3 Buried Leads (13 page)

Waiting for Derrick and the rest of the sheriff’s investigators to arrive was pure torture. I was seriously considering getting into my car and bolting. Eliot could deal with the police while I hid under the bed at my house for the next month.

“Don’t you even think about running,” Eliot warned me.

“I wasn’t,” I lied.

Eliot didn’t look like he believed me. I didn’t blame him. I was too keyed up to even attempt a good lie.

Derrick was the first person to arrive on scene. Eliot pointed to the bag on the ground wordlessly.

Derrick looked in it briefly and then turned in my direction. “I’m assuming your fingerprints are all over this.”

“Probably,” I admitted. “I didn’t really expect to find anything.”

“You’re either the luckiest person I know or the unluckiest,” he grumbled.

I was leaning towards unluckiest right now. “Is it blood?”

“It looks like it,” Derrick said. “I can’t be 100 percent sure. I don’t know what else it could be, though.”

“What about oil? It is a machine shop.”

“Oil isn’t red.”

“Maybe it’s paint?” I said hopefully.

Derrick shook his head. “Even if it turns out to be something besides blood, you’re going to be in a whole heap of trouble with Jake.”

“Did you tell him?”

“I did,” Derrick said morosely. “As much as I wanted him to tear you a new one, I was afraid he would freak out in front of a bunch of people and try to throttle you. Then Eliot would step in and everyone would go to jail.”

“What did he say?”

“He started swearing like a sailor and hung up. I’m fairly certain he’ll be here when he calms down a little bit. You may have handed us a big break here, after all.”

“I don’t think he’s going to see it that way,” I countered.

“Probably not.”

We lapsed into silence for a minute. I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket another two times. Since it was probably just my mother freaking out because I’d ignored her earlier texts, I decided to keep the streak alive and really unhinge her. I didn’t think I could keep my fingers from shaking long enough to type on the phone anyway. “Where is everyone else?” I finally asked.

“The tech team had to get their equipment. They’ll be here in a minute.”

“Why didn’t you guys search this place before?”

Eliot cleared his throat. “Do you really think that’s important right now?”

“I was just asking.”

Derrick glared in my direction. “We had no reason to search here,” he said. “We can’t just break into a place and look around. We need warrants and evidence.”

“I didn’t break in,” I argued. “I just walked through the gate.”

Thankfully for all of us, the tech team had arrived on scene and was now making their way into the open yard. Eliot led me to the wall of the building. I noticed he positioned me between him and Derrick. I figured it was a strategic move.

The three of us watched the tech guys work in silence for about fifteen minutes. Then I heard a loud voice from around the corner and knew that things were about to get ugly.

“Where is she?”

Derrick exchanged a quick glance with me and then pushed himself away from the building to position himself between Jake and me. “Here it comes.”

Jake rounded the corner. His gaze fell on me almost immediately. “You are unbelievable!”

I remained mute. There was no point irritating him anymore than he already was.

“You don’t have anything to say to me?”

“Not really.”

“If I’m not mistaken, we just had this conversation less than an hour ago.”

“What conversation?”

“The one where I told you not to put yourself in a situation like this!” Jake’s voice was shrill, and he was gesturing wildly.

“No, you said if I was going to do anything I should take Eliot with me. Look, Eliot is here.” I didn’t mention the fact that he was only here out of sheer coincidence. Wait, why had he come here? Now probably wasn’t the time to ask him that question, I figured.

“You only hear what you want to hear, like always,” Jake was ranting now. “It’s unbelievable. You just don’t listen. It’s like you’re deaf and dumb.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but Eliot shot a hand out to stop me. “Don’t,” he warned.

“I tell you what not to do and then you go and do just that,” Jake was on a roll now. “You ignore the law. You ignore that little voice inside of you that tells you that what you’re doing is a stupid idea. You ignore your family. You ignore me.” He glanced in Eliot’s direction. “I bet you don’t listen to him either.”

I knew he was nowhere near being done, so I just sat back and waited for him to get everything out. I didn’t really have a leg to stand on in this argument anyway. I needed to plot my next move.

“I don’t know what chemical imbalance you’re suffering from that makes you just walk into these situations,” Jake raved some more. “Now you’ve created a whole mess of my investigation.”

