Читать книгу The Girl Who Cried Murder - Paula Graves - Страница 9

Chapter One

Mike Strong scanned the gymnasium for trouble, as he did every time he walked into a room. Fifteen years in the Marine Corps, in war zones from Africa to Central Asia, had taught him the wisdom of being alert and being prepared. All that training hadn’t gone out the window when he’d left the Marines for life as a security consultant.

Especially at a company like Campbell Cove Security Services, where preparation for any threat was the company’s mission statement.

The new 6:00 a.m. class was amateur hour—otherwise unschooled civilians coming in for an hour of self-defense and situational awareness training before heading off to their jobs at the factory or the grocery store or the local burger joint. In all likelihood, none of them would ever have to draw on their training in any meaningful way.

But all it took was once.

His later classes were more advanced, designed to give law enforcement officers and others with previous defense training new tactics to deal with the ever more complicated task of defending the US homeland. He’d come into this job thinking those classes would be more challenging.

But if the newest arrival was any indication, he might have been wrong about that.

She was tall, red-haired, pretty in a girl-next-door sort of way. Pert nose, a scattering of freckles in her pale complexion, big hazel-green eyes darting around the room with the same “looking for trouble” alertness he’d displayed a moment earlier. Beneath her loose-fitting T-shirt and snug-fitting yoga pants, she appeared lean and toned. A hint of coltish energy vibrated through her as she began a series of muscle stretches while her eyes continued their scan of the room.

What was she afraid of? And why did she expect to find it here?

Trying to ignore his sudden surge of adrenaline, he started with roll call, putting names to faces. There were only twelve students in the early-morning class, eight men and four women. The redhead, Charlie Winters, was the youngest of the group. The fittest, too.

Most of the others appeared to be fairly average citizens—slightly overweight, on the soft side both mentally and physically. Nice, good-hearted, but spoiled by living in a prosperous, free country where, until recent years, the idea of being the target of ruthless, fanatical predators had seemed as likely as winning the lottery.

“Welcome to Campbell Cove Academy’s Basics of Self-Defense class,” he said aloud, quieting down the murmurs of conversation in the group. “Let’s get started.”

He followed Charlie Winters’s earlier example and took the group through a series of stretching exercises. “I want you to get in the habit of doing these exercises every day when you get up,” he told them. “Because you won’t have time to do it when danger arises.”

“How will stretching help us if some guy blows himself up in front of us?” one of the men grumbled as he winced his way through a set of triceps stretches. Mike searched his memory and came up with the name to go with the face. Clyde Morris.

“It won’t, Clyde,” he answered bluntly. “But it might help give you the strength and mobility to get the hell out of Dodge before your terrorist can trigger the detonator.”

He didn’t miss the quirk of Charlie Winters’s eyebrows.

Did she disagree? Or did she have an agenda here that had nothing to do with preparing for terrorist threats?

Nothing wrong with that. There were plenty of reasons in a free society for a person to be ready for action.

But he found himself watching Charlie closely as they finished their stretches and he settled them on the mats scattered around the gymnasium floor. “Here’s the thing you need to know about defending yourselves. Nothing I teach you here is a guarantee that you’ll come out of a confrontation alive. So the first rule of self-defense is to avoid confrontations.”

“That’s heroic,” Clyde Morris muttered.

“This class isn’t about making heroes out of you. It’s about keeping you alive so you can report trouble to people who have the training and weapons to deal with the situation. And then return home alive and well to the people who love you.”

He let his gaze wander back to Charlie Winters’s face as he spoke. Her gaze held his until the last sentence, when her brow furrowed and her lips took a slight downward quirk as she lowered her gaze to her lap, where her restless fingers twined and released, then twined again.

Hmm, he thought, but he didn’t let his curiosity distract him further.

“I guess I should take a step backward here,” he said. “Because there’s actually something that comes before avoiding confrontation, and that’s staying alert. Show of hands—how many of you have cell phones?”

Every person raised a hand.

“How many of you check your cell phone while walking down the street or entering a building? What about when you’re riding in an elevator?”

All the hands went up again.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” he said. “How can you be alert to your surroundings if your face is buried in your phone?”

The hands crept down, the students exchanging sheepish looks.

“Look, we’re fortunate to live in the time we do. Technology can be a priceless tool in a crisis. Photographs and videos of incidents can be invaluable to investigators. Cell phones can bring help even when you’re trapped and isolated. You can download apps that turn your phone into a flashlight. Your phone’s signal can be used to find you when you’re lost.”

