Season of Fear

by Brain Freeman

They came together, kissing. The time apart, the distance, the arguments, melted away. He knelt in front of her and removed the rest of her clothes. He kissed her stomach, kissed up her body to her face. Her fingers, with sharp nails, pushed his shorts down. They were naked; they were pressed together. It was the Fourth of July, and fireworks lit up their eyes. He had never needed a woman so much.

  She led him to the bedroom. They lay facing each other, touching, but then she pulled him on top of her. Her knees bent, and her legs separated. He was trapped between her thighs; he was inside her. Everything else in the world finally fled his mind, and the only things left were her skin, breath, and wetness.

  The storm raging outside sounded distant and unimportant, nothing but a summer rain.

  *

  Cab awoke two hours later. It was a short night, but he felt as if he’d slept forever.

  It wasn’t light outside. He could barely see. He stretched out a hand to the warm indentation on the mattress, but the bed was empty. Lala was gone. There was no note and no message on his phone. He pushed himself up, propped against a pillow. Through the doorway to the living room, he could see that her clothes were gone, too. The sensation of their lovemaking lingered with a satisfying ache on his body, but if it hadn’t been for the faint essence of her perfume in the sheets, he wouldn’t have been able to swear she had ever been there.

  38

  Annalie rapped her knuckles on the window of the Thunderbird, and Peach bolted awake. She shook herself, reached across the car, and unlocked the passenger door. Her friend scrambled inside out of the rain.

  Peach stared at the downtown streets. It was early. Tampa was a ghost town. She was in her usual parking place, spot 52 in the lot outside the Common Way research office. Around them, the storm felt like a living thing. The lot was filling up like a lake, and if the water got much deeper, she was afraid that her car would float away.

  Peach gave her a quick, earnest hug. ‘I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to get here.’

  ‘We don’t have a lot of time,’ Annalie replied. ‘In another three or four hours, everything on the coast will be impassable. You should be home, Peach, not here. It’s not safe. What’s going on? Your message said something about Deacon.’

  ‘He’s gone. They took him.’

  ‘Who did?’

  Peach took a breath and explained everything. She played his voicemail for Annalie, who frowned as Deacon talked about gun trafficking.

  ‘You saw blood?’ Annalie said quietly.

  Peach nodded.

  ‘You’ve tried calling him?’

  ‘Over and over. No answer.’

  Annalie was silent. The wind roared.

  ‘If he was asking questions about Frank Macy, it’s possible that Macy heard about it,’ Annalie said finally. ‘Someone could have tipped him off.’

  ‘But what is Macy doing?’ Peach asked. ‘What’s he up to?’

  Annalie stared through the windshield. Drips of rain slid down her face. ‘Whatever it is, it’s not good.’

  Peach folded her hands tightly together. ‘You think he killed Deacon, don’t you?’

  ‘I have no idea, Peach,’ Annalie said. ‘I hope not.’

  ‘We need to find Macy.’

  Annalie grabbed her wrist. ‘We don’t need to do anything. Not you.’

  ‘I can’t just sit here.’

  ‘Go into the office. Go through Justin’s e-mails. Go through Deacon’s e-mails. See if you can find anything that would tell us what Macy is doing or where we can find him.’

  Peach felt her face flush, and she opened her mouth to complain, but Annalie interrupted her. ‘Listen to me, Peach. Please. You’re emotionally involved. You’re out of control. I don’t blame you, but that’s the way you make mistakes. Let me worry about Frank Macy. Let me find him. If you find anything that would help, you call me right away. Okay?’

  Peach wanted to scream, but she knew Annalie was right. ‘Yeah, okay. Keep me posted. Don’t leave me in the dark.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  Annalie got out of the car and ran to her Corolla. A few seconds later, she drove away, carving out waves of water as if she were parting the seas.

  *

  The more time Peach spent in the office, the more her frustration grew.

  The foundation was closed for the holiday, but even if the office had been open, the storm would have kept everyone away. She worked in peace, listening to the walls rock. Her fingers flew on the keyboard, but she learned nothing. She went back through Justin’s e-mails but didn’t find anything that would explain what he had discovered. She knew Deacon’s password, and she studied his e-mails, too, but there was nothing other than his usual campaign research.

