Termination Man: a novel (58 page)

“Yes,” she admitted. “It does.”

“And I know that you want to get out of here, too. You don't enjoy working for Craig Walker. Hell, you
couldn’t
enjoy working for him. A woman with your looks and talent. That’s no way to build a professional resume—working for a little one-person operation with no name recognition. I mean, if it was McKinsey or Ernst & Young, that would be different, of course. But who the hell has heard of
Craig Walker Consulting
?”

“Do you have a better idea?” she asked, knowing that he almost certainly would have a better idea for her.

“As a matter of fact I do,” he said. “TP Automotive could use you.  How would you like to manage a division?” he asked. “I can arrange that, you know.”

Now she was getting somewhere. As much as it hurt for her to admit it to herself, Shawn had made a correct assessment on the nature of her job with Craig Walker Consulting. Craig paid her well enough (
though not nearly what she was worth to him—and not a fraction of what it would cost him to replace her
); but the job was a dead-end gig over the long term. Craig’s was a fly-by-night company, not an organization where she could build a future. As Shawn had noted, Craig Walker Consulting was essentially a one-person operation, with Craig as the sole proprietor and decision-maker. And her boss had demonstrated lately that his judgment was not as sound as she had once believed it to be.

Moreover, she believed that Craig—like all men—would turn out to be inherently fickle. How long would it be before a he decided to replace her with someone younger, more attractive, and more compliant to his wishes? As a matter of fact, her presence in this bed with Shawn more or less doomed her employment relationship with Craig. Craig was not a man who took betrayal lightly; and there was no denying that she had betrayed him. In more ways than one.

She noticed that Shawn had been silent for a while. He
was
holding something back from her. She nudged him:

“Shawn, what’s up?”

“I’ve got something to take care of tonight,” he said.

“Something more important than me?” She ran a hand along the length of her thigh, reminding him of what he would be leaving behind in this hotel room.

To her surprise, Shawn’s immediate response was to sit up and get out of bed. He was kneeling on the floor, tying his shoes, before he finally gave her an answer.

“Yes,” he said. “Tonight, dear, what I’ve got to do is even more important than you.

Shawn Myers waited in the parking lot of the Peach Factory for Nick King to show up. The digital clock readout on the dash of the Audi reported the time as 9:47 p.m.
Where was that idiot?

Shawn watched a woman walk across the parking lot toward the employees’ entrance with a gym bag in tow. The woman was an obvious dancer. She was wearing jeans and a parka now, but in a few minutes she would doubtlessly be transformed into one of the fantasy girls that the Peach Factory was so famous for: a cheerleader, a schoolgirl in a plaid skirt, a policewoman…the possibilities were endless.

These thoughts did not arouse his imagination as they ordinarily would. After his triple-play hotel room encounter with Claire, his libido was fully sated for once. But there was another, larger factor that prevented him from taking his usual pleasure at the anticipation of the strippers:
He had explicitly lied to his father, and in the presence of Bernie.

There was no going back now—not that going back had ever been an option. Neither his father nor Bernie would make themselves accessories to murder, he was sure. They had backed him on the Tina Shields problem fifteen years ago for the same reason that they had backed him on the Alyssa Chalmers issue: The evidence against him was flimsy; and the two older men could justify allowing him the benefit of a doubt. (
Even though both of them likely knew—or strongly suspected—that he had raped Tina Shields and assaulted Alyssa Chalmers.
)

But murder was something else entirely. It left no room for ambiguity. Ohio was a death penalty state, and there was no statute of limitations for murder. Donna Chalmers and her daughter might have already set in motion a chain reaction that would eventually put him in the gas chamber.

Unless he took immediate and decisive action.
He recalled what Bernie had said in the meeting this morning: He had talked about mobilizing every available resource to protect the company.

Well, he intended to mobilize every available resource to protect his own life. He had turned the matter over in his head many times since first seeing the news report, and he had decided:
Donna Chalmers would have to die—and her daughter, too.
Their personal links to his mistakes made them liabilities that he could not leave open. They would have to be eliminated. With Donna and Alyssa gone, the Porter woman would likely see the writing on the wall, and go back to worrying about factories that belched too many contaminants into the atmosphere. She would never admit it, but the consecutive deaths of Tina Shields, Donna, and Alyssa would scare the hell out of her. She would assume that she was next.

Shawn realized that it wasn’t so simple as that: The Columbus P.D. might be able to attribute Tina Shields’s untimely departure from the world of the living to the woman’s lifestyle. The deaths of Donna and Alyssa would be something else. Here was a hardworking single mother and her daughter—who was probably on the fucking honor roll at her high school. Explanations would be demanded in the aftermath of their killings. And he would top the list of suspects who had a motive to kill Ms. Chalmers and her daughter.

Which was where Nick came in.
The police would not suspect UP&S’s ex-loading dock flunky of murder.

As if his thoughts had summoned the man, Nick King’s vehicle pulled into the parking space beside Shawn’s own. The music blaring from his stereo was audible even with the pickup truck’s windows closed—even through the windows of the Audi. Nick was still living the life of a high school hoodlum.

“Shawn, my man!” Nick said, tapping on the window of the Audi.  

Shawn was climbing out of the Audi. “You’re late,” he said. “We were supposed to meet at 9:30.”

Immediately after the meeting with Bernie and Kurt, Shawn had sent Nick a short and urgent email message:
“Urgent business. Another job for you. Meet me tonight at PF, 9:30.”
Although PF could have multiple interpretations for society at large, Shawn knew that between him and Nick, it could have only one meaning.

“Okay, so I’m a few minutes late,” Nick said. “What about it?” Nick seemed to be spoiling for a fight tonight.

