Surest Poison, The (13 page)

“Mike told me you served over there.”

“Yeah.
I went in right out of high school, took Ranger and Airborne training and
was sent to Vietnam as a Special Forces replacement.”

He told her how it started when he was
assigned as liaison with a detachment of Military Intelligence personnel
operating under the guise of a Special Forces unit. Their mission was to
plan and direct cross-border intelligence operations into Cambodia, using
South Vietnamese civilians as agents. The operation gathered valuable
information on enemy movements and supply routes, allowing U.S. commanders
to thwart several Vietcong attacks. But key agents started disappearing like
balloons around a dart board. An investigation showed the problem occurred
in an area managed by a particular Vietnamese agent. The man was
interrogated, administered truth serum, and given a lie detector test. The
results showed him guilty. He soon vanished, never to be heard of again.

“What happened?” Jaz asked.

“After an investigation, the Army charged
several officers and enlisted men with murder. I got caught up in the
hysteria. They interrogated me for hours. I heard some of the guilty parties
whispering threats against anybody who talked to the investigators, but I
couldn’t tell them anything because I hadn’t been clued in on the plot.”

“How did it wrap up?”

“The charges were dropped when the CIA
refused to testify, but a lot of careers came to premature ends. Although I
was exonerated, it helped me decide to get out of the Army, get a degree,
and become a National Park Ranger.”

“Sounds like you got caught in a bad
spot.”

“Yeah.”
Sid tried to stretch his long legs as best he could. “It was too much like
my experience with the shooting that ended my Park Service career, and that
abortive drug sting in Lewisville. You think maybe I have a talent for being
in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

She turned her head and smiled. “You were
in the right place at the right time for me. But I know the feeling.
According to my mother, I spent several years in the wrong place.”

“Was that when you quit college?”

“Right.
I was playing basketball, and they brought in a new coach who changed
everything. I no longer felt that I fit in. I got angry, quit, and joined
the Air Force. It’s not the best choice when your mother’s an aristocratic
snob.”

Sid watched her face in the glow of the
dashboard lights, the pique in the curl of her lip, the rigid set of her
jaw. “Mike said your family disowned you.”

Her eyes cut toward him for an instant,
then returned to the road. “I was persona non grata at the mansion. To make
it even worse, as far as they were concerned, when I left the Air Force I
went into boxing. My former sergeant was a Golden Gloves champion. He became
my trainer. As you may have noticed, I’m pretty independent.”

“Agreed.
But things obviously worked out in the end.”

“The issue involved my mother more than
my dad. After she died in the early nineties, he was nearly killed in a car
wreck. I quit my job as a policewoman and moved back home to take care of
him. After he was well enough to work again, I returned to college to get my
degrees. I served as his assistant until he died.”

Sid thought about what she had said as
the conversation wound down. Now that he knew the whole story, he found a
lot to admire about her, not the least her tenacity.

A few minutes later, Jaz swung into a
parking spot in front of the small house in Ashland City. Bobby’s car sat in
the short driveway. In the yard next door, the jack-o-lanterns grinned as
though nothing was amiss. Jaz killed the lights and they walked up to the
house. Only a soft glow behind the draperies in the front window gave any
indication of life beyond the walls.

Noting a peephole in the front door, Sid
covered the lens as Jaz knocked.

After a minute or so, the door opened a
few inches. Bobby’s eyes, large and distrustful, appeared in the gap.

“Hello, Bobby,” Jaz said. “We need to
talk.”

“I can’t talk, Miss Jaz. And please don’t
come back again.”

He started to shut the door, but Sid
jammed his foot into the narrow space. “I’m Sidney Chance, Bobby,” he said,
pushing the door open. “I’m a friend of Jaz’s. I operate a private
investigation agency. It’s time for some answers, son.”

Bobby stepped back, fear twisting his
face. He looked a bit cowed by Sid’s size. As the visitors stepped into the
room, Connie and Little Bob appeared at the entrance to the kitchen. Jaz
closed the door behind her.

Bobby turned to his wife and son. “Get
back in the kitchen.”

“Stay.” Sid spoke in a commanding voice,
holding up a hand for emphasis. “It’s time for a family conference. Let’s
all sit down and get comfortable.”

Though he looked anything but
comfortable, Bobby moved over to a chair. He seemed unsure how to handle
this new large, dominating presence in the room.

Sid remained standing after the others
were seated. He had been playing it by ear up to this point, but the ploy
seemed to be working. Jaz sat in silence beside Connie, appearing engrossed
in his performance.

Sid stared into Bobby’s eyes. “Something
happened today. You refused to answer your grandmother’s calls, even hung up
on her once.”

“I told him he shouldn’t have done that,”
Connie said, her voice like a whisper.

Bobby sat with his arms folded, his lips
sealed.

Sid let his gaze move around his
audience. “Okay. Here’s the deal. All the indications are that this family
is in big trouble. Jaz and I are both private investigators and former
police officers. We can’t ignore the situation. If you don’t explain the
problem, we’ll have to report it to the police and let them take over. I
can’t predict how they’ll handle it.” He was quiet for a moment. “It’s your
choice.”

When Bobby said nothing, Connie spoke up.
“They grabbed Little Bob off the street this afternoon.”

A shocked look crossed Jaz’s face. “Who
did?”

“I don’t know. They drove him around for
about an hour,
then
let him out up the street.”

Sid looked at the boy and asked in a
gentle voice, “Could you describe the car?”

He
shrugged,
his face somber. “It was sort of new. Maybe a Dodge or something, I think.
It was black.”

