by Paula Graves
At the front desk, a pretty dark-haired girl in her early twenties had her cell phone perched on her very pregnant stomach and didn’t even acknowledge Briar’s entrance.
Briar stepped up to the reception desk. “Is Leanne Dawson here?”
The pregnant girl looked up in surprise. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I need to speak to Leanne Dawson. Is she here?” For a brief dizzying moment, it occurred to her that this girl could be Leanne. And if she was pregnant—
But to her relief, the dark-haired girl just waved a hand in the general direction of the slim blonde on the right. “She’s over there.”
No offer to let her know Briar was coming. Which, she supposed, might work in her favor.
She crossed to the desk where the blonde continued jotting down notes, her hair covering her face like a curtain. Briar cleared her throat, making the woman jump.
“Leanne Dawson?” she asked.
The woman swept the shiny blond curtain away from her face, giving Briar a good look at the woman her husband had been sleeping with.
She was a pretty woman and, to Briar’s bemusement, at least five years older than Briar herself, with clear blue eyes and lightly tanned skin that contrasted pleasantly with her straight wheat-colored hair. She was slim but well proportioned, with full breasts and long legs, displayed modestly enough by her tailored blouse and well-cut slacks.
“I’m Leanne Dawson. May I help you?”
Her accent was Southern but light and well modulated. An educated woman who hadn’t lived in the hills her whole life, Briar thought. Had that been part of the attraction for Johnny, beyond Leanne’s position as Cortland’s bookkeeper? Had he enjoyed being with someone so obviously different from the little hillbilly girl back home?
Stop it, she scolded herself silently.
“My name is Briar Culpepper.” She wondered as she gave her maiden name whether or not Johnny had told Leanne Dawson anything about the wife back home. If he had, Leanne showed no sign of recognition. “I’m a police officer in Bitterwood, Tennessee, looking into the murder of John Blackwood.”
Leanne’s expression shifted at the mention of Johnny’s name. Bleakness darkened the blue of her eyes, and her lower lip trembled slightly as she waved at an empty folding chair on the other side of her desk. As Briar took a seat, Leanne said quietly, “I don’t know anything about his death.”
“But you knew John Blackwood.”
“We were...friends.”
“You were a little more than friends,” Briar pressed, feeling pretty terrible for pushing the other woman this way without revealing the truth about herself. And if Logan’s life hadn’t been at stake, she probably would have come clean and asked for the woman’s forbearance. But she couldn’t afford to alienate Leanne Dawson until she asked the questions she wanted answered.
“Officer—”
“Call me Briar.”
“Pretty name.” Leanne smiled slightly before the expression faded into gloom again. “I’ve talked to so many people about him. I don’t know what more to say. I made a really awful mistake. Not just where Johnny was concerned, either.”
“I understand from your earlier statement to Ridge County prosecutor Dalton Hale that you and Johnny engaged in your liaisons in Wayne Cortland’s office.”
Beneath her tan, Leanne blushed deep pink, making Briar feel like a complete creep. “Only a few times.”
“Did you go into the office together always? Or was Johnny ever alone there without you?”
Leanne’s gaze darted up to meet Briar’s. “Why?”
“We’re trying to establish if Mr. Blackwood ever had access to Cortland’s office unattended.”
Leanne licked her lips, looking down at the open ledger that lay on the desk in front of her. As if suddenly realizing the company’s books were laid bare to Briar if she wanted to look, she snapped the book closed and folded her hands on top of the book. “I made the mistake of giving Johnny liberties I shouldn’t have.”
“Including allowing him to go into Wayne Cortland’s office unescorted? Maybe to wait until you could safely sneak away?”
Leanne lowered her face to her hands. “He made it seem so exciting. Fun and dangerous.” She dropped her hands and looked at Briar, her expression stiff with embarrassment. “I don’t attract exciting, dangerous men. He made me feel so alive.”
Briar felt a hard, hot ache in the center of her chest, but to her surprise, it had less to do with her own feeling of betrayal and more to do with her sympathy for Leanne Dawson’s obvious sense of shame and regret.
“So he made a game of your relationship. And part of that game was doing something crazy and dangerous. Like having sex in your boss’s office?”
She nodded, a tear sliding down her cheek. “Sometimes it would take a half hour to get away. I was so afraid Mr. Cortland would go in there and find Johnny, my heart would be beating a mile a minute by the time—” She stopped, dashing the tear from her face with an angry stab of her knuckle. “All that time, he had a wife and I didn’t know it. I guess that’s what made it feel dangerous for him, huh?”
Briar looked down at her own hands, at the faint ring of pale skin on her left ring finger where the ring had been until Johnny’s death. “Did Mr. Cortland have a safe? Or a drawer or file cabinet nobody else was allowed to access?” she asked.
“You know, that prosecutor asked me the same question, but I didn’t remember—” Leanne paused, then started again. “It might not have meant anything. But there was a drawer in Mr. Cortland’s desk that he used to always keep locked. Not that unusual—he might have kept personal items there. People do, you know. But just the other day, I remembered that he stopped locking the drawer a few months before the explosion.”
