[Cutthroat Business 01.0 - 03.0] Boxed Set Read online

  “Like I told you on the phone, I’ve already spoken to Lila Vaughn,” I said, as kind of an introductory statement. Kieran made a moue. I hesitated. “Do you know Lila?”

  He shook his head. “Oh, dear me, no. No, no. Not personally. Although I have certainly seen enough of her lately. On the news, in the papers, online...”

  I nodded. “She’s a lot more resilient than I would be in her situation.”

  Kieran murmured a musical, “Mmm-hmmm…” as the waiter arrived, and we sat in silence for a moment or two, while he set down our drinks. I was having water again, while Kieran had ordered something with cherries and pearlized onions on a stick upright in clear liquid.

  “Well, dear,” Kieran said, after a taste, “what exactly is it you want to know about my ordeal? I can tell you about it, or you can ask whatever questions you have. The latter may be more productive. Although maybe I should give you a precís first.”

  “Please,” I said. Kieran drew breath and threw himself into a spirited recounting of what was probably the most terrifying – and exciting – thing that had ever happened to him.

  I won’t bore you with the details. They matched what I had read online in every particular. Kieran had had a relatively successful open house, with more than two dozen visitors, but by the time 3:45 rolled around, the house was empty. He was just beginning to think about closing up shop when he’d heard the rumbling of a big engine in the driveway. Looking out, he saw a moving van backing up to the side door. It confused him, because the owners hadn’t told him that anyone was coming to pick anything up, but it didn’t worry him.

  “I just assumed that they’d forgotten to mention it,” he explained. “The stager I brought in recommended that they put some furniture and bric-a-brac in storage, to open the rooms up a little bit, and we’d talked about taking the valuable paintings down and putting them away while the house was on the market. So I didn’t think anything of it.”

  I nodded. “When did you realize that something wasn’t right?”

  Kieran had realized what was up as soon as the movers walked in. Four men – four big men – wearing ski-masks and gloves.

  “Yes,” I murmured, “that would probably tip me off, too.”

  Kieran puffed a shaky laugh. As he had been talking, some of the affectations had dropped away, revealing what I recognized was a severely shaken man. “Three of them pushed past me into the house. The fourth grabbed my arm and led me into the kitchen. He was very big.” Kieran shuddered.

  “How big?” I wanted to know. Kieran shook his head despairingly.

  “Height, maybe six-two or -three. He towered over me, anyway. And he probably weighed over 200. He was just solid, you know. All muscle. I could feel it through the padded coveralls. And he had dark brown eyes and dark brows, and his skin color was medium. He might have been a light-skinned black, or Hispanic or Mulatto, or even Middle Eastern.”

  I nodded. “And what did he say to you?”

  “He said...” Kieran swallowed, “that if I just did what I was told, he wouldn’t hurt me.”

  “He, or they?”

  Kieran shrugged. “He, they... does it matter?”

  “Probably not. Was there anything distinctive about his voice? Accent? Dialect? Any words he used?”

  I crossed my fingers. I should have known better; whoever it was – Rafe or someone else – wasn’t likely to have called Kieran darlin’.

  Kieran informed me that no, there hadn’t been anything distinctive at all about his voice, other than that he was clearly from the South. Or had been here long enough to be able to manage a reasonable approximation of the dialect.

  “So what did he tell you to do?” I asked.

  Kieran closed his eyes. “To be quiet and sit on the chair. I did, and he tied my hands and my legs. And then he told me to sit tight until he came back. So I did. They went past with paintings and other things that they put in the truck, but none of the others talked to me.”

  “And did he come back?” He had for Lila, so I was interested to know if he had for Kieran too, or if it had been just because Lila was Lila.

  Kieran nodded. “The others went out with the last load, and I could hear the truck starting. He stopped in the kitchen to make sure I was OK.”

  “That was nice of him,” I said, inanely. Kieran rolled his eyes.

  “No, it wasn’t. It was horrible and cruel and mean.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “Although it sounds as if, everything considered, he could have treated you worse.”

