Hostile Witness

by Leigh Adams

  “Maybe she’s paying for them over time?” Kate suggested. “Maybe she’s just making the monthly payments out of her salary.”

  Noah shook his head vigorously. “See that SUV? We’ve got the pink slip for it. Paid in full. And I looked it up. Costs nearly sixty thousand dollars.”

  “What do you think is going on?”

  “I don’t know that I think anything is going on,” Noah said. “I know what the usual thing would be. Drugs. Especially the places she’s been. Afghanistan. Southeast Asia for a while. South America. Lots of drugs. And where there’s lots of drugs, there’s usually lots of money. But I also know Sarah. And that doesn’t sound like Sarah.”

  “Maybe she’s got some kind of job on the side.”

  “I don’t think the military lets you do that. You said you were going to try to talk to her?”

  “Yes,” Kate said, feeling a little miserable about lying. “To all the members of the unit who are still alive.”

  “They can do those video chats right from combat zones. It shouldn’t be all that hard to do one of them from Brazil.”

  “I suppose not,” Kate said.

  “I want to have one of those video chats with Sarah,” Noah said. “If you get a chance to talk to her, tell her that. She’s an open book, that girl. She always has been. If I can see her face to face, I’ll know if anything’s wrong.”

  “I’ll be sure to make a point of it.”

  “I’ve sent a dozen letters asking her, and it’s like I never sent anything at all. She writes once a month but ignores anything I’ve said, and the letters are always for Mama, anyway. And it would kill Mama if there’s anything like drugs. It would kill her.”

  “I can see that it would.”

  “Yeah,” Noah said, his face looking suddenly bleak. “This is a nice neighborhood, you know, but it wasn’t where we grew up. That was a couple of miles that way, and it was bad. Judith and I bought this house for Mama. It was all working out all right. And now there’s this.”

  “You don’t know anything’s wrong yet,” Kate said.

  Noah looked grim. “I know there’s something wrong, all right,” he said. “And so do you.”

  ***

  The story Noah had told had to be bad news. Kate was sure of it. She didn’t believe Sarah could be making the kind of money that would buy the kinds of gifts she was sending home, at least not as an ordinary soldier. And the lack of direct contact—that wasn’t just bad, it was ominous. Obviously, somebody somewhere wanted Sarah out of the way. Whether they’d left her alive was the question. Kate wondered if the same sort of thing was happening to all the soldiers in Ozgo’s old unit.

  Kate was working out a plan to investigate each of the soldiers in that unit that she could find when the eighties rock station she had been not quite listening to broke for the news, and a name caught her attention.

  Flanagan.

  Bill Flanagan.

  She turned the sound up: “Police are treating the death as suspicious. Fairholt Bridge has been closed for repairs for three months. Police have erected a new barrier farther along the access road and designated the area a crime scene.”

  Crime scene, Kate thought.

  Like everybody else in the area, Kate was familiar with the Fairholt Bridge. It was a shorter and more efficient route to a lot of things than the regular highway, and she had used it dozens of times. But the Fairholt Bridge was closed for repairs and had been for months. All the traffic that normally would use it had been detoured in a big loop that took them out to Virginia 7.

  When Kate got to the detour signs, she ignored them. At first, that didn’t make any difference. Then she began to see cars, all of them stopped, and, ahead, a pair of police officers with their patrol cars parked crosswise to keep both cars and people from getting any closer. Behind the patrol cars was a mass of yellow crime scene tape.

  Kate pulled off to the side well back from the last parked car. She got out without bothering to lock up and headed for the knot of people. The police were bound to look at her as just another rubbernecker, unless Tom himself was here, and she doubted it.

  Most of the people had moved as close to the crime scene as they could. As far as Kate could tell, it wasn’t doing them any good. The barrier had been placed far back enough so that there was little chance of seeing what was going on.

  A few people were hanging back, just milling around. Kate chose one—middle aged and looking vaguely like Frank—and sidled up to him.

