Dying Brand

by Tyson, Wendy

  “I’ll be right there.” Tenzin Jinpa looked at Vaughn. “Would you care to join us?”

  Vaughn shook his head. “Thank you, but if I sit in this position any longer, you’ll need a crane to lift me up.”

  The nun smiled. “Be well.”

  But Vaughn was still thinking about the quote. As they rose to leave the room, Vaughn said, “So your father spun off the family business in an effort to forget what happened?”

  Tenzin Jinpa, the woman once known as Amelie Diamond, smiled ruefully. “I had not seen my father since the day I told him I was becoming a Buddhist. Neither forgiving nor forgetting was part of his character.” She bowed. “Now good day, Mr. Vaughn. Continue to seek justice. It is a noble pursuit.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  It was during the first weekend of what Eleanor had begun to view as her captivity that she found the first of the outbuildings in the woods. It was a sturdy affair, consisting of a concrete block foundation and heavy timber walls. Thick metal chains and a chunky metal padlock blocked entry, as did its positioning. Placed within a dense area of pines and deep into the woods, it wasn’t visible from the road, the driveway or the house.

  She’d gone for a walk in the woods, as much to clear her mind as to get away from Doris and those dogs. The shed intrigued her. Was it Doris’s? It did seem to have her father’s handiwork, and she wouldn’t have put it past him to build it out here in order to store ammunition or valuables or even guns. But upon closer inspection, Eleanor realized the shed wasn’t on Doris’s property. A tree a hundred yards away had been tacked with a “Keep Out—No Hunting” sign and another marked the area as private property. Doris had no such signs. And taking the time to mark the perimeter of her property would take energy and effort, two things Doris seemed to lack.

  Then whose shed was it?

  Eleanor pulled at the lock. It wouldn’t budge. The metal was rusting and the padlock showed signs of weather and age. The fact that it was still intact, though, said these woods were pretty deserted. Otherwise, kids would have broken in long ago and used the shed as a place to hang out, smoke pot or screw. Eleanor walked on.

  Within another half mile, she came upon another building, a stone cottage of sorts situated in the midst of an overgrown clearing. Its rotting roof had fallen in and two of its eight windows were broken, with vines that wove their way around the exterior like a living shroud. Portions of the vegetation surrounding the building seemed denser and shorter than the others, and these shorter portions formed a swath that led from the cottage. She got down on hands and knees and felt underneath the weeds. Bingo. Blacktop. Cracked, faded and marred by plants growing up through the fissures, but blacktop nonetheless. There had been a road leading to this cottage. The road, though, looked like it headed farther into the woods. To where?

  Eleanor pictured the area in her head. This must be the back side of Dunne Pond Resort. Growing up, it had been a place where wealthy Boston families summered. Now, it was abandoned.

  The sun was sinking into the western horizon. The woods, so lush and full of peaceful promise in the summer months, felt cold and eerie. A harsh wind whipped through the trees, leaving Eleanor breathless. She pulled Doris’s down parka tighter around her midsection, her mind swirling with possibilities.

  She needed to get to her money and plan some type of escape. She couldn’t hide at Doris’s forever. But how? She had no doubt the authorities were looking for her, and after what she’d done, she had no doubt others were looking for her, too. Her sister was proof of that.

  Eleanor scanned the clearing. It helped to know her surroundings. If things got bad, at least she’d have somewhere else to go. Somewhere away from Doris. Somewhere safe.

  Allison had dropped Mia off at her car three hours ago, and now she found herself wandering aimlessly through her house. She’d changed into workout clothes and tried to go for a walk, but that didn’t help. Instead of feeling calm or inspired, she felt more agitated. She wanted to do something, something that would put an end to the uncertainty about Scott and these photographs.

  Upstairs, she placed a call to her sister’s rehab center. She’s doing the program, they told her. No, she couldn’t talk to her, they told her. The woman on the other end of the line was sympathetic but reserved. She managed to give Allison almost nothing of substance.

  Next, Allison called her sister Faye to check on Grace.

  “She’s doing great,” Faye said. “Mom and Dad adore her.”

  Even Brutus was busy not needing her. The dog and his new best friend, Simon the cat, were curled around one another on her bed. When Allison slipped into her room to change into jeans and a sweater, Brutus opened one eye, thumped his tail stub on the comforter, and resumed his snoring.

  “You’re both worthless,” Allison muttered. But she gave each of them a stroke before making her way to the office.

  There, she called Jason while she flicked on her computer. Jason didn’t answer. Disappointed, she left a voicemail and settled in to do some searching on the web.

  A search on Eleanor turned up the same material she’d seen before: a Facebook page she couldn’t access and dozens of race finishes. Eleanor’s profile picture showed a grinning woman in her late thirties or early forties climbing the side of a cliff. Thin and muscular, Eleanor had the tan skin and bleached hair of a woman who spent a lot of time outdoors.

  But there was a hardness in her eyes, even in her profile picture. She wore no helmet, and her bright blue eyes stared at the cameraperson with an almost startling intensity, as if she were daring them to say or do something.

