Current Affairs (Tiara Investigations Mysteries) (23 page)

We heard the rustle of leaves, and Gina Kent walked into the clearing. I realized something else, too. There was no blood. He was wearing a bulletproof vest. I held my finger up to my lips for Gina to keep quiet. He was out cold for the time being, and he never needed to know who shot him. What they say about no good deed going unpunished is true.

She walked up and turned him over with her hiking boot. Then she aimed her gun at his head. I threw down Kelly’s gun and shoved Gina. Tara and Victoria were there in a split second, and they sat on her. That was when we heard the cock of a rifle. We looked into the woods to our left and there was Beatrice
Englund
walking toward us.

“You girls okay? Need any back up?”

“Mom?”
Kelly looked confused.

“Baby, you weren’t going to kill a policeman, were you?”

“No, this is what I was going to do.” Too late I saw she had picked up her gun. She slowly raised it to her temple.

“No, baby, no.” Her mother stopped and just stretched her arms to her, the hunting rifle under her arm.

“Kelly, what about your baby?”
I asked. She dropped her head and then her arms and shrugged her shoulders.

Beatrice was moving slowly forward. “Why did you want Detective Kent to see you kill yourself?”

Kelly didn’t answer.

 
“You wanted to tell him something, didn’t you?” She nodded her head, just barely, but I saw it and pushed on. “You wanted to tell him that Kerry Lee killed David.” I could feel Victoria and Tara’s eyes on me. I hadn’t held out on them. I was just then figuring this all out.

Kelly’s little girl voice was hard to hear. “Kerry Lee kept pressuring me to tell him what you three were doing, where you were and what you had learned. I told him I didn’t know and that what I did know was that you were trying to help me.” She looked her mother in the eye. “I know when people help me, Mom. I tried to tell
him
about Kerry Lee.” She tapped Kent with the toe of her pump. “But he just ignored me.”

“We’ve got to get Kerry Lee!” Tara yelled as she got up off Gina.

“Get Kerry Lee? Are you forgetting we are the only ones here not armed?” Victoria’s voice of reason reminded us of that most important fact.

Gina Kent got up off the ground, walked around and picked up her handgun. “And I thought I had problems.” She was walking off but stopped at the path and turned around. “He’s not even worth shooting.” She pointed at Detective Kent. Unfortunately, she was pointing with her gun and my heart skipped a beat. But pointing was all she did.

 
“By the way, thanks for this.” She threw a crumpled photograph at her husband unconscious on the ground. “I never would have found this place without it. Now, how do I get out of here?”

“Is that what I think it is?” Tara asked.

“It’s one of the photos she took from us.”
 
It was of the West Park entrance sign.

By this time Beatrice was at her daughter’s side. With one hand she took the gun away from Kelly and handed it behind her back to Tara. Then she put an arm around her daughter. She turned her around and walked back out of the woods with her. She was speaking gently to her and rubbing her back. I couldn’t take my eyes off of them.

The idea that Tiara Investigations was the child I never had hit me like a ton of bricks, but I couldn’t think about that yet.

We sat down around Detective Kent. I looked down at him. He was out cold. “I wonder how long this is going to last? We need to be sure Kerry Lee doesn’t leave the hospital.”

Tara handed the gun to Victoria who put it in her jacket pocket. Then she leaned over and lay down on her side, propping herself on her elbow. She pulled his cell phone off his belt as we watched. “Remember this is a
walkie
talkie, too. There must be a button for that. Here it is.
Breaker, breaker.”

“Thirty years ago,” I said. “Say, come in.”

“Come in,” she said but more like she was welcoming someone at her front door.

“Is this Detective Kent’s radio? Ma’am, put the Detective on the line.”

“He’s using the bathroom. I have something very important to tell you. It’s a message from him.”

I whispered, “Send a few officers to Gwinnett General Hospital and guard Kerry Lee. Do not let him leave until you hear from Detective Kent.”

“Did you hear that?”

“I still need to talk to the Detective, ma’am.”

Said detective stirred, moaned and found
himself
lying next to Tara eyeball to eyeball. “Well, hello.” Then he was out again.

“Thank you, Detective Kent. I’ll call the hospital now.” Tara replaced the phone on his belt.

Victoria got to her feet. “When did you figure out Kerry Lee killed David?”

“I think all three of us have been feeling like we were overlooking something. By the way, why does overlook mean you didn’t see something, but overheard means you did hear something?
Just wondering.

“Anyway, remember when we talked about competing in a triathlon? Victoria suggested the biathlon, and I said that she meant
duathlon
. A biathlon is cross-country skiing and sharp shooting.
 
That reminded me I had seen a biathlon trophy in his office.
 
It dawned on me that David Taylor’s killer had to have been an excellent marksman. Remember, it was one shot to the heart.”

“Wow,” Tara said.

“I remembered seeing that little trophy in his office of a skier with a rifle over his shoulder. I knew then that he had the ability to shoot from a distance.
 
Then he must have made the same mistake we did about the man Kelly was spending time with. He was at the mall making sure Kelly was good and incriminated.”

“It was Savannah Westmoreland that got us to the Mall to see them and to Cracker Barrel on Monday morning so you would be attacked!” Victoria enjoyed seeing all the pieces fit together too.

