THE SECRET OF CHEROKEE COVE (10 page)

“
If
he’s missing.” Nix thought about his meeting with Alexander Quinn the day before. Quinn had intimated that Merritt Cortland could still be alive, but Quinn always had an agenda. Even if he knew for a fact that Cortland was dead, he would lie about it if it suited his own interests.

The real question was, what did Alexander Quinn want from Nix? What was his skin in the game?

One of his fellow detectives, Delilah Brand, entered the office yawning, arching one dark eyebrow at the sight of Dana sitting in front of Nix’s desk. “Morning,” she said, making faces at Nix behind Dana’s back.

“Delilah, have you and Dana met?”

“Briefly, at the engagement party,” Delilah answered, smiling as Dana turned with a nod of greeting. “What’s the latest on the chief?”

“I called him last night and he said the physical therapist gave him the go-ahead to leave on crutches. So he thinks the doctor will finally spring him this morning.” Dana checked her watch. “Of course, if I know anything about hospitals, that means he’ll get out sometime this afternoon.”

“Sure glad Laney has to deal with him and not me,” Delilah murmured, then looked up at Dana, apology in her eyes. “Sorry.”

“No need to apologize,” Dana said with a grin. “I wouldn’t want to have to deal with him, either.”

“Anything new on the investigation?” Delilah directed the question to Nix. He didn’t have to ask what investigation. Everyone in the office took the attempt on the chief’s life personally.

“We’re following a couple of different leads.” He summarized where they’d gotten in the investigation. “Don’t suppose you know anything about Blake Culpepper?”

“Just that he’s trouble,” Delilah answered. “I’m from Smoky Ridge, you see,” she explained to Dana. “Smoky Ridge families and Cherokee Cove families don’t mingle much. Hell, if we followed the example of our ancestors, Nix and I should be mortal enemies.”

“Why’s that?”

Nix shrugged. “Hell if we know. Some of these family feuds go so far back, nobody remembers why we hate each other.”

Dana looked thoughtful, but she didn’t comment.

About thirty minutes later, Nix called the file room to see if anyone had arrived. The clerk, Robby Alvarez, had just clocked in and told Nix to come on down, so Nix and Dana headed to the other side of the headquarters building, where the department kept its old files.

“Everything prior to 1980 is stored off-site,” Nix told her as they entered the file room. “But the file on your parents’ accident should be here.”

Dana let out a low whistle as she looked around the relatively small room. It was set up like a library, with tall shelves of file boxes separated by narrow aisles. Being relatively new to the police department, Nix had rarely had occasion to venture into the file room. A good thing, too, since the cramped space made him feel enormous and clumsy.

“How are they filed? By year? Alphabetically?”

“Alphabetically,” he answered. “So Massey should be somewhere in the middle of all this.”

Dana went straight to the middle aisle and started scanning the labels on the file boxes. Nix started at the other end of the aisle. They found the
M
’s near the middle and started going through the boxes.

“Damn it,” Dana said a few minutes later, slapping her hand against the side of the box she was looking through. “I just went from Martin to Masters without finding any files labeled
Massey.
”

“That’s not right,” Nix said with a frown, looking over her shoulder at the open box.

She moved aside to let him take a look. He went through the files slowly, in case a couple of folders had stuck together, but she was right. There was no file for the Massey accident. “I wonder if it was archived already.”

“I thought you said everything from 1980 forward was here.”

“I thought it was.” He walked out to the clerk’s desk, where Alvarez was typing on his computer. “Alvarez, if I were looking for a file on a fatal MVA from fifteen years ago, would I look here or in the off-site archives?”

Alvarez looked at him as if he were stupid. “Everything from 1980 forward is in there,” he said, waving at the file room. “We won’t move any more files out of there until we run out of room again. I figure that’ll be in about four years, based on the current crime rate.”

“Has anyone checked out any of the files recently?”

“Let me see.” Alvarez tapped the keyboard rapidly. “Detective Brand has a couple of files out on meth dealers in the area, and Detective Calhoun is looking at complaints filed against militia groups.”

“What about the chief?” Dana asked. “Has he pulled any files recently?”

“He asked about a file a few days ago, but he was going to come look for it the morning after his engagement party.” Alvarez looked up at Nix suddenly. “He was interested in an old MVA, too.” He glanced at Dana, saw her visitor badge and added, “‘MVA’ is ‘motor vehicle accident,’ ma’am.”