“Actually, I think I helped you.” I don’t know why I open my mouth sometimes.
Seriously.

“You helped me?” Jake’s eyebrows were practically melding with his hairline.

“Garbage pickup in the city is tomorrow. If I hadn’t looked in the dumpster, no one would have found this.”

Jake took a step towards me. His face was so red I was momentarily worried that he was going to have a heart attack right in front of me.

Eliot stepped in front of me protectively. I knew it wasn’t necessary. Even as irate as he was, Jake would never actually physically hurt me. “She knows she made a mistake,” Eliot said calmly. “Screaming at her isn’t going to change anything.”

“No, but it will make me feel better,” Jake grumbled.

The tech officers were still working dutifully, but I noticed they were occasionally shifting their eyes up in Jake’s direction occasionally. They seemed nervous.

Jake was now pacing a five-foot path in front of us. He was muttering to himself, but I could still hear every fifth word or so. Moron and idiot seemed to be his favorite options at this point.

I turned to Eliot dubiously. “I told you we should have just made an anonymous call.”

Jake stopped pacing and rounded on me in disbelief. “You weren’t going to call us?”

“I wonder why?” I said sarcastically.

“Yeah, this is
all my fault.” Jake started pacing again.

After about an hour, the tech guys finished up and were carrying the bag of garbage to the front of the building. A second team of tech guys were now searching through the rest of the dumpster.

Eliot and I followed Jake and Derrick, who were trailing behind the first set of tech guys, back to the front of the building. Jake hadn’t said anything else to me since his last explosion, but I did notice him shooting me angry looks on occasion.

When we rounded to the front of the building I stopped in disbelief. All four area news vans were parked in front of the facility. Crap.

Jake looked as surprised as I felt. “What the hell?”

“They showed up a few minutes after you got here,” one of his deputies said from the other side of the gate.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was told that would probably be bad – especially given the mood you were in.”

Jake glared at me again. “How can this possibly be my fault?” I asked him. “They obviously got the tip from someone in your department. I certainly didn’t tell them.”

Jake mulled that over for a second. “They probably heard it on the scanner,” he said finally.

I noticed that Shelly was moving away from her news van and towards us. She slowed her pace when she saw me with Jake.

I smiled at her with false brightness. “Hi Shelly,” I greeted her with faux enthusiasm.
“Fancy seeing you here.”

Shelly ignored me. “Sheriff Farrell, is it true that you found a body?” She shoved a microphone in Jake’s face.

“No, it is not true,” Jake argued. “We did not find a body.”

Shelly looked disappointed. “What did you find?”

“We’re just doing some simple tests for our investigation,” Jake said stiffly. “Trying to leave no stone unturned.”

Shelly shot a glance at me. I was suddenly interested in the cut on my finger. “What is she doing here?”

“Ms. Shaw was just . . . helping us with our investigation,” Jake gritted out.

I raised my eyebrows in surprise. “I was?”

“You were,” Jake confirmed. “Her help has been invaluable.” I could tell that statement hurt.

“How did she help?” The venomous tone of Shelly’s voice was pretty frightening.

When the other news representatives caught sight of Jake, they all rushed around us and started shoving their own microphones in Jake’s face. “Did you just say that Avery Shaw is helping you with the investigation?” The question had come from Devon – and she didn’t look any happier than Shelly was.

“I did,” Jake said. “I cannot go into details right now. Our investigation, including Ms. Shaw’s part in it, is not open for public consumption.”

Shelly looked dumbfounded. “So she gets to know what’s going on and we don’t?”

Jake grimaced. “I guess you could say that.
Although Ms. Shaw will not be printing anything from the investigation in her publication at this point.”

I hadn’t agreed to that. I opened my mouth to argue my point but Eliot wasn’t taking any chances. He clamped his hand over my mouth to make sure I couldn’t say anything stupid.

“She doesn’t look like she’s agreed to that,” Shelly pointed out. “Personally, Sheriff Farrell, I don’t think it’s particularly fair that Ms. Shaw is getting better information than the rest of us.”

“Oh, that’s rich,” Devon shot back. “Since you’ve been getting special treatment from the sheriff yourself, I don’t really think you have any place to complain.”