“Did you see the license plate?”

“No, sir.”

Bobby finally spoke. “The man called when
I got home. He warned me not to talk to anybody. Next time they take Little
Bob, we’ll never see him again. He said don’t talk to Jasmine LeMieux. He
knew she’d been here.”

Jaz’s eyes widened. “How did—?”

“Somebody’s been watching, or they have a
contact around here.” Sid turned back to Bobby. “Have you been borrowing
money to pay gambling debts? Did they demand the money and you couldn’t pay
it back?”

Bobby’s mouth dropped open. “No, no,” he
protested. “I don’t owe
nobody
. Honest, I don’t.”

Sid wasn’t sure whether to believe him,
but he decided to let it drop. “Look, the only way we can fight this is to
find the perpetrator. You must know who he is.”

“I’m not sure,” Bobby said, hugging his
shoulders.

“What did he tell you not to talk about?”

Bobby shook his head, his eyes downcast.
“I won’t sign my boy’s death warrant.”

Sid saw his chances for coming up with
anything useable fading like a morning fog. But he decided to make one more
try. “You must have seen the man when they picked you up at the hamburger
shop.”

“I didn’t know the one who met me. They
blindfolded me before they took me to the man who made the threat. I’m
sorry, Mr. Chance, I won’t give them an excuse to hurt my family.”

18

When they were
back in the car, Jaz called Marie to tell her everyone was
okay,
she could relax and go on to bed. Little
Bob’s experience was left out of the conversation.

She turned to Sid. “I appreciate what you
did in there. It was a super job. He paid a lot more attention to you than
he would have to me.”

“I just wish it had produced some
positive results. We still don’t have anything to go on. Bobby is a scared,
confused young man. He’s a bit naïve and not sophisticated enough to realize
his best hope is to get police protection.”

In the glow of the dash lights, he could
see the doubt on her face. “This is a small town and a small county, Sid.
How much protection would he get? What would it take to get it?”

Sid stared into the darkness as she
turned toward Ashland City’s Main Street. “We need more background on Bobby.
Where do his parents live?”

“His mother left them when he was twelve.
His dad died several years ago. That’s one reason Marie has always been so
protective of him.”

“Check with her when you get home and see
if she recalls anybody who had a grudge against Bobby, anybody who might
have a reason to threaten him.”

“I’ll try, but I’d think she would have
said something by now.”

As they headed down Ashland City Highway,
Jaz slowed the Lexus and backed off from a car that swerved just ahead of
them.

Sid stared at the taillights that now
hugged the shoulder of the road but pulled away fast. It was a late model
Chrysler. The light over the license plate was out, but he saw a bumper
sticker with the sabertooth tiger logo of Nashille’s NHL hockey team, the
Predators.

“That character is either drunk or
stupid,” he said. “He almost clipped us.”

“I vote for both.” Jaz’s tone mirrored
her disgust. “He came up beside us moving really slow,
then
gunned it.”

Sid considered that for a moment. The man
who called Bobby at home mentioned Jaz by name. He knew she had been a
visitor at the house. Could this guy be somebody who had followed them from
Bobby’s street to see where she was headed, or who was with her?

“Did you get a good look at who was in
that car?” he asked.

“No. The windows had a dark tint. Why?”

He told her the question that had crossed
his mind.

“You think they’re following me now?
Could it be the same people who tailed you?”

“Not the same car,
for sure.
And it may be
nothing. I don’t want to start getting paranoid, but I think it’s time you
started watching your back.
Wouldn’t be a bad idea to
start carrying your piece.”

She pointed to the handbag on the
floorboard beside her foot. “I never leave home without it. Well, rarely.
Are you going to start taking your own advice?”

“Probably.”

“Maybe we’d better take a closer look at
this guy,” Jaz said.

She sped up in an attempt to catch him,
but the suspect car had already disappeared down the southbound ramp into a
stream of traffic by the time Briley Parkway came into view.

“If it’s somebody interested in us,” Sid
said, “I’m sure we’ll meet again.”

Jaz swung onto the northbound lane toward
Madison.

It wasn’t
until
she got home that Jaz
thought about the man John mentioned who had asked if she was in that
morning. She got out the surveillance tape from the front gate camera and
ran it back until she found the car involved. Normally, the tape would have
provided a good image of the driver, but in this case he had a black cap
pulled low on his forehead and large sunglasses. The only identifying
feature was a dimple in his chin.

Since the car backed out of the driveway
entrance, the license plate was not visible. One fact struck her, however.
The car was a green Ford. It could have been a twin of the one that followed
them out of Ashland City on Thursday.

19

Sid began his
run Saturday morning at sunrise, although he’d been in bed hardly long
enough to call it a night. A book of fascinating cases written by a veteran
PI had kept him turning pages way past the time he should have given up.
After his usual routine of shower, breakfast, coffee and newspaper, he set
out to follow through on what he and Jaz had agreed. He called the farm
supply store where Bobby Wallace worked. The woman who answered told him it
was Bobby’s day off. As soon as Jerry Jackson arrived to beef up his
security system, Sid climbed into his pickup truck and headed back to
Ashland City. He kept an eye out for any sign of a tail but saw no one.

The store fronted on Main Street not far
beyond the center of town. Small tractors lined up at one side of the
parking area like race cars awaiting the checkered flag. Sid walked inside.
He took in the artful display of power tools and small farm
implements,
then approached the counter where a
young woman with boyish brown hair and a pixy smile greeted him.