Death Benefits

by Jennifer Becton

  [BLOCK QUOTE] A blaze that consumed a 1986 Ford LTD early Saturday morning on Highway 403 may have been set purposefully, law enforcement sources say. The fire, which was extinguished by the Cranford County Volunteer Fire Department, left behind the scorched body of an unidentified driver. “The call came in around 3 AM,” says Fred Thomas, owner of the Bait and Tackle and one of the first volunteer responders on the scene, “and Mike Symmes and I risked our lives to put it out. It was unfortunate that the victim couldn’t be saved.” Sheriff Bart “Tiny” Harper says that the case has been handed over to the state for further investigation, and though he cannot reveal the identity of the victim during an ongoing investigation, the body has been transferred to the state medical examiner, and he added, “Foul play is suspected.” [BLOCK QUOTE]

  “Holy shit!” he said aloud, shattering the silence of his kitchen.

  This was his missing body. It had to be.

  First of all, foul play was suspected. And torched bodies didn’t often show up in Cranford County. Murders never happened either.

  He sneered at the thought. At least no murders that anyone knew of.

  Second, it would be too big of a coincidence for him to be missing a body and one to show up burned all to hell to obscure the identity.

  And third, the fire had taken place on 403, which just happened to be the road he lived on. It was too coincidental. The body had to be one and the same. And now it might be at the medical examiner’s office.

  His hands were shaking so hard that he had to lay aside the paper to keep from tearing it in half as another realization struck him full force: he had a much bigger problem than just one person—probably a lost hunter—stumbling onto his land and, worse, onto his secret.

  The authorities had their hands on the body. What if, even though it had been burned, they could still identify the carcass? After that, it wouldn’t be difficult for them to connect him to it, and that was very, very bad for him.

  But it had been burned, right? Maybe they wouldn’t be able to tell who it was. Maybe they couldn’t track it back to him.

  The man jammed his hands together in front of him in an effort to stop the damn quivering. He didn’t have time to sit around shaking like a coward. He had to figure out how to erase the connection between himself and the body or he would be totally screwed.

  What did he need to do?

  He needed to find out for sure if the body was indeed one of his. With the stiff already at the medical examiner’s office, he had no idea how he could possibly go about it. He couldn’t exactly head over to the lab and demand entrance, and he sure as hell couldn’t just go up and ask Sheriff Tiny for info.

  So that meant he had to find the jackass who had robbed his pit. And thanks to the Cranford Gazette, he now had a place to start. He knew the carcass thief owned a Ford LTD. He knew that Fred Thomas had more information, and he knew where ole Fred worked.

  He stood, sending the wooden chair skittering behind him at the sudden sense of urgency that overcame him. He had to do something, even if it meant coming out into the open.

  Stalking to his back door, he paused to yank a baseball cap from the pegboard and jammed it onto his head as he shoved the screen door open, enjoying the sharp crack as it slammed shut behind him.

  He threw himself into his old blue pickup and started the engine.

  Fred Thomas knew all about whatever the hell had happened out on 403, so he needed to get him talking. That shouldn’t be difficult. Fred was a hunter, and hunters were worse than both fishermen and women in general for telling tall tales, so he’d probably have to listen to a lot of BS before he got the info he needed.

  And if that didn’t work out, well, he had alternative methods for extracting information.

  He’d use them if necessary.

  The parking lot was only sparsely populated when he pulled in, which was good. Usually, it was easy for him to stay invisible. People didn’t notice him. He didn’t know why, but he sure couldn’t risk anyone noticing him now. Not with so much on the line.

  As he entered the store, the bell on the door tinkled above his head, and in his ears, it sounded sharp and loud. He let the door fall back into place as he slouched toward the far side of the building, ending up in the shotgun shell aisle.

  He lowered his baseball cap and picked up a box of twelve-gauge deer slugs. He pretended to read the back of the packaging, but he didn’t care for shotguns. It was cheating. Well, maybe not with the deer slugs, but 00 buckshot was definitely an unfair advantage. Anybody could kill a deer with seven to nine balls in one shot.