  Kieran admitted, grudgingly, that he could have. “He explained that they were leaving, and that I had to stay tied up, because if I didn’t, I’d be on the phone to the police before the truck had left the yard. He said he was sure that someone would be home to find me before long, but just in case, he’d check later to make sure.”

  “And you told the police that, of course.”

  Kieran nodded. “They put a policeman outside and took down the license plate numbers of all the vehicles that drove down the street for the rest of the night. But no one came.” He shuddered.

  “Maybe someone did, and you just didn’t realize it,” I said comfortingly. Kieran shook his head. I insisted, “No, really. Maybe your clients got a phone call or something, which they didn’t think had anything to do with what had happened. A wrong number, or someone pretending to be from the newspaper or collecting for the police benevolence fund or something.” That last lie would appeal to Rafe, I felt sure. To make a phone call pretending to be from the police benevolence fund to see if anyone was home to answer the phone was just the sort of thing he’d do. “I’m sure he wouldn’t have let you sit there all night.”

  “He might!” Kieran said petulantly. I opened my mouth to argue, but thought better of it. We may not be talking about Rafe Collier here, and even if we were – especially if we were – I didn’t want to give Kieran the idea that I knew anything.

  Luckily, this was at the exact moment when the waiter arrived bearing our food, and Kieran didn’t notice my lapse. I watched him cut his burger into neat quarters before he began to eat, daintily, with both pinkies sticking out. His face looked drawn. I decided that I had tormented the poor man enough, and that I needed to leave him alone to eat his dinner in peace. I attempted to put him at ease with an innocuous question about how long he had worked in the real estate business, and we spent a pleasant half hour eating and talking shop. Kieran had twenty years of experience, and was a fount of knowledge. I’d been in the business for roughly two months, and needed all the help I could get. Walker had been very helpful during my first six weeks, but I couldn’t exactly call him in prison every time I had a question, and Tim was no help at all. I processed as much as I could of what Kieran was saying, wishing I had thought to bring a tape recorder.

  “So you worked with Brenda Puckett before she died,” he said at one point. I nodded. “She’d been bending the rules for years, you know. It’s a good thing someone finally stopped her, although rather a pity it had to happen the way it did.”

  Having been the one to find Brenda with her throat slit from ear to ear, I had to agree.

  “And quite a shame about Walker Lamont, of course.” Kieran took another bite of medium-rare cheeseburger, chewed daintily and added, “He was a nice man.”

  A nice man who had murdered two women and would have murdered two more, myself included, if I hadn’t stopped him.

  “He was,” I agreed. “We always got along well. Until he threatened to kill me, of course.”

  “Of course,” Kieran nodded. “Have you spoken to him since?”

  “Oh, yes. He asked to see me, so I went out to Riverbend Prison one day last week. He wanted to apologize and tell me where to find the paperwork to fix some of the illegal things that Brenda did. It’s hard for me to say that Brenda deserved what she got – nobody ever deserves to get her throat cut, I think – but all the same, I can’t feel as sorry for her as maybe I should.”

  I took another bi
te of my own burger and added, “People told me that real estate was a cutthroat business, but I had no idea they meant it literally.”

  Kieran nodded. “There are a lot of raw deals in this business, dear. The longer you stick around, the more you’ll realize how true that is. Most people are out for themselves, and will step over your lifeless body to get where they want to go. Just look at the way Tim Briggs was getting his face on TV after Brenda died. Or your friend Lila, how she’s using this unpleasant, criminal situation to make herself more recognizable to the public. She’s trivializing a crime that involved not only her, but me as well. And my clients. They’re beside themselves with grief. They lost a collection of paintings that it had taken two generations to amass.”

  I nodded sympathetically. I had felt the same way when Tim was getting himself in front of the TV-cameras after Brenda’s death, and I knew he would probably reap the benefits in increased referrals and sales.

  On the other hand, I could understand where Lila was coming from, as well. She was trying to scratch her way to the top of a very competitive business – a business that Kieran Greene, by the looks of him, had succeeded quite well in – and if she decided to use the lemons life had handed her to make lemonade, it was hardly my place to object. More power to her, even if it wasn’t the choice I would have made. My mother would never have let me hear the end of it if I had.

