Running Out of Time

by Cindi Myers

  “I guess you went with Parker, huh?”

  “Well, yeah, though we had to pretend we weren’t together when his parents were around.” Merry rolled her eyes. “It’s so silly, but Parker says I just have to be patient. All this fuss about the poisoned medication and the bomb is slowing everything down.”

  “I’m sure your patience will pay off,” Laura said. “How was Gini’s son—Leo?”

  Confusion clouded Merry’s eyes. “How do you know Leo?”

  “I met him in town. He seemed really torn up about his mom’s death.”

  “Yeah. They were close.”

  “Do you know him well?” Laura asked.

  Merry wrinkled her nose. “No.”

  “I thought somebody told me the two of you used to date.”

  Merry laughed. “Me and Leo? Get out of here! Somebody was pulling your leg. He’s definitely not my type.” She shook her head, emphatic.

  “I guess I misheard.” Laura stepped away. “I’d better get to work. I’ll talk to you later.” She headed to her office, reviewing the conversation with Merry. She didn’t think Merry was lying about her relationship with Leo. Gini’s son wasn’t handsome, wealthy, powerful or charming—all things Merry appeared to value. If she wasn’t in a relationship with him, she must have gone to see him on Parker’s behalf.

  Parker was already in the office when Laura arrived. He turned from her desk. “Where have you been?” he demanded.

  Laura moved around the desk and slid into her chair. “I was talking to Merry.”

  “About what?”

  “About you.” She looked him in the eye. One of her early trainers had stressed the importance of sticking to the truth whenever possible. “I was asking her how I could do a better job for you.”

  “As if Merry would know anything about that,” he scoffed.

  “She’s your girlfriend, isn’t she?”

  He frowned. “I guess she told you that.”

  “Yes. Why? Is it a big secret?”

  “It isn’t appropriate for me to be dating an employee of the company.” He tapped his index finger on the papers in her in-box. “So don’t mention it to anyone.”

  “Your secret is safe with me.” She smiled and he took a step back. Before he could escape to his office, she asked, “How was the service for Gini Elgin? I drove by there Saturday and it looked like a big crowd.”

  “Gini had a lot of friends,” Parker said. “She’ll be missed.”

  “How’s your friend Leo?”

  “I don’t imagine he’s doing very well, considering his mother was killed.”

  “Do the police have any suspects yet?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so. We’ll probably never know who did something so horrible.” He turned away. “Block off the rest of my morning. I have a meeting with my mother.” Not waiting for an answer, he left the office.

  She settled behind her desk. She hadn’t learned anything new from her questioning of Merry and Parker. Not that she had expected them to spill their secrets to the nosy new employee, but the lack of progress in the case frustrated her.

  The door opened and Merry sauntered in. “I want to see Parker,” she said, and headed for his office.

  “He’s not here,” Laura said. “He said he had a meeting with his mother.”

  Merry pouted. “He really ought to be in charge of this place, not her.” She sank into the chair across from Laura’s desk. “Honestly, she treats him like a child. When we’re married, things are going to be different. I’m not going to let her run over him this way.”

  Laura opened her mouth to ask what Merry intended to say to Mrs. Stroud when the building shuddered, and a deafening roar surrounded them. Both women dropped to their knees on the floor as pictures, coffee cups and a vase of flowers slid to the floor and shattered. As the concussion subsided, screams rose to take its place. Laura was on her feet and running, Merry at her heels.

  “What happened?” The younger woman screamed as people, some bleeding, others showered with debris, raced past them, out of the building.

  Laura shoved her way through the crowd, toward the source of the commotion. “I think there was another bomb,” she said, more to herself than to Merry. Why had she been too late to stop it?

  Chapter Nine

  The man and woman looked up when Ana tapped on the partially open door to the hospital room. “Mrs. Stroud? We need to ask you and your son some questions.”

  Donna Stroud, her face washed of color except for the purple half moons beneath her eyes, pressed her lips together tightly and nodded. Parker, on his back in the hospital bed, white bandaging swathing his forehead, said nothing, though his gaze bored into Ana and Rogers as they entered the small room, which smelled of antiseptic and dry-erase marker. “How are you feeling, Mr. Stroud?” Ana asked.

  “About like I would expect a person to feel who’s been blown up.” He pressed a button by his side to raise the head of the bed. “They tell me I have a concussion and contusions, which is medical talk for being beaten half to death.”

  “Where were you when the blast occurred?” Rogers asked.

  “I was standing just outside the door to my mother’s office. I was about to go in.”

  “Did you know Ms. Dupree was in the office?” Rogers asked.

  “No. I didn’t know anyone was in there.”

  “This is so horrible.” Donna spoke in a hoarse voice, just above a whisper. “Angela wasn’t just an employee. She was a friend.” She swallowed hard. “I can’t believe she’s gone.”

  “Do you know why Ms. Dupree was in your office yesterday morning?” Ana asked.

  Donna shook her head. “I don’t know. But it wouldn’t have been unusual for her to stop by and say hello. We often chatted at work.”

  “Ms. Dupree’s assistant, Shania Merritt, said her boss was bringing some pay raise authorizations for you to okay,” Ana said.