  It required no accuracy or finesse.

  “Can I help you?” a voice asked from behind him.

  Startled, the man in the baseball cap spun to face Fred Thomas, a short, stocky man with an honest face. “Oh, uh,” he said as he turned to replace the box of shotgun shells on the display. “You got any .243 Winchesters in stock?”

  “Nice cartridge,” Fred said as he motioned for him to follow him back to the counter where the rifle ammo was stocked. “Good for deer.”

  “Yeah,” the man agreed as he bellied up to the glass display counter. He glanced around as Fred pulled three boxes of ammo from behind the counter and laid them out for his perusal. No one seemed to be in earshot, so instead of reaching for the ammo, he pretended to study Fred and let recognition appear on his face. “Hey, aren’t you the guy mentioned in the paper today? Didn’t you put out that car fire?”

  “Sure did.” Fred beamed.

  “I live off 403 and didn’t even see smoke. Must not have been a big fire,” the man said.

  “Hell, boy, you kiddin’ me?” And with that, Fred Thomas launched into a detailed account of the night. “The car was fully involved when we pulled up. Flames shooting out of the engine compartment and the passenger area. That fire was truly impressive.” He leaned further over the counter and whispered, “And there was a person sitting right there in the front seat. I never seen anything like it.”

  “Yeah? That so?” he asked, trying to sound encouraging but skeptical. “I heard all kinds of rumors, but I don’t believe any of them. That kind of stuff doesn’t happen here.”

  “Well, buddy, it sure did happen,” Fred said, rising to his toes and then lowering his weight back to his heels, “and we had to try to save that guy. Mike kept the flames off so I could work on extracting him.”

  “Sounds like a damn dangerous thing to do,” he said, hoping to keep Fred boasting.

  “Definitely dangerous.” Fred leaned further onto the glass case, and the man in the baseball cap wondered if it might crack beneath him, sending shards of glass all over. That would be a pretty picture.

  He shook the image from his mind and listened as Fred continued, “A bumper strut could have blown off and took out one of my knees, but I went in there anyway. Unfortunately, it was too late.” Fred crooked a finger at the man across the counter, urging him to lean forward. Fred whispered in a conspiratorial tone, “I shouldn’t say this because the name hasn’t been released officially yet, but Theodore Vanderbilt got himself cooked good.”

  The man almost smiled at how easy it had been. Instead, he shrugged. “Don’t know any Theodore Vanderbilt.”

  But he would get to know him very soon.

  “You ever see a burned body, son?” Fred asked.

  “No, sir,” he responded.

  “Well, it ain’t pretty, and this whole thing has dragged in more cops than you’ve ever heard of. And I don’t know nothing official, but I’m starting to think it wasn’t even Theo in the car.” Fred shook his head, not realizing how dangerously close to the truth he had come.

  “But who else could it be?” the man asked, enjoying the irony. “Nobody ever gets killed in Cranford County.”

  “You mark my words,” Fred said. “It ain’t Theo. Next time I see you, I’ll be proven right. You’ll see.”

  “Yeah, we’ll see,” he said.

  “So,” Fred said, gesturing to the boxes of .243 ammo
, “you want target, varmint, or big game?”

  He only had to consider a moment. Even if a rifle wasn’t his favorite weapon, he was clearly going to need it soon. And he wanted to be sure he could drop someone big in one shot if he needed to.

  He looked the shop owner square in the eye and said, “Big game.”

  Fifteen

  After the fiasco at the U-Strip-Em, Vincent and I returned to the DOI to take care of some miscellaneous tasks. I settled into my office to call the Alley Cat bar and confirm Carter Hashaway’s alibi for the night of the car fire. The bar owner—a man who identified himself as Skippy—confirmed that the young man had been drinking with a group from the track until closing time at 2 AM. So Carter had most likely not had time to be involved in the staged accident. Plus, he’d probably been far too drunk, high, or both.

  No matter what, I was glad he was safely tucked away in jail. He was one factor we didn’t have to worry about, and after a few days without booze and meth in his system, maybe he would end up getting clean.

