by Andy Straka
“Cold.”
“Told you.”
“But the hog was awesome. Listen, I’ve got something for you.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I hacked into the cell phone company’s records” and set up a monitoring program for your stolen phone when I got back last night. It scans the data on any calls made beginning with yesterday morning.”
I looked at Toronto. “Bet I know where you learned to do something like that.”
“Yeah, well, the guy made a call with your phone. Yesterday, late morning. Must’ve been right after he got away from you.”
“You got a number?”
Toronto was nodding.
“Sure do.”
“Wait a minute. Let me get something to write it down.”
Toronto, anticipating the need, already had a pen and piece of paper he’d taken from one of his pockets. She read the number off to me and I repeated it for him. West Virginia area code. I wasn’t sure about the exchange.
“Thanks, Nicky. Great work. We’ll get on this right away.”
“Don’t forget about me back here,” she said and hung up.
I flipped the phone shut and tucked it back inside my jacket.
“Guy used your cell phone, right?” Toronto said, looking at the number he’d written down.
I nodded.
“Smart girl. I was going to check the records later myself.”
“Recognize the number?”
“Nope.”
“But it shouldn’t take you all that long to find out who it belongs to.”
“Nope.”
“Let me ask you something,” I said. “A few months back, you called to say you’d be gone for a while. Someone else was taking care of your birds. You’d be out of the country for a few weeks, but you wouldn’t tell me where you were going.”
“Right.” Toronto rolled down the glass and spit out the window.
“Some kind of big job though.”
“Yeah.”
“And there have been a couple other times like that … you just haven’t talked that much about them.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Listen,” I said. “Are you working for somebody else right now, Jake? 1 mean here and now?”
He said nothing.
“ ’Cause I thought you were working for me. I mean, we’ve got federal homeland security, FBI, CIA, special forces, take your pick. …”
“I’m not working for anybody but you and Chester right now,” he said.
“Okay. Then why do I get the feeling you’re not telling me something?”
“Chill, Frank. Maybe you’re just a little nervous.”
“What kind of operation were you involved in that time when you disappeared?”
He drew in a deep breath. “All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you this much. It was a reunion, of sorts. Guys from my old special forces unit.”
“Government backed?”
“Yeah, I’m almost certain.”
“You’re almost certain?”
“Look, we aren’t exactly talking on-the-record stuff here. I’m sure nobody in the official chain of command would’ve even scratched their chin if we’d gotten caught.”
“Where’d this take place?”
“Canada. North of Vancouver. Straight of Georgia.”
“A dive operation?”
“You said it, I didn’t.”
When he was in the military Toronto had spent time with the Navy SEALs. When he first joined the NYPD he worked as a police diver before giving it up to go for his detective’s shield. He kept diving recreationally, but then gave it up when he started getting into falconry. Or so I’d thought. Where he lived in western Virginia wasn’t exactly a hotbed for scuba aficionados.
I, on the other hand, had decided to try my hand at diving in a swimming pool with a bunch of tourist divers while on vacation at a Florida resort when I was still single and working patrol. Not that I was all that into marine science or underwater adventures or anything. I just thought it might be a good way to meet women. And I was right.
Only problem was, take me down below ten feet where I didn’t feel like I could just pop right back up to the surface and I started freaking out—some kind of latent claustrophobic thing going on, I guess. I’d never bothered to find out and never went back. I knew enough by then about extreme situations to know that if I panicked, whoever else was diving with me would also be placed at risk. Every now and then, I still woke up in a night sweat thinking about it.
“What did you guys do up there?” I asked.
He didn’t answer right away. Then he said, “We took something … and don’t ask me what it was.”
Neither of us said anything more for a couple of minutes and I didn’t push the matter. If he didn’t want to tell me any more details, maybe it was better I didn’t know.
When he finally spoke again his voice came out almost like a whisper.
“One thing we both know for sure, Frank, there’s people in this world getting burned up by hate.”
I nodded. “Like the guys who flew the planes into those buildings.”
“And like these Stonewall Rangers. I know, ‘cause if my life had been just a little different I could’ve almost become one of ‘em.”
An ambulance with its lights flashing passed us as we reached the outskirts of Dunbar and the interchange with the interstate again.
“But not Chester,” I said.
“No. Not Chester.”
“Let’s drop back by the house. Why don’t you see if you can find out who that phone number belongs to. And while you’re at it, why don’t you stop by and see if that veterinarian’s got anything.”
“All right. What about using the telemetry to look for Elo?”
“I’ll get hold of Farraday, see if I can get him out here later to help us. And I’ll contact the conservation officer, see if she’s interested in coming too.”
“What are you gonna do in the meantime?”
“Go stir up some trouble,” I said.
11
The town of Nitro, I’d learned from a book Betty Carew had let me borrow the night before, actually had a pretty interesting history. The community was formed as a company town of sorts by the Ordnance Department during World War I. The federal government needed a centralized place to manufacture large quantities of gunpowder and chose the remote yet easily accessible river bottomland not too far from Charleston. Almost overnight, a boomtown of about thirty thousand arose from nothing. Looking at the old pictures reminded you a little of one of those temporary mining boomtowns out West during the late eighteen hundreds.