“Thank goodness. I was afraid you were going to tell us we had to lose our iPhones,” one of the students joked.

“No, but I am suggesting you start thinking of it as a tool in your arsenal rather than a toy to distract and entertain you.”

Again, he couldn’t seem to stop his gaze from sliding toward Charlie’s face. She met his gaze with solemn eyes, but her expression gave nothing else away. Still, he had a feeling that most of what he was telling the class were things she already knew.

So what was she doing here, taking this class?

Swallowing his frustration, he pushed to his feet and retrieved the rolling chalkboard he’d borrowed from one of the other instructors. “So, revised rule one—stay alert.” He jotted the words on the board. “And now, let’s talk about avoiding confrontations.”

* * *

MIKE DISMISSED CLASS at seven. One or two students lingered, asking questions about some of the points he’d covered in class or what points he’d be covering in their class two days later. He answered succinctly, hiding his impatience. But it was with relief that the last student left and he hurried to his small office off the gymnasium. It was little more than a ten-by-ten box, but it had a desk, a phone and a window looking out on the parking lot.

He caught sight of Charlie Winters walking across the wet parking lot. She’d donned a well-worn leather jacket over her T-shirt and baggy sweatpants over her yoga pants, but there was no way to miss her dark red hair dancing in the cold wind blowing down the mountain or the coltish energy propelling her rapidly across the parking lot.

She stopped behind a small blue Toyota that had seen better days. But she didn’t get into the car immediately. First, she walked all the way around the vehicle, examining the tires, peering through the windows, even dropping to the ground on her back and looking beneath the chassis.

Finally, she seemed to be satisfied by whatever she saw—or didn’t see—and pushed back to her feet, dusting herself off before she got in the Toyota and started the engine.

As she drove away, Mike turned from the window, picked up the phone on the desk and punched in Maddox Heller’s number. Heller answered on the second ring.

“It’s Strong,” Mike said. “You said to let you know if I had any concerns about the new class.”

“And you do?”

He thought about it for a moment. “Concern may be too strong a word. At this point, I’d call it...curiosity.”

“Close enough,” Heller said. “So, you want a background check on someone?”

“Yes,” Mike said after another moment of thought. “I do.”

* * *

CHARLIE KEPT AN eye on the rearview mirror as she drove home as fast as she dared. She’d like to get a shower before her early-morning phone conference, and she was already going to be cutting it close. Could she really keep this up two days a week, given her boss’s delight in scheduling early meetings?

Besides, after this morning’s class, she wasn’t even sure it was worth her time. All that stretching and they didn’t do anything but go over the basic tenets of self-defense. On a chalkboard. Hell, she’d already covered those basics with a one-hour search of the internet. She didn’t need an academic journey through the philosophy of protecting oneself.

She needed practical tools, damn it. Now. And she didn’t want to spend the next few weeks twiddling her thumbs until Mr. Big Buff Badass deigned to detach himself from his chalkboard and teach them something they could actually use.

Channeling her frustration into her foot on the accelerator, she made it back to her little rental house on Sycamore Road with almost a half hour to spare. As had become habit, she waited at the front door for a few seconds, just listening.

There was a faint thump coming from inside, but she had two cats. Thumps didn’t exactly come as a surprise.

Taking a deep breath, she tried the door. Still locked.

That was a good sign, wasn’t it?

She unlocked the door and entered as quietly as she could, standing just inside the door and listening again.

There was a soft prrrrup sound as His Highness, her slightly cross-eyed Siamese rescue cat, slinked into the living room to greet her. He gave her a quizzical look before rubbing his body against her legs.

“Did you hold down the fort for me like I asked?” She bent to scratch his ears, still looking around for any sign of intrusion. But everything was exactly as she’d left it, as far as she could tell.

Maybe she was being paranoid. She couldn’t actually prove that someone had been following her, could she?

There hadn’t been a particular incident, just a slowly growing sense that she was being watched. But even that sensation had coincided with the first of the dreams, which meant maybe she was imagining it.

That could be possible, couldn’t it?

She went from room to room, checking for any sign of an intruder. In her office, her other cat, Nellie, watched warily from her perch atop the bookshelf by her desk. If there had been an intruder, the nervous tortoiseshell cat would still be hidden under Charlie’s bed. So, nobody had been in the house since she left that morning.

Beginning to relax, she took a quick shower and changed the litter box before she settled at her computer and joined the office conference call.

