Angel's Advocate (24 page)

Bree looked, although she didn’t want to. The Chatham County scene of crime team had erected huge floodlights in a fifty-foot-wide area around Shirley’s body. Her hands and feet were bagged in plastic. A photographer snapped pictures of the gory mess of her skull. She’d been shot down in an alleyway between two of the barns. Worried horses poked their heads out of their stalls. Their stamps and snorts added a surreal undercurrent to the mutters of the swarm of technicians and police officials. A small family group huddled against the walls of the barn to the left of the corpse. Mr. Chavez, most probably, and two olive-skinned, dark-haired teenagers. All three were weeping.

“I’m afraid you might be right,” Bree said quietly. She closed her eyes and swallowed. This
was
her fault.

“She was so excited over that whacking damn check you people gave her. Well, you bought her and then you buried her. I hope you people are proud of what you’ve done.”

“Missy.” Abel stood by quietly. He came forward and took her gently by the shoulders. “I want you to go into the house and wash your face.” He glanced over her head at Sam Hunter, who was standing with his hands shoved into the pockets of his chinos. “Are you through with her?”

“We’ll need a signed statement from her about the discovery of the body, but yeah, go on ahead. I’ll send someone on up to the house as soon as we’ve finished here.”

Abel smiled at Bree, a rueful twist to his lips. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. I’ve got to get Virginia settled. Will you be here a while?”

Bree nodded. Her face felt frozen. Sasha stood at her knee, subdued, his attention drawn to the busy figures at the site of the body. Hunter glanced swiftly from Bree to Abel and back again. He waited until Abel’s tall figure led Missy off into the darkness that lay beyond the circle of artificial lights.

“I’m sorry about this,” he said. “Mrs. Trask said you’d visited Shirley Chavez this afternoon. She seemed to think you’d have some idea of the motive behind the killing. I didn’t realize she was so upset with you.”

“She liked Shirley.” Sasha thrust his warm nose into her hand, and she cupped his head. There was something very calming about the shape of a dog’s head beneath your hand. Bree stroked the dog and stared at the ground. Anything rather than look at that poor huddled form beneath the lights and hear the weeping family in the shadows. “Missy has a right to be angry. She lost her husband just three weeks ago, so she’s a bit fragile to begin with. This is another horrible injustice. You knew Charles Trask had died?”

Hunter nodded. “Fell and broke his neck jumping a horse over a fence.” He sounded faintly surprised that something like that could happen. “I’ve been a good city kid all my life. Can’t see the attraction in it.”

“Hunting can be a dangerous sport.”

“Especially for the fox.”

Was that disapproval in his voice? Bree looked up. “They haven’t had a live hunt here in years. They use a drag.”

Hunter quirked his eyebrow up.

“A drag is a pouch saturated with a chemical scent. The hounds follow that instead of . . . you’re trying to distract me up, aren’t you?”

“I’d like to get that look off your face.”

Bree looked at her feet again. “I do feel responsible for this, Hunter.”

“You want to tell me why?”

She hesitated, trying to order her thoughts. “There’s some connection here. It’s just not clear to me yet.”

“Connection between what?” Hunter demanded.

“This murder. Probert Chandler’s murder. And a couple of robberies at the Marlowe’s warehouse on Route 80.”

Hunter’s lips tightened to a thin line. But all he said was, “What robberies?”

“I was hoping you could tell me.” She leaned forward, the better to see his expression.

Hunter’s face darkened in the glare of the harsh lights. “I don’t have time for this,” he said tightly.

“You haven’t had any reports of any break-ins out at the Marlowe’s warehouse?”

“No.” He stared back at her, his gaze as assessing as hers. “You know something. What?”

He wasn’t hiding anything from her. She was sure of it. “Shirley told me someone’s been stealing pallets of PSE from Marlowe’s. And that the corporate types have been all over the local guys, trying to keep it quiet.”

Hunter didn’t say anything for a long moment. His face was totally expressionless. Finally, he said, “Let me get back to you on that.”

“You promise?”

“If you promise to tell me about anything,
anything
that you turn up as soon as you get it.”

“Sure. As long as you give me a little time to set up my own case.”

