A Welcome Grave Page 3

  She looked at me, trying hard for empty eyes, but not succeeding. After a few seconds, she turned her head.

  “Call me with the identifiers,” I said after some silence passed. I’ll find him for you, and then we’ll be done. Okay?”

  She didn’t answer, but she nodded. I stood up and paused for a moment, considering crossing the room, reaching out to her, an embrace, a hand on the shoulder, something. Instead, I let myself out of the house.

  3

  Joe was on his back on the living room floor with a broomstick clenched in his hands. While I leaned against the doorframe and watched, he lifted the broomstick from his waist and raised it in an arc. A normal person would have brought the broomstick back behind his head. Joe stopped with the broomstick at about chin level and grimaced. There was sweat on his face, and when he remembered to breathe, it was a harsh gasp. He narrowed his eyes, and I saw his jaw muscles bulge slightly, the molars clenching. The broomstick inched back, but just barely. He held it there for a moment, took another breath, and tried for another inch. Didn’t get it. He exhaled heavily and returned the broomstick to his waist.

  “Didn’t you have therapy this morning?” I said.

  “Yes.” He shifted slightly on the floor, then began the exercise again.

  “So you come right back from therapy and start all over again? Isn’t there a rest period in there somewhere?”

  “You’ve got to work hard at it.”

  I shook my head, swung my body off the door frame, and moved around him and into the living room. He was pushing it hard—probably harder than any of the medical professionals who dealt with him wanted—but it was Joe. I knew him too well to be surprised, and certainly too well to try to discourage it.

  He took another one of those shallow, gasping breaths, and I looked away. Almost three months of this now, and still I had to look away. That’s how it goes when someone takes a bullet because of you.

  “You heard about Alex Jefferson?” I said, taking a seat on the couch.

  He lowered the broomstick and set it aside. Then he sat up with a grunt, wiped sweat away from his face with the back of