by a large SUV, from the look of the paperwork. Dana winced.

  After a couple of deep breaths, she pushed thoughts of what could have happened aside and looked to see if there was any sort of an ambulance transport report.

  “Bingo!” She found one. Scanning it quickly though, she realized TSA hadn’t done the transport from the accident scene, another service had. She skimmed the rest of the paperwork on Nix. There wasn’t much.

  So that theory didn’t pan out. Still curious about Nix, she started pulling up Court View and looking at case files. Since she had her SSN from the medical records, she also called on the private databases she paid to use to get more information. Nix was 26. She’d been in jail for a couple of years for possession and intent to distribute tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of cocaine.

  From the case files, Dana couldn’t tell if there had been other suspects or co-conspirators. It didn’t appear there had. How does one small woman lay her hands on so much Coke? Where’d that money come from or who was fronting that? She had more questions than she did answers.

  Back on the Internet, she got into her LexisNexis subscription and started looking at full case histories. An hour later, she had a little better understanding of how Avery Nix landed where she had, but no more about how she got started on her journey to being a dealer on such a large scale in the first place. With that much coke, she was a distributor with connections, not a street level dealer. Rare for a woman, and rarer still for one who was only twenty-four years old when she’d been sentenced and sent up.

  Is it even relevant? Does it fit? I should have gone home for the holiday. I could run all this by Mel and she could contact the locals maybe and get them to talk to her�
�tomorrow…Monday… Dana sighed, feeling defeated.

  Dana took a walk outside, to clear her head. The air was a little cool, but not with the level of chill and the rain they were experiencing back home in Ohio. Hunting season would start there in a few days. She knew Mel’s dad and their nephew Colt were both anxious to get out and hunt, cold and wet weather or not. Her own father had even gone and applied for an Ohio license. He hadn’t hunted in all the years since her grandfather had sold the hunting camp they’d maintained in the Allegheny Mountains, in Pennsylvania.

  She didn’t miss ‘the camp’ as they all had called it, what with the lack of running water and an outhouse for the most basic of human needs. She still found herself reminiscing about family times spent there as she walked along. She hoped their Tennessee cabin, with more modern conveniences, would give them a lifetime of memories too.

  So lost in thought was she, she never noticed the car following her along slowly, at a distance.

  Back at the hotel, the front desk attendant stopped her. “Paper ma’am?”

  “No thanks. I get most of my news online these days.”

  “Oh, but you’ll miss out on most of the sale ads and the early bird coupons.”

  Dana wrinkled her nose in confusion.

  “For tomorrow? Black Friday?” She held the paper out and Dana took it.

  Back in her room, she set it down on the desk and marveled at it. The Thursday Tennessean was quite the tome, as thick as she remembered the Sunday Pittsburgh Post Gazzette of her childhood being. Probably still is.

  She marveled at all of the ads. Why do people still shop this way? Cyber Monday; now that I can get into…crowded stores, not so much.

  Laying the ad circulars aside, she started flipping through the paper itself. At the metro section, she stopped cold. A picture of Caleb in his EMT uniform smiled back at her under the headline, ‘Tap Root Hills Man Found Murdered’.

  ###

  “What if Sheila is dead too, Mel? I mean, why Caleb? Even the FBI didn’t think he was guilty of anything, obviously, there was a lot more than met the eye there.”

  “And, they weren’t keeping an eye on him like you thought they were,” Mel said. “Now I’m worried about your safety. You need to pack up and get out of there; come home.”

  Dana did respond.

  “Did you hear me? Forget this. Let the FBI handle it. Just come home. Besides, if you leave now, you’ll get here in time for turkey sandwich leftovers and a second round of Hannah’s pies.”

  “I don’t think so Mel. Not yet, as good as that sounds right now. I admit, I was hitting walls down here, but this changes things. Someone’s playing for keeps. I think I need to stay in Tennessee a while longer and follow some more leads, try and find Caleb’s killer.”

  “I disagree. Let the Nashville police and the FBI figure that out.”

  She told Mel then about Theo and his spending. “That money is coming from somewhere. Drugs maybe? Ford’s cellmate, Avery Nix, got sent up for a king-sized distribution operation…with no sign of who her backing was. There’s got to be some sort of a link there. I just feel that in my gut and my gut is rarely wrong.”

  “Now, I admit, at first I thought the whole deal was something to do with Theo and some sort of accident insurance scam or something, but I don’t have near enough information to prove any of that. But, maybe there’s a personal tie between Theo and Avery. They’re about the same age. Maybe Caleb caught on to their little operation…got a little too close and Theo had him killed.”

  “I don’t see how any of that fits with Sheila Ford.”

  “Well, okay, let’s back up and look at this piece by piece. Theo and Caleb were partners and now Caleb is dead. Maybe Theo had some sort of scam or side gig running drugs going on and Caleb caught on. Maybe he threatened to turn Theo in, so Theo took Caleb out of the picture.”

  Mel blew that off. “That might be true, but Sheila still doesn’t fit in with all of that. She was in prison and her illness, her disease, whatever it is appeared there. She was a transport patient, not part of their drug dealing plot, even when you throw Nix into the whole mess. Didn’t Nix tell you, Ford spent the last two months of her incarceration in the med bay?”

