Dead Head: A Dirty Business Mystery (16 page)

“I don’t know anything about the law, but that sounds like a trap to me.”

“Harder drugs were found in Caroline’s gym bag, as was forty-seven thousand dollars in cash. She’d been under surveillance for some time.
Seems like half the student body was on speed at one time or another, and what better way to distribute than through one of the most popular girls in school?”

I couldn’t believe it. Our Caroline?

“But why would she do it?”

“There could have been any number of reasons—money, wanting to look cooler than the other kids, boredom. I’m a bachelor. I don’t know why kids do the things they do. I’m just telling you what I heard and read.”

“Where?” I asked.

In the police report. O’Malley had seen it and I needed to. I didn’t know about the past, but police records were public these days. In Springfield, all I’d have to do was walk into the station house and ask for it, like the mother of that unruly thirteen-year-old. A decades-old report in another state where I’d never been and didn’t know anyone was going to be harder. Certainly for a gardener, but maybe not for a journalist. I thought of asking Lucy for help, but I’d have to tread carefully. In this instance, she was one of them. I didn’t want her contributing to the feeding frenzy surrounding the Sturgises, although it was naive to imagine I could stop it.

At least now I had something tangible to look for, and who knew, maybe my online research would turn something up. I couldn’t wait to hustle O’Malley out of the house and get back to the computer.

I inhaled three slices of pizza and washed them down with copious amounts of diet soda guaranteed to ruin my teeth and the lining of my stomach.

“You were hungry,” O’Malley said, working on slice number two, pacing himself and peeling off excess strands of cheese.

Not really, but I hoped that if the food was gone, O’Malley would leave soon after. He finally took the hint.

“I can’t stop you from looking for this person, but I don’t see what good it will do anyone.”

He didn’t, but I did. It was my reputation and my new life, almost as much as it was Caroline’s.

Soon after Mike left I resumed my Facebook research. The
M
s were promising because there were just so many, but no one looked remotely like the trucker I’d seen at the diner. Nothing at all until the
W
s, someone named Jeff Warren. I’d assumed the name JW referred to his first and middle names. The picture he posted was of a Tigers shirt and hat. I reedited my Facebook profile and became a Detroit Tigers fan. Then I friended Jeff. Within four hours he’d confirmed me as a friend and I learned that he worked for Hutchinson Shipping and was currently on some mind “making a dead-head run on some mind-numbing stretch of highway between Maine and North Carolina.” Which would mean he’d recently driven through Connecticut.

Before I even brushed my teeth I ran downstairs and turned on the computer to check for Facebook messages. Had Jeff Warren posted something? Did he say where he was? It was ridiculous—I felt like a fifteen-year-old girl waiting for “Billy” to ask me to the prom. I showered and dressed but punctuated every morning ritual with a return to the computer and my Facebook page. It was as if I were tethered to the damn thing and some unseen force was reeling me back in every ten or fifteen minutes.

When I was in the television business, my company had an account with an online outfit called
Background.com
. It was pretty scary that something like
Background.com
even existed. I hadn’t thought of it that way in my previous life when I had different notions of the definition of privacy, but the fact that anyone, anywhere could simply plug in your name and get your phone number and vital statistics made me want to close every credit card account, shred every piece of paper that had my name on it, and become a survivalist somewhere in Montana.

The production company used it to vet possible hires and to confirm the reliability of story sources. It wasn’t a given that you’d get all the info you needed on a source, but often you could find out if someone who’d been spilling his guts to you had any hidden agenda or ax to grind. Once I’d learned that a so-called witness to improprieties at a day care center had himself spent time in jail on a lesser but similar charge. It had saved me days and an embarrassing story, but more important, it had saved his potential victims a lifetime of having to repudiate untrue allegations. They never learned how close they came to being ruined.

Instead of checking Facebook for the umpteenth time, I went to the Background Web site. Our passwords used to be changed monthly but were sometimes repeated since Betsy, the department head, wasn’t quite as paranoid as management thought she should be. And it wasn’t easy to keep coming up with memorable words or names every four weeks when you’d been doing it for years and had passwords for just about everything.