“I have not been getting special treatment,” Shelly argued. “He hasn’t told me anything, no matter how hard I try. He says he can’t talk about an ongoing investigation.”

I couldn’t help but wonder exactly how hard she had tried – and what her methods of interrogation had involved. My guess was a thong and love cuffs.

“Besides,” Shelly continued. “You’re not exactly innocent in this. You’re sleeping with one of the deputies involved in the case.”

I glanced over at Derrick. His cheeks were reddening under the sudden scrutiny of the media throng.

“Don’t equate my relationship with Derrick to your social climbing with the sheriff,” Devon challenged Shelly. “What Derrick and I have is real. What you have is ruthless ambition.”

I was starting to like Devon.

“Everyone knows he’s always going to favor Avery over you, anyway,” Devon charged on. “He can’t help himself. No one can figure out why. She’s nuts.”

The love is gone.

I turned to Eliot. “We should probably go.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

Eliot and I slunk away, leaving Jake to deal with his media harlots and me to wonder how I was going to explain this to Fish. So much for getting off his shit list.

Eliot and I said our goodbyes on the street. When I had asked him why he was at the machine shop, he had been evasive and didn’t answer the question. I figured that he was going to do exactly what I had done – he just didn’t want to admit it.

When he left to get in his truck, I couldn’t help but notice that he didn’t give me a kiss goodbye – or ask me over to his place for the night. He must be really mad.

I went back to the office, dreading the lecture I was about to get from Fish. I had no choice, though. I needed some direction on where I should take my investigation next. I didn’t think that Jake’s orders were enough to stop us from printing what I had found, but I wasn’t sure if that was the way Fish would want to play it. We really couldn’t afford to piss Jake off at this point.

Fish was waiting for me when I entered the building. “You did it again,” he said.

“What?”

“You got personally involved in a story.”

“It’s not my fault. I went to the machine shop to try and find someone that has known Brian Frank for a long time. It just happened.”

Fish shook his head distractedly. “I don’t know how you do it?”

“Just lucky, I guess.” I was going for cute. I think Fish read it as deranged.

“What did you find?”

I figured Fish had met me in the reception area because he didn’t want to risk anyone else hearing what I had stumbled on. After I told him, he seemed to consider our options in silence for a few minutes. “We’re not going to run anything tonight,” he said finally.

“Are you sure?”

“The sheriff clearly doesn’t want anyone to know what we’ve found,” Fish said. “He’s not going to tell anyone else. If we run with this, we run the risk of getting something wrong. We’ll wait.”

I was silently relieved. I didn’t want to piss Jake off
anymore than I already had. “So what do we tell everyone?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? You know that’s not going to work. They’re going to be on me the minute I walk into the newsroom.”

“Then don’t go in the newsroom,” Fish said simply. “Go to a coffee shop and email me a short story that just covers the press conference. Then you can be done for the day.”

“You’re rewarding me with an afternoon off?” I couldn’t help it, I was surprised.

“I don’t see a lot of other choices, do you?”

“Not really,” I admitted.

I followed Fish’s orders and went to a coffee shop downtown. It only took me about twenty minutes to write up the story and ship it off to Fish. I was now at a loss what to do with the rest of my afternoon and evening.

When my cell phone started to ring, I felt a jolt of anxiety course through me. I could only hope it wasn’t Jake – or my mom. I didn’t want to talk to either of them right now. I was relieved when I saw Carly’s number pop up.

“Hey.”

“The wedding is off!”

This was about the tenth time the wedding had been called off due to a Carly freak out in the past six months. I wasn’t particularly worried that this one would hold. “What’s wrong now?”

“His mom wants me to sign a prenup,” Carly choked out.

“Why? It’s not like Kyle owns anything of value?”

“She says that I’m a gold digger and I’m after her family money.”

“Does Kyle’s family have money?” I knew his mom drove a Bentley, but I figured that was just because she was pretentious.

“They’re have some money. It’s not like they’re rich, though,” Carly replied.

Carly was a
well paid accountant for an insurance agency. I wasn’t quite sure what Kyle did – but I didn’t think he earned a lot of money hawking whatever Internet wares he was peddling on a regular basis. “So? Sign it. You’ll make more money than him anyway.”

“That’s not the point,” Carly sounded irritated with me now. “She’s already planning for our divorce.”