  Chapter Five

  The second house that Gary Lee and Charlene wanted to see was an early ranch – anno circa 1940 – with huge windows and tall ceilings. It hadn’t been renovated to the degree that yesterday’s Tudor had, and a lot of the old features had been maintained. The fireplace hadn’t been outfitted with hissing gas-logs, but burned good old-fashioned wood, and the windows were original rather than tilt-in replacements. I liked it a lot better, with the exception of the carpets that covered all the floors. But as I explained to Gary Lee and Charlene, there were bound to be hardwoods underneath, and refinishing floors is no big deal. (Or so I gather, although I’ve never had to do it myself. The carpenter who refinished my mother’s floors a few years ago didn’t seem to think it was anything much, anyway. Messy and dusty and inconvenient for a few days, but hardly nuclear science, for all that. Rafe had managed to refinish the floors in his grandmother’s house, and he had barely made it through high school before he went to jail. Mostly what it takes, I believe, is the ability to figure out how the machine works, and the necessary muscular strength to keep it upright and moving.)

  My cell phone rang just as Gary Lee and Charlene were heading up the stairs to the master suite on the second floor. I checked the number and waved them on. “I have to answer this. Take your time upstairs, and let me know if you have any questions.”

  They nodded and giggled and kept going. I ducked out into the back yard, to the brick patio, before I answered the call. “Good afternoon, detective. What can I do for you?”

  “Where are you?” Tamara Grimaldi asked, without introduction. I told her I was showing a house in the Riverwood neighborhood in East Nashville. “I’d like to see you when you’re done.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll come downtown as soon as I’m finished here.”

  “I’ll meet you somewhere closer. Are you familiar with the TBI-building?”

  I wrinkled my forehead. “The Tennessee Bureau of Investigations? Sure. It’s just a few minutes from here. What are you doing there?”

  “I’m not there. I’m just down the road from it. Brown building on the right before you get to the TBI-building. I’ll be waiting in the lobby. Don’t drag your feet.”

  I had a hard time breathing. “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”

  “I’ll tell you when you get here.” She disconnected. I closed the phone with shaking hands. This didn’t sound good.

  Gary Lee and Charlene were still upstairs when I came back inside, and I stopped at the bottom of the stairs and started gnawing the lipstick off my bottom lip. Time passed, during which I tried to convince myself that a few minutes wouldn’t make a difference, and that it wouldn’t be kosher to drag them out before they were ready. After two minutes I decided I’d waited long enough, and raised my voice. “Excuse me!”

  My voice cracked and I had to try again. “Gary Lee? Charlene?”

  I heard something that sounded like a scramble, and then Gary Lee’s voice. “What’s up?” His voice sounded rusty, too. It was followed by a giggle and a low-voiced comment from Charlene.

  “I’m sorry,” I yelled, “but are you guys almost finished? I’ve had an emergency and I have to go.”

  “Oh.” There was a momentary pause and then, “Just a minute.”

  “I’ll be outside.” I headed for the front door, and stood tapping my foot impatiently until they came rushing down the stairs. Charlene’s hair was disheveled – so was Gary Lee’s, although there was nothing new in that – and both of them looked rumpled and rather the worse for wear.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, as I hurriedly locked the door and hid the key inside the gray lockbox, “but I have to go meet someone. Something’s wrong, and I have to deal with it. We can come back later, if you want.”

  They exchanged a look. “No,” Gary Lee said, “I think we’ve decided that this one isn’t for us.”

  Charlene nodded. “The master suite didn’t really work for us.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  “There’s another house we’d like to see. On Baxter Avenue. If you think you’ll have time tomorrow – if your problem’s gonna be solved by then – maybe we can go see that instead?”

  “I’m certain things will be taken care of by tomorrow,” I said, with no clue whether I was telling the truth or not, “but unfortunately, tomorrow is Sunday, and I’m hosting an open house from 2 to 4. Do you want to do it earlier or later, or do you want to wait until Monday?”

  Gary Lee and Charlene exchanged a look. “Monday’s fine,” Gary Lee said.