When I had left the company the password was Pyewacket1250. Betsy was an animal lover, and Pyewacket was the name of the cat in a movie she was crazy about. The twelve fifty was a constant, a required numerical addition to the password. That part was easy to remember—it was our address. I took a chance and tried to sign on with the old password. No luck.

I considered looking through the newspapers, trying to find a more recent film with animals in it, but how would I know?—They rarely got top billing unless you went back to
Marley & Me
, and Betsy was more of a cat person than a dog lover. I knew it would mean tipping my hand, but it was a heckuva lot simpler to call Lucy Cavanaugh.

Lucy and I went way back. She’d have liked us to go way forward, too, but I was still committed to my five-year plan for Dirty Business. If I couldn’t make it work, then maybe I’d see about a return to the big
city and the career I’d left behind.
I can get us a production deal. We’d
be a two-woman team and just use the freelancers we liked and only when we needed them. Our lives will be a write-off.
I could hear her sales pitch even as I dialed.

The company we’d both worked for had flirted with hard-hitting news stories during my tenure, but I couldn’t take credit for that. I left during the embryonic stage of non-news news. Now there was more money and ratings in missing coeds, baby bumps—real or imagined—and celebrities misbehaving. Those were the things people seemed to care about, and it was one of the reasons I was not unhappy to get out.

Lucy’s assistant, Courtney, always sounded disappointed when she heard it was me on the phone and not a colleague or source about to drop some bomb that would make them all famous. Courtney might have been nicer to me if she knew that I was on the fringes of one of those salacious stories, but I resisted the urge to impress her. She put me through.

“Luce, I need a favor.” I was interrupting her, of course—I could hear her keyboard clicking. It was nearly impossible to get her undivided attention.

“What’s up?” she asked. “I’m checking on a chocolatier who’s being accused of using less cocoa in his candies than he claims. I think we got him.”

I felt so much safer knowing that someone was tracking down the real evildoers. “I’m calling about Caroline Sturgis,” I said.

The clicking stopped, and for a moment I wondered if I had crossed over to the dark side.

Lucy knew Caroline had been extradited to Michigan; everyone who cared to, knew. It was what I would have considered junk news if I hadn’t been tangentially involved. A judge there had scheduled a hearing to be held in three weeks. Until that time Caroline would be making her home in a Michigan jail. I tried to imagine her in a cell instead
of in her pristine kitchen with its whiteboard tracking everyone’s activities. What would her new bulletin board read? Walk around courtyard, make hand-carved shivs, design tattoos, join gang?

“They confiscated her knitting needles,” Lucy told me. I could tell she was reading from a screen. “I guess they didn’t think she was a threat to herself or anyone else in the Bridgeport jail, but things are more formal where she is now. Maybe they’ll let her crochet. How much damage can she inflict with a plastic crochet hook? Although I suppose you could kill someone with a sharpened pencil if you stuck it in that right spot.” An interesting theory. I’d have to bring my pencil case the next time I went out at night.

“I need to use Background. Do you guys still have an account?” I whispered, as if someone other than Lucy could hear me.

“You’re wasting your time.” The keyboard clicking resumed. “I already plugged her name in. Just a few old phone numbers under Monica’s name and five under Caroline’s—her home number and four cells which look like hers, her husband’s, and the two kids’. I did get the criminal records, though, and the original arrest report. You want them?”

Sure I did. Lucy sent them and the phone numbers as an E-mail attachment. The police report had been copied so many times it was probably six generations away from the original and nearly impossible to read, but I printed it out anyway.

“Caroline was arrested with two others, Kate Gustafson and Edward Donnelley. I checked them out but nothing much came up,” Lucy said. “She’s dead and he’s out of prison. Gone.”

“I need to look up someone else. Betsy will never know and it won’t cost the company a dime. Can you give me the new password?”

Silence.

“C’mon, it’s five hundred dollars to open a Background account—you know I can’t afford that. Just this once?”

The clicking stopped.

