by Matt Hilton
‘Who’s that?’ she wondered aloud.
Parked in front of her house was a gunmetal-grey sedan car. Occasionally she received visitors, but they were few and far between. Generally it was a neighbour who called by, or someone interested in purchasing her artwork having been guided to the house by Hilary Bartlet, who worked part-time at Billie’s shop in Hill End. She wondered if this latest arrival had come in search of a particular piece of art, or to commission work, because the grey car wasn’t a vehicle she recognised. Billie craned to make out a figure inside it, but from this distance the windows were opaque, as blank and formulaic in colour as the car’s paintwork.
A man of similarly bland colours was standing on her porch.
That of itself wasn’t surprising. Someone who’d made the effort to drive all the way out to Baker’s Hole might decide to wait for her on receiving no reply when they knocked. Even as she figured the visitor had come to such a decision, he straightened and spied back at her. The man then turned briefly, and from the way he snapped his attention back on the approaching pick-up she guessed he’d hailed someone else. She followed the direction in which he’d turned and saw a second man walk out from the front of her garage. For obvious reasons, Billie experienced a twinge of concern. Hilary wouldn’t have sent these men to Billie’s house like this, not to the home of a single woman out in a remote corner of the hills. There was no formula to spotting an art lover, but Billie doubted the men in suits and raincoats were the type to while away the hours in any gallery – other than a shooting gallery. They looked like cops, or maybe FBI.
Billie fumbled her cell phone from her coat pocket and checked for missed messages. There were none. Hilary would have warned her if the men had been at the store enquiring after her whereabouts. She put the phone away. She didn’t take her foot off the gas. Momentarily she considered bypassing her house, keeping going until she was in Hill End, where she would feel less intimidated by facing the strangers. But what if she was worrying about nothing? The appearance of the men – cops, FBI agents or whatever – might have nothing to do with her former life. And, if it had, trying to run wouldn’t make any difference. Better to face things than have the grey car chase her along the valley.
She slowed, then pulled the Chevrolet into the drive. By now the first man she’d noticed was leaning on the porch rail, smiling faintly as she drew up alongside the sedan. His friend had stalled midway between the garage and house, and looked mildly embarrassed that he’d been caught snooping where he’d no right. She gave him a disapproving squint through her bug-encrusted windshield as she turned off the ignition. The engine continued to sputter a few beats after she withdrew the key.
As she climbed out of the pick-up, she looked at the two men in turn, before settling on the one on the porch. It was obvious from their manner that the one on her porch was the senior, in age and in rank. She directed her question at him. ‘Who are you people, and what the hell do you think you’re doing trespassing on my land?’
On the porch, the man adjusted his raincoat so that Billie got a look at the official shield clipped to his belt. ‘We’re looking for Wilhelmina Womack.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m Agent Brandon Cooper. I need to speak with her concerning her husband.’
Billie scowled at the man. ‘Why would a federal agent be asking after a dead man? You do know that Richard died?’
The agent snorted, before approaching the steps and moving down them at a leisurely pace. Billie waited. She folded her arms, a defensive posture. On her right forearm was a smudge of paint which she rubbed at with her opposite thumb, then allowed her arms to swing down by her sides. She felt awkward and knew that the agent would recognise her ill ease.
‘Mrs Womack,’ he said as he came to a halt in front of her. He was taller than her, slight of build, a man with neat grey hair, but he carried the faintest buzz of beard growth on his chin. She guessed that the agents had driven through the night to reach her home this morning. ‘Can we speak candidly and cut to the chase? You are Wilhelmina Womack?’
‘Billie . . . but I don’t need to answer your questions. I’ve already been through all this with the police, so I’ll ask you to leave.’ She pointed at their car.
Neither man budged.
‘Go on, get the hell out of here,’ Billie demanded. ‘And don’t come back without a goddamn warrant.’
‘Why would we need a warrant?’ asked Cooper. ‘I only want to speak with you.’
‘Show me that shield of yours.’
Cooper grunted at her attitude, but flicked back the front of his coat.
‘How do I know that it’s official? For all I know you guys are weirdos who seek out lone women while pretending to be federal agents. A badge like that, I could buy one of those at Toys R Us. Any other form of identification?’
For the first time Cooper’s look of smug satisfaction slipped. He dug in his breast pocket and brought out a leather wallet, flicking it open and holding it close to Billie, who studied an ID card inside it in detail.
‘Satisfied now?’ Cooper asked.
Billie checked his face against the photograph ID on the card. ‘Why would an ATF agent wish to speak to me about my deceased husband?’
‘Wouldn’t you rather we went inside? It’s a bit cold out here, don’t you think?’
Billie folded her arms: to hell with looking defensive. ‘We’re not going inside. I’m fine where we’re at; if you don’t like it, then you’re free to leave.’
Cooper glanced once at his fellow agent, turning his mouth up at one corner in a sour smile of acceptance. ‘It could take a while,’ he said.
‘I haven’t much to say about Richard. We ended on very acrimonious terms . . . and that was before he killed our daughter.’