Tara was still lying beside Kent. “He would have seen us on Friday night and thought he could pay someone to scare us off the case. It was Lee that James Goody was referring to. That connects the two of them.”

“Let’s face
it,
we violated one of our rules. We trusted a scared person.”

“He was scared after Tara ran over his foot.”

“He was scared before that. He knew we were getting closer and closer to the truth. He knew we stayed in the building, eluding his security measures and connecting The Peachtree Group to the murder, and he knew we would never go away.”

“So what he told you on the way to the hospital was a lie?” Tara propped herself up on her elbow.

“Oh, I think some of it was true, just not the whole story. I think he wanted to stop David from correcting the software so his company could keep the lucrative military contract. Victoria, do you have the flash drive with you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think the insurgents ever knew they had a way to destroy American UAVs?”

“I didn’t see any indication they had intentionally attracted a Backpack UAV in order to destroy it.”

Tara reached over and rubbed my arm. “That means you don’t have to tell your husband about this. He would want to know how you knew, and you would have to tell him about Tiara Investigations.”

“We need to tell someone since the defective ones are still out there. But who should we report it to, the FBI?”

“We need to stop The Peachtree Group from shipping any more out.” Victoria pushed her glasses up.

We looked at Tara, the attorney in the group. “Let’s tell Detective Kent. He can take credit for as much of it as he wants when he turns it over to the FBI. They’ll take the matter to the appropriate military investigative office, and they can get the answer to your question about other communications systems being compromised.”
Amazingly enough, she seemed to have forgotten she had a man lying next to her.

 
Then Detective Kent moaned again and tried to get up. Unfortunately when he did he rolled over onto Tara. After a roll or two in the pine straw, rather than the hay, they extricated themselves. Victoria helped Tara, and I helped Kent, get up. He moaned and removed his shirt and then looked at his bulletproof vest.

He felt around his torso. “I guess getting knocked out is a small price to pay for this thing saving my life.”
 
While he was doing that I leaned down and picked up the photograph and stuffed it in my waistband.

“The bullet
hole’s
in the back.” Tara trailed off because he was no longer listening to her. He turned and looked at me because I was standing behind him.
 

“Oh, no, you didn’t …”

“No! Good Lord, no. I didn’t shoot you.”

“I don’t guess you saw anything?”

“We heard a shot and found you on the ground.” The other Tiara detectives jerked their heads in my direction, but other than that they were cool as cucumbers.

Victoria moved to stand in front of him. “We’re wasting time talking. We figured out who killed David Taylor. It was Kerry Lee from The Peachtree Group.”

“What evidence do you have for that accusation?”

We hadn’t put our heads together to decide how much to tell him, so I had to think fast. “We just went through all of that. Somebody ought to invent a jacket that doesn’t cause short-term memory loss.”

“I’ll call for back up and go pick him up. He’s probably at his office.” Detective Kent winced.

Tara jumped in, “Well, see, I didn’t mean to, but I …”

“He’s not there,” I interrupted her. “He had an accident, and he’s at Gwinnett General.”

“I need to call an officer to go and guard him at the hospital.”

“You already did,” Victoria said.
“Hmm, memory loss.
You better have your head looked at.”

“Wait, if Kerry Lee is in the hospital, who shot me? None of you saw or heard anyone leaving the woods?”

“No.”

“Sorry.”

“Nope.”
When Victoria spoke, he turned and glared. I guess he had expected more of her, at least.

“For the love of Pete.”

We helped him to his car and waited for him to leave. Victoria could hardly wait for us to talk. “Why didn’t you tell him his wife shot him?”

“I have no idea.” While I tried to think of the reason, Detective Kent’s car peeled out of the parking lot, spraying gravel. “No harm, no foul?”

Tara looked at me and then Victoria, “As Whitney Houston would say, ‘
ain’t
it shocking what love can do?’
Anywho
, I think he knows what his own wife is capable of, and that’s why he never stopped suspecting Kelly Taylor.”

Okay, so that completes my statement. That’s how we saved the world. And how we saved our worlds with a day to spare, a well-spent spa day, that is. Now I have to catch a plane to London. I wonder if they give couples massages there.

Leigh Reed

P.S. Was this office decorated by the Gwinnett County Police? You’ll want to do something about that.

Epilogue

I
was able to join my husband in London. On Thursday night I sat down in my business class seat and collapsed. I had already planned to use the flight to do some serious life evaluation thinking. I was deceiving my husband, as Victoria was Shorty. How long could we keep up these double lives?

 
My cell phone rang. Victoria had sent me a photo of Tara sitting on a bright yellow scooter with three or four sales people, more specifically salesmen, around her. The text read, “What color do you want?”

I hugged the phone to my heart. Then I typed in
army green.
I would have it all a little longer.

Meet Author Lane Stone

Lane is a native
Atlantan
and graduate of Georgia State University.
 
She, her husband, Larry
Korb
, and the real Abby divide their time between Sugar Hill, Georgia, and Alexandria, Virginia.
 
She’s a member of both the
Chessie
Chapter and the Atlanta Chapter of Sisters in Crime.

When not writing, Lane is either raising money for women political candidates for Women’s Action for New Directions, hiking in various countries, or playing golf.

~

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