Shawn kept his temper in check, focusing on the fact that he needed Nick—needed him very badly, in fact.
That’s what happens when you let circumstances get so out of control
, he told himself.
You become dependent on idiots like this.

“Let’s go inside,” Shawn said. “We’ll talk in there.”

The interior of the Peach Factory was noisy and crowded as usual. As they took a seat near the chaos of the stage, Shawn reflected that this was an extremely malapropos place to be planning a murder. But on the other hand, the Peach Factory was like a nexus that connected all the elements that had led him to this step: his lust, his friendship with Nick, his desire for a fantasy-like escape from the incessant boredom of the automotive industry. Perhaps this wasn't such a bad place to plan the solution to the Donna and Alyssa Chalmers problem, after all.

Shawn told Nick what he had in mind. His new friend—if he could possibly call Nick that—was less than enthusiastic.

“Whoa, whoa,” Nick said. “Ain’t nobody going to get too riled up when a pill-popping barfly like Tina Shields takes a swim in the river and washes up on the bank. But this other woman—man—that’s hard-core. And her daughter? How old is this girl?”

“Fifteen.”

Nick whistled and shook his head. “So you’re asking me to dispose of a woman and her under-aged daughter, all so we can cover up what happened to Tina Shields? Don’t make a lot of sense to me, Shawn.” Nick paused briefly to admire the gyrations of the dancer currently onstage. Then he said: “No, man. Count me out.”

Shawn reached across the table and grabbed Nick by the collar. “You don’t get it, dumbass!” he hissed. “This is much bigger than Tina Shields, and it’s getting bigger every minute. If we don’t take care of Donna and Alyssa, then Tina Shields becomes much more than a routine case of a ‘pill-popping barfly taking a swim in the river.’ What happens is that Tina Shields becomes part of a conspiracy. Do you know that word?”

“I know that word, you silver-spoon son-of-a-bitch.” Nick shoved Shawn’s hand away. “And if you ever touch me like that again, you’ll be the one taking a swim in the river.”

Shawn took a quick glance around him. Even in the melee of the strip bar, his argument with Nick was attracting attention. Luckily, there were no club bouncers in sight. But two middle-aged men in business suits were staring at them from an adjacent table. Shawn glared at the two men and they looked away.

“Excuse me,” he said placatingly to Nick. “I’m sorry, okay?”
You have to remember that Nick King is nothing but a tool
, he thought. He also reminded himself that he had experienced much the same misgivings when he had first contemplated killing the mother and daughter pair—even though that didn't change the fact that it had to be done. “Although it might not be apparent to you, Nick, I’m actually trying to look out for both of us here.”

“You son-of-a-bitch.” Nick’s face was bright red. “I can’t believe you fucking grabbed my shirt like that.”

“Get over it, okay? Or before long you’ll have a bull queer grabbing you in the shower at Lucasville. If you don’t end up in that little room where they stick a needle in your arm.”

Lucasville was a town in the southern, rural tip of the state. This was the location of the
Southern Ohio Correctional Facility
. The maximum-security prison in Lucasville housed Ohio’s death row inmates. Shawn had learned about Lucasville back in 1997, on the then nascent World Wide Web. He had murdered Jill Johnson and Carla Marsh late in the previous year; and the police were pestering him about the rape of Tina Shields. Problems like that will prompt a man to conduct research on his state’s penitentiary system. Until recently, he had believed that the personal relevance of such information was long past.

“Okay,” Nick said finally. He pointed an index finger at Shawn. “But don’t ever do something like that again, or you’ll be the one I fucking kill.”

“Fine,” Shawn said. “Fine. Now let’s talk about what we need to do.”  

Using the passwords that I’d obtained from Netbit Sniffer, I had made a routine of reading Shawn Myers’s email on a daily basis.

So far, most of what I had seen did little to help me protect Donna and Alyssa, or to guess the next move that I could anticipate from TP Automotive. Shawn’s email inbox contained spammy messages from several porn sites of which he was apparently a paid subscriber. They were mostly vanilla stuff—nothing that would lead to criminal charges. When I saw the messages, I couldn’t help reflecting that many people—myself included—would be a lot happier now if Shawn Myers had been able to content himself with porn.

But that wasn’t the way things had worked out. And I had to try to piece the situation together, assembling a few facts and many suppositions from multiple sources.

I laid out the elements that I had gathered so far:

Shawn was almost certainly guilty of rape—and probably guilty of murder.

I now had to assume that Kurt Myers knew the extent of his son’s guilt. Kurt was willing to bend and manipulate the law in order to protect his son. He was also willing to use the implied threat of violence, as I had discovered myself. But men make all varieties of threats when they are cornered. Was Kurt Myers willing to step over the line that separates threats from the actual deeds? Was the
vice president of strategic planning
willing to place himself among the company of common thugs?

When I ran Netbit Sniffer, I had also acquired Shawn’s access to the TP Automotive website in Detroit. Of course, there was a public portion of the site that anyone could access. This contained the usual public relations fluff: glowing accounts of the company’s financial performance, and its management’s commitment to responsible corporate citizenship. I was interested in the non-public sections, which were protected by a firewall. Using Shawn’s login and password, I went poking around, not really sure of what I was looking for, when I happened upon the identity of the giant who had been with Kurt and Bernie that night outside of Donna’s house.

Adam Seitz looked far less intimidating in his photo on the TP Automotive intranet site, smiling and clad in a suit and tie. The caption beneath the photo listed him as an assistant manager in the TP Automotive corporate security department. This gave me a much-needed dose of relief. When I had seen Adam the other night, dressed like a mafia hit man, I had begun to think that TP Automotive might be connected to organized crime. Although organized criminal elements prefer to launder money through smaller, less conspicuous businesses, my worst fears weren’t outside the realm of possibility.