The town had been mostly in a state of decay, however, since the end of the First World War. When the chemical industry moved into the Kanawha River Valley in a big way beginning in the fifties and sixties, building a number of plants in the area, other towns, both upriver and down, apparently benefited more directly. The population might have shrunk to just a few thousand, but battered Nitro hung on, like the steely-eyed war veteran she was.
It took twenty-five minutes to drive from the Carews’ place in Nitro to the Kanawha County sheriff’s office at the courthouse on East Virginia Street in downtown Charleston. I stayed off the interstate and paralleled the river the whole way in. The sky was clearing a little and pale sunlight had begun to warm the cold air.
Downtown, the Kanawha was as pristine as a river could be, flanked by a few square blocks of high-rise buildings and the gold-domed state capitol. Now it was just a moving gray slab of water with the occasional barge or other commercial boat traffic, but the marina I’d passed and several private homes with dry-docked cabin cruisers, jet skis, and other pleasure craft indicated a summertime of boating pleasure in the shadow of the big buildings.
The county courthouse was a sprawling, fortresslike structure with stone walls and a red tile roof. Scaffolding encircled the back two-thirds of the building and a few workers appeared to be doing something to the stone. Just across Court Street
was the headquarters for the Charleston City Police. The cities of South Charleston, Dunbar, St. Albans, and the town of Nitro all had their own police forces too, but since Chester’s shooting had taken place on county land, the investigation fell within the sheriff’s department’s jurisdiction, hence Nolestar’s involvement.
A chinless, heavy-jowled female dispatcher with luminous eyes and beautiful hair nodded at me as I entered the department’s headquarters. She was on the phone when I walked in. I waited until she’d finished her end of the conversation. Something about a break-in and some petty thievery at an auto salvage yard.
“Can I help you?” she asked. Her hair was blond and so long that, from my vantage point, it appeared as though it might reach all the way to the floor—a size-twelve Rapunzel in a county sheriff’s uniform.
“Sure. My name’s Pavlicek. I’m a private investigator from Charlottesville, Virginia. I was hoping I might catch Deputy Nolestar in the office.”
She gave me a questioning look.
“I’m the guy who got slugged with the barrel of the Mossberg yesterday.”
“Up there where that hunter was killed earlier in the week, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Let me see if I can find someone to speak with you.”
She disappeared through a door at the side for a minute or so then returned.
“Deputy Nolestar’s not in,” she said. “But if you’d like to have a seat around the corner, Mr. Jackson, our public information officer, said he’ll be with you in just a minute.”
Great. Now I was getting turfed to the PR person.
“You familiar with the Chester Carew shooting?” I asked.
“Oh, wasn’t that awful. Those damn poachers. The county gets a few of ‘em every year. First time one’s ever shot a human being though that I’ve ever heard of.”
“Is that what the department is still officially saying, the shooting was an accident?” I thought of Kara Grayson’s business card tucked in my wallet and wondered what the TV reporter might have to say about that.
“Well, I’m just a dispatcher, Mr. Pavlicek. I’m not sure if I should …”
She glanced to her left. I looked up to see a tall, athletic-looking man, six feet five or so, with a hooked nose and a pipe clenched between his teeth, come through the door and make a beeline for me. He wore a three-piece suit he could’ve borrowed from an undertaker and smelled a lot like chestnuts.
“Mr. Pavlicek?”
“I am he.” I said.
“Hiram Jackson.” He took the pipe from his mouth and shook my hand.
“Thanks for seeing me.”
“Not at all. That’s my job. Why don’t you come on back?”
He led me through the door and down a narrow hall to a little alcove with two old vinyl chairs and a rack of magazines and a squeaky-clean ashtray.
He touched the ashtray as he passed. “Not supposed to be smoking in the building but I like to chew on my pipe while I work on the computer.”
In the corner of the alcove was a doorway that led us to a small windowless office with a wooden desk mostly taken up by a large computer screen. Jackson pulled a pile of papers off a straight-back chair at the side, gestured for me to sit, and deposited himself behind the desk.
“So you’re the man who got surprised by some idiot with a twelve gauge yesterday, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“And I hear you’re a private investigator, from Virginia. Charlottesville. Is that right?”
“You heard right.”
He stuck his pipe back in the corner of his mouth. “How did you get into PI work?”
“Used to be a cop.”
“In Virginia?”
“No, New York.”
He nodded, taking the pipe from his mouth and setting it on the desk. “I take it you were a close friend of Chester Carew,” he said.
“Yes, I was.”
“Bad business that. We could do with a lot less of that kind of thing around here.”
“I’m sure you could.”
“So you wanted to talk to Deputy Nolestar again?”
“Yes.”
“He’s, um, tied up for the rest of the day. Had to go up to Clarksburg for something.”