  She hated to admit it, but Mel was right. “Yes. Nix claims she didn’t see her and didn’t know she had been released from the prison or that she had escaped. I guess I need to find out who visits Nix…possibly Theo Lundquist.”

  “Good luck getting back in there. You’ve probably worn out your welcome with the warden.”

  That gave Dana another idea. “Hear me out on this Mel. I’ve seen Sheila’s records and the records of another prisoner with chronic medical complaints - don’t ask. Maybe the prison is playing a game with Medicaid, Mel. Think about it. Shelia was extradited down here to face charges in Patricia Dunkirk’s murder just a little over a year ago. She’s only been in the prison system seven, eight, maybe nine months. In that time, she goes from healthy to near invalid status? I’m not buying it.”

  “That’s just it,” Mel said, “The prison wouldn’t see that money and that has nothing to do with those two EMT’s or Nix. You’re just grasping at any idea that pops into your head.”

  “Think about it this way, then. Let’s suppose everything that day I picked up Sheila was rigged. The massive pileup? Maybe it was one big scam by these people. A massive insurance scam. It gets most of the paramedics and EMTs out of that station. Say Theo is one of them. He’s ordered to call in sick that day, for some reason, so he does, leaving Sheila with an inexperienced EMT. The ring takes Sheila at the first opportunity.”

  Mel shook her head on her end of the line. “But for what reason?”

  Dana’s mind continued to spin. Instead of answering Mel, she threw another idea out there. “What if Caleb was in on it after all Mel? What if the whole thing was planned with him involved too? That’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “None of this makes any sense. And, that leaves Nix out.”

  “Hear me out. I was watching out the back window of that rig, Mel. We weren’t followed. How could we be? We detoured to his post, first and then got on the road. I looked out quite a bit. I’m telling you, if we were trailed, I’d know it. That stop, in that location, had to be planned. They were waiting for us there.”

  “And then they took the EMT out of the picture when you stayed on and started poking around? That makes me feel a whole lot better…not!”

  “Well, maybe or maybe he was expendable to them all along,” Dana said, trying to placate her wife. “They had to expect an investigation after an escaped prisoner, after all. They don’t have all of law enforcement in three-four states under their influence.”

  “True. The question is; why then? How does Sheila figure into all of it? Why would they want her?”

  Dana blew out a heavy breath. “If it’s some kind of insurance fraud, I don’t have a clue how I would even begin to prove that.”

  “In your travels around down there, have you run into anyone else working on something like that at the prison, at the hospital…anywhere?”

  “You know, now that I think about it, no one. It’s like nobody here cares. Ford is gone so she isn’t their problem.”

  Chapter 23 - Kin Folk

  Dana got cleaned up, put on the best outfit she had with her that was still semi-clean, then added her badge and her sidearm. She drove the half hour to Tap Root Hills in traffic that was still holiday light.

  The management office for the little apartment complex was open with a single soul on duty. He glanced up from the football game playing on the television from where he sat on a sofa, when she entered the office, but he turned right back to the game without standing or saying anything. He held a plate of food in one hand and gestured with the other toward the front desk. When she didn’t move, he covered his mouth briefly while he finished chewing and then said, “Sign in over there.”

  “Um, I’m Detective Rossi with the police department.” She pulled her wal
let out and flashed the photo pocket of her Ohio Driver’s License at him quickly because she’d forgotten the ID wallet in the car. “I’m here to do some follow up on Caleb Lighty.”

  He glanced her way again. “Who?”

  “The man that was killed in his apartment here a couple of days ago.”

  “Sorry. Didn’t know him. It’s Thanksgiving. I doubt there’s anyone around that did.”

  “That’s not why I’m here. I need to get into the apartment, do some more investigating.”

  “It’s still sealed off. Police said no one goes in there.”

  “I am the police.”

  The game cut to commercial. The man turned around and gave her the once over for the first time, noticing the badge and gun. “You’re not with Nashville.”

  “No. Sheriff’s Department.”

  He pursed his lips and gave her a half nod then set the plate down and got up. “I’ll give you the key. It’s 310. Lock up when you leave. I ain’t hanging around in there.”

  “Leave it a mess, did they?”

  He waggled his shoulders in a mock shiver. “No, it just gives me the creeps.”

  It was a walk up with an outside entry. From the outside, she could tell it was narrow and probably not very deep. The entries to neighboring apartments were only eight to ten feet to either side of his door. She’d come at the building from the opposite side where the layout looked identical.

  Inside, her suspicions were confirmed. One decent sized, but not large room spread before her with a galley kitchen and dining area at the back taking up two-thirds of the rear wall space. The enclosed area to the left of that, she assumed was the bathroom.

  She took booties out of her go bag and slipped them on over her shoes and then stepped in carefully, looking at the floor ahead of herself first. A six-inch square of rug had been cut from the deep brown, wall to wall carpeting a few feet from the door. She stooped there and looked carefully at the rug with her mini-Mag-lite. She saw a single drop just a few inches from the cutout. Widening the circle, she picked up another and then another leading around the futon sofa and back toward the bathroom.