  She checked her brother’s office voicemail. There was one new message from Caprice, which had come in the previous evening.

  ‘Deacon, it’s me. Tried your cell phone, but couldn’t reach you. Give me a call in the morning. I’m going over to Diane’s, and we’ll ride out the storm there. If you need me, I should be at the house by 10 a.m. or so.’

  No one had been able to reach Deacon. No one knew where he was.

  She didn’t know what to do next. She logged into Justin’s account again and opened up the edited photograph taken outside the Crab Shack. He’d used the picture to guide her to his hideaway, but there was nothing left inside the house except the article about Frank Macy poking out from under a file cabinet. Whatever he wanted her to find, someone else had already found it and stolen it.

  Then she remembered the photograph in the broken frame on the floor of the bedroom. It was the same photograph of herself that was attached to the e-mail. When she’d found the article about Frank Macy, she’d forgotten all about the photograph on the floor. If Justin wanted a picture of her in his hideaway, he had plenty of others to choose, but he’d used that one. She didn’t think it was an accident.

  He was trying to tell her something more.

  She decided to go back to Justin’s safe house. It was empty. No one would be there. She couldn’t stay in the office any longer, doing nothing.

  Before she logged out, however, she took another look at Justin’s messages and saw the other e-mail he’d failed to send. The one to Ogden Bush.

  I need to see you.

  She grabbed her coat, but instead of leaving, she headed down the empty office corridor to Bush’s office. She let herself inside, the way she had two days before, and unlocked the man’s filing cabinets again. The file on Justin was still missing. She remembered a file on Birch Fairmont in another drawer, and that file suddenly took on new significance for her. She opened the other drawer, but the file on Birch was gone, too.

  Bush had cleaned house.

  She relocked the filing cabinets and did a search of the man’s desk. She reviewed pink handwritten phone messages, copies of research reports that been gathered and written by the employees in the office, lists of media contacts around the state, and drafts of Diane’s events calendar for the week ahead. Nothing looked unusual or suspicious. Bush wouldn’t leave anything lying around that he didn’t want someone to see. It was a dead end.

  Then she saw that his voicemail light was flashing.

  With only the slightest hesitation, Peach punched the speakerphone, and she heard a voice with a faint southern drawl fill the office. ‘I need to talk to you right now. It’s urgent.’

  It was a short message, but the voice was familiar. She’d heard it before. For a moment she struggled to place it, and then she knew. The recognition washed over her. The voice belonged to the man who called himself Curtis Clay, the man who’d pretended to be a St Petersburg cop. The man who had held a gun on her and tried to put her in handcuffs in Justin’s apartment.

  That man. That fraud. He was in bed with Ogden Bush.

  She clicked off the phone, but as she did, a silky voice called to her from the office doorway.

  ‘What are you doing here, Peach?’

  Ogden Bush had his hands on his hips
. He wore a wet fedora. His raincoat dripped on the floor, and she could see a tailored black suit underneath it. His face was dark and curious, but he didn’t sound angry. He was too smooth to blow up at her, and that made her trust him even less.

  ‘You’re a spy,’ she said.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘You’re a spy. You’ve been spying on me.’

  Bush’s face melted into a politician’s smile. He sat down in the guest chair and made no attempt to dislodge Peach from behind his desk. He crossed his legs, displaying wet shined shoes, and smoothed the creased lines of his suit pants.

  ‘We’re all spies at this place, Peach. Isn’t that what you’re doing, too? You didn’t need to sneak in here. If you wanted answers about something, you could have talked to me. Exactly what do you want?’

  Peach stabbed the button on Bush’s phone. The short message played on the speakerphone. ‘Who is he?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s a contact of mine,’ Bush said.

  ‘He works for you.’

  ‘Lots of people work for me. You work for me, too.’

  ‘No, I work for Diane Fairmont.’

  ‘We both do,’ Bush said.

