Domestic Affairs (Tiara Investigations Mystery) (14 page)

“Must they?” Tara asked. “I’m not wearing underwear.”

I was laughing when the security officer tapped on the window.
 

“Would you please open your hood and trunk?”

I could handle pushing the two buttons.
 

“The visitors’ parking lot is straight ahead. The museum lobby is accessed through the ground level.”

Right. We parked where he had instructed, but skipped the museum.
  

We were overdressed for the joint in our wool suits.
 
Mine was an Escada brown pants suit with velvet trim on the lapels. Tara was in her green Reed Krakoff suit, a pencil skirt and fitted jacket. Victoria was rocking a winter white ensemble, skirt and fingertip length jacket, by Donna Karan. You know how heels make you strut a little? Well, we walked up to the security desk like we had background music. Before we had time to get our first lie of the day out of our mouths, some loud, short, bald guy wearing polyester and shoes he didn’t know were really athletic footwear approached from the side.
 
“Are you here from the temp agency?”

“Yes, sir.”

He turned and pounded off. “Follow me.” Thank the Lord he didn’t say, “walk this way.” We were caffeined-up to the sky and would’ve had a Monty Python moment.
 

“You all need to sign in.”
 
The uniformed, young woman at the desk was calling out behind us. Of course, that was a nonstarter. We had to follow our new boss.

“My administrative assistant didn’t come back after lunch on Friday. And she didn’t show up yesterday or today.” We followed him into an elevator and he pressed the buttons for the second and fourth floors.
  
Then he looked at each of us before jabbing a finger at me. “You’ll come with me. You two I’ll drop off at human resources.” So basically the guy had made an end run around HR and snagged a temp. All of sudden, I didn’t feel so bad about not having any office skills at all.

When the elevator stopped at the second floor, Tara and Victoria were unceremoniously dismissed with the flapping of his hand. Sure, it was rude but I was thinking that this was just getting better and better, since he could have walked them to the personnel office himself.

“Take a left and you’ll see a sign for HR,” he said as the elevator doors closed.
 

More useless information had never been spoken.
 
Those two Tiara Investigations detectives already had their assignments.

“I’m Leigh.”

“I’m Harold and I’m Director of Environmental Safety.”
Better and better, since that would include water.

Standing in front of my cubicle, he pointed to the instructions for answering the phone and told me generally how he liked things done. I only heard every third word because a photograph on the desk caught my eye. A young woman was sitting on the ground giving the camera a huge, seemingly genuine smile. It was Janice Marshall. In another photo she was dancing and peeking playfully under a tall man’s arm being too short to look over his shoulder at the photographer.
 
She wasn’t dressed like a pseudo bad-girl as she had been yesterday morning, nor was she the Miss Jane Hathaway at the funeral home.
 

“Is this the person I’m replacing?” I had interrupted him and that threw him off.

“Uh, yeah. Janie, or something. She hadn’t been here that long. I have a conference call in about five minutes. You can place the call and transfer me in.” He loped into his office and came back with a piece of paper.
 
“Here’s the number to call.”

Tara was walking up to my cubicle but slowed down when Harold came back. The phone on my desk rang.
 
I sat down and placed my handbag out of the way.
 
Then I adjusted my chair. I was killing time until he left and I could make out what Tara was trying to tell me. She was pointing to me and then pretending she was holding a phone up to her ear. Did she want me to call her cell?
 

Harold paced in front of me, stopping to scowl at my phone each time he turned. Finally he bellowed, “The phone’s ringing! Aren’t you going to answer it?”

“It’s probably for you.”

Harold’s eyes bulged out like I’d only seen on ‘Remember to take your blood pressure medicine’ posters. He growled and huffed off. The caller had hung up before he answered.
 
Harold was going to have to move faster than that.
 

It rang again and Tara was close enough to whisper, “Answer it.”

So I did. It was for Harold, which I could have told her. He yelled out at me, “Transfer the call in here!” I pressed the transfer button and then hung up.

Next the intercom button lit up so I answered it.
 
“You lost that call!”
 

“I don’t want to talk about it. It’s too upsetting.” In all fairness to myself, between Thomas Chestnut’s murder, what was going on with Jack and the Senate Committee hearing, being a little short of sleep, I found the CDC’s phone system more than a little stressful. I was a fake temp anyway. He had no idea just how temporary I was. And was that really the best use of my time?
 

“Oh, you’re going to talk about it!”

Oh, yeah? I jumped off my chair and climbed under the desk. Tara swung around and sat down.
 

“Where’s that other one?” Harold yelled.
 

“She didn’t work out. HR is calling the temp service to let them know.”
 
Tara’s voice was soothing. I think she added in a little conspiratorial wink, like ‘oh, what we competent people have to put up with.’

His silence told me HR never responded that quickly to a problem. Either that or her top button had come undone.
 

“She’s had problems in other positions, too.
 
Actually, she’s been dismissed from all her previous placements. She just can’t seem to catch on. Oh!”
 

The last was due to the pinch I gave her calf.
 

 
“Get me on that conference call.” I pictured the boss stomping back to his office, couldn’t really hear it since he wore soft sole shoes.

I reached up and pointed to the instructions and to the paper with the call-in number. It didn’t take much to make Harold happy and that did it.

“Can I come out now?”

“In a minute.”

“Look at the photographs tacked to the cubicle,” I hissed.

Tara gasped. “Vic, over here.”

“Have you seen Leigh?”

