Death Benefits

by Jennifer Becton

  Before I could even form the words, “Don’t run,” Carter bolted between a Chevelle and a Nova.

  I cursed inwardly as I took off after him.

  “Stop,” I shouted. “Police!”

  He wasn’t going to stop, I knew. His legs kept right on churning as he wove a path between vehicles toward the back of the property. Cars blurred in my vision as I flew past them in pursuit of a young man who was rapidly increasing the distance between us.

  I was never going to catch this kid on foot.

  Then, Vincent appeared in our path, and Carter stopped abruptly.

  Hell, I knew Vincent, and if I’d been a criminal, I would have stopped too. He stood, legs spread, hand on the butt of his holstered Sig, in the middle of Carter’s path. It was like an old western duel. I half expected someone to yell “draw.”

  I kept running toward my prey, hoping his moment of shock would last until I could cuff him.

  I came within a few strides of Carter when he careened suddenly to the right and made off down an aisle of trucks and vans.

  By the time I turned the corner down the aisle, I’d lost sight of him among the taller vehicles. Vincent jogged up beside me and asked, “You see where he went?”

  “No,” I panted, “but he can’t have gotten far.”

  “He’s probably in one of these vehicles.”

  I looked down the depressingly long aisle. “I’ll take the left side,” I said, fully prepared to draw down on the kid if I had to.

  And with that we divided up and began looking inside each vehicle. I’d made it about halfway down the row when I came to a white panel van. Just the sort of vehicle that killers and child abductors drive in movies.

  It would be suitably ironic if he were in there, I thought, as I came carefully to the passenger door, which hung ajar on uneven hinges. I jerked at the handle, and the door screeched open.

  In the darkened van, I saw nothing, but he could be hiding somewhere in the inner sanctum.

  “Hashaway, come out now,” I ordered, my hand on my weapon. “It’ll go easier.”

  Apparently, my order had an authoritative note. Carter leapt out of the side door of the minivan behind me and shoved me hard into the open panel-van door.

  He actually hit me!

  He seemed as shocked by his actions as I was because he paused briefly as I surged to my knees and whirled toward him.

  Just as I reached out for him, Carter took off again, but I managed to grab a fistful of his shirt.

  I held on as Carter dragged me a few yards, and then, realizing I wasn’t letting go, he spun, his fist flying wildly at my face and his body lunging toward me, leaving him slightly off balance.

  My rage exploded, and I grabbed the back of Carter’s skull with my left hand and pummeled him under the chin with my right palm. His head snapped backward, and I took the opportunity to twist him to the left, rolling his whole body like a ball over my extended leg and swiftly to the ground.

  With Carter off balance, taking him down hadn’t required much effort at all, and now he lay blinking up at me in surprise.

  My hand on my M&P, I shouted, “On your belly. Now!”

  Miracle of miracles, Carter complied.

  I cuffed him just as Vincent arrived beside us, looking suitably impressed.

  I glanced up at him over Carter’s prone form. “Pretty little lady, my ass.”

  “Why did you run?” I demanded as Vincent pulled the cuffed man into a sitting position and began to pat him down.

  “I’m holding,” he admitted, head hanging dejectedly. “I thought I was going to get arrested.”

  “Where is it?” Vincent asked.

  “Left jeans pocket.”

  “Any needles? Knives? Anything that will piss me off when I reach in there to take it?”

  “No, nothing like that. Just a baggie.”

  “Of what?” I asked.

  “Glass.”

  I clucked my tongue at him as if I were ashamed. “Meth? You know that stuff will mess you up.”

  “I know, I know,” Carter said, watching with desperate eyes as Vincent extracted a bag of crystals from his jeans and waved it in front of him. “But I’m hooked. Can’t do nothing without it.”

  “You got any warrants?” I asked as I whipped out my phone to check his police record.

  “No, no warrants, man,” he said to me.

  I raised an eyebrow and glanced at him over my phone. “Man?”