Hunter rubbed the back of his neck and stared up at the night sky. She could hear him taking several deep breaths. “You aren’t seriously suggesting I compromise an investigation on behalf of a civilian? Or that I forget that I’m working for the Chatham County Police Department?”

“Of course not!” Bree straightened up belligerently. She looked around the busy area. “Is there a place where we can sit down?”

“I’m finished here, for the moment. Forensics is in the middle of doing their thing, and I’ve got two detectives taking statements from the workers. Let’s go into the farm office.” He flipped open his cell phone, told whoever was on the other end of the transmission where he’d be, and followed her back across the paved courtyard to the old brick building. Somebody had made a fresh pot of coffee in the automatic pot that sat on the worn pine credenza. Bree poured both of them a cup. The heat warmed her hands. The shock of the incident was wearing off. She sat down in the chair across from the desk and tried to kick her brain into first gear. “Let me start with what I know for sure: a representative of the Chandler family authorized Stubblefield, Marwick to give the Chavez family five hundred thousand dollars to drop any civil charges against Lindsey.”

Hunter crossed his arms and rested his head against the office wall. “Okay. Quite a sum. But I suppose they can afford it. This led to someone blowing a hole through Shirley Chavez’s skull?”

Bree ignored Hunter’s bluntness. “The Chandlers can afford to buy the state of Rhode Island. I don’t know which Chandler it was. And it’s important. Because I think Shirley was killed because of what she knows about a series of robberies at the warehouse.”

“I haven’t heard—”

Bree cut him off with an upraised hand. “This is all conjecture, Sam. Can you just let me think aloud for a second?”

Something in her voice—which was almost shrill with her tension—made him back off. Or maybe it was his given name, which she rarely used. “It was George who authorized the payoff, possibly. He seems to have a little more influence with the corporation than I’d been led to believe. And he’s Stubblefield, Marwick’s client.”

Hunter focused on her statement. “Wealthy heir to the family fortune starts in the mailroom and works his way up?”

Bree’s smile was wider this time, and genuine. “Well, that’s just it. I called my paralegal as I was driving over here, to see if we had any information on who inherited what when Probert Chandler died. He’d already settled a relatively modest amount of money on each of his children as soon as they hit twenty-five. The remainder of the family fortune is left in trust to his wife, who in turn will leave it to the three kids, although Lindsey’s will be in trust until she’s twenty-five, too. The mind boggles at the thought of that kid with a third of twenty billion. Anyhow. This is a traditional family—can you imagine leaving twenty billion dollars to your widow? That just isn’t done with these huge fortunes, Hunter. Trust me. There are all kinds of tax issues. Anyway, so none of the three kids benefited by his death. At least, not on the surface. If Carrie-Alice had been in the car with Probert, that would have been another issue altogether.” She broke off, thinking about this. Hunter cleared his throat impatiently. “These trust funds include huge amounts of voting stock. So, of course George will get whatever George wants in that company, despite the fact that his job title is junior mailroom clerk, or whatever it happens to be. A lot of the wealth is in stock.” Bree took a deep breath. “I’ll tell you what’s impressed me so far about this case. The spin. The fact that the public perception of Probert and his clan is poor boy makes good. That George is the humble scion of a thrifty hardworking billionaire. The complete silence around the warehouse robberies. Squashing Cordelia, which is almost impossible to do. And this is all
after
Probert himself has died.”

“So George calls the shots?”

“That’s my guess. But it’s a guess, at this point. Now for more puzzles. You know as well as I do that buying off a victim is illegal, the way that Payton McAllister did it. Which is stupid. Because if they’d gone the private-settlement route to settle a civil suit, nobody would think twice about it. Just another rotten-rich family buying justice. You see what I mean? So that’s an anomaly. The only possible reason to buy off the Chavezes this way is speed. The Chavezes withdraw the complaint and boom! the case drops off the radar. Shirley said Payton McAllister was out at her house by four o’clock the afternoon of the assault on Sophie. George—if it is George behind this—hadn’t counted on his sister loving the limelight. Instead of the case being decently buried, next thing he knows, she’s on Savannah’s most notorious talk show, being as bad a kid as she can possibly be. And they can’t snatch her off to a nice little clinic somewhere, because the police and DA’s office are already involved, and she’s under arrest.” Bree suppressed a laugh. “George must have felt as if he was playing Whac-a-Mole.”