“She’s under the desk.”

I think it says a lot that Victoria expressed neither surprise nor curiosity that I was hiding under a desk.
 
   

“Look at these pictures,” Tara said.

This time Vic positively gasped in astonishment.
  
“How many jobs does that poor girl have?”
 

“Get real, Dalai Lama.” I ridiculed from below.
 
“Tara, look for anything personal she left behind, her address, anything. Vic, go through the file cabinets behind the desk. What was she working on? Anything to do with Lake Lanier, or Buford Dam, or Thomas Chestnut?”

Tara got up and closed Harold’s door. When she returned, she reached her hand under the desk. “His back is turned.”

“Vic, how did you do?” Since she looks like a sexy math-lete, I knew if Harold came out and found her he wouldn’t suspect anything nefarious.

“I found the guest office Thomas Chestnut and other consultants used whenever they worked on-site. It’s two doors down on the right. I didn’t have time to find out if he left anything.”
 

I crawled out from under the desk and got on the other side of the cubicle from Harold’s door. “I’ll go look.”
 

My cell phone rang and Tara handed it to me. I answered it once I was in the hallway.
  
It was a current client. She wanted to be sure we’d be following her husband, Ellis, at lunchtime. I assured her we would and hung up.
 
This Mrs. was very wealthy. She hadn’t told him she wanted a divorce.
 
She expected him to go for alimony because of her family money and her legal team wanted to check that.

A young woman in white painters’ overalls and a navy CDC staff t-shirt was scraping a name off the door next to Harold’s. It wasn’t the second door down, but I wanted to start a conversation. “Was this Thomas’s office?”

“No, it was Robert’s. Poor guy.”

“Why?”

“Twenty-three years of service and he was fired.”

I m-m-m’d in sympathy.
 

“A consultant complained about him. I don’t think that’s right. The consultant should have been put on the curb.”
  

I had to decide:
 
keep her talking or see if Thomas had left anything behind. I didn’t have time to do both.
 

A man with an overgrown moustache he thought was amusing walked down the hall toward us and I acted like I was doing anything but talking to her. He wore the same painters’ overalls but his ensemble included a denim shirt with the CDC emblem. Rank has its privileges, I suppose.
 

“When you get through here, come back to the loading dock.”
 
He nodded to me and walked off.
 

I slipped into the office. The guest office idea was a dud––there was nothing there.
 

“This is too clean,” Victoria said when she and Tara joined me.

Tara opened and closed a few metal cabinet doors.
 
“You’re right. No guest office is this bare. There should be the odd office pen or memo pad in an overhead bin.”
 

They had office experience and I didn’t, so I deferred to them.
  

“This office hasn’t just been cleaned, it’s been cleared,” Tara said.

 
I walked to the door and looked both ways. “Let’s get out of here. We have some place to be at noon.”

On the way out, I pointed out the office of Robert somebody who’d been fired for playing too rough with Thomas Chestnut.
 

Harold’s office door opened and he bellowed to an empty chair, “I need you to….”

Mentally wishing him all the luck with that, we decamped.

A few minutes later, I was behind the wheel and we were headed back up to Gwinnett County. “Anything interesting in Janice’s desk?”

Vic was fooling around with the camera. Photos from cases have their own folder on the memory card and she wanted to be able to save those we were about to take in their proper place. We’re confident and we’re organized. “She lives in Decatur and, yes, we have her address. Her parents live in Boston and so that may be where she’s from. I think she might be engaged.”

“I don’t think she’s engaged. I think she wants to be engaged.” Tara was tapping notes into her notebook computer in the back seat.
 

“Why don’t you think she’s engaged?” I snagged a pair of sunglasses from the dash.

“She had too many bride and wedding magazines.
 
And there weren’t any photos of her with a guy looking betrothed. What did you find out, Leigh?”

“Other than the first name of the guy Thomas had fired, nothing. It was Robert. That and the location of his former office should be enough for Detective Kent.”

 
Victoria told me she hadn’t found any information on water safety and Buford Dam. Damn.

***

I was moseying through the parking lot of the Days Inn on Jimmy Carter Boulevard when Mr. Ellis Jones, walking hand in hand with a young woman, turned around and looked right at me. Our eyes met. I read his mind and knew what he was about to do. “We have us a runner.” This happens from time to time and, yes, we have an app for that.

I pretended to give chase.
 

Tara yelled from the sidewalk, “Hey, Bryan?”

It’s the craziest thing––if you call someone who’s doing something––or someone––he shouldn’t be doing, a random name, he’ll stop and look at you, relieved. Of course, the camera in Victoria’s hand went click, click, click.
 

***

We got back on I-85 north. Our first stop was my house to feed Abby and take her out, and then we headed to the Cracker Barrel on Lawrenceville-Suwanee Road for lunch and to get my Jeep.

I checked my watch for billing purposes. Then we were back talking about Thomas Chestnut.
 
We got to talking about what a good idea it would be to check out his home, then wondering if Bea had a key. Tara called her. She didn’t, but she told us the address and where he hid one. He lived in Duluth, as does Kelly Taylor, on Abbott’s Bridge Road.

Victoria and Tara ordered Cracker Barrel cheeseburgers without the buns and I had a vegetable plate of fried okra, baked apples, carrots and broccoli.
 
My phone rang but the number wasn’t one my phone recognized.
 

“I’m changing planes,” Jack said. “It seems my departure from the Army is being brought into this.”