  ‘That man calls himself Curtis Clay,’ Peach went on. ‘He called my home and pretended to be a cop. I caught him in Justin’s apartment.’

  ‘What were you doing in Justin’s apartment?’ Bush asked with a wink. ‘You see? I told you, we’re all spies. None of us is innocent.’

  ‘Who is he?’ she repeated.

  Bush picked up a small pewter replica of the Bok tower from his desk and played with it between his fingers. He didn’t answer. She smelled his cologne, and she watched his ruby ring glint under the light. His face was a mask, but she knew he was thinking fast. Looking for a way out.

  ‘What do you know about Justin’s death?’ Peach asked.

  ‘I only know what the police tell me, Peach.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. You kept a file on Justin. He wanted to talk to you the night before he was killed. Why did he want to see you?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ Bush told her calmly. ‘We never spoke. This is the first I’m hearing about it. I think you should go home, Peach. The storm is getting bad. The office is closed. You shouldn’t be here.’

  ‘My next call is to Ms Fairmont. I’m going to tell her everything.’

  Bush shrugged. ‘She knows what I’m doing.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  Peach watched the man’s face. She wasn’t a poker player, but she knew a bluff when she saw it. She picked up the phone and punched the number for Ms Fairmont’s house. Ringing buzzed through the speakerphone. Before there was an answer, Bush leaned casually across the desk and depressed the button on the receiver to cut off the call. ‘All right, I think we can arrive at a compromise,’ he said. ‘The fact is, there are things that Diane is better off not knowing. Candidates think they want to know everything, but really, they don’t. It’s what we call plausible deniability.’

  ‘I call it lying,’ Peach said.

  ‘Whatever. Okay, you want to know who that man is? His name is Curtis Ritchie. He’s a private investigator, and yes, I use him from time to time. There’s nothing unusual about it. It’s common practice. I asked him to gather some information for me on Justin’s activities.’

  ‘He told me he was a St Petersburg cop.’

  ‘I told Curtis to stay within the bounds of the law,’ Bush said, ‘but he’s ex-police. Sometimes he forgets where the lines are drawn now that he’s on his own.’

  ‘Why were you spying on Justin?’

  Bush continued to twist the pewter model between his graceful fingers. ‘I found out that Justin was asking questions that were outside his job responsibilities here at the foundation. I was curious. I wanted to know why.’

  ‘About the Labor Day murders.’

  The man’s eyebrows rose, as if she knew more than he expected. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why do you care?’

  ‘The only things that scare me in political campaigns are things I don’t know.’

  ‘Were you afraid something might come out that would make Ms Fairmont look bad?’

  ‘If there was anything like that,’ Bush said, ‘I wanted to find out about it before our enemies did.’

  Staring at him, Peach realized for the first time that she no longer had any idea who their enemies were. Once everything had seemed clear to her. Now she was caught in a labyrinth of ulterior motives. She didn’t know whom to trust.

  Deacon had already told her: Don’t trust anybody.

  ‘What did Curtis Ritchie find out?’ Peach asked. ‘He called you last night. His message said it was urgent.’

  ‘I never reached him.’

  ‘What was he doing?’

  ‘He was following someone that you led him to,’ Bush admitted. ‘An unpleasant character named Frank Macy.’

  Peach wanted to jump across the desk. ‘Where? Where is Macy?’

  ‘I don’t know. The last time I talked to Curtis, he said that Macy was in the industrial docks area, heading toward the Picnic Island pier. He thought Macy might be meeting someone. I haven’t been able to reach him since then.’

  39

  Cab pulled into the cobblestoned driveway of Diane’s estate. The wrought-iron gate ahead of him, sculpted with herons and vine leaves, was closed. He turned off the Corvette’s engine. Rain gushed horizontally across the windshield. He saw no security staffing the gate or patrolling inside the wall. He didn’t like that the exterior of the estate was deserted. The wall was built for privacy, not protection, and an intruder could easily get to the house without being challenged. He would have preferred to see men with guns outside.

  His phone rang, and he saw the caller ID for Caprice Dean on the line.