  “Ma’am,” he corrected himself quickly.

  We were silent for a moment as I scanned the twenty-one-year-old’s record. Then I glared at him, happy I’d taken him down as hard as I had.

  He’d been busted for possession twice and was suspected of cooking meth—or having knowledge of a lab at least—somewhere in Cranford County.

  I showed the phone to Vincent.

  “You selling this stuff?” Vincent asked Carter, whose gaze went from compliant to defiant.

  “No, I’m not selling. I swear!”

  “Well, here’s the irony, kid,” Vincent said. “We’re from the Georgia Department of Insurance and had no interest in what drugs you enjoy injecting, snorting, or otherwise inserting into various orifices. But now….” He let his voice trail off, giving Carter the opportunity to spill his guts.

  And that’s just what he did.

  “I’ll talk. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.” He paused and looked between us. “Insurance cops? This is about Theo’s life insurance, right?”

  “Yes,” I affirmed. At the sound of my voice, Carter’s focus shifted from Vincent to me. His eyes had grown wide, fearful. “Were you with him the night he died?”

  “Hell, no.” Carter’s face pulled into a sneer. “I don’t go nowhere with that asshole.”

  I frowned in confusion. “You weren’t with him at the dirt-track driver’s meeting?”

  “I was at the meeting, but not with him.”

  I groaned inwardly. Leave it to a meth head to sit around and argue semantics with the police.

  “When did the meeting end?” I asked, electing not to ask him about his evident hatred of his stepfather until the end of the interview. Or to mention that fact that he shouldn’t be allowed to drive anything—not a dirt-track car or a forklift—if he was on methamphetamines.

  “A little before 11.”

  “Did you leave with Theo?” Vincent asked.

  “I done told you,” Carter snapped. “I don’t go nowhere with that guy.”

  “Did you see him leave?” I asked. “Was he alone?”

  Carter shook his head. “No, I didn’t see him leave. I got better things to do than keep tabs on him.”

  “Well, do you know if he was driving his Ford LTD that night?” I asked. Kathy had already said that Theo had been driving the car when he’d left their house, but it never hurt to confirm.

  “Man, I don’t know. Theo owns hundreds of cars.” He gestured with his chin at the surrounding junkyard. “Not all of these have been totaled and had their titles revoked. Some of them are sold to us outright, and we get the titles. He could have been driving any damn one of them.”

  “You’re not telling us much of anything, kid,” Vincent said.

  “Look,” Carter squeaked, “I don’t know what he was driving that night, but I do know he sometimes did drive an LTD. God knows why.”

  “Do you know where he went after the meeting?”

  “I only know where he didn’t go: the Alley Cat. Me and some other drivers met up for a few beers, and he wasn’t there.”

  I made a mental note to ensure that’s truly where Carter had been. He certainly seemed to be building a nice motive for killing Theo himself.

  “You didn’t like Theo much, did you?” I asked.

  “That sure ain’t no secret,” Carter said. “The guy was a low-rent piece of white trash. He treated my mom like shit. He thought a good day’s work lasted ten minutes and always took the easy way out.”

  “So how did this place become so su
ccessful?” Vincent asked, looking toward the newly renovated building and the rows of cars around us.

  Carter’s chin rose. “Me and Momma. We worked our asses off here, and now that we got the renovations done, we was trying to talk Theo into selling.”

  “How’d he take that suggestion?” I asked.

  “He flipped out, started yelling at Momma, said it wasn’t gonna happen.”

  “Did he say why?” Vincent pressed.

  “No, but I figure he just didn’t want to give up his easy life. With me and Momma doing all the work here, why would he ever want to sell?”

  Unless, of course, he could find a way to make even more money. Say, by faking his own death?

  I cut my eyes to Vincent. The picture of the Vanderbilt family was rapidly deteriorating. His meth-head stepson despised him, and neither Carter nor Kathy mourned his death. And why would they? According to them, he was a drunk with the work ethic of a slug, things we couldn’t have seen on our financial printouts.

