by Jenna Rae
Suddenly it seemed ridiculous, changing vehicles in the middle of all this. Donnelly’s death might have been a suicide. He might have been working alone. His girlfriend might just not want to admit he’d been a crook. Brenda might be assuaging her guilt over Tami Sheraton’s death by pursuing a fantasy investigation.
But. She talked to Jonas Peterson and he disappeared. She talked to Staci Smith and she disappeared. For all she knew, Smith was a flaky and neglectful mother who made a regular thing of taking off. But that didn’t jibe with what she’d seen or what the neighbor had said.
And she knew Peterson. They’d been partners for years and had been together fifty or sixty hours a week for most of that time. He was moody, stubborn, rigid and more than a little self-righteous, but even on his worst day he was not flaky.
After a moment’s thought, she nodded in sudden decision. She called Chief Walton’s office. After a brief exchange of pleasantries with his assistant and then with him, she explained her call to CPS. Walton murmured vaguely as she told him Donnelly’s girlfriend was missing and that she needed him to file a report. He asked few questions and promised to get it done.
She took a jaunt several miles inland to a large discount store in relatively well-developed Santa Rosa, where she bought hair dye, colorful makeup and clothes too flashy for a professional woman in her forties.
Stopping at home, she emerged two hours later a redhead with slightly shorter, much spikier and more odiferous hair. She also sported bright magenta lips, heavily made-up eyes, and spangled earrings. The look was completed by neon sneakers, a colorful, low-cut top and tight, stretchy black jeans. Her holster rode a tad lower in the new pants, and she found herself chafing not only at the unfamiliar positioning of her weapon, but also the discomfort of walking in the world as a different person. In her early years on the force, she had spent more than a few hours undercover as a prostitute, and she felt now much as she had then, like an imposter.
She spent much of the night researching Dan Miller and the early part of the morning awaiting his call. Given the time difference, she’d expected to hear from him before daybreak. When his call didn’t come, she finally left him a message and sent an email. Ten minutes later she got a response to her digital missive. Miller was having trouble with his phone and would call her in a day or two. If something was urgent, could she call his office tomorrow to leave a message with his assistant?
She grunted. Why was Miller suddenly giving her the runaround? She speculated about this for some time before looking at the clock and realizing it was too early to do anything meaningful. After a short, broken nap, she dove into Thursday ready to start moving into the shadows of Donnelly’s troubled life.
She called Peterson’s house and left yet another message on each of his phones. She talked to bar owner Simpson at The Hole, but there was no news. Restless, she drove south and walked through all of the little shops Donnelly had been extorting money from, but no one would talk to her. They acted like they didn’t know what she was talking about, and she couldn’t get anything out of them.
Of course, she was just wandering into the stores and not identifying herself as a police officer, and she wondered if their response was more or less guarded because of this. One tobacco shop owner finally admitted, in the most indirect way possible, that the business owners had received a financial settlement from the city and had signed a nondisclosure agreement as a condition of the settlement. Then he shut down and asked her to leave.
Nodding, she went to the business next door. At Sam’s Discount Liquor Store she met the owner, Narek. There she explained she already knew about the settlement and was not asking anyone to violate that agreement. “I’m not trying to cause trouble, really. My dad and my brother-in-law are partners, and they’re thinking of opening a candy store down where the old salon used to be. My dad wants me to find out about the deal because he doesn’t quite trust that this ugly business is over. I just want to make sure they’re not walking into a bad situation, you see how it is.”
“Hmm. We signed the paper and they gave us the money. A settlement.” Narek presented each syllable with care. His wide mouth curled with distaste, and Brenda felt a sudden affinity for the owner of the store behind which Tami Sheraton had died. The short, thin Armenian shrugged, and his dark, troubled eyes darted to the street as though he expected ruffians to appear in the store’s doorway. “Now we cannot talk about it. You see?”