“And the murder?”

“Which one?” Bree got up and began to pace around the room.

“Cordy gave me a call,” Hunter said after the silence had stretched on.

“She did,” Bree said. She darted a glance at him. His face was forbidding. But he wasn’t yelling at her to turn over the name of the witness. At least not yet.

“Unofficially,” he said wryly. “And I had to agree to sit on it until you delivered on your promise. She said something about forty-eight hours?”

Bree made a face. “If that’s what she said, that’s what I get.”

“So you think this guy, the one that jacked Chandler’s car in Skidaway Road and then went down into the ravine after, is the same guy who showed up later to keep Shirley quiet?”

“It leaps out at you, doesn’t it? I mean it tracks.”

Hunter yawned. “Sorry. I had a late night yesterday, and tonight’s not going to end early. No, it doesn’t necessarily track. It’s a theory. And you’re making way too many assumptions.”

“Which is why you should let me go forward with investigating this case. So I can clear up these assumptions.”

“Here’s something to investigate.” There was more than a trace of sarcasm in the tone of his voice. “Why kill Shirley Chavez? So word leaks out there’s been a payoff. So what?”

“Well, that should leap out at you, too, Lieutenant,” she snapped. “Because I’ve been poking around into Probert Chandler’s murder, that’s why. If I find the guy that killed Shirley, I find the guy that smashed Probert over the head with the high-beam flashlight.” She bit her lip to keep her tears back. The image of Shirley Chavez’s shattered skull was as real to her as the look on Hunter’s face. “Missy was right. I stirred this whole thing up.” She cleared her throat loudly. “This should make it easier to catch him, anyhow. He must have left some forensic evidence this time. And you guys are good and thorough, right?”

“Maybe.” Hunter flipped his cell phone open and spoke into it. “Markham? I want you to include something else in the background check on everyone who set foot on the farm today. I’m looking for a connection to Marlowe’s or the Marlowe’s lawyer. Stubblefield, that’s right.” He grinned sourly into the phone. “Yeah, wouldn’t that be nice? But he’s got a gofer on point for this one. Lawyer by the name of Payton McAllister.” He slipped the cell phone back in his pocket. “Interesting leads. There’d be more than a few of us on the force that’d be happy to nail Stubblefield.”

Bree’s own opinion was that it’d be a true community service, but she said, “What can you tell me about the case here? Missy Trask found the body? Is that right? Did anyone see anything? Do you have any leads?”

Hunter stood away from the wall and stretched. “I’m going to get Mrs. Trask’s written statement right now. I can’t stop you if you want to go with me.”

This, from Hunter, was a major concession. But Bree hesitated. Abel was with Missy. And Virginia, too. Bree was tired. It’d been a long day with a truly hideous end. If she had to confront Missy’s accusing face one more time, and in front of Abel, too, she’d die on the spot. Virginia would be there, too, who’d loathed Bree from the moment she’d set eyes on her all those years ago at Plessey. But God hates a coward, and most policemen do, too.

“Fine,” she said aloud. “I’ll just tag right along, if you don’t mind.”

She trailed Hunter out into the dark. The rain had cleared, and the sky was swept with mist. The moon showed palely through the wisps, and the night was still, except for the clatter from the barns where the forensics team tramped up and down. There were no media yet, but it was only a matter of time.

When Ashbury Seaton invested in racehorses in 1883, he’d had a lot of cheap labor to run his stable and a lot of land to build on. Seaton House was a two-story, rambling structure that had started out as a small, six-room plantation house in the late eighteenth century. Succeeding generations of Seatons grew cotton, then tobacco, and finally, with a prescience not usual to Southern businessmen at the time, moved into railroad stock and freed their slaves just at the start of the Civil War. The brick office building had been sort of a dower house, where a succession of strong-minded Seaton matriarchs found themselves banished as their sons and daughters married and took over the business. It was located less than two hundred yards from the big house. The shortest route between the buildings was this brick-paved path that led to the kitchens in the back.