  “Hello?” she said. “Do you know what’s going on?”

  The man turned to her. He looked less like Frank when she saw him close up. “It’s Bill Flanagan,” he said. “The head homicide guy who was testifying in that big case. There was an accident.”

  “There was a lot of commotion on the road,” Kate said. “I—he’s dead?”

  “Went off the bridge,” the man said. “Word is he went right over the side of the Fairholt Bridge down there. Supposed to be an accident. Accident my ass.”

  “They’ve got crime scene tape up,” Kate said. “They can’t really think it’s an accident.”

  “Yeah, well, they’ve got crime scene tape up because they know nobody would believe it. Got drunk and went off the side of the bridge. That’s what they were telling people when I first got here.”

  “And that’s not possible?”

  The man gave her the kind of look he’d visit on a complete idiot. “This is a construction site. If you accidentally got onto the roads that lead up to the bridge on a weekday in the daytime, it wouldn’t matter because there would be equipment everywhere. At night, they’ve got barriers up.”

  “I don’t understand,” Kate said. “If it’s all blocked off like that, how did Flanagan get onto the bridge?”

  “That’s a good question, isn’t it?” the man said. He sounded triumphant. “They said Flanagan got into a car dead drunk and then drove out here and went off the bridge. But the roads were all blocked up. If he got into his car and forgot the bridge was closed, seriously, he’d have come to a barrier; he’d have had to stop. Then he’d have to get out of his car and move those barriers, and they’re fucking concrete.”

  “Oh,” Kate said. She looked up at the crowd at the barrier. The man had stopped paying attention to her and gone back to milling around.

  There was, she decided, no harm in trying. She made her way through the little crowd of people and all the way to the barrier. The two patrolmen were steadfast, and they determinedly would not make eye contact with her.

  Another middle-aged man was crammed up almost next to one of the patrol cars, and Kate tried him.

  “Hey,” she said.

  This man was younger and had a beard, but he was just as contemptuous. “Don’t bother,” he said. “They’re not giving anything out.”

  Kate could see that. “They haven’t made any public statements?”

  The man rolled his eyes. “They’re not going to make any public statements,” he said. “The whole thing’s a mess. But I’ve got a police band.”

  “Do you?” All Kate wanted to do was keep him talking.

  “Yeah, and they were doing a lot of talking on it,” the younger man said. “There was an anonymous call that came in at two thirty-five this morning saying a car had driven over the side of Fairholt Bridge, and it was submerged entirely in the water. They were all annoyed at it. They thought it was a hoax, but you can’t let that kind of thing go, so they sent a couple of patrolmen out.”

  “You were listening to the police band at two thirty in the morning?” Kate said.

  “It was Saturday night, wasn’t it? Still, I didn’t pay it no mind until the stuff started coming over about it being Bill Flanagan.”

  “And they found the car?” Kate said.

  “They did.”

  “What about the barriers?”

  “The northbound road had one of the barriers pulled aside.”

  “I still don’t understand,” Kate said. “Bill Flanagan is supposed
to have driven out there for some reason unknown, stopped, pulled aside a barrier, and then driven over the bridge and over the side because he was . . . drunk? He did all this because he was drunk? Or because he wanted to commit suicide? I thought the barriers were heavy. If they’re that heavy, how did he move them around when he was drunk and, well, out of shape?”

  “Exactly,” the younger man said.

  Kate looked at the two patrol cars and past them, but although she could see a little more from here, she couldn’t see much. There was a large piece of equipment. That was probably what they were using to pull the car out of the river. Since they knew Flanagan was dead, they must already have the body.

  Kate thought of Lucy Leeds and her story about the man who came to Flanagan’s house and sat in the driveway.

  “Okay,” she said.

  It was just a placeholder response so she didn’t seem rude. She wanted to get back to her car and back home. She wanted to talk to Tom. Tom would know the particulars of this.