His wry look suggested that if he was going to break that rule, it wouldn’t be by talking to some crazy lady who looked like she was headed to the local bingo hall to smoke Pall Malls and gossip about celebrities. Brenda doubted he believed her lie about the brother-in-law, but he was too polite to call her on it.
Nodding, she caught a glimpse of herself in a small mirror hung behind the counter and realized her altered appearance was familiar. Was she imagining that? No, she realized with a start, she wasn’t. From a distance she looked exactly like her mom at forty. How strange. Was that some passive-aggressive nonsense sneaking up out of her subconscious? She’d spent hours making herself look like her late mother and not realized she was doing so. She pushed the thought aside.
If the victims of Donnelly’s scheme had signed nondisclosure agreements with the city as part of the payoff designed to prevent lawsuits, how was she going to investigate?
“Okay,” she said to Narek, “what if we talked about theoretical stuff? Like if, for example, some random business was getting shaken down by some random dirty cop, when might that have started?”
“Who are you? Why are you asking these questions? The truth, please.” He slipped out from behind the counter and walked down the middle aisle of the small store. He fussed, adjusting a bag of chips, a carton of crackers, a whip of jerky. She wondered if he realized he was promising himself the store was still there, still his, still real. Or was she projecting her own insecurities on the shop owner?
“I knew Tami Sheraton.” She saw recognition and fear on his face. “I want to know why she died. I want to make sure her death wasn’t in vain.”
“I do not want any more trouble. I had no doings with this murder of lady police Tami Sheraton.”
“And I have no desire to cause you any.” She made a wry face. “Listen. The theoretical cop who was threatening theoretical business owners like yourself? Maybe he was on his own, but I don’t know for sure. I wonder if maybe someone else was running the show, which would mean that someone else could still be shaking down business owners like you, or is likely to do so again soon.”
This was not a revelation to him, judging by the resignation in his expression.
“I would like to prevent that so you can stop forking over your hard-earned dollars to some bully. Even if the money comes out of the settlement for a while, that payout won’t last forever, and then you’re still on the hook for the extortion fees.”
“Ah.” He looked down at the candy in the endcap display, needlessly straightening and rearranging colorfully wrapped items on the spotless metal shelves. “The theoretical extortionist, his cohort, would have to be someone the victims did not fear, you see? For them to say a single word. It would have to be someone whom the shop owners did not think was dangerous to them also.”
She nodded slowly and sighed. He was scared. She took in his shallow breathing, flared nostrils, lowered gaze. She noted how his mouth was a tight line bracketed by tension lines. His body language—tight and restless at the same time—was that of a prisoner under surveillance and trying to look casual.
Her gut lurched, and she was sickened by the fact that right under her nose, in her town, folks were being terrorized by the very people who’d promised to protect them. “This has been terrible for you, I’m sure.”
He carefully nudged a candy bar into alignment with its fellows and turned to face her.
“I have lived in seven countries since I left my home. Everywhere I had to pay bribes to corrupt officials. Then we came to America. My cousins, they said
it was different here. They said we do not have to bribe any officials. It is the criminals who must hide because they do not control police. But my cousins, forgive me, they were wrong. It is the same here as everywhere else.”
“No, sir, it’s not.” She leaned forward and stared into his eyes. “It’s not. That’s why I’m here. I want—”
“She used to come here for shopping.”
She was taken aback. “What?”
“Lady police Tami Sheraton. She always bought some special thing—dessert wine from Spain or Irish whiskey or some special thing. She would come to the back door because I asked it of her. People are worried if police come always to the store. Maybe she will ask for money also, you see? So she came to the back of the door as my favor. She would come to ask me, ‘What is a good sake? What is a decent Australian shiraz?’ Not like most people who are shopping in here. A lady. I liked her.”
Her mind raced. “I didn’t know that.”
“But that is all I can say. I am sorry she is died. May God forgive us all for the wrong men do. But I cannot help you. I have a family to take care of. I cannot be foolish.”