Cooper appeared momentarily knocked off-stride by her bluntness. He again glanced at his colleague, this time indicating that he return to the sedan. ‘I’ll handle this, Ray. You may as well stay warm.’
‘This is your show, Brandon,’ said the other agent and turned away.
Cooper pushed his wallet inside his coat pocket, and then flicked a hand towards the lake. ‘If you’re unhappy about going inside, will you walk with me? It was a long drive over from Seattle, and I’m feeling every mile in my bones. Do you mind taking a stroll down by the lakeside?’ After a moment he added: ‘I can see why you’d live out in these hills. It’s beautiful here.’
As the younger agent climbed inside the sedan, Billie brought an extra coat from the passenger seat of her pick-up. It was through stubbornness that she’d refused to go inside, and now she was regretting it. While painting she hadn’t felt the cold, but down here where a chill breeze blew off the lake she found that she was trembling. Then again, it was more to do with Cooper’s loaded words than the low temperature, so it would probably make no difference. She shrugged into the coat, and then indicated that Cooper lead the way. His patent leather footwear wasn’t conducive to walking along the rocky shoreline, but it had been his decision to go that way, and his discomfort gave her some slight satisfaction.
Ripples of water sloshed on the pebbles along the shore. A recent storm had thrown leaves and twigs on to the lake surface; now they were piled in a small drift a foot or so higher up than the waterline. Cooper walked, using the mound of flotsam as a route marker, keeping it always at a pace to his right. Billie moved along, a step behind his left shoulder. A couple of hundred yards further on Cooper halted and stared across the lake to where the hills on the far shore shimmered in the breeze. He exhaled, long and slow, purging some of the weariness of the journey from his bones, but also, Billie thought, girding himself for what was to come next. She also settled her gaze on a point on the distant shore, and nodded to herself.
‘Has Richard been in touch?’
Billie blinked a couple of times in confusion, but it was a waste. Cooper was still watching the far shore. Billie shoved her hands into her coat pockets. ‘What? Like via an Ouija board or something? Are
you forgetting he’s dead?’
Cooper’s shoulders rose and fell an inch. He still didn’t turn towards her. ‘His body was never found. I know that you filed to have him recognised as deceased, and your petition was granted, but that’s not the same as us discovering his corpse.’
Images flashed across Billie’s vision of a vehicle plummeting from a bridge, with her daughter Nicola inside, screaming in terror all the way down to the shocking collision. It was easy to imagine the terrific impact of the car as it slammed hood first into the river: from the height it had fallen, it would have been akin to striking concrete. She saw the structure of the car collapse, roof and doors bursting open like a rotted fruit, the windshield smashing to glittering atoms as frothing water cascaded inside to force Nicola from her seat. She thought of her unconscious daughter expelled by the displacement of pressure, to tumble and turn in the dark, freezing water, until finally she’d been caught by the clinging tree roots a quarter-mile downstream, to perish from her injuries and hypothermia. Nicola had not drowned, but it was easy for the investigators to assume that had been Richard’s fate. They thought that the freezing waters had claimed him, sucked him down to some deep, dark place beneath the boulders from which the subsequent police dive team had failed to discover him.
‘You suspect that Richard’s still alive somewhere?’ she said, her voice a raspy whisper. ‘How could he have survived the fall, or being swept along by the freezing water? Our daughter Nicola died. He did too.’
‘That’s assuming that he was still in the car when it went off the bridge.’ Cooper finally turned and faced her. His features had taken on a hangdog expression. ‘I know it’s not something you wish to contemplate, but he could have jumped clear before the car went through the balustrade.’
‘That isn’t what the police investigation concluded. They said that the car was moving at speed when it hit, it had to be to smash through the barriers, and that – even if Richard had jumped clear and survived – he’d have been severely injured. There would have been signs to show where he struck the ground: blood, clothing fibres, scuff marks, those kinds of things.’
Cooper gave a noncommittal shrug. ‘It sounds as if they took the lazy approach to me. Just because they didn’t see the obvious doesn’t mean that more subtle indicators weren’t there. I dug into the police report, and also others on file concerning the same bridge. The fact that the safety barrier had been damaged by a previous collision seems to have escaped the investigating officers, or they simply discarded it as being unimportant. It suited them to believe that both Richard and Nicola were in the car when it crashed. But it’s easy to conclude that the car wouldn’t have needed to be travelling as fast as they assumed. In fact, a car driving at as little as twenty miles per hour would have had enough force behind it to break through the previously damaged barrier. Your husband could quite easily have jumped clear at the last moment, without leaving any trace on the asphalt.’
‘If that was the case, wouldn’t Nicola have jumped as well?’
‘Not if she was incapacitated in some way. There were bruises on her face, as you may recall from the County Coroner’s report, sustained before she died. Now the lazy thing is to assume that your daughter suffered her injuries when the car struck the river, or while she was being carried along by the floodwaters . . .’ Cooper allowed the suggestion that Nicola’s bruises had been delivered at the hands of her father to hang, urging Billie to come to her own conclusion.
She shook her head angrily.