  She was halfway back to the spot she’d parked her car when a man stepped out of the crowd barely a foot in front of her. He was very tall and dressed in black, and Kate recognized him instantly.

  It was Jed Paterson. Kate had never been close to him before. His eyes were so cold, they felt like death.

  Paterson was running those eyes up and down Kate’s body, and Kate backed away instinctively. Then he looked directly into her eyes and smiled.

  Kate maneuvered around him and headed to her car. It took all the control she had not to run.

  Fourteen

  Part of Kate wanted to closet herself in the computer room and find out as much about Jed Paterson as she could. Instead, she confined herself to checking the news websites and the television news for information about what had happened to Flanagan. It took the police until nearly six o’clock to finally admit that what they had on their hands was probably murder. Other than that, they weren’t admitting much.

  It was a good evening on the home front, though. Jack and Frank were both in good moods, and Kate made a point of taking the cooking seriously. They actually had dinner together for the first time in forever. Then they sat around for four hours playing Monopoly. Kate found herself forced to admit that she’d been missing “normal” for quite a while.

  “You’d don’t have to miss it if you don’t want to,” Frank said when she brought the subject up. “You’ve just got to decide you want to.”

  Kate didn’t know what that meant, but she let it go. Jack was already “in bed,” meaning in his room reading something. She went to bed herself.

  When she got up on Sunday morning, Jack was in the computer room working on a school assignment and Frank was doing the Sunday crossword in the paper. Kate didn’t want to interrupt either of them, so she got herself a cup of coffee and went back to her bedroom. She even made the bed before she sat down on it. Then she got out her laptop and went to work.

  She checked the news sites for more information on the Flanagan murder and got not much more than she’d had the night before. She started to look up Jed Paterson but then stopped. Paterson made her scared. It was more doom and gloom than she wanted for a Sunday morning.

  Instead, she got the Facebook account for Kaitlyn Plymouth up and looked to see what was coming through her newsfeed. Most of it was cats. There were dozens of cats. Maybe hundreds of cats. One of the people “Kaitlyn Plymouth” had friended appeared to think of nothing but cats. Even her profile picture was a cat.

  She had six notifications. The first one was the confirmation that Brayde had accepted her friend request.

  Kate wasn’t really surprised. She’d learned enough about Brayde from Tom and Google to figure that he wasn’t going to turn down a friend request from nearly anyone in a short dress.

  When Kate looked around some more, she found a message: That night at the Gresham was unfuckingbelievable. We should do it again.

  Kate had no idea what the Gresham was. Probably a bar. Probably an expensive bar with a bad reputation. Did Brayde just think he recognized her from a night when he couldn’t recognize anything? Knowing Brayde, the woman he thought she was had been an expert in abandoned and acrobatic sex. Enthusiastic abandoned and acrobatic sex.

  She clicked on Brayde’s name. The profile was as to be expected: St. Alban’s, of course, and then Dartmouth, with membership in Sigma Chi. Then there was law school. Dalton Brayde might be an unmitigated ass, but he wasn’t stupid.

  Kate checked out a couple of other things, none of which were really interesting. There was a picture of him at the age of eight or nine at somebody’s dance class. He was wearing a tuxedo and looked cherubic. There was a picture of an enormous sailboat called the Easy Virtue. There was no mention of the firm he worked for or even of the fact that he was a lawyer.

  Kate checked out a few pictures, saw nothing interesting, and navigated back to her (fake) page. Now that she thought about it, she had no firm idea of what she had expected to get out of friending Brayde on Facebook.

  But a notification had appeared that Brayde had also invited Kaitlyn to an event.

  Come to the Bonfire and Burn Up Your Weekend.

  She checked the date. It was today. She checked the time on her watch.

  The bonfire had started half an hour ago.

  She got up and headed for her closet. She had to have something suitable for a picnic thrown by a satyr. And although she didn’t know what she could get out of Brayde, it wouldn’t hurt to find out.