“Thank you,” Dana said, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth.

“Alvarez, this is the chief’s sister, Dana Massey. Deputy U.S. marshal Massey.”

Alvarez looked mortified. “Sorry, ma’am. Didn’t mean to condescend.”

“No offense taken,” she assured him. “Is there any sort of file index that lists the files kept here or in the off-site archive?” she asked.

Damn, Nix should have thought of that. “You keep an index on this computer, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.” Alvarez called up the database. “What names, exactly?”

“Calvin Massey and Tallie Massey.”

Alvarez looked at her. “Kinfolk?”

“My parents,” she answered bluntly.

Alvarez shot her a look of sympathy. “Oh. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.” She nodded toward the computer monitor. “What else do you need?”

“The exact date.”

Dana gave it to him, and Alvarez typed in the information. After about twenty seconds, he turned to look at them, his expression puzzled. “It’s not here.”

“Not there?”

Alvarez shook his head. “There’s no sign of any file on an MVA with fatalities on that date.”

Chapter Ten

Dana’s gut coiled into a tight knot. “You’re telling me that there’s no record of my parents’ deaths?”

“Not in these files.”

“That’s not possible.” She looked at Nix. “There had to be some sort of record of their deaths. I had a death certificate and I think there was probably a letter from the police department, affirming that the death was an accident, or we wouldn’t have been able to get the money from their insurance policies.” She rubbed her temples, fighting off the first twinge of a tension headache. “How could there not be a file on the accident?”

“Are you sure it happened in the Bitterwood jurisdiction, ma’am?” Alvarez asked.

“Their car went off Purgatory Bridge.”

Alvarez blew out a long breath. “Yeah, that’s Bitterwood jurisdiction, all right.” He turned back to the computer and typed in something else.

Dana peered over his shoulder and saw that he’d used a span of dates covering the day before and the day after the accident. “What are you doing?”

“I thought maybe someone had misspelled the names on input, or maybe it happened close to midnight and someone entered the wrong date, but I’m not coming up with any files on or around that date.” He looked almost as aggrieved as she felt.

“Is that unusual?” Nix asked.

Alvarez shot a worried look at him. “Very unusual. You can say what you want about the previous chief, but he made sure the record-keeping around here was good. We don’t throw away anything, even when we probably should.”

Nix traded gazes with Dana. He looked as if he wanted to give her a hug, and at the moment, she didn’t think she’d have protested if he’d tried. But he apparently took their pact to heart, for he kept his hands to himself and turned back to Alvarez. “Can you take a look and see if there’s any chance of a computer glitch or database error? I’ll check back later.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And check with the Ridge County Sheriff’s Department. They might have records, if for some reason they also answered the call that night.”

With a nod, Alvarez turned back to the computer, hammering the keys as if he took personal offense at the system’s failure to produce what they had asked for.

Nix flattened his hand against Dana’s back. “Come on.” He gave a nod toward the door, urging her out. In the corridor, he lowered his voice. “If there’s been a clerical error, Alvarez will find it.”

“But you don’t think it’s a clerical error, do you?” she asked.

He must have realized he was still touching her back, for he pulled his hand away quickly, flexing his fingers at his side. “No, I don’t.”

“Then what do you think it is?”

“I’m not sure.”

She grabbed his hand and gave it a sharp tug. His gaze met hers, blazing with heat. She took a step closer to him as if drawn by a magnet.

He pulled his hand away and stepped back, though he didn’t drop his gaze. Tension crackled between them, but she made herself retreat, as if distance could snap the tug of attraction ensnaring them.

She took a shaky breath and tried to focus her thoughts. “We’re talking about my parents’ deaths, Nix. If you have a theory about why the file is missing, I damned well have a right to know.”

“It’s only a theory,” he warned.

“Understood.”

He nodded toward the end of the corridor and started walking, forcing her to catch up. His voice low, he said, “You know about the corruption in this department. It’s why your brother is chief of police now.”

“Of course. But that corruption is fairly recent, isn’t it?”

“We’re not sure how far back it goes,” he admitted.

“But fifteen years?”

“It could. We don’t know. There might still be officers on the force who are on the take. It’s an ongoing investigation.”

The image of Doyle, bleeding and injured in his wrecked truck on a dark mountain road, flashed through her head, making her feel sick. “What if Briar’s friend was right? What if my parents’ wreck wasn’t an accident?”