  Ah, my dreams of sobriety for my sister were running rampant if I thought a few nights in county lockup would do anything for someone like Carter.

  Just before the end of the workday, Ted dropped by to get a status report on Cranford County. He told me to keep up the good work and report back when we had something concrete.

  What a motivator.

  Soon the DOI building emptied for the day, leaving Vincent and me alone in our separate offices, so I took the opportunity to pull out my cell phone and make a quick call to Tripp Carver.

  “Hey Tripp,” I said, spinning around in my office chair so I could look out the window at Mercer in the gathering dimness of evening.

  Before I even asked about my sister’s case, Tripp waded right into it. “I’ve had shit for luck with Atkins. My buddies in Orr County have been pushing him to name his associate, but so far, he’s mute. I contacted the DA’s office, and the prosecutor has offered a plea deal—info in exchange for reduced charges—to Atkins’s defense attorney, but they don’t seem amenable so far. He’s not giving up the name easily.”

  Damn, I thought.

  “That’s okay,” I said, wishing that something in this case would actually be easy and thinking of poor Tricia in the ICU. She just couldn’t catch a break. “At least you tried.”

  “Well, take heart, Jules,” Tripp said. “It’s not over yet.”

  “Oh?” I asked. Tripp’s upbeat tone gave me hope.

  “I ran into your friend Helena downtown today. We had lunch, and she gave me some ideas about where to go from here. I’m pursuing those now. That girl sure knows how to work the system.”

  “Hels?” I repeated, feeling a jolt of panic hit my spine. I hadn’t told Helena anything about Atkins or my investigation. I wanted to keep that part of my life separate. I wanted to be me without the baggage when it came to my best friend.

  “Yeah,” Tripp affirmed. “I guess you hadn’t had time to fill her in on Atkins, so I told her. Hope that’s okay.”

  “Sure,” I said, though I wished he hadn’t. I wanted as few people as possible involved in my investigation. There was no need for my actions to hurt anyone else.

  Fortunately, there was little Helena could do to get herself implicated in my dishonest dealings.

  “Oh,” I said, suddenly remembering that I hadn’t told Tripp about my sister’s current status. “Tricia’s in the ICU right now.”

  “You’re kidding!” Tripp said. “What’s wrong?”

  “She fell and broke her ankle. It required surgery, and now they’re worried about her detoxing.” I paused and tried to make my next words sound light, but they came out kind of bitter. “You know, the usual.”

  “That’s too bad, Jules. But, you know, this won’t last forever.”

  It wouldn’t? It had lasted seventeen years already, and we were getting nowhere with Atkins. I was beginning to despair of ever finding Tricia’s rapist. I sighed.

  “Don’t sound so down. I’ll come by the hospital to visit,” Tripp promised. We said our goodbyes, and I sighed again.

  If only a visit from Tripp could solve all my ills.

  By the time I got off the phone, the sky had completed its transformation from bright blue to light purple, and the lights of the city were blinking on, giving the streets a magical glow. This was a moment when the small Southern city resembled an image from a fairytale, all purple and perfect.

  The ideal evening for romance. Maybe an intimate dinner for two and a stroll down a moonlit street.

  Too bad I was stuck digging through the financial information of a potential fraudster and checking the alibis of meth heads.

  A room away, Vincent’s presence was palpable. In the quiet of the building, I could hear him tapping at his keyboard, and occasionally a printer would whir to life.

  The shrill ring of his cell phone sliced into the pleasant quiet, and I heard Vincent answer, followed by a few grunts of assent, and then the words “hold on.”

  He appeared in my door.

  “Medical examiner,” he said to me as he turned on the phone’s speaker and set it on my desk.

  “Dr. Greene, you’re on speaker with me and Special Agent Julia Jackson, who is also working the Cranford fire case,” Vincent said. “You have something for us already?”

  “Believe it or not, I do,” Dr. Greene said in a voice that managed to be deep and rich even through the tinny speaker.