  “Great. Give me the particulars, and I’ll meet you there. Same time?”

  3:30 worked well for them on Monday, too, and I jumped in the Volvo and peeled rubber out of the driveway, leaving them to get into their hybrid and drive off at their leisure. Not the way a shark-like real estate professional should behave, but my priorities are thankfully not so skewed yet that I’d slaver over a pair of buyers rather than answer the summons of the MNPD.

  I broke several laws and almost the sound barrier on my way to Gass Boulevard, but mercifully I avoided getting a ticket. Although I admit I almost ran off the road when I came to the brown building on the right, just before the TBI-building. Or more accurately, when I saw the discreet sign at the entrance. Center for Forensic Medicine, it said.

  Now, I don’t have much of a social life outside Todd Satterfield, so I read quite a bit (tawdry romance novels, mostly) and I watch TV. Like everyone these days, I know what Forensic Medicine means. Just to clinch it, in case I hadn’t known, underneath it said Davidson County Medical Examiner’s Office. Tamara Grimaldi had directed me to the morgue. This couldn’t be good.

  I managed to settle the Volvo in a parking space without dinging the cars on either side of me, and walked into the building, heart beating. Just like she had said, Detective Grimaldi was waiting in the lobby, her feet on an oak coffee table and her head leaned back with eyes closed. I hesitated, loath to wake her if she was enjoying a no doubt well-deserved nap. She looked like she could use one. Her naturally olive complexion had lightened to a drab tan, and there were circles under her eyes.

  “I’m not asleep.” Her eyes opened and fixed on me.

  “How did you know it was me?” I took a few steps closer.

  “Your smell precedes you. Chanel No 5, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a classic. So what am I doing here?”

  “I need a favor.” She swung her legs off the table and stood up. She was dressed in jeans and a crisp button-down shirt today, with a gun in a holster under her arm. I avoided looking at it. Ever since Walker came after me wi
th one, I’ve been a little leery of guns.

  “Is this something left over from Brenda and Clarice’s deaths?” I asked, referring to my recently departed co-workers.

  “Unfortunately not. This is something new.” She headed for a door at the back of the lobby, waving me to follow. I did, my ladylike pumps clicking fast to keep up with her long legs and short heels. She added, over her shoulder, “There’s been a death. I need confirmation of an unofficial identification.”

  I felt the color leeching out of my face. “Oh, my God! Who died? It’s not someone in my family, is it?” I’d had no idea any of them were coming up to Nashville today, but they might have driven up without telling me. “Or Todd? He hasn’t called me, but sometimes he likes to show up unexpectedly.” To surprise me, he says, although sometimes I wonder if it isn’t so he can make sure I’m alone. “Or... it’s not Rafe, is it?”

  The way he drove, like a bat out of hell, it wouldn’t be surprising. And I didn’t suppose he really had a next of kin who could identify him. His parents were both dead; Tyrell before Rafe was born and LaDonna this summer. And his grandmother, poor old Mrs. Jenkins, went in and out of knowing who he was, thinking he was her son, or someone she didn’t know at all.

  Or was it Mrs. Jenkins herself…?

  But no, then Grimaldi would call Rafe to do the honors, wouldn’t she?

  “It isn’t Mr. Collier. Nor anyone else you mentioned. I would tell you who we believe it is, but I don’t want to prejudice your identification.”

  She pushed the call button for the elevator, and we waited in silence. My mind was spinning. I’ll admit to being relieved when she sent the elevator up rather than down. On TV, the dead bodies are usually kept in the basement, and I was cowardly happy that we weren’t headed that way.

  Upstairs, she led me to a small, friendly room that looked more like someone’s sitting room than an office at the Forensic Science Lab. It looked out over green trees and the spiky satellite and cell phone towers on top of the TBI-building. A manila folder was holding pride of place in the middle of the table, and she waved me to it. “I thought it’d be easier for you to look at pictures rather than the corpse itself. Just glance at the first two photos, if you don’t mind. There are some others in there – crime scene photos – that I doubt you’ll enjoy. Take your time.”