  Donna nodded. “That sounds right.”

  “Why weren’t you in the office, Mrs. Stroud?” Rogers asked. “Wouldn’t you usually be there at that time of morning?”

  “Yes, but...” She glanced at Parker. “My husband isn’t well.”

  “Is this to do with his dementia, or something else?” Ana asked.

  Donna looked pained. “Steve is forgetful, although most days he manages fine. But sometimes, he’s frustrated by his inability to remember and gets confused. Then he becomes angry and we argue. Yesterday morning he was especially combative and I stayed home to try to calm him down.”

  “What was he being combative about?” Ana asked.

  “He had gotten it into his head that Parker was negotiating to sell the business to a competitor and he insisted we should fire Parker.” She shook her head. “It’s utter nonsense, of course, but once he gets an idea like this into his head, there’s no reasoning with him.”

  “Where would he get such an idea?” Rogers asked.

  “There’s no basis in reality for these delusions,” Parker said. “It’s a symptom of his disease. He could see something on TV or dream something and believe it’s real.”

  “What were you doing outside your mother’s office, Mr. Stroud?” Rogers asked. “Wouldn’t you normally be in your own office at that time?”

  “I wanted to speak to my mother about the production schedule for next month. As the factory manager, I often consult with her.”

  “Your assistant, Ms. Lovejoy, told us you told her you had a meeting scheduled with your mother,” Ana said. “She was told to leave your calendar clear for the whole morning because of this meeting.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  Ana turned to Donna. “We didn’t see any notice on your calendar of such a meeting, Mrs. Stroud.”

  “My son doesn’t have to make an appointment to consult with me.”

  “So this
wasn’t a prescheduled meeting?” Rogers asked.

  “No,” Parker said. “If Ms. Lovejoy thought that, she was mistaken.”

  Or perhaps Parker had wanted Laura to think the meeting had been scheduled earlier, for whatever reason. Ana turned her attention to Donna again. The woman seemed to have aged five years since their first meeting a week ago. “I know you’ve answered this question before, but we need to ask again,” she said. “Can you think of anyone who might wish to harm you?”

  “Are you suggesting my mother was the target for this madman?” Parker asked.

  “The bomb was in her office, we think under her desk,” Rogers said. “It was designed to trigger when she opened her bottom desk drawer.” He looked to Donna, who had blanched even paler. “We were told that drawer is where you keep a box of tissues and some other personal items.”

  She nodded. “I don’t know of anyone who would...” She wet her lips. “Who would want to kill me?”

  Parker struggled to sit up in bed. “You’re upsetting my mother. Don’t you think she’s been through enough?”

  “Why would Angela open that drawer?” Ana asked. “Do you know?”

  “I... I can guess.”

  They waited as Donna stared at her fingers laced together in her lap. When she looked up, her eyes were desolate. “Angela was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. She was due to have surgery, then chemotherapy the week after. I was the only person she told. We had cried together over the news. I can guess that if she came to talk to me yesterday, she was going to let me know her treatment schedule. We would have cried again. When she didn’t find me there, maybe she got teary-eyed. She knew I kept tissues in that drawer, so she might have opened it, intending to pull herself together before she went back into the outer office.”

  “Did you see anyone suspicious in or around the office that day or the day before?” Rogers asked Parker.

  “No.”

  “Mrs. Stroud? Did you see anything or anyone suspicious?”

  Donna shook her head. “No.”

  “Have you received any threatening letters or phone calls?” Ana asked.

  “Only the one letter I gave you—the ‘six for six’ message. Nothing else.”

  “Are you going to find the person who did this?” Parker asked. “Because you’re not doing a very good job so far.”

  Ana ignored the dig. In his place, she would probably have been frustrated by the lack of progress in the case, too. Civilians expected law enforcement to solve crimes quickly, in the space of a few days. Building a case and finding the guilty party usually took much longer. “Have you considered closing the plant temporarily?” she asked Donna.

  “Out of the question,” Parker said.

  Donna’s answer was less strident. “We have a hundred employees and their families who depend on us,” she said. “We can’t shut them out. As it is, we had to temporarily lay off fifty people when we shut down the plant that made the Stomach Soothers.”

  “We need you to find whoever is doing this so we can put this tragedy behind us,” Parker said.

  “This case is our top priority,” Rogers said. A nurse entered the room and he moved toward the door. “We may need to talk to you again.”

  He and Ana moved into the hallway. He waited until they had reached their rental car before he spoke. “What do you think?”

  “I think someone has targeted these people,” she said.

  “Leo Elgin?”

  “Maybe. Has your surveillance turned up anything on him?” He and Jace had been trading off watching Leo during daylight hours.

  “No. The plant is closed today, so Jace is watching Elgin. If he doesn’t turn up anything, we need to focus on someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “We’re going to look at everyone who had access to that office,” Rogers said.

  “Donna Stroud had access,” Ana said. “And she was conveniently not there this morning.”

  “Do you think she killed two of her employees and sabotaged her own product?”

  “I think we both know criminals who have done stranger things.”

  He nodded. “Let’s look closer at her and see if we can find out.”