  “No offense intended, Dr. Greene. It’s just that we usually don’t hear from the ME this soon.” Vincent’s voice was rough and uncivilized compared to Dr. Greene’s smooth tone, but as always he was all business, the consummate professional.

  He was right about MEs. Even when we did hear back, it was usually via reports, not personal phone calls.

  If Dr. Greene were calling us and so quickly, this had to be a major find.

  At that thought, anxiety flooded from my toes to my fingertips, and I began tapping my pen on the desk blotter to release nervous energy.

  “Well,” the ME said, “ordinarily we like to linger over a body and ferret out all its secrets before we call in the cops—you know, because you LEOs are so patient and all—but I found something you might think is interesting.”

  Dr. Greene paused, obviously a bit of a showman. Unable to stand the suspense for more than a few nanoseconds, I prompted him with unconcealed eagerness. “What did you find?”

  “Before I give you any information, I need you to understand that I am still in the beginning phases of the autopsy, and given the condition of the body, I anticipate needing a little extra time. Already I’ve run across several anomalies, including a distinct lack of blood and some lacerations, that may or may not be explainable by the fire. So I’ll need more time to run a bigger panel of tests.”

  “What have you got now?” Vincent demanded.

  Dr. Greene’s words came through the speaker bluntly. “I can tell you for certain that the body recovered from the car fire is not that of Theodore Vanderbilt.”

  Everything went silent for a moment as Vincent and I absorbed this news.

  His fingers tightened on the edge of my desk, and I feared that the wood might splinter under the pressure. “Not Theodore Vanderbilt? How do you know?”

  Given what Morton Ivey had told us about the inviability of normal visual or fingerprint identification, how could Dr. Greene possibly be sure if he had only begun his autopsy?

  “Because,” the doctor’s voice said through the speaker, “the body on my table is that of a woman.”

  “What?” Vincent and I asked in unison.

  My pen stopped tapping as I listened to Dr. Greene explain. “Bone structure of the pelvis and the internal organs—the uterus was a pretty sure sign—revealed that this was an elderly woman.”

  Holy crap, I thought, unable to take my eyes off the phone as the news sunk in. The identity of the body had always been in question, but I hadn’t expected the victim to be an elderly woman.

  Q
uestions entered my mind rapidly: Who was this older woman? Why was she in the LTD? How had she come to be there?

  What in the hell were we dealing with?

  “I thought that would make an impression,” Dr. Greene said into the quiet, and I could practically hear him smiling, pleased to have silenced two LEOs with his news. “I’ve already x-rayed the victim’s teeth and will also run a DNA test to see if either method might help us identify the body. Of course, she’d have to be in our database for DNA to prove effective, which seems unlikely. Our best bet is dental records.”

  “How long will those tests take?” Vincent asked, echoing my thoughts.

  “The DNA test will take at least two weeks,” Dr. Greene said.

  “Two weeks is too long to wait on a test that may prove fruitless,” I said, interrupting Dr. Greene in my eagerness.

  “But I’ve already got my staff working on the dental x-rays. We compiled a list of elderly women reported missing in Cranford and the surrounding counties, and we’re working through them one by one. If those prove unhelpful, we’ll expand the search statewide. As the autopsy progresses, we’ll have more details—approximate height, weight, and age; race; and medical conditions—that should help us narrow the field.”

  I looked at Vincent, and his expression reflected my feeling of discouragement. Even with the details from the autopsy, compiling the dental x-rays of all missing elderly women in the state of Georgia would take forever, and we needed to identify the victim as quickly as possible so that we could notify the family and reconstruct the crime.

  Because we were clearly dealing with a crime.

  Insurance fraud was becoming more certain with each new detail we learned. An unidentified woman’s body had burned in Theodore Vanderbilt’s car, the coroner couldn’t rule out foul play, and the fire investigator strongly suspected arson. Eva had discovered some of Vanderbilt’s personal effects—his wedding ring and watch so far—in the debris, and now it was looking as if they had been planted on the body to try to hide the true victim’s identity. And if that weren’t enough to make us suspect fraud, Kathy Vanderbilt was already demanding money from her supposedly deceased husband’s life insurance policy.