Because she worked for a government contractor, Ordnance Solutions, most of her conference calls consisted of a whole lot of officious blather and only a few nuggets of important information. This call was no different. But she wrote down those notes with admirable conscientiousness, if she did say so herself, especially with His Highness sitting on her desk and methodically knocking every loose piece of office equipment onto the floor.

She hammered out the project her bosses had given her during the conference call, a page-one revision of the latest operational protocols for disposal of obsolete ordnance from a recent spate of military base closures. Most of the changes had come after a close reading by the company’s technical experts. Charlie was used to working her way through multiple revisions, especially if the experts couldn’t come to an agreement on specific protocols.

Which happened several times a project.

Nellie, the cockeyed tortie, ventured into her office and hopped onto the chair next to her desk. She let Charlie give her a couple of ear scratches before contorting into a knot to start cleaning herself.

“Am I going crazy, Nellie?” Charlie asked.

Nellie angled one green eye at her before returning to her wash.

The problem was, Charlie didn’t have a sounding board. Her family was a disaster—her father had died in a mining accident nearly twenty years ago, and her mother had moved to Arkansas with her latest husband a couple of years back. Two brothers in jail, two up in South Dakota trying to take advantage of the shale oil boom while it lasted, and her only sister had moved to California, where she was dancing at a club in Encino while waiting for her big break.

None of them were really bad people, not even the two in jail. But none of them understood Charlie and her dreams. Never had, never would.

And they sure as hell wouldn’t understand why she had suddenly decided to dig up decade-old bones.

And as for friends? Well, she’d turned self-imposed isolation into an art form.

She attached the revised ordnance disposal protocols to an email and sent it off to her supervisor, then checked her email for any other assignments that might have come through while she was working on the changes. The inbox was empty of anything besides unsolicited advertisements. She dumped those messages into the trash folder.

Then she opened her word processor program and took a deep breath.

It was now or never. If she was going to give up on the quest, this was the time. Before she made another trip to Campbell Cove Security Services and spent another dime on listening to Mr. Big Buff Badass lecture her on the importance of looking both ways before she crossed the street.

Pinching her lower lip between her teeth, she opened a new file, the cursor blinking on the blank page.

Settling her trembling hands on the keyboard, she began to type.

Two days before Christmas, nearly ten years ago, my friend Alice Bearden died. The police said it was an accident. Her parents believe the same. She had been drinking that night, cocktails aptly named Trouble Makers. Strawberries and cucumbers muddled and shaken with vodka, a French aperitif called Bonal, lime juice and simple syrup. I looked up the recipe on the internet later.

I drank light beer. Just the one, as far as I remember. And that’s the problem. For a long time, those three sips of beer were all I remembered about the night Alice died.

Then, a few weeks ago, the nightmares started.

I tried to ignore them. I tried to tell myself that they were just symptoms of the stress I’ve been under working this new job.

But that doesn’t explain some of the images I see in my head when I close my eyes to sleep. It doesn’t explain why I hear Alice whispering in my ear while the world is black around me.

“I’m sorry, Charlie,” she whispers. “But I have to do the rest of this by myself.”

What did she mean? What was she doing?

It was supposed to be a girls’ night out, a chance to let down our hair before our last semester of high school sent us on a headlong hurdle toward college and responsibility. She was Ivy League bound. I’d earned a scholarship to James Mercer College, ten minutes from home.

I guess, in a way, it was also supposed to be the beginning of our big goodbye. We swore we’d keep in touch. But we all know how best intentions go.

I should have known Alice was up to something. She always was. She’d lived a charmed life—beautiful, sweet, the apple of her very wealthy daddy’s eye. She was heading for Harvard, had her life planned out. Harvard for undergrad, Yale Law, then an exciting career in the FBI.

She wanted to be a detective. And for a golden girl like Alice Bearden, the local police force would never do.

She had been full of anticipation that night. Almost jittery with it. We’d chosen a place where nobody knew who we were. We tried out the fake IDs Alice had procured from somewhere—“Don’t ask, Charlie,” she’d said with that infectious grin that could make me lose my head and follow her into all sorts of scrapes.

For a brief, exciting moment, I felt as if my life was finally going to start.

And then, nothing. No thoughts. Almost no memories. Just that whisper of Alice’s voice in my ear, and the haunting sensation that there was something I knew about that night that I just couldn’t remember.

I tried to talk to Mr. Bearden a few days ago. I called his office, left my name, told him it was about Alice.

He never called me back.

But the very next day, I had a strong sensation of being watched.