  Allison thought about Eleanor in the context of Scott’s lovers. Unlike Leah, Eleanor didn’t seem remotely academic. In fact, she seemed the antithesis of Leah’s bookish, slightly arrogant persona. And where Julie was all soft curves and feminine smiles, Eleanor appeared sinewy and fit.

  Allison changed her search terms and revisited Leah, Transitions, Doris Long, even Brad Halloway and his wife. She found nothing new…until she searched using terms related to Scott’s murder. On a local news site, she saw the headline, “Three Arrested in Murder of Local Businessman.”

  The three kids suspected of killing Scott had been detained.

  Allison stared at the photo. Three boys, all black, all between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. Two looked scared—terrified, really—and one had the deadened look of someone who hadn’t cared in a long, long time. Such a tragedy, Allison thought, to have lost all hope and joy before your twenty-first birthday. Edith Myers had been right about one thing. What were we doing to our youth?

  But then it struck her: these boys would go to jail, where they would be housed with hardened criminals. The likelihood of reformation was low. The likelihood of learning new antisocial behaviors, of becoming even more hardened to others’ suffering, was high.

  This is wrong, she thought.

  Allison unlocked her filing cabinet and pulled out the file in which she kept the photographs and other information she’d accumulated on Scott’s murder. From within, she pulled out the business card Detective Jim Berry had given her so many days before. She placed the file in her laptop bag and grabbed her phone and car keys and dialed Detective Berry’s number on her way out the door.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Vaughn left the Buddhist Center feeling agitated. Why, he couldn’t say. He only knew that something in Amelie’s words set off a mental alarm. It wasn’t so much what she’d said but how she’d said it. So distant, cool. As though Ted Diamond, his wife Lily and everything that had happened in her younger years belonged to someone else, and by becoming Tenzin Jinpa she had somehow escaped her past.

  If only it were that easy.

  Vaughn considered where to go next. His first thought was Mia, but then he remembered that she was no longer available to him and his sense of agitation deepened. He called Allison but his call went straight to voicemail. He decided
to head to the boxing gym for a spell. Clear his mind, work up a sweat and think about what to do next. He started the BMW and was backing out of the spot when he thought of something else Amelie had said in reference to the problems in China: Neither forgiving nor forgetting are part of his character.

  Could Scott have ticked him off? Had Scott been a part of the China fiasco? Unlikely—he wasn’t even working there at the time. But perhaps they’d run into each other in the past. Vaughn realized he’d never asked Amelie if she knew Scott, or if it was possible her father had known the man. He started to call the center but remembered that Amelie—Tenzin Jinpa—was in afternoon meditation. Instead, he called Jamie. Angela answered right away.

  “Have Jamie do me a favor,” he said without preamble.

  “What do you need, Vaughn?”

  He asked her to ask Jamie to look for a connection between Scott Fairweather and the Diamond family. “Anything,” he said. “Business or personal.”

  Angela agreed. After a painful silence, she said, “Are you feeling better?”

  “Just make sure Jamie knows it’s important.”

  “Of course.” Angela sounded wounded.

  Vaughn didn’t want to end the call that way. He said, “About this morning. The beer. I’d like to think I wouldn’t have…well, thank you.”

  “You were hurting,” Angela said. “Sometimes you have to accept your own weaknesses in order to move on.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not so ready to move on.”

  After they hung up, Vaughn felt even worse than he had before. Like Ted Diamond, neither forgiving nor forgetting seemed to be in his wheelhouse. And apparently acceptance wasn’t much of a strength, either.

  Detective Berry agreed to meet Allison at the Starbucks on Sixteenth and Market in downtown Philadelphia. She spotted his red hair from outside the café. When she entered, he looked up from his high-top table in the corner. He didn’t smile.

  Allison took her time ordering a coffee. As she placed cream and sugar in her drink, she counted to ten and back again in an unsuccessful effort to quiet the dragonflies zooming around in her belly. She really didn’t want to have this conversation, especially before talking to Jason, but he wasn’t answering and she couldn’t get the thought of those boys out of her mind.

  Allison took a deep breath, grabbed a napkin, and did exactly what she told her clients to do in these situations: she projected the confidence she wished she felt instead of the nervousness she was actually feeling.

  “Detective,” she said, pointing to his tea. “I would have offered you something but I noticed you already had something to drink.”

  “Thanks for the thought.” He glanced at his watch, making no attempt to hide his impatience. “You wanted to see me about the Fairweather murder? You said it was urgent, so here I am.”

  “Yes, you are. Thank you.” Allison pulled the folder out of briefcase. She had separated the nudes from the tamer photos and email and left them back in her car. There was no way she would pull them out here, and if he thought they were important, she preferred to give them to him in the privacy of her car.

  She slid the folder to him across the table. He opened it, his eyes going from the semi-nude picture of Allison to the email and the envelope.

  “I assume someone sent these to you?” He raised his eyebrows. “Blackmail?”

  “That’s just it, Detective. I don’t think so. There have been no other attempts to contact me. I have several more, photos I didn’t want to bring into Starbucks because of their X-rating. Plus, similar photos were sent to family members and a colleague.”

  “All of you?”

  “Of me…and Scott.”