“You’ve called off the wedding ten times,” I pointed out.

“Don’t be a pain”

“I’m just saying, from her perspective, you might seem a little fickle.” I’m loyal to Carly, but I’m also honest.

“I didn’t call you to be rational,” Carly argued.

“Oh, sorry. She’s a bitch. You want to egg her car again?”

“No, she would know that was us,” Carly pointed out. We had done just that a few months ago. Even though Harriet Profit couldn’t prove we had done it, I knew she had her suspicions.

“What do you want to do?”

“I suppose you have to work tonight?”

“Actually, I’m done for the day.”

“You want to get drunk?”

That sounded like a great idea – as long as I hid her phone so she couldn’t drunk dial Kyle or his mom late in the evening and I hid my own so I couldn’t do the same. “Always.”

“Come over to my parents’ house. They’re gone for a long weekend. They said I was a
bridezilla and they needed a break from me.”

I could see that.

“I’ll be over in an hour.”

“Bring a fifth of something.”

“What? Hot Damn?”

“No. I haven’t been able to drink that since we threw up on it that one time.”

“Whiskey?”

“Yeah.
Bring sour mix, too.” That would be much more pleasant to throw up on.

“See you soon.”

I arrived at Carly’s with a fifth, two packs of smokes, and a handful of DVDs.

“What did you bring?”

“I didn’t know what you would be in the mood for, so I grabbed
The Goonies
in case you wanted to laugh,
My Girl
in case you wanted to cry and
The Shining
in case you want to fantasize about killing someone,” I explained.

“
The Shining
. Definitely.”

That was my choice, too.

Carly started mixing drinks while I popped the movie into the DVD player. She seemed calmer already.

“Have you talked to Kyle today?”

“He says he doesn’t want to talk to me if I’m just going to threaten to call off the wedding, again.”

“Won’t you be glad when you’re finally married? Then you can start to threaten him with divorce.”

“We’re getting married in the Catholic church,” Carly said. “We can’t get divorced. I’ll have to threaten him with an annulment. My mom will pitch a fit if I get divorced.”

“Well, that will be just as fun.”

Carly turned to me suddenly. “How are things with Eliot?”

I told her about my day, not leaving anything out. I knew Carly wouldn’t tell anyone. She was stunned when I finished.

“You’ve had a shitty day.”

“Yeah.”

“How long do you think Eliot will be mad?”

I shrugged. I had no idea.

“How long do you think Jake will be mad?”

“Only a year or so.
He eventually forgives me. He’ll throw it in my face forever, though.”

“Well, at least he didn’t arrest you,” Carly offered helpfully.

There is that.

After watching
The Shining
, we were ridiculously drunk. We decided to take a walk around the block to get some air and sober up. The walk turned into an hour-long affair, especially after Carly fell in her neighbor’s bushes and I couldn’t anchor myself well enough to pull her out, so I fell in, too.

It took us almost a full five minutes to extricate ourselves from the bushes. When we finally did, I couldn’t help but notice a man sitting in a blue SUV parked across the street from us – about three houses down from Carly’s parents’ house. It was dark, so I could only make out a silhouette, but the occupant was obviously staring at us.

“Who is that?” Carly asked, slurring her words a little.

“One of your neighbors,” I don’t know.

“It’s probably Mr. Peterson.”

“Does he own a blue SUV?”

“I don’t know. It’s a big truck like that. He’s probably going to tell my parents I was drunk.”

“You’re an adult, why would they care?”

“Why do you still wear
Star Wars
shoes to specifically drive your mother insane?”

Point taken.

Carly and I carefully made out way back to the sidewalk and headed towards her house. I stopped once to see if the man was still staring at us. He was. I shot him the finger, which Carly quickly tried to cover up.

“Don’t do that.”

“He’s a dick.”

“You don’t even know him,” she admonished.

“Any guy who watches two girls fall in a bush and does nothing to help them is a dick.”

“You have a point,” Carly ceded, turning around and flipping off Mr. Peterson, too. She would regret that in the morning, I figured.

When we got back to Carly’s house, we both passed out on the floor. For such a shitty day, the evening had actually turned out to be somewhat fun. I doubted I would be feeling the same way in the morning, though.