“I don’t want to cause trouble for you. I just want—”
“You are not only a friend of lady police Tami Sheraton. You are also the police, but you are pretending not to be. You are bad like— No. No. You are hiding from your own people, because you do not trust them also. You cannot help us.”
She opened her mouth and shut it again. He’d read the situation as clearly as if it were a menu. She shrugged helplessly. “Please talk to me.”
He spoke over his shoulder as he strode away from her on stiff legs. “They will kill me if I talk to you, and they will kill you also if you keep doing this thing. Please go away. You will make them angry and they will punish us. Do you not see? Go away from here. Do not come to this store anytime. Please go now. Please.”
“Narek—”
But the man was gone, having escaped into the storeroom. Brenda drifted out to the parking lot, wishing she’d found a better way to handle things with the liquor-store owner. She’d frightened a man who was already scared, a refugee who’d fled his home in hopes of a better life and found here only the same corruption and scare tactics he’d found elsewhere. Wasn’t America supposed to be better than that? Wasn’t Briarwood supposed to be better than that?
She chose Briarwood because it seemed like the idyllic American town, safe, prosperous, and hospitable. She was shaken by a sudden awareness that she might have lost touch with the reality of life for most of the people who lived in the city she loved. She was at sea.
At sea, she thought, repeating it like a mantra, over and over, as she trudged back to the Caliber. Andi is my anchor, she thought wildly. She grabbed her cell phone.
“What? You’re actually calling me? Did NATO dissolve? Is everything okay?”
“Ha-ha. I’m a little freaked, actually.” She updated Andi on what she’d been up to and what she’d found out, hoping she wasn’t oversharing. By the time she’d finished giving voice to it all, she was breathless. She waited a few seconds before Andi responded with a low grunt.
“What?”
“That’s a lot to process. Send me a picture of your hair.”
She complied and listened to Andi’s hoot of laughter.
“Sugar, that is a truly terrible color on you. You look like a middle-aged hooker with a personality disorder.”
“Thanks, pal. Real charming. Supportive too. I’m supposed to look different.”
“Well, mission accomplished. I’m all for a good midlife crisis, you’ve earned it, but this is just sad.” Andi’s tone dropped. “Bren, I’m not sure this is a good idea. I’m not even sure what you’re trying to do.”
“It’s temporary. It’ll wash out.”
“Not the hair color, though, yeah, thank God that’s not permanent.” Andi paused and Brenda listened as she apparently went into a quieter room, probably her office in back of the café. “You know what I’m talking about.”
She made a noncommittal sound. “Hey, what do you know about Dan Miller?”
“Watchdogs Dan Miller? Lots of money, obviously. A little off. Thinks he’s smarter than everyone. Thinks he says all the right things, but he doesn’t manage to sound sincere. His guards are Neanderthals. We had to demand they change personnel here at the boardwalk five times, because the first four crews were drooling, jackbooted thugs. Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. Just chasing every random idea, really.”
“Stay away from him, kiddo. I wouldn’t trust that man with an empty wallet.”
She gave an abbreviated laugh. “Miller’s playing rabbit with me, which is weird because he’s been persistently offering me a job for the last several years.”
“Well, maybe he’s not too thrilled about how this Donnelly thing makes him look.”
“What would it have to do with him?”
“His whole shtick is that Briarwood is safer because of him and his company, so how does it look when a cop gets murdered by another one? Half the businesses down at that end of town pay his company a lot of money they can’t afford for electronic surveillance. Why didn’t his guys see something was wrong? Why didn’t their computer geniuses notice there was a cop walking around with literal bags of cash every time he left these small businesses?”
“Well, we didn’t, and they were ours to protect.”
“Yeah, but you don’t have cameras set up all over town and practically unlimited access to the footage. You know how the whole trend now is to privatize government programs, so we lose all accountability and transparency while taxpayers line the pockets of the greedy few?”