“You know I’m not supposed to. Why don’t you tell me who you’re looking for and let me do it?” she asked.

“I can’t tell you just now. Later, I promise. If I’m right I don’t want to scare anyone off with major media coming in.”

“Flatterer. And do I get to use any of the info at some point in the future?”

“Absolutely.”

After a pause she spoke.

“Do we?”

“Do we what?” I asked. “Have a deal? Yes, we do.”

“
Dewey
. Dewey1250.”

Warren. It had to be Warren. It couldn’t be something less common like Wozniacki or Wittgenstein, so he would be easier to find.
Background.com
had phone records for fifty-three men named Jeff or Jeffrey Warren. Seven of the fifty-three were Michiganders. I didn’t know the Upper Peninsula from Upper Volta, but three of the seven had zip codes that were reasonably close to the one I’d found for Caroline, and luckily there were only two high schools in her town.

I reminded myself that when I searched my own name, I found nothing except entries about Billie Holiday and Judy Holliday, so I wasn’t optimistic, but it was a place to start.

All I had to do was to call three total strangers. Easy, right? Except that electronically invading someone’s privacy was one thing. Given the anonymity of the Internet, it was simply a matter of pressing keys on a keyboard. If the information was available online, people had somehow made the decision to put it out there for all to see, hadn’t they? That’s what I told myself anyway. I was less sure I could pull off this level of
snooping on the phone.
Hi, I was just wondering if you ratted out my favorite client?
Ugh, I was starting to sound like a character from
The So
pranos.

I tried to channel the telemarketers who routinely and breathlessly interrupted my dinners and at-home movie nights. Two seconds of silence and then a friendly voice suggesting they were someone I knew before they launched into their pitches: “This is Heather?” as if they’re asking you, waiting for you to commit yourself by continuing to listen or, worse still, asking “Heather who?”

What was it that kept people on the phone, as opposed to automatically hanging up the way I did when I answered the phone and heard those first few seconds of dead air? How do the good ones hook people? Bank error in your favor? You may already have won? We’re calling about the warranty on your car? It had been a long time since anyone I knew had been taken in by one of those ploys.

A lost item was a possibility. Babe had used it on her bulletin board, but on the phone I’d have to say what it was. It had to be something most people owned that you could conceivably be without for a day or two without missing or freaking, so anything like a wallet or driver’s license was out. Terry had said the guy was wearing expensive sunglasses, Oakley’s. I’d give them a shot. If it sounded ridiculous when I said it out loud, I’d come up with something more inventive for the next call.

Telemarketers generally sounded as if they were smiling—like they were drugged or lobotomized (less like babies or idiots in this instance). I smiled. I dialed. A woman answered the phone. Expecting a man to pick up, I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Astonishingly enough she didn’t buy my story about having found old Jeff’s sunglasses.

Somewhere in between being called a skanky ho and a heartless home wrecker I considered stopping her, but it wasn’t really me she was trashing and she obviously had buckets of venom inside her, so I let her
vent. Given some of the details she was throwing out, I’d have been very surprised if this Jeff Warren hadn’t been cheating on his wife, so maybe she had a right. She had dates, locations, and all the particulars of a tryst in Milwaukee that her Jeff and I were supposed to have taken together. Then she got personal. She made disparaging remarks about my hair and my alleged cup size. It went further south from there, to my butt and hips and the problems I undoubtedly had with them. How she knew this was beyond me. Still, I stayed on the line. I was fascinated by her lung capacity. Perhaps she was a swimmer?

My family was scum. She could tell by my voice that I, too, was trash. (I’d liked to have asked, “How exactly?” but didn’t see how I could fit it in.) I was dangerously close to switching allegiance. No wonder her Jeff fooled around—the woman was a harridan. I gave her thirty seconds to come up for air. If the confirmation of Jeff’s infidelity had driven her crazy, it had been a short drive and I’d done enough penance for it.

“Excuse me, ma’am?” I said. How many adulteresses called their lovers’ wife
ma’am
? “I think I must have dialed the wrong number.” It stopped her cold—but just long enough for her to fill her tank and start again.