With a soft exhalation, Nix stopped in the middle of the hallway and turned to face her. “Then it’s possible someone covered up the evidence that would prove it was deliberate.”

She’d half hoped he’d tell her she was being paranoid. But the look on his face was anything but skeptical. He didn’t just believe the rumor might be true, she realized.

He believed it was likely.

Her knees suddenly felt like jelly. She stepped backward until her spine flattened against the wall, letting it prop her up.

Nix took a couple of steps toward her, stopping just short of touching her. “You okay?”

“Yeah. I just—” She blew out a long breath. “It was hard enough knowing someone killed my brother David on purpose. But my parents, too? And almost Doyle, as well?”

“We don’t know for sure—”

“You think it’s true,” she said. “I can tell you do.”

He dropped his gaze. “You see too damned much.”

She made herself stand up straight, relieved that the temporary trembling in her limbs had dissipated. “So how do we prove it?”

His gaze snapped up to meet hers. “Don’t you think you’re a little too emotionally involved in this investigation already?”

Part of her knew he was right, but she’d be damned if she’d back off and let someone else find out what had happened to her parents fifteen years ago. Their deaths had changed everything for her and her brothers. Everything. Maybe David wouldn’t have gone to Sanselmo if her parents were still alive. Maybe they’d have talked him out of it the way she hadn’t.

“You can’t leave me out of this investigation now,” she said.

He looked at her as if he was inclined to do exactly that. But as she steeled herself to argue, he finally shook his head. “I probably should, but you’d just go around me and make my job that much harder.”

She managed a smile. “You’re coming to know me so well.”

“But the next step, I have to take alone.” He gestured for her to continue walking with him.

“What step is that?”

“If there’s anyone who’d remember that accident, it’s the former chief. Before his retirement, he’d been approaching forty years on the force, first as a patrol officer, then up the ladder.”

“Was he already the chief at the time of the accident?”

“I believe he might have been. Either way, he’ll remember.” He looked at her, a warning in his expression. “But he’s not going to talk to the sister of his successor, so you’ll have to sit this one out.”

She hated to be left out of any facet of the investigation, but Nix was already accommodating her far more than most local cops would be willing to do. “Okay. I can find something to do with my time.”

He gave her a suspicious look. “Such as?”

She just smiled.

“I can’t come riding up on my Harley every day,” he warned with a quirk of his eyebrows.

“You have me mixed up with a fairy-tale princess,” she said. “I can slay my own dragons.”

“Be careful,” he warned as she detoured toward the exit. He followed her to the door. “Some of the dragons around here don’t play fair.”

She flashed him a grin. “Neither do I.”

He was still watching from the doorway, his brow furrowed, as she drove away.

* * *

F
ORMER
B
ITTERWOOD
CHIEF
of police Derek Albertson had resigned from the force to escape the shame of being fired, but after the last two men he’d installed as chief of detectives turned out to be criminals, his options had been limited. As far as Nix and the other detectives knew, the chief was innocent of corruption himself, but it was hard for the man to justify keeping his job as top cop when he’d failed to root out the corruption in his own inner circle.

Since his retirement, Albertson had kept mostly to himself, spending most of his time at his modest house on Pinedale Road, just north of Main Street. His wife had died of cancer a few years earlier, so when Nix arrived shortly before eleven that morning, only the chief and an aging bluetick hound greeted him when he knocked on the front door.

Albertson’s eyes narrowed at the sight of him. “What do you want?”

“I’m looking into a cold case,” Nix answered, not seeing any point in polite chitchat, since Albertson showed no signs of welcome. “An MVA from about fifteen years ago, involving a couple of tourists.”

Albertson’s eyes narrowed further. “Tourists?”

“Well, actually, the wife was a former Bitterwood native. Tallie Cumberland.”

Albertson’s eyes were slits. “What’s this really about? Did Massey send you here?”

“Chief Massey doesn’t know I’m investigating his parents’ deaths.”

“Why
are
you?”

Nix cleared his throat. “You’ve heard about the chief’s accident?”

Albertson nodded. He stepped away from the door but left it open, which Nix read as a tacit invitation to enter.

Nix let the hound dog sniff his pants legs and, finally, the back of his hand. The hound seemed to approve, wandering off to the corner of the small living room, where he picked up a rawhide bone, settled on the floor and started gnawing.