Andi’s late wife, Lauren, had been passionately opposed to the unholy marriage of politicians and profiteers. It had been one of her most constant themes, and Brenda bit her lip at the way Andi phrased the concept the way Lauren used to. She swallowed hard, missing the sound of Lauren’s voice.
“Yeah?”
“The politicians can make more money, the private corporations can make more money, they can destroy the unions and our infrastructure, making us finance the whole debacle with our taxes. It’s a game, and Dan Miller, idiot though he is, knows how to play it.”
“I know, but it’s not like the security guards are going to replace the police department, Andi.”
“Oh, no? Why not? It’d be cheaper. No pensions, no health care, no raises, no equal-opportunity requirements. Law enforcement could be a few dozen guys making minimum wage looking at cameras and playing with their guns. The only people you have to pay a decent wage are the tech guys, and you only need a few of those once you’ve got all the cameras in place. It’s a perfect nightmare: secretly held, privately owned, taxpayer-funded invasion of privacy. They even call themselves Watchdogs!”
Brenda absorbed that. “Right now all I’m looking at is who got Donnelly to run this extortion thing. Then I’ll know who besides that rabbiting lowlife is responsible for the death of Tami Sheraton.”
“Listen, either you’re completely paranoid and overreacting, or you’re stirring up something dangerous. Either way, I’m not happy about it.”
“Yeah, well.” She bit her lip as she listened to diminutive Andi sink heavily into her creaky office chair. It was falling apart and needed to be repaired or donated, but Brenda knew that Lauren had bought the chair, so Andi would never replace it. Maybe for Andi’s birthday she could hire somebody to fix the chair so at least it wasn’t a safety hazard.
“I had the kids put up the posters like you asked. They made a Facebook and Twitter thing too. Do you think Jonas is really missing, like dead or kidnapped? And the girl, the stripper? Or do you think they’re both kind of fragile people who can’t handle weirdness?”
“Oh, Andi.” Brenda exhaled loudly. “I don’t know. Honestly. I mean, I can’t say about the woman. I met her one time. Peterson? It’s hard to say. He has a drinking problem, and I’ve been worried about him. He hasn’t seemed like hi
mself lately. But I can’t picture him taking off like that.”
“I don’t want you to disappear. Don’t end up like Tami Sheraton. I can’t lose you too.”
She closed her eyes and swallowed hard. “Oh, Andi.”
“I mean it, Bren. I love you. I need you to be careful.”
“I love you too. I promise to be careful. If things seem hinky, I’ll call in for help. Really, I have no interest in playing with fire.”
“Speaking of, have you talked to Tori about all this stuff?”
“Yeah, funny. We’re talking more now than we did back when.”
“That wouldn’t take much. What does she say?”
“Well—”
“Let me guess, she wants you to avoid following the white bunny down the hole, and you’re not listening to her either. Right? She and I can agree on that much at least. Oh, gotta go. I have a delivery driver trying to get my attention. Call me tomorrow?”
Before she could respond, Andi was gone. She snorted at herself. She couldn’t believe she was still obsessing over Tori. She would close her eyes at night and smell Tori’s perfume. She would see something funny and think of telling Tori about it.
The sweetbriar rosebushes that filled their little city with cheery color and sweet scent had somehow become tied up in her feelings about Tori and the life and sweetness she’d brought into Brenda’s world. Now, nearly everywhere she went were painful reminders of what she’d lost.
She’d built her whole life around the job and around Tori, and now the job was tainted by corruption, and Tori was the ex who’d cheated on her with some random woman. How had she let both things slip through her fingers like that?
Cancer had robbed Andi of Lauren, and there hadn’t been anything she could do to stop it. Heart disease had robbed Michael of Dave. But some enemy hadn’t taken Tori, not even the woman she’d cheated with. Brenda knew she’d blown it with Tori. She’d known they were off course, and she’d failed to do what she could to stop it.