‘It’s something you have to consider,’ Cooper said. ‘Your belief was that your estranged husband snatched Nicola, after you refused him access to her during the divorce proceedings. You also believed that he drove the two of them to their deaths out of some bitter sense of revenge. In other words, if he couldn’t have his daughter, then neither could you. But what if his reason for taking her was for an entirely different reason?’
Tears stung Billie’s eyes, but she refused to allow her emotions to overwhelm her. ‘That’s ridiculous. Despite everything, Richard loved our daughter. I can accept that out of torment and irrationality he might – on the spur of the moment – drive them off the bridge in some misguided act of desperation. But no, I’d never believe that he’d set out to purposefully murder Nicola so that he could . . . what? Disappear? Why would he do that? Where was the gain? Our divorce was acrimonious, and he was contesting ownership of my family home, but disappearing like that would simply mean he’d end up with nothing. In fact, if anything, without having to split everything, not to mention the payout from his life insurance policy, it made me a relatively wealthy person. Isn’t that the exact opposite to what you’d expect from him?’
‘Not if he was attempting to disappear completely, without fear of ever being hunted down. Believe me, Billie, he stood to be far wealthier that way than taking half of your combined assets.’
‘How? What in God’s name are you talking about?’
‘You didn’t know about the cash Richard stashed away in offshore accounts then? Hmm, I can tell by the look on your face that this is all news to you.’
‘I hadn’t the faintest clue,’ Billie said. ‘How much are we talking about here?’
Cooper pulled a notebook out of his coat pocket and opened it to a page marked by a blue ribbon. Billie doubted that he needed to refresh his memory; Cooper’s actions were designed to add gravitas to the announcement. He turned the notebook towards her. ‘Count the zeros, Mrs Womack. And, before you ask, no I haven’t forgotten to add the decimal point.’
Staring at the open page, Billie totted up the zeros as instructed. Before she’d even finished she was shaking her head. ‘No. This can’t be right. There’s simply no way possible. My ex-husband didn’t have access to that kind of money.’
Cooper merely raised his eyebrows.
Billie shook her head.
‘It’s true, Billie,’ Cooper said. ‘Your husband disappeared with more than eighty million dollars.’
3
It was evening in Tampa. Most Brits – as I once did – tend to think that it’s always hot in Florida, but not so. There’d been a bit of a cold spell, and for the first time in ages I’d dressed in blue jeans, a navy sweatshirt and black leather jacket. I could still feel the nip in the air, and shivered involuntarily as I walked towards where Rink had parked his Porsche Boxster. It was out of sight of the main strip in an otherwise deserted parking lot.
‘Any movement?’ Rink had wound down the window and leaned out with one elbow dangling over the door. He too had foregone his usual bright attire to pull on a dark-coloured jacket that he’d zipped up to his throat.
‘Not a thing,’ I said. ‘I’m beginning to think that Redmond’s worrying over nothing.’ What were the chances of a repeat of the two previous weekends’ burglaries tonight? Pretty slim, I thought.
‘Who knows? But chances are they see his place as a soft target and will try again.’
‘Hope they come soon,’ I said. ‘Don’t know about you, Rink, but I don’t fancy hanging around all night. It’s bloody freezing out here.’
‘Lovely and warm in here.’ Rink offered a grin.
‘Don’t rub it in.’ I scrubbed my palms vigorously on my opposite upper arms.
‘I thought you Brits were supposed to be used to the cold?’
‘Been a while since I was home,’ I reminded him. ‘I’m turning into a snowbird like you, Rink. We’re growing soft in our old age.’
‘Speak for yourself, brother. I’m toasty.’
‘Care to swap places?’
‘Nope. I’m claiming executive privileges. My car, my warm spot. Don’t forget you’re just the hired help.’
He was kidding. He was the owner of Rington Investigations, but as far as the day-to-day business went we were full partners. He just enjoyed taking the mickey at my discomfort, the way I would have if our roles were reversed.
‘I’m going to take another walk around the block,’ I said, ‘check on the back l
ot while I’m there.’
‘Gimme a shout if you need me.’ Rink scrunched down in the heated seat, getting comfortable as he buzzed up the window. He gave me a shit-eating grin all the while. I shook my head in disbelief and his grin only broadened.
I walked away, feeding my hands into my jacket pockets. It wasn’t cold enough for ice, but it was as near as damn it. Putting a bit of energy into my walk warmed me up, and also gave me a little cover as I headed around the block. Who’d think I was on a stakeout when it looked like I was in a hurry to be elsewhere?
Jerry Redmond had sought our services after thieves had targeted his business premises two weekends in a row. The Tampa PD had reassured him that they’d send a squad car by his warehouse to keep an eye on things, but they’d also made the same promise last week and had missed the second burglary. Through two nights and the four hours this evening that Rink and I had been in the area we’d never seen a patrol car. Didn’t surprise me; there were more important things for the cops to concentrate on than protecting fridges, freezers and washing machines. To be honest, there were probably better things for us to be getting on with but a job was a job. The economic downturn meant that you had to take whatever work came your way. Redmond’s cash would help keep Rington Investigations in the black as much as payment from any other job.
