Replaceable: An Alan Lamb Thriller (3 page)

“You’ll think I’m crazy.”

“Why don’t you tell me anyway. I’ve heard some crazy stories over the years that turned out to be true. I try to come into this kind of thing with an open mind. So try me.”

“It’s ridiculous really.
Impossible
, actually. That’s why I didn’t bother telling anyone about it. I can hardly believe it myself.”

“The man at the door. You recognized him, didn’t you?”

Sitka bit his lower lip and nodded.

“Who was the man that assaulted you?”

Fear crept back into Sitka’s eyes. “You won’t believe me.”

“If you aren’t honest with me, I can’t help you. Now, who was the man at the door that assaulted you?”

“It was me,” Howard Sitka said. “When I opened the door, the man standing on the other side of it was
me
.”

“Pillar of the community or not,” Defries said as Alan exited the interrogation room, “the guy’s gone batshit crazy. That blow to the head must’ve knocked him silly.”

Deputy Defries might not have been wet behind the ears, but he hadn’t spent as much time as Alan or Detective Pete Weathers had when it came to studying the smaller nuances of human behavior.

Weathers was shrewd, Alan had to give him that, and it wasn’t lost on him that Weathers was studying him now.

“You don’t think so, do you?” Weathers asked.

“What’s that?”

“That he’s crazy.”

“What was your impression of Sitka when you were interviewing him?”

Weathers shrugged. “I saw a guy that
believes
he’s telling the truth. Of course, he didn’t go all Twilight Zone on me about being clubbed by a carbon copy of himself either. But I didn’t catch any overt signs of deception. You and I both know that the truth comes in many shades.”

“Not for me,” Alan said. “I see it all in black and white.”

“That makes you fortunate. Just because he could pass a polygraph doesn’t mean he’s speaking the gospel truth.”

“Is the D.A. bringing charges?”

“Hell yes. Sitka’s respected in the community, so they’ll have him in front of a judge first thing tomorrow morning. Set bail. That could go either way. Personally, I don’t think the guy’s a flight risk, but he’s got enough money in the bank, he could hightail it out of Dodge if he wanted to. Given his stature, he’s probably part of the Good Old Boy’s Club, if you know what I mean. Wouldn’t surprise me if they release him on his own recognizance.”

Alan didn’t like to see an innocent man take the rap for something he didn’t do. His radar, his sixth sense or whatever you wanted to call it, was rarely wrong. Given the evidence, and depending on whether the D.A. was the overzealous type, they weren’t going to let Sitka walk. Not based solely on Alan’s intuition that the man was innocent.

“Anything else we can do for you, Agent Lamb?”

“I’ll need to speak with the wife. And employees of the bank.”

“I’ll get you Nancy Sitka’s address. My suggestion, and you can take it or leave it, would be for you to interview her at home. Not much reason to haul her down to the station. I’ve already interviewed everyone that was on duty that day at the bank. Not a one of them believes Sitka would do something like that. If you ask me, it’s what I would call complex stupidity.”

“Complex stupidity?”

“Yeah, when a criminal tries so hard to be clever that they end up making the dumbest mistakes.”

“I like that. ‘Complex stupidity.’”

Weathers handed Alan his card. “Keep in touch, yeah?”

“I’ll do that.”

Alan phoned Nancy Sitka shortly after leaving the Richmond County Sheriff’s Department. He told her that he realized it was getting late, but asked if there was any way she would be willing to speak with him. Understandably, she was badly shaken in light of recent events, but she reluctantly agreed to see him.

He interviewed her at home. She was a frazzled mess. Alan didn’t blame her. She was fifty-one, with brunette hair that was only beginning to make the slow transition to a metallic gray. She offered Alan a cup of coffee after she had shown him into the house and gestured for him to sit down in one of the two living room recliners.

Alan’s initial impression was that Nancy Sitka seemed like a kind and down-to-Earth woman. In some way that Alan couldn’t pinpoint, she reminded him of his own mother.

Nancy’s sister, Charlene, was keeping her company at the house. When Alan began the interview, she excused herself and disappeared into the kitchen.

The story Nancy Sitka gave him didn’t deviate from her previous statements. She maintained that she had arrived home from work shortly after five o’ clock on the evening of Wednesday, the 21st of August, and had found her husband bound and gagged in their bedroom. Duct tape covered his mouth; his wrists and ankles had been bound with the same material. Something she mentioned to Alan, which she hadn’t mentioned to the other investigators, was how delicate of a job it had been removing the tape, especially the tape covering her husband’s mouth.

“I almost couldn’t do it,” she told Alan. “Once that stuff is stuck on something, it isn’t meant to come off.”

When Alan was finished, he thanked her for her time. As he was getting ready to leave, she said, “You spoke to him already?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Do you think he did it?”

“It’s not up to me.”

“My husband isn’t capable of something like that. I know him, and he just wouldn’t do it.”