“The dispatcher said you were the county’s public information officer.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can you tell me any more about the status of the Carew investigation?”
“Well, like I said, that’s my job, so to speak, among other things, put a public face on everything. You know how it goes.”
“What’s the public face on Carew’s death? I was just at his funeral yesterday.”
He studied his hands, flexing his fingers for a moment, as if there were something about them that might give him special powers of insight or persuasion. “I heard they released some birds at the cemetery, something like that.”
“Buteos. Hawks. Released back to the wild.”
“Interesting. You’re one of these, uh, falconers too?”
“I am.”
Now he was examining his fingernails. “So you want to know what the department is doing about Carew’s death, is that it?”
“In a nutshell.”
He finally turned his gaze back to me. “Well, Kelly probably told you, Bobby Nolestar’s the one you really need to speak with, but I can tell you this. Whoever killed Chester Carew didn’t stick around to celebrate their feat. I believe the deputies did, however, find evidence of someone else at the scene.”
“Evidence? What kind of evidence?” I obviously wasn’t about to tell him that Toronto and I had just been out searching the area.
“Sorry, Mr. Pavlicek. They’re not giving out those kinds of details. I can tell you Deputy Nolestar has been working round the clock on this case.”
“What about federal involvement, the FBI?”
There was a barely discernible narrowing of his eyes at the question. “I don’t know anything about any federal involvement,” he said. “As far as the department is concerned, we’re still investigating a hunting accident.”
He picked up his pipe again, stuck it in his mouth, and reached to pull open the top drawer of a filing cabinet next to his desk, extracting a piece of paper from a file before handing it to me. “Press release,” he said out of the corner of his mouth. “This was just given out to the media this morning.”
I read it over. It told me nothing I didn’t already know.
“Have you had a lot of press coverage of Carew’s shooting?” I said.
“Not much really. I’m afraid hunting accidents aren’t all that uncommon in this state. The missing bird made the story a little unusual, mind you. The reporter who wrote up the piece for the Charleston Daily Mail did a nice little sidebar about it.”
“Anything on radio or television?”
“Just our usual to the news departments, asking for anyone who might have information to come forward. Had a reporter call yesterday from KBCX. She was snooping around about something to do with Carew, but that was all.”
“Do you remember her name?”
“Kara something … why?”
“Just curious.”
He leaned back in his chair, took the pipe from his mouth once more. “You said you were a cop in New York. What kind? Patrol officer?”
“At first. Eventually I made detective. Homicide.”
“You must’ve seen some grisly killings in your time then.”
“My share, I guess.”
“We don’t see a lot of homicide around here, thank God. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve got our share of crime.”
“How about you?” I asked. “How long have you been working for the county?”
“Less than a year actually. Before that I was in Washington.”
“Law enforcement?”
“No, nothing so dramatic, I’m afraid. Department of Labor.”
I noticed a pair of hiking boots on a mat in the corner with not quite dry mud on them.
&nbs
p; “You an outdoorsman?” I asked, gesturing toward them.
He chuckled. “Not really. But some of my neighbor’s cows got out this morning and I had to go help him chase them down.”
I nodded.
He sat up straight in his chair and pulled another pile of papers across his desk beside the monitor. “Well, if there’s nothing else I can help you with, I need to get back to work. I’ll let Deputy Nolestar know you stopped by looking for him.”
“Sure.”
“Come on. I’ll walk you out.”
We both stood and I followed him out the door and back down the hallway. This time he left the pipe behind.
At the dispatcher’s desk he shook my hand again and turned to go. “Pleasure meeting you. You do want to watch yourself around here, Mr. Pavlicek.”
“Yeah? How’s that?”
“Wouldn’t want you getting hit in the face with any more shotguns,” he said.
12
I ate lunch in a yuppified delicatessen a couple of blocks from the state capitol complex. There were trees along the sidewalk, pattern brick in the street, and a prosperous air to the neighborhood.
While I was eating, a young couple at a table across from me couldn’t keep their hands off one another, laughing softly and nuzzling and pawing each other between bites of their pastrami sandwiches. They both wore wedding rings and were both dressed in business suits—getting together for lunch obviously.
I got to thinking about Marcia, wondering what she was doing in school at the moment. I still didn’t know what had gone wrong between us. I didn’t seem to know anything anymore when it came to women. I finished my pity party along with the rest of my roast beef on rye and emptied my tray into the trash by the door before I left.
The studios of KBCX-TV were housed in an old depot that had been converted to office space along the riverfront north of downtown. Plate-glass windows in the lobby offered a panoramic view of the boat traffic and the chemical plant downstream.
“So what’s this? A sneak attack?” Kara Grayson was dressed in blue jeans and a sweatshirt this afternoon, definitely not her on-camera getup. We were sitting alone in her office with a view of the river.
“Not exactly,” I said.
“You’re lucky you caught me. This is supposed to be my day off,” she said. But there was a hint of mischief in her eyes that told me the intrusion was not at all unwelcome.