  Earlier, when we arrived, I’d pondered the possibility that Kathy had murdered her husband and that she’d acted alone in setting the fire that covered up her crime. But that scenario was fraught with problems. Would little Kathy have been able to muscle Theo’s body into the driver’s seat by herself?

  Now I was wondering if mother and son might not be in this together. That made plenty of sense to me. Kathy would have had a difficult time staging the accident, but with the help of her son, it would have been possible.

  “Where was your mother that night?” I asked, trying to sound as if the question had just occurred to me.

  Carter was no longer buying my act. “Why?” he asked defensively.

  “Doesn’t matter why,” Vincent snarled. “Answer the nice law enforcement officer, or she’ll make things difficult for you.”

  “At home, I guess,” he said. “I don’t live in that house anymore. Couldn’t stand it there.”

  “Anything else you want to tell us about that night?”

  Carter squinted up at me. “What else is there?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  He shrugged.

  Vincent nudged me. “Seems he’s done talking, so I’m calling the Cranford sheriff’s department to pick him up.”

  “What?” Carter wailed as Vincent began to dial his phone. “I cooperated! I told you what I knew!” He turned to me. “Make him quit. This will be my third strike! I’ll go to prison.”

  Over Carter’s wailing, Vincent managed to identify himself and request a car.

  Carter was staring at me now, his eyes begging me to do something.

  I only shrugged.

  “I’m afraid I can’t ask him to stop,” I said. “You’ve got to pay for that little baggie in your pocket, and this will teach you not to run from the cops next time.”

  And it will keep you off the streets until we figure out what happened to Theo, I added silently.

  Carter turned away, shaking his head. “Momma ain’t gonna like this.”

  As it turns out, Carter was underestimating his mother’s reaction. Kathy went ballistic the moment the Cranford County sheriff’s cruiser rolled up to the U-Strip-Em.

  She rushed out of the building with her blond ponytail flying behind her and ambushed the vehicle before its occupants could exit. Vincent and I stood at the edge of the parking lot with Carter still in handcuffs and watched as Sheriff Harper himself emerged from the passenger seat. This was a surprise.

  Why send the sheriff to arrest a two-bit druggie?

  But even more surprising was Kathy’s reaction to seeing him. She went toe to toe and belly to belly with him almost immediately.

  “Just what in the hell is going on here?” she shouted in the sheriff’s face. “You can’t arrest Carter. My boy ain’t done nothing!”

  Sheriff Harper didn’t step back, but he didn’t bow up at her either. His hands clenched into fists at his sides, and he said, “Mrs. Vanderbilt, please calm down.”

  Kathy’s back stiffened, clearly relaying the fact that she wasn’t going to calm down any time soon. Actually, I half expected Kathy to begin kicking dirt on the man’s shoes like a baseball coach disputing an umpire’s call.

  “No! I will not calm down! You’re arresting my baby!”

  I couldn’t see her face from my angle, but I had a pretty good idea of what it looked like: scrunched up with rage. Kathy sounded pissed.

  She leaned even closer and said something I couldn’t hear, but it caused Sheriff Harper’s calm façade to crack momentarily, and I wondered what that was all about.

  The sheriff calmly responded, “I said no such thing,” and then he sidestepped Kathy and walked in our direction.

  Suddenly seeing fresh prey, Kathy launched herself at Vincent and me.

  “And you two assholes! You claimed you wanted to ask Carter about Theo’s whereabouts the other night, not get him arrested.”

  “Ma’am,” I said, stepping forward to block her view as Vincent handed Carter into the sheriff’s custody, “you need to calm down and let the sheriff and his deputy do their jobs. Your son had a good quantity of meth on him, but you can go to the jail and bail him out as soon as he’s arraigned.”

  I watched as every muscle in Kathy’s body seemed to tense, and for a moment, I thought she might try to slap me, but instead she turned her wrath on Carter.