The explosion that had blown Wayne Cortland to his eternal reward, Briar thought, along with several other people, some of whom may have been innocent pawns in Cortland’s games. Leanne was damned lucky she hadn’t been one of them. “Was that before or after Johnny’s death?”
“After,” Leanne answered after a moment of thought.
If it was right after Johnny’s murder, Briar realized, it was possible that Cortland had figured out what Johnny was up to. Had he sent someone to kill Johnny and retrieve what her husband had stolen?
Whoever he’d sent after Johnny clearly hadn’t found what he’d been looking for, or Blake and his boys wouldn’t be trying to kidnap Logan as leverage to get their hands on what Johnny had stolen.
So where, exactly, had Johnny hidden his bloody secrets?
“How soon after Johnny’s death did he stop locking that drawer?” Briar asked.
“I don’t remember.” Leanne gave Briar a troubled look. “Do you think Johnny took something from Mr. Cortland’s office?”
“Do you?”
The other woman looked down at her hands, her brow crinkled with thought. She had neat, well-manicured hands, Briar thought, darting a quick look at her own work-worn hands with their short, uneven nails and the occasional ragged cuticle. Johnny must have looked at this woman and seen everything Briar wasn’t.
Maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe their marriage had failed not because Johnny wouldn’t grow up but because they’d grown in different directions.
“I wondered if he took something,” Leanne said quietly after another moment of silence. “The last time I saw Johnny, he told me I should look for another job. When I asked him why, he said he had a feeling something bad would be going down at the sawmill. He wouldn’t tell me what. Wouldn’t even tell me why he thought so.” She shook her head slowly, tears glistening on the rims of her lower eyelids. “The day of the explosion, I’d taken a day off work to go for a job interview. This job, as a matter of fact.”
No wonder Dalton had focused on Leanne Dawson as a person of interest. The coincidence of
her being off work that day, and looking for a new job, at that, would have raised his suspicions.
“You were very lucky,” Briar said.
“I know. I still can’t believe it sometimes. Any of it. Mr. Cortland always seemed so nice and...ordinary.”
“That’s how it works sometimes.” Briar couldn’t stop herself from asking one final question. “Do you think Johnny loved you?”
Leanne’s sharp blue eyes snapped up to meet Briar’s. “That’s a strange question from a police officer.”
“I know. Forget I asked it.”
The other woman’s eyes narrowed. “What did you say your name was?”
“Briar Culpepper.”
“Oh, my God.” Leanne’s eyes widened with horror. “You’re his wife. Aren’t you?”
Briar tried not to react, but her skin was already crawling with regret. She shouldn’t have come here and pretended she was just another police officer.
“What, did you want to see what I looked like? See how I compare?” Leanne was crying now, soft silent tears spilling down her cheeks. “Do you want an apology? Because I’ll give you one. God knows, I owe it to you.”
“I don’t want an apology. I believe you when you say you didn’t know he was married. I sometimes think Johnny didn’t really understand that fact himself.” Briar made herself meet the other woman’s red-rimmed eyes. “I’m sorry to have come here like this. I’m sorry I wasn’t up-front about who I am. But you have to understand—there are people who believe Johnny took something potentially incriminating from Wayne Cortland. Very dangerous people who are willing to go after my son to get that information back.”
Leanne’s tears kept falling, but her expression shifted from despair to horror. “Someone’s gone after your son?”
“Twice, at least. And I don’t know what Johnny took, if he took anything at all. Or where he would have hidden it if he did.”
“And you think I know?”
“I don’t know. I was hoping, I guess.”
Leanne pulled a box of tissues from her desk drawer and blotted her cheeks. “You’re putting a lot more importance on my relationship with Johnny than either he or I did.” She took a deep breath and lifted her chin, meeting Briar’s gaze. “I knew it was a fling. I knew it was reckless, but he made me feel good, you know? Desirable and maybe a little dangerous myself.” Her mouth curved in a self-conscious smile. “I know, me? Dangerous? But that’s how he made me feel. Like I could take on the world single-handed. It was an addictive feeling.”
Briar’s stomach squirmed with sympathy. That had been Johnny’s most potent attraction for her, too, at least when she’d been younger. He’d had the verve and style of a bad boy without really being very dangerous at all. The most harm he’d ever done to anyone was all emotional, and even then, Briar thought, he’d never meant for it to happen.
He hadn’t meant to break her heart. Or Leanne Dawson’s. And if she was honest, her heart wasn’t nearly as affected as her pride.
“You never had any suspicions about Wayne Cortland?” she asked Leanne. “That his business might be a front for something illegal?”
“Of course not. I wouldn’t have worked for him if I had.”
She sounded honest, Briar thought. There was nothing in her tone to even hint at deception. Wayne Cortland had played the part of the honest businessman very, very well. It was why he’d gotten away with his crimes so long in the first place.
“Thank you for your time, Ms. Dawson. I appreciate it. And again, I’m sorry for not telling you who I was up front.”
Leanne shook her head. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help.”
Briar had gotten halfway to the doorway when she heard footsteps coming up behind her in a rush. She turned on her heel so quickly that Leanne nearly rammed into her headfirst.