  ‘Good morning, Cab,’ she said. ‘What a beautiful day.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Oh, you’re not scared off by a little storm, are you?’

  He could hear the grin on her lips as she teased him. He was disappointed that he still felt a physical reaction to the undercurrents in her voice. There were some women like that, women you had to work to resist.

  ‘Apparently, the storm scared off the security at Diane’s estate,’ he replied.

  A sheen of ice returned to her voice. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In her driveway.’

  ‘Cab, really? Do you have to bother Diane today?’

  ‘I do,’ he said.

  He knew she wanted to snap at him, but was restraining her temper. ‘Well, I’m going to be over there myself in a couple of hours. If you’re still there, I’m going to kick you out. Unless you can play nice and forget about work and just have cocktails with us, that is.’

  ‘Not today, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Your mother’s coming, too.’

  ‘Yes, she told me.’ He added: ‘You said you were going to increase security here at the house.’

  ‘I did. We should have two men inside right now.’

  ‘Inside,’ Cab said.

  ‘Yes, inside. Maybe you haven’t noticed the torrential rain and sixty-mile-an-hour winds. Do you really expect me to have people standing outside in the storm?’

  Cab frowned. ‘No.’

  ‘Well, good, can you get off my back? Not that I would typically complain about you being on my back.’

  He didn’t take the bait. ‘What do you want, Caprice?’

  ‘I wanted to apologize for yesterday.’

  ‘That’s not necessary.’

  ‘I overreacted,’ she went on. ‘I’m not used to people telling me no. Actually, I enjoyed having you stand up to me. It makes me even more interested in you, personally and professionally.’

  ‘Professionally, I’m in charge of solving crimes, and you’re in charge of protecting your pretty political ass.’

  ‘That sounds about right. And personally?’

  ‘Personally, nothing is going to happen.’

  She sounded disappointed. ‘Don’t I
have a chance to persuade you? I can be very persuasive if you give me an opportunity. I’m not looking for a commitment. Neither one of us wants the white picket fence, do we? We’re not signing up for marriage and kids.’

  Kids. Cab thought again: Boy or girl. No, he didn’t want a commitment, but he wanted more than he would find in bed with Caprice.

  ‘I was going to call you today,’ he said. ‘I found out what happened between Birch and Diane.’

  ‘No comment,’ she said.

  ‘I want to know if you and Lyle knew about it. I want to know who else knew.’

  ‘And I repeat: No comment.’

  ‘Fine. You won’t talk. Let me tell you what I think. You and Lyle found out what happened that Saturday night. You knew exactly what Birch did to Diane. You knew you were running a monster on the ballot.’

  Caprice’s voice tensed with frustration. ‘Cab, you are playing with fire here. This kind of scandal is exactly what Diane’s enemies want, and it will do nothing to protect her. Do you really want to be a tool for Ramona Cortes?’

  ‘You’re talking about politics, Caprice, but I’m talking about murder. People died. Your fiancé died. Don’t you care what really happened?’

  ‘How dare you say something like that to me!’ she exploded at him. ‘I don’t need you to lecture me about what I owe to those people. I know what happened. I know who was responsible for it.’

  ‘Last chance. Did you and Lyle know what Birch did?’

  ‘Yes, of course we knew!’ Caprice hissed at him. ‘Do you think we’re idiots? Do you think we could spend all that time with a candidate and not realize he’s a self-absorbed, cheating, abusive son of a bitch? News flash for you, Cab. So are half the politicians in Washington and Tallahassee. Birch would have fit right in.’

  ‘Maybe so, but he never would have been elected if the truth had come out back then. He would have been crucified for what he did to Diane. It would have been the end of the Common Way Party before it even started.’

  ‘You’re right. That’s true. It’s true today, too. Why the hell do you think we kept it a secret? Why do you think it’s still a secret? People like heroes and martyrs, Cab. They want the image, they don’t want reality. Do you think anyone would thank you if you exposed what Birch did? That’s not what they want to hear. The person you’d be hurting is Diane, because victims don’t get elected governor.’