  She tried to step around me to get to her son, but I blocked her, effectively keeping myself between her and Carter. Still, she peeked around me and yelled, “What were you thinking? We talked about this.”

  “I dunno, Momma,” Carter said, looking ashamed. “I just wasn’t thinking, I guess.”

  “No, you weren’t, and this time you’re really going to jail,” Kathy shouted, “because I ain’t bailing your butt out. You’re on your own.”

  The deputy led Carter toward the prisoner containment section of the cruiser, and with every step the young man pleaded with his mother. “I’m sorry, Momma. Please bail me out,” he repeated like a litany. “I don’t wanna go to jail again.”

  I tried to keep a bit of distance between mother and son, but Kathy kept launching herself at Sheriff Harper and Carter as they marched to the car.

  “Ma’am,” I said, finally sick of the drama. I grabbed her by the arm, twisting it behind her back as gently as I could yet still using enough force to let her know I meant business. “You’re not doing yourself any favors.”

  I led her a few paces away from the car, but despite my physical involvement, she kept screaming at Sheriff Harper.

  Finally, Carter went into the back of the cruiser, and frankly, I was a little surprised that Kathy hadn’t been invited to join him.

  I would have been happy to be rid of her at this point, but instead, I held her still until the car disappeared from the lot.

  I pushed Kathy forward and released her, making sure she was just a little off balance and I was out of striking distance if she decided to come after me. She did turn, and she did seem to be contemplating her next move, but Vincent appeared beside me.

  “Take it inside,” he said. “Now.”

  And Kathy obeyed.

  Maybe she wasn’t actually grieving, but she was at least experiencing a great deal of stress over her husband’s death, and now we were sending her son to jail. Still, her reaction had been completely over the top. And what had she said to Sheriff Harper?

  Once in the relative quiet of the GMC, I looked at Vincent as he put the key in the ignition. “That was more action-packed than I expected.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed as the truck rumbled to life and carried us back onto Highway 403. “Something isn’t right between the widow Vanderbilt and Sheriff Harper,” he said.

  I nodded. “We’ll need to check up on that and verify Carter’s alibi for the night of Theo’s death. But if Kathy holds true to her word, at least Carter will be in jail for a while. One variable out of the way.”

  Fourteen

  He picked up his weekly copy of
the Cranford Gazette on his way home from work. Reading the paper usually helped clear the bad thoughts from his mind, but today he was hoping for so much more. He needed information.

  One of his bodies was out there—somewhere—and he knew it would show up sooner or later.

  Oh, he had sources he could ask, but he couldn’t risk it. He had to stay invisible. He had to watch from the sidelines and wait and listen. If he asked questions of the wrong people, he could risk turning attention on himself.

  And he couldn’t have that.

  So he flipped to the front page of the paper, and his insides leapt at the headline, which read, “Charred Body Discovered in Vehicle Fire.”

  Beneath the headline was an enormous picture of a burned sedan surrounded by yellow police tape. He sat back for a moment and smiled. Yes, he knew just how the scene would have looked as the fire took hold.

  The body would have gone up like kindling. As flames licked around it, the head and appendages would have been the first to take real damage. The skull would have split under the force of the steam from the person’s own frying brain, and the arms and legs would have clenched as the muscles and tendons shrank.

  Soon pieces would have begun to fall off, one by one, as the fire did its job. If enough time passed, there would be nothing left but ash and bone chunks.

  Fire like that always excited him, and he could feel the tingle of glee run through him now as he sat over the newspaper. But he could not indulge himself. He shook his head violently to force the images from his mind.

  He must think logically and not let himself get carried away.

  He had to be practical. Ask practical questions.

  Could this possibly be his body? Or was it just some drunk driving accident?

  And if it was his body, how well had the fire done its job?

  Was it still identifiable? Could it be connected to him?

  And who had taken the body in the first place?

  He picked up the paper, and with one last look at the photo, he forced himself to read the attached article, which took up little real estate on the rest of the front page. For such a large headline, it didn’t say much specific: