At Fault (Southern Fraud Thriller)

by J W Becton

  I looked back at them boldly before Bleakley ordered me to move along. The two of them retreated to their cruiser, leaving me standing on the shoulder of the road, momentarily gaping after them with a mixture of fury and amazement.

  Four

  Michael Lacarova slid the slim jim between the window glass and the rubber gasket and fluidly popped the lock on the late seventies Chevy.

  He didn’t have to turn his head to know that no one else was around to witness his crime. At this dead time of day—neither the morning rush hour nor lunchtime—he knew he would be alone in the parking garage.

  Tossing the slim jim onto the vinyl passenger seat, he pulled the flat-head screwdriver from his back pocket and then slid his body behind the wheel. He didn’t bother shutting the door behind him as he wedged the screwdriver into the seam of the adjustable steering column casing. When he heard the brittle sound of cracking metal, he slunk down in the seat to see the newly exposed metal shaft that forked along the column. Using the screwdriver to pry the forked ends away from the metal cross bar, he disengaged the ignition switch. One pull up on the forked end, and the car engine roared to life.

  Two minutes, a slim jim, and a screwdriver: it was just that easy.

  He sighed, slammed the door, and pulled out of the parking deck into the bright Mercer morning.

  Hell, he thought as he turned the Chevy toward the garage where it would be stripped and parted out, late seventies GMs were easy pickings. Even as a kid when he’d still been boosting cars for kicks and grins, he’d been able to crack into one of these babies in less than five minutes.

  Of course, things were different now. Back then, the worst he’d ever done with a stolen car was joy ride around town with a girl tucked beside him.

  Yeah, he thought he’d been the man, but the fact was that he’d been so painfully innocent back then. He was just another dumbass teenage hornball testing the boundaries between adolescence and adulthood, alternately dabbling in the life of a street thug and doing things that most normal kids his age were doing in their parents’ basements.

  That all changed when he’d gotten caught in the process of stealing a Buick Regal, of all things.

  A shitty-ass Buick.

  He’d been a scrawny, stupid sixteen-year-old kid when he’d been caught, when his life had gone straight to hell, and it was not because he’d been sent to jail.

  It was because the cops weren’t called. He hadn’t gone to jail that day, but that didn’t mean he’d walked away a free man.

  He remembered it clearly.

  He’d gotten the door of the Buick open quickly enough and was working on getting the heap started when he heard a noise close behind him. He flung himself around to find a woman coming toward him, hands on hips, face contorted with a strange mixture of anger and curiosity.

  “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing, son?” she asked, slowly walking closer, filling up the space of the open door and blocking his means of escape. “Wait. Don’t tell me. Let me guess.”

  She surveyed his work, and Lacarova contemplated trying to make a run for it while she was distracted. But she gave him no chance to escape as she leaned into the doorway, slid her cold hand around the back of his neck, and dug in her nails.

  “Yes, I can see you know what you’re doing. I can see your talent,” she said in an appreciative tone that confused him.

  Torquing his neck so that he was forced to meet her eyes, the woman had smiled at him, an evil, twisted expression on her face.

  “What were you planning to do with the car?”

  Unsure of what to say, Lacarova tried to avert his eyes, and despite the nails that he felt sure were drawing blood now, he managed to shrug in response to her question.

  “Answer me, son,” she said.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Nothing?” She sounded skeptical.

  He kept his eyes downcast, wondering how he was going to get out of this. “I was just going to drive it around. Go to the mall.”

  Her laughter, a hard, sharp sound, surprised him, made his ears ring.

  “You’re stealing my car so you can joy ride?”

  She laughed again, but then the sound died on her lips, and her voice was stone sober when she spoke.

  “That’s the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard from someone with your obvious talent. Where’s your vision?”

  Confused, Lacarova ventured a look at her face and then immediately wished he hadn’t. The woman’s nails dug in harder, definitely drawing blood.

  He could not speak, and they stared at one another for long moments.

  “You have two choices here,” the woman said finally. “Choice one: you can finish taking my car so you can drive across town for a giant pretzel at the mall. That scenario will end with me calling the police, and you’ll go to jail. Like that idea?”

  “Not really,” he said, trying to sound brave. “What’s the other choice?”

  “You can come to work for me, and I’ll show you what you should be doing with stolen cars. That will end with you earning a lot of money for your talents.”

  He gaped at her.

  “You’ll let me off if I come work for you?” he repeated. “That’s it? That’s all I have to do?”

  “You seem to be a handy kid,” she said, looking him over with more intensity than he was comfortable with. “A bit on the scrawny side, but I can tell you’ll be useful. Won’t you?”

  Lacarova had bristled at being called scrawny and wanted to tell her to go to hell, but at the time, the choice seemed obvious. She was offering him an out. He would have to work for her.

  Looking back, Lacarova had to admit that his new work situation had started out good.

  The boss, as he’d taken to calling her to avoid having to remember which alias she was using at any given time, was always distant, and that suited him just fine.

  But through her, he’d learned a great deal: how to strip a car and part it out. And he didn’t just steal stuff. He learned to repair cars and how to run simple scams, and he was making good money, just like she promised he would. Soon, he found himself staging car crashes for fun and profit and conning insurance companies out of tons of dough.

  In time, Lacarova had become the boss’s right-hand man, and he’d matured into the position. Though he’d not grown much larger or taller than he’d been back then, he didn’t need to be. His power came from another source: from his knowledge of the workings of their scams and from his association with the boss herself.

  Lacarova might not know where she lived or if she had any family—or even her real name—but he didn’t care about those details.

  He knew the important stuff; he knew about the business.

  And he knew the two most important facts about the boss: she didn’t like to get her hands dirty, and she paid him well to take care of matters for her.

  For a while, he had been happy with the situation. But then the boss began to expand the enterprise, and her demands became harsher. Now, he realized that what he’d thought was the path to freedom was actually the way to becoming the boss’s bitch.

  Instead of going to prison for a few months, his freedom had been taken from him permanently.

  Now the boss owned him, and he had no choice but to obey her orders, no matter how depraved they might be.

  Five

  I jammed the exploded air bag back into its case in the steering wheel as best I could, but it continued to work itself free as I drove back to Mercer from Polk Highway. So I made the best of an annoying situation by viewing it as a makeshift punching bag and using it to work out my frustration with Deputies Bleakley and South. I was in the midst of giving it a good jab when my phone trilled from where I’d stowed it beneath the armrest.

  I groped for the device, quickly checking the screen and seeing a picture of Tripp Carver winking up at me. Only a few blocks from the office now, I took the call.

  “Special Agent Jackson,” he said, his voice as overtly flirtatious a
nd beguiling as ever, even as he addressed me by my title.

  I smiled in response. Typical Tripp. Always ready to show his admiration of the opposite sex, even if he were on official business, which was probably the case because he hadn’t called me Jules as he usually did.

  “Detective Carver,” I replied, allowing a certain amount of wariness to leak into my tone.

  I suspected the reason for his call was related to my sister’s rape case, and if he felt the need to soften the blow with a little flirtation, then it wasn’t good news.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Oh, you know. Murder and mayhem. Constant shootouts. That’s the life of a violent crimes cop,” he said, somehow managing to sound proud, exhausted, and amused with himself in the same breath.

  I laughed lightly.

  “Yeah, yeah. If you think violent crimes is a tough gig, you should try insurance fraud,” I said, touching my swollen eye gently.

  He laughed deeply at my words, but when he spoke again, his tone was serious. “Ordinarily I would agree with you, but after your last two cases, I wouldn’t joke about something like that,” Tripp warned.

  He didn’t even know the half of it.

  “Do you have a sec to talk?” he asked as I pulled my mangled car into the driveway at the Georgia Department of Insurance, an older building—not quite antebellum but quaint nonetheless—that had been converted into office space.

  I circled the building and entered the private, gated area in the back where a tall security fence would hide the sedan from public view, just in case anyone associated with the alleged fraud ring happened by.

  Mercer wasn’t a big city, after all, so while undercover, we couldn’t be too careful.

  “Sure,” I said as I wedged the car into the spot next to Vincent’s BMW and set the parking brake. I thought about killing the motor so I could hear Tripp better, but it was getting cold and I needed the heater.

  “Is this about Slidell?”

  After months of investigation, I now had a name for the man who raped my sister seventeen years ago—Clayton Leslie Slidell—but I had yet to see the monster’s face.

  And I wasn’t likely to see it any time soon. I had assured Tripp that I wouldn’t interfere with the official investigation and promised to let him handle the matter. So far, I had kept my word.

  Oh, I’d done a little snooping on the internet, nothing that a run-of-the-mill private investigator couldn’t do and absolutely nothing utilizing my police resources. I’d seen satellite pictures of Slidell’s last known address and searched public records to see if he owned property or was involved in lawsuits. But I did not do any physical snooping and had no contact with the suspect.

  I trusted Tripp to make sure Slidell was arrested.

  Besides, having the bastard taken down precisely by the book was the best eventuality.

  The Orr County Police Department had a warrant to arrest Slidell for assault, but they had never caught the asshole at home. They weren’t even certain that his house was occupied.

  As a result, the investigation into my sister’s rapist had stalled. Again.

  Orr County PD had done its due diligence—knocked on his door a dozen times, spoke to a few neighbors—but they couldn’t locate Slidell. Nor could they devote any more time to tracking down the guy.

  That’s the sad thing about police investigations: there’s always a time limit. Even smaller, less busy departments don’t devote unlimited man-hours to serving arrest warrants. After a couple of shifts of officers try to serve a warrant, it’s labeled as outstanding and goes into the National Crime Information Center database, where officers are alerted if the criminal in question is ever picked up on driving violations or other warrants anywhere in the country.

  Over all, it’s a good and necessary system, but when Tripp had told me a few weeks ago that Slidell had been relegated to the NCIC pile, I was frustrated. That meant we were back to waiting for him to make a mistake,

  It had taken seventeen years for him to make the first one.

  I didn’t want to wait another seventeen.

  “Yeah,” Tripp said. “I have a lead.”

  I sat bolt upright, almost careening into the steering wheel with my chest.

  “What?” I demanded. “What’s the lead? Did you find him?”

  “Slow down there, Zippy,” Tripp admonished. “We haven’t made an arrest—”

  “Oh,” I said, disappointed.

  “—but I was able to do a more thorough canvass of the neighborhood of his last known address. Spoke to some neighbors, and let me tell you, it wasn’t easy getting information out of the residents of that area. They see anything resembling a cop, and doors slam up and down the street. But I finally found a woman who knew something.”

  I remained silent, waiting.

  “Slidell moved from his last known address about three months ago. According to the neighbor, he was living with a woman named Marnie Jacobs.”

  “Have you located her yet?” I demanded. “Is he still cohabiting with her?”

  “Dang, Jules, take it easy,” Tripp said. “I just got the name this morning, and I called you right away. I had to bust my butt for a week to get the department’s approval, coordinate with Orr County, and then get the manpower to canvass the area. I told you I would do this through proper channels, and that takes time.”

  Feeling like an ungrateful jerk, I immediately backpedaled.

  “I’m sorry, Tripp,” I said, meaning it. “I just…I just want it to be over.”

  We were so painfully close to the truth. Once Slidell was in custody, the pieces of the puzzle would come together. The Orr County Police Department would have Slidell for assault, his fingerprints would be taken, and then they would be matched to the perpetrator’s print found on my sister’s car.

  At that point, there would be enough evidence to get a warrant to sample Slidell’s DNA, and if it matched the evidence in Tricia’s file, then we could arrest and eventually prosecute the bastard for raping my sister. And then he’d get the punishment he deserved: twenty-five years to life or perhaps the death penalty.

  “I know you want to get the guy,” Tripp said, “but we don’t want to ruin your sister’s chance at a successful prosecution by cutting corners. This has to be legal and above board.”

  I grasped the phone tighter in my hand. Tripp, in his none-too-subtle way, was reminding me to keep a low profile. He suspected—and rightly so—that I had crossed a few lines in my pursuit of justice. I’d never admitted the truth to him, but I had copied the police report my sister had filed, stolen a few samples of the physical and DNA evidence, and used them to pursue my own investigation into her rape in order to keep her case from going cold.

  That doesn’t sound so bad, but I could technically be charged with evidence tampering, and, if I were convicted, that felony could land me ten years in jail.

  Yes, it could.

  Despite the risks to my career, I had not been able to bear the idea of Tricia’s rapist getting off scot-free, and if I hadn’t become involved, Tricia’s case would have gone cold. In fact, without my intervention and insistence, all physical evidence could have been discarded after ten years’ time as per Georgia law, which is ridiculous since there is no statute of limitations on rape when DNA evidence exists. I simply could not allow the evidence to be destroyed, not when I could pursue the justice my sister deserved.

  My actions had resulted in the discovery of the name of the probable rapist, Clayton Slidell, but finding him was easier said than done.

  As much as I’d wanted to horn in on the investigation, I couldn’t take part without seriously jeopardizing Tricia’s case. I could just imagine the headline: “Sister of the rape victim leads search for alleged attacker.”

  Hello? Vendetta, anyone?

  Anything I did had to be as far in the background as possible.

  Tripp’s reminder of these facts annoyed me, but he was right. I couldn’t afford to take any more questionable acti
ons, even if I had good reasons.

  But that didn’t mean I had to like it.

  “Trust me,” he continued, injecting confidence into his tone. “You want to do this the right way, and—”

  “Don’t worry, Tripp,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “I’ve been patient since we got his name, haven’t I? I’ve let you handle it. I will not do anything to jeopardize Tricia’s case.”

  And I wouldn’t, but that didn’t mean I would refrain from pursuing Slidell using public records searches and other methods a private investigator would use, just in case Tripp missed something.

  Now I had another reason to hurry inside the DOI building. Not only had the day turned as cold as a mother-in-law’s disapproval, but once I disconnected with Tripp, I itched to hunt down Marnie Jacobs, Slidell’s alleged paramour.

  But first things first. I had to talk to Vincent and try to deconstruct what the heck had taken place on Polk Highway.

  I slammed the door of my sedan, leaving my ice pack to languish on the front seat, and marched through the cold afternoon and into the DOI.

  Because it was Saturday and not an official workday for other employees, the office administrator’s desk was empty, and I was grateful not to have to explain my black eye to Matilda.

  Knowing we were one step closer to catching Slidell made me feel even antsier than when I’d first left the accident site, and I was ready to be done with the fraud investigation before it had even begun.

  If it were up to me, I might have been tempted to set the sedan on fire and call it a total loss just so I could concentrate more fully on my sister’s case. Of course, that was illegal and pretty unethical for someone who investigates fraud for a living. So instead of committing arson, I banished my naughty thoughts and bounded up the stairs to my office, determined to get on with the job.

  I was rounding a corner when I bumped into Vincent in the hallway. He carried a stack of papers topped with a sack of takeout, and had it not been for those impediments, we would have ended up flush against each other.