Alan wanted to tell her that he believed her, that after speaking with Howard Sitka he had come away with the feeling that the man was innocent.

But he didn’t. He simply nodded, thanked her again, and walked back to his car.

He spent a restless night at a Days Inn, tossing and turning for most of it. He was accustomed to travel, but had never grown comfortable with sleeping in a place that wasn’t his home. His room at the Patriot Inn wasn’t exactly a place you would call home, but it was the closest thing to it he had these days. After a string of failed relationships, he had convinced himself that he wasn’t destined to settle down. He had been engaged once, years ago, but that had ended when Alan had opted to take the job with the FBI. His last girlfriend, whom he had dated for seven months before she had broken it off, had told him that he made a better friend than a boyfriend. At some point, Alan had taken that sentiment to heart. He hadn’t given up, at least not purposely, but he wasn’t actively searching either.

Lucy, God bless her hippie heart, had tried to convince him to sign up for Match.com or eHarmony, had even gone so far as to promise to create and manage his profile for him, but so far he had been reluctant to acquiesce.

“How open would you be to a tarot card reading?” Lucy had asked him once. “I’ve got this friend that’s really good at it. It can be very revealing.
Plus
, she’s single.”

Alan had dismissed the idea. The last thing he needed was Lucy sticking her fingers into his love life.

After managing two hours of sleep, Alan awoke at 6:00 A.M. on Friday morning. He went to the local Denny’s and drank coffee until Mellencott Bank opened and then met with Howard Sitka’s secretary, Rosemary Jeffers. She confirmed that Sitka had arrived at the bank promptly at 8 o’clock on the morning of the 21st. When Alan asked her if she had noticed anything unusual about his behavior that day, she shook her head, but then her eyes widened as though a lightbulb had just gone off in her brain.

“Come to think of it,” she said, “there
was
something a little odd. I don’t know if you’d even call it
odd
per se. It’s probably nothing, but usually Howard makes his morning rounds, stopping by to chat with everyone for a few minutes. I think he does it to get the general sense of morale, but don’t quote me on that. But I remember that day specifically because he didn’t do it. He just holed up in his office for most of the day. I remember stopping by his office to ask him a question, and…well, it was kind of funny really.”

“Funny how?”

“Howard has been here forever. He knows everything. I’ve never asked him a question he didn’t have the answer to. But when I stopped by to ask him a question about a particular client, he just stared at me for a long time and then said he’d get back to me. It was strange. He’d never done that before. Usually, he’d give me the answer lickety-split. The thing is, it was kind of an easy question. I even knew the answer myself, but I just wanted to double check. You know how you can know something, but then you start to doubt yourself, and ask just to make sure? That’s basically what it was. But when I asked Howard about it, he looked downright stumped. Almost like I’d caught him with his hand in the cookie jar.”

Alan thanked Rosemary Jeffers for her time. As insignificant as her observations about Howard Sitka seemed, he committed them to memory. Sometimes the smallest detail made all the difference.

Alan’s phone rang during the drive back to Atlanta. It was Pete Weathers.

“They located Sitka’s Cadillac,” Weathers said. “A uniform found it abandoned in an underground parking structure seven blocks from the bank. That explains why we couldn’t locate it sooner. Nothing unusual. No money either. Dusted for prints. Took a DNA sample from the straw of a McDonald’s soda cup. We just got the results back for those and the ones the forensics guys pulled off the vault.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. The ones they pulled from the vault match Sitka’s and those of numerous other people employed by the bank. Prints in the car match Howard and Nancy Sitka’s.”

Alan had to admit to being more than a little crestfallen. He had hoped his assumption of Sitka’s innocence had been correct; had hoped that evidence would eventually back up his assumption.

Can’t win ‘em all,
Alan thought, but it didn’t do much to improve his mood.

“Except…”

“Except what?”

“They found one set that didn’t match anyone’s. Not exactly anyway. On both the vault and the steering wheel of the Cadillac.”

“You ran them against the database?”

“Yeah, we did,” Weathers said. “That’s the funny thing. They came back as Howard Sitka’s.”

Even over the phone, Alan could sense the detective’s bewilderment.

“How’s that?”

“You got me. The examiner said the prints are close. Not just close, but almost indistinguishable. Said he’d never seen anything like it. If he hadn’t been paying close enough attention, he said he might have missed the differences. Listen, Agent, it might be that the examiner has it wrong. If those prints aren’t from the same man, then they’re similar enough that they fooled the machines.”

“What about the DNA samples?”

“Don’t have those back yet. Sounds like it’ll be another day or two.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Can’t make any rhyme or reason out of it. My guess is that the expert’s off his game. We’re having them sent out for a second opinion. The examiner seemed to think they were too similar to be a coincidence.”

“I hate coincidences,” Alan said. And that was true. He hadn’t always, but he had seen enough of them during his years in law enforcement, that he had learned to hate them.

“My thoughts exactly. Any ideas?”

“Not yet.” But the wheels in his head were turning.