  Berry frowned. He picked up the email and re-read it, then stared at the photograph.

  “You’ve handled all of these?”

  Allison nodded. She looked away, toward the window, the faint hammering of a headache chipping away at her skull. “I didn’t share these with you before because they seemed unrelated. But now that others have received them, too, and especially now that you’ve made arrests, I thought I should share.” She frowned. “You can understand my reticence.”

  Berry sat back in his seat. He took off his reading glasses and, one end in the corner of his mouth, began to chew on the plastic. His silence was maddening. He was waiting for her to say more and she wasn’t about to give him a thing.

  Eventually, he said, “I could charge you with obstructing justice.”

  “For what, Detective? Nothing tied these photos to Scott’s murder.”

  “Anything could be relevant. You’re smart enough to know that.” He put the glasses back on and again picked up the email. “And obviously you know that or you wouldn’t be here today.”

  “It was the boys. They’re just kids. I thought ‘what if.’” Allison met his stare. “Truthfully, I can’t see how these photos are connected. But I have come to learn that Scott had quite the active sex life and obviously someone,” she pointed to the folder, “is not so happy about that. These pictures may point to a motive. Something other than drugs.”

  “So you think someone killed him out of jealousy?”

  “I don’t know what to think. The Scott I knew wouldn’t do drugs. He was far too careful to do anything that could hurt him physically.” She paused, thinking. “And then there’s the fact of my name in his calendar. Why? I haven’t seen Scott in years, since after that email was sent. Why would he want to see me?”

  “Who took the photos, Ms. Campbell?”

  Allison looked away. “I assume Scott did.”

  “Is it possible he was going to blackmail you? That the pictures, and the calendar entry, were part of a plan that, luckily for you, got interrupted by his murder?”

  “But the pictures arrived after his death.”

  “And you’ve not received a single blackmail notice. Scott may have arranged the mailings before he was killed, but with him gone, there was no one to follow through with the plan.”

  “I guess it’s possible. I’ve thought of that myself. But what about Eleanor Davies?”

  “Eleanor?” Berry looked momentarily confused. “The girlfriend?”

  Allison nodded. “She disappeared days after Scott’s death. Why would she run?”

  “Why do you say she ran, Ms. Campbell?”

  “What would you call it, Detective? A woman stops showing up at work, leaves her home and cat behind?”

  Berry resumed chewing on his reading glasses. He seemed to be deciding whether or not to tell her something. “How do you know all this?”

  Allison tried to keep her face neutral. “I did some checking. I know some folks at Transitions. Brad Halloway for one. He told me the police know Eleanor is missing.”

  Detective Berry smiled. “If you talked to Halloway, then you also know Eleanor has a history with men. She’s had more lovers than the Eagles have had losses. Scott was one of many. Why did she take off?” He shrugged. “Who the hell knows? Doesn’t matter, though. We have our boys.”

  Alarmed, Allison said, “But what about her sister’s murder?”

  “In Florida?” Another shrug. “What about it? Rich single lady gets offed in her house. That’s a problem for the Fernandina Beach police—not our jurisdiction. We looked into it but didn’t see a connection.”

  “What if Ginny’s murder had been a warning to Eleanor?”

  Berry shook his head. “Allison, you have an active imagination, I’ll give you that, but a detective you are not. There is no connection between the drug-related murder of Scott Fairweather and the break-in and murder of a rich white lady in Florida. She was a real estate agent. Imagine all the crazies she met on a regular basis.”

  Allison fought hard not to roll her eyes.

  “With all due respect, Detective, between Ginny’s murder and these photographs, don’t you think there could be someth
ing else going on?”

  “Shortest distance between point A and point B is a straight line. Kids with records, motive and opportunity. That equals a straight line in my book. The kids were selling and Scott was buying. The boys wanted the cash and the merchandise.”

  “Were there drugs in Scott’s system?”

  Berry wiped his mouth with a brown napkin and then tossed it on the table in front of him. “Look, you know I can’t tell you that, but it doesn’t really matter. He could have been buying them to sell them. And there’s always a first time.”

  A jury may think it matters, Allison thought.

  “What if someone paid them to kill Scott?”

  “Who? These are street kids, not paid hit men.” He shook his head. “Besides, if that had been the case, you can bet they would have squealed. They’re a sorry lot. They would have done anything to shift the blame. Sorry, Allison. When things line up so neatly, we don’t look to make complicated connections.” He stood, handing Allison her folder. “Here you go.”

  “Don’t you need these?”

  “No. Unless you want to report them. Then I suggest you head to your local precinct.”

  “I don’t want to report them.”

  “I figured as much.” He gave her a jaded half smile. “If anything else comes up, don’t sit on it this time.”

  Detective Berry opened the door for Allison. Outside, he stopped to button his overcoat, and she waited for him to finish before heading to her car.

  “You know, Fairweather was a complicated man,” he said while finishing the last of his buttons. “In any investigation, we look at not only the suspects, but the victim, too. Fairweather had created a lot of drama in his life. I would originally have said that he wasn’t the man you used to know.” Berry pointed at the folder. “But based on what you shared, I’m not so sure that’s true.”