* * *

MIKE WRAPPED UP his third training session of the day, this time an internal refresher course for new recruits to the agency, around five that afternoon. He headed for the showers, washed off the day’s sweat and changed into jeans and a long-sleeved polo. Civvies, he thought with a quirk of his lips that wasn’t quite a smile. Because the thought of being a civilian again wasn’t exactly a cause for rejoicing.

He’d planned on a career in the Marine Corps. Put in thirty or forty years or more, climbing the ranks, then retire while he was still young enough to enjoy it.

Things hadn’t gone the way he planned.

There was a message light on his office phone. Maddox Heller’s deep drawl on his voice mail. “Stop by my office on your way out. I may have something for you.”

He crossed the breezeway between the gym and the main office building, shivering as the frigid wind bit at every exposed inch of his skin. He’d experienced much colder temperatures, but there was something about the damp mountain air that chilled a man to the bone.

Heller was on the phone when Mike stuck his head into the office. Heller waved him in, gesturing toward one of the two chairs that sat in front of his desk.

Mike sat, enjoying the comforting warmth of the place. And not just the heat pouring through the vents. There was a personal warmth in the space, despite its masculine simplicity. A scattering of photos that took up most of the empty surfaces in the office, from Heller’s broad walnut desk to the low credenza against the wall. Family photos of Heller’s pretty wife, Iris, and his two ridiculously cute kids, Daisy and Jacob.

Even leathernecks could be tamed, it seemed.

Maddox hung up the phone and shot Mike a look of apology. “Sorry. Daisy won a spelling bee today and had to spell all the words for me.”

Mike smiled. “How far the mighty warrior has fallen.”

Heller just grinned as he picked up a folder lying in front of him. “One day it’ll be you, and then you’ll figure it out yourself.”

“Figure out what?” he asked, taking the folder Heller handed him.

“That family just makes you stronger.” Heller nodded at the folder. “Take a look at what our background check division came up with.”

“That was quick.” Mike opened the folder. Staring up at him was an eight-by-ten glossy photo of a dark-haired young woman. Teenager, he amended after a closer look. Sophisticated looking, but definitely young. She didn’t look familiar. “This isn’t the woman from my class.”

“I know. Her name was Alice Bearden.”

Mike looked up sharply. “Was?”

“She died about ten years ago. Two days before Christmas in a hit-and-run accident. The driver was never found.”

Mike grimaced. So young. And so close to Christmas. “Bearden,” he said. “Any relation to that Bearden guy whose face is plastered on every other billboard from here to Paducah?”

“Craig Bearden. Candidate for US Senate.” Heller nodded toward the folder in Mike’s lap. “Keep reading.”

Mike flipped through the rest of the documents in the file. They were mostly printouts of online newspaper articles about the accident and a few stories about Craig Bearden’s run for the Senate. “Bearden turned his daughter’s death into a political platform. Charming.”

“His eighteen-year-old daughter obtained a fake ID so she could purchase alcohol in a bar. The bartender may have been fooled by the fake ID, but that doesn’t excuse him from serving so much alcohol she was apparently too drunk to walk straight. And maybe her inebriation was what led her to wander into the street in front of a moving vehicle, but whoever hit her didn’t stop to call for help.”

“And he’s now crusading against what exactly?”

“All of the above? The bartender was never charged, and the bar apparently still exists today, so I guess if he sued, he lost. Maybe this is his way of feeling he got some sort of justice for his daughter.”

Mike looked at the photo of Alice Bearden again. A tragedy that her life was snuffed out, certainly. But he hadn’t asked Heller to look into Alice Bearden’s background.

“What does this have to do with Charlie Winters?” he asked.

“Read the final page.”

Mike scanned the last page. It was earliest of the articles on the accident, he realized. The dateline was December 26, three days after the accident. He scanned the article, stopping short at the fourth paragraph.

Miss Bearden was last seen at the Headhunter Bar on Middleburg Road close to midnight,

accompanied by another teenager, Charlotte Winters of Bagwell.

“Charlie Winters was with Alice when she died?”

“That seems to be the big question,” Heller answered. “Nobody seems to know what happened between the time they left the bar and when Alice’s body was found in the middle of the road a couple of hours later.”

Mike’s gaze narrowed. “Charlie refused to talk?”

“Worse,” Heller answered. “I talked to the lead investigator interviewed in the article. He’s still with the county sheriff’s department and remembers the case well. According to him, Charlotte Winters claims to have no memory of leaving the bar at all. As far as she’s concerned, almost the whole night is one big blank.”

“And what does he think?”

“He thinks Charlie Winters might have gotten away with murder.”