  Brayde had invited his entire friend list to this bonfire thing, and Kate had seen by looking through his profile that almost all of his “friends” were women whose profile pictures were suitable for placement in a Victoria’s Secret catalog.

  The clothes she’d found weren’t quite right for the kind of party Brayde was probably throwing, but she couldn’t see herself buying another outfit just to fit the profile. She compromised by tying her T-shirt in the back so it hugged her chest. Then she pulled her hair into a ponytail and put on enough makeup to constitute a disguise for a bank robbery. Then she got into her car and looked at herself in the rearview mirror. The sight made her wince. She was making a hash of this.

  Hash or not, she was determined.

  It turned out the bonfire was being held in a broad field in the Burning Tree Country Club. The field was all the way at the back and not marked for golf. The clubhouse was out of sight.

  Kate parked in a small lot just to the side of the opening in the stone wall. As soon as she got out of the car, she realized that she’d had no reason to worry about the way she was dressed. She’d underestimated how drunk everybody would already be.

  The bonfire itself was huge, a massive circular thing well off the road. Most of the people at the party were staying well away from it. At the edge of the broad field, near the trees and a good four hundred yards from the fire, there was a table set up with bottles of alcohol arranged on it. Behind the table stood a small man in a tuxedo making drinks. He looked like he’d just swallowed vinegar.

  The people attending the party were, as Kate had prophesied, almost all women, and they were dressed any which way. Most of them looked expensive. There was nobody checking invitations or checking guests off a clipboard list. Attila the Hun could have walked in here and nobody would have noticed.

  Right then, Kate spotted Brayde himself. He was standing between two women. He had his arms around both of them. They appeared to be holding him up. He also had a tall, metal mug in one hand with a top on it so that none of the liquid could spill.

  Kate went straight across the lawn to Brayde. He was obviously hammered, so there was no reason to be subtle.

  She’d just about got to him when she recognized one of the two women. It was Chan Hamilton, and Kate could tell right away that Chan was not even a little bit drunk. She wasn’t even a little bit happy, either. In fact, she looked murderous.

  Brayde was weaving back and forth. Every once in a while, he seemed to half-lose his balance so
that he fell forward on the two women and looked as if he was about to drop to the ground. Then he righted himself again, and Kate realized that every single item of his clothing had a tiny embroidered whale on it: Vineyard Vines, the choice of people who thought Izod and L.L. Bean were too cheap.

  Kate was close when Brayde finally noticed she was there. He immediately took his arm from around Chan’s neck and staggered in Kate’s direction.

  “A new one!” he shouted. “I’ve got a new one!”

  Chan stayed standing right where she was, staring daggers at Brayde’s back.

  Brayde pulled his right arm from around the other woman so that he could stagger faster. He was in front of Kate before she was ready for him.

  “Well, hello, whoever you are. Did you just walk in off the street? I don’t know you. Or maybe I do know you. If you’re from Vegas, I’m not admitting to anything.”

  “I’m not from Vegas,” Kate said. “I’m from Facebook.”

  “Facebook!” Brayde cried. “I love Facebook. You can meet a dozen screws a day on Facebook.” He threw his right arm around Kate’s neck.

  She pushed him off her. “Get away from me!” she demanded. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” Brayde said. “I’m ready and willing to go. You know how you hear all that stuff about alcohol getting a man down? Not this man. Nothing gets this man down.”

  “Nothing gets you down because you eat Viagra like candy,” Chan said.

  “Don’t believe her,” Brayde said. “Channie and I grew up together. Yes we did. I even asked her to marry me once. Only woman I ever asked to marry me. She turned me down. She likes men in uniform. Do you like men in uniform? I’ve got camo boxers, if you want to see them.”

  At just that moment, a man emerged out of the crowd. Kate hadn’t noticed this man when she first came in; if she had, she would have known immediately who he was. There were those elongated ear lobes. And there were the clothes, still all black, even on this bright, sunny, early afternoon.