  “And let’s talk to that competitor Steve Stroud accused Parker of negotiating with. Maybe someone is angling to get Stroud Pharmaceuticals at a bargain price.”

  “Good idea.” One more item on the long list of threads to pull in this case. This was the tedious part of working a case—following leads that went nowhere, talking to people who might or might not have something to hide and trying to put all the information together to form a picture that led to the guilty party. It took hours of effort and focus, but that, more than bravery or cunning, was what solved most cases. It was one reason the bureau hired as many accountants as military types. Brains counted more than brawn more often than not.

  * * *

  FOUR TO GO.

  Merry had placed the envelope on the top of the pile of mail Tuesday morning, and pointed it out to Donna when she delivered it. “It looks like the other letter, doesn’t it?” she asked, leaning in close, so that Donna caught the scent of her perfume—floral and delicate, if applied with a heavy hand. “The one the FBI was so concerned about.”

  Donna stared at the plain white envelope, with her name in dark block letters, no title, and the address for Stroud Pharmaceuticals. “Aren’t you going to open it?” Merry asked.

  “I think I should call the police,” Donna said. “Or maybe Agent Ramirez. I have her card in my desk somewhere.” But she made no move to search for it, fixated on the envelope.

  “What if it’s a solicitation from the local funeral home or something?” Merry asked. “I mean, really?” She plucked the envelope from the stack of mail and slid one pink-polished nail beneath the flap.

  “You’ll destroy fingerprints,” Donna protested.

  Merry shook her head. “Every criminal knows to wear gloves.” She flicked open the envelope flap and dumped the contents onto the desk. The half sheet of copy paper lay crookedly on the blotter, twenty-point type exclaiming, Four to go!

  Donna gasped and swayed.

  “Mrs. Stroud, you’ve gone all pale.” Merry took her arm and eased her back in her chair. “You sit there and take deep breaths. You’ve had a shock.” She left, then returned with a cup of water from the cooler in the corner. “Drink this.”

  Donna drank and began to feel a little steadier. “Thank you.” She glanced at the words on the paper and suppressed a shudder, then opened her desk drawer and took out Ana Ramirez’s card. “I’d better telephone for someone to deal with this.”

  “What does that mean?” Merry asked. “‘Four to go’?”

  “I don’t know,” Donna lied. Though she knew very well what it meant. Six people had died from taking poisoned Stomach Soothers. Two people had perished in the two bombings at Stroud Pharmaceuticals. Four more deaths before the score would be even, in the bomber’s twisted logic.

  * * *

  JACE WAS NUMB with boredom after three nights of tailing Leo Elgin, but he forced himself to stick with the surveillance. The man might be the dullest person Jace had ever met, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t up to no good.

  Though, as far as Jace could tell from the bugs he’d placed in the house, Leo wasn’t up to anything but sitting in front of his computer playing hundreds of rounds of solitaire. He received no visitors or phone calls, and the only person he attempted to call was Parker Stroud. The afternoon after the bomb exploded that killed Angela Dupree, Leo tried to call Parker, who was in the hospital, six times. Parker never answered, though that wasn’t too surprising, given that he was injured. Leo left only one message. “This is Leo. What’s going on over there?”

  Jace slumped in a van with the logo of a fake pest control company, parked on the street with a clear view of Elgin’s house. Time
s like these, he missed smoking the most, even though smoking while on surveillance was forbidden—the scent of smoke might attract attention. Still, he missed how smoking gave him something to do with his hands and something to focus on besides his own breathing.

  Movement in the house, followed by the sound of a door opening and closing. Jace sat up straighter. It sounded as if Leo had left the house, but Jace saw no movement near the front door. Had Leo gone out the back? Jace got out of the van and, walking purposefully, he marched down the sidewalk. When he reached Leo’s house, he ducked down the side, into a screen of shrubbery between Leo’s house and the neighbor’s. He reached the backyard in time to see Leo unlock the door to a wooden shed in the back corner. With a sagging roof and sides almost devoid of paint, the shed looked on the verge of collapse.

  Jace shoved further into the screen of bushes, gritting his teeth as thorns raked his arms and face. He could hear movement from inside the shed—something heavy being shoved around. He headed toward the back of the little building, hoping for a window or a missing board that would allow him to see inside. But instead of an opening, he discovered the back of the shed was all but covered by a five-foot mound of dirt and sod, as if the shed had been built into the side of a hill.

  But this was no hill. Jace had seen a similar structure at his grandparents’ farm. At some point the Elgins, or whoever had owned the property before them, had built an old-fashioned root cellar. Rather than digging out a space underground, they had built up the earth around the shed. Somewhere inside there was probably a door leading into the storage area within the mound of dirt.

  The FBI had searched the Elgin property, but would they have recognized the root cellar?

  Jace retreated the way he had come, and walked back to his van. He called Rogers. “The people who searched the Elgin home. Did they look in the root cellar?” he asked.

  “Let me check.” A moment later Rogers was on the line again. “There’s no mention of a root cellar.”

  “It’s at the back of that old shed, built into a mound of earth,” Jace said. “They need to check it.”