The other woman took a quick step back, wobbling for balance. “Sorry,” she said. “I just thought of something. I don’t know if it means anything to you—it didn’t to me. But that day Johnny told me to look for another job, I’d made a joke about stocking my pantry while I could in case the winter turned out to be a lean one. And he said he never had to worry about stocking his pantry. He had so much stored away folks were starting to think he was a doomsday prepper.”
Briar released a soft huff of laughter. “If he’d had to stock things away for himself, he’d have starved.”
“I never thought him one for gardening,” Leanne admitted. “I was just sitting here thinking about that conversation and it struck me you must have been the one who stocked that pantry he was talking about.”
Briar nodded. “Is that the strange thing you remembered?”
“No, it’s what he said after that. He said, ‘It’s amazing how many different things you can store in a Mason jar.’ And then he winked at me and headed off on his truck route.”
Briar felt a little tremor run up her spine.
“Do you think that means anything?” Leanne asked.
Briar kept her expression neutral. “I doubt it. He’s right—there are all kinds of things you can put away in a Mason jar. He was probably just trying to sound naughty and secretive.”
Leanne’s curious expression shifted to a mixture of fondness and regret. “That was Johnny, all right.” Her face reddened. “I’m sorry. I guess you’d know that a lot better than I did.”
“Do me a favor, Leanne, okay? Stop beating yourself up about Johnny. The only thing you did wrong was fall for his lines. You weren’t the first girl to do that, you know.”
“Thank you. And I hope you find what you’re looking for and that everything goes well for you and your son.”
Briar smiled again and turned back toward the door, trying not to let her suddenly energized legs break into a run as she headed out into the waning daylight.
It was after four when she pulled her Jeep out of the Pinter Construction parking lot. The drive back to Bitterwood would take more than three hours, an interminable amount of time when she was now almost certain where she’d find whatever it was that Johnny had stolen from Wayne Cortland.
It couldn’t have been files, at least not the paper-and-ink sort of files, because there wasn’t a Mason jar in her stash at home big enough to contain that sort of contraband. But maybe Johnny had taken photos of the files and stored them on a memory chip. Or even a flash drive. Either of those things would be small enough to store inside a jar of peach preserves or pickled okra. Store it inside a pill bottle or a small film canister, wrap it in a zippered plastic bag and shove it into a jar of canned vegetables or fruit, and almost nobody would think to look for it there. The plastic would protect it from the canned food, and the food would protect it from easy detection.
The only danger would have been if Briar had pulled that particular jar from the shelf and opened it. And since she had a particular system of storing things, oldest in front, newest in back, Johnny could easily have chosen the least likely jar to be opened right away.
All she had to do was go through the jars that would have been at the back of her stash at the time of Johnny’s death and see which one held his secret.
Her phone trilled as she pulled out into traffic on the four-lane that led to the interstate highway, but when she tried to answer, she got a “low battery” message. “Damn it.” She couldn’t even see who had called.
There was a charger in the glove compartment. At the next traffic light, she pulled out the charger, hooked it to the cigarette lighter and plugged in her phone. The display came on and she saw that the missed call had been from Dana Massey. She called her back.
Dana answered on the first ring. “Briar? Where are you?”
“In Wytheville, Virginia,” she answered. “Long story. What’s up?”
“I’ve been trying to call Dalton for the last hour, and nobody’s answering. Is he with yo
u?”
Alarm rattled her nerves. “No. He should be at home. He’s watching Logan for me.”
Dana’s silence raised her panic level by several notches.
“Maybe he’s not answering any calls but mine,” Briar ventured.
“That could be it.” Dana sounded relieved by the thought. “Why don’t you call him and see what’s up? And then tell him to give me a call. I may have some information for him about a group of anarchists he’s been trying to tie to Blake Culpepper. But I’ve been given the okay to talk only to Dalton.”
“I’ll tell him.” She hung up and tried Dalton’s cell phone. After five rings the phone went to voice mail. She left a message, then tried his home number.
She got a busy signal.
Maybe he didn’t have call waiting, she told herself as she set the phone on the seat to continue charging.
But twenty minutes later when she tried the house phone again, she got another busy signal.
After a third try, she called Dana back. “There’s something wrong,” she told Dalton’s sister. “And I’m three hours away.”
“I’m still in Knoxville, but I’ll call Nix and have him check on Dalton and Logan. I’ll get there as soon as I can.” Dana hung up the phone without saying goodbye.
Briar set the phone on the passenger seat, her heart starting to race as she pushed the Jeep’s speed as high as she dared.
Chapter Thirteen
Someone was hammering outside the house. The sound droned on and on, setting off painful throbs in the middle of Dalton’s forehead. He struggled to open his eyes, trying to stand up and cross to the door to yell at the offender to stop with all the noise.
But his eyelids seemed as heavy as boulders, and the hint of daylight that crept between the narrow openings felt like stiletto knives being rammed into his eyeballs. Nausea rolled through his gut in greasy waves, forcing him to be very still. For a second the hammering went silent, so silent that he feared for a moment that he’d been struck instantly deaf.