Albertson had already dropped into a well-worn recliner that faced an ancient television. The picture was on—a judge show, Nix saw—but the volume was muted.

Nix sat on the lumpy sofa next to the recliner. “The chief’s brakes were tampered with.”

Albertson’s gaze slid away from the muted television and met his. “Really.”

“You don’t sound surprised.”

“Nothing surprises me anymore,” Albertson muttered.

“Do you know anything about it?”

Albertson shot Nix a hard look. “Is this an official interrogation?”

“Should it be?”

Albertson laughed. “No. I may not be happy the town saw fit to replace me with an overgrown surfer boy, but I don’t hold it against the kid.”

“Good to hear.” Nix leaned toward him. “Did you know the Cumberland family believes Tallie and her husband were murdered?”

Albertson snorted. “The Cumberlands ain’t exactly the most reliable folks you’ll come across in these parts. You’d be wise not to put too much stock in what they think.”

“Normally, I might agree with you,” Nix conceded. “But this morning, when I tried to take a look at the accident report in the department’s files, it was missing.”

Albertson gave him a considering look. “Maybe someone had checked it out. Maybe the new chief.”

“I asked. He hadn’t. And even stranger, the file isn’t listed in the database.”

Albertson shook his head. “That’s not possible. We kept records of everything that happened on our watch, even if it was a false alarm. That accident happened in our jurisdiction. I remember it. It would be in the files.”

“But it’s not.”

“Who tried to find it?”

“Alvarez.”

Albertson frowned. “That system is his baby. If he didn’t find it—”

“It’s not there,” Nix finished for him.

Albertson was silent for a long moment. Finally, he sighed. “Good God, how far back did it go?”

He knew something, Nix realized. “How far back did what go?”

“The corruption.” Albertson had gone pale, looking every minute of his sixty-five years. “I thought it started and ended with that bastard Cortland, but if the file is missing—” He looked up at Nix. “What makes you think it wasn’t an accident?”

“Besides instinct?”

Albertson’s mouth quirked slightly at his answer. “Besides that.”

“Shortly before his accident, Chief Massey was looking into his mother’s history. Apparently Tallie never told her children anything about her life here in Bitterwood.”

“I can see why she wouldn’t.”

“Did you know that some folks in her family believe her story about the babies being switched?”

“Wishful thinking,” Albertson said firmly.

“What if it wasn’t, though?”

“You realize you’re believing a grieving little girl’s story about her dead baby over the word of—” Albertson stopped short, slanting a look at Nix.

“I know the parents of the other baby were Nina and Paul Hale.”

Albertson frowned. “How do you know?”

“Nothing stays secret forever in these hills,” he answered.

“The Hales are good folks. They’re not the sort of people who steal other people’s babies.”

“And Tallie Cumberland was?”

Albertson shrugged. “She was young and heartbroken. She wasn’t thinking straight.”

Nina and Paul Hale would have been nearly as young as Tallie, Nix thought. And if they’d found their son dead in his bassinet, how much harder would it have been for them to accept the loss knowing that a poor, unmarried young woman had a healthy little boy just a couple of hospital rooms away?

Would
they
have been thinking straight?

“What are you planning to do?” Albertson asked.

“I need to know if there was any reason to suspect the Masseys’ wreck wasn’t an accident. That’s what I was hoping I might find in the file. But it’s not in the archives.” He looked pointedly at Albertson as something the chief had said moments earlier flashed through his mind. “You were wondering how far back the corruption went. Why?”

Albertson released a long, gusty breath. “Because of who investigated the accident,” he admitted.

“Who was it?” Nix asked, although he realized what the answer must be.

Albertson sighed. “It was Craig Bolen.”

* * *

D
ANA
’
S
CELL
PHONE
rang as she entered Ledbetter’s Diner in search of an early lunch. When she saw it was Nix, she answered quickly. “What did you find out?”

“Guess who was the primary investigator on your parents’ accident?”

She thought a second. “Craig Bolen?”

“How do you do that?”

Her stomach twisted in a knot. She found the nearest empty table, pulled out the chair facing the door and sat heavily. “I could tell from your tone that you’d found something important. And since Bolen is already in jail for corruption—”

“It figures his criminal tendencies might have been in play fifteen years ago,” Nix finished for her. “Where are you?”

“About to have lunch at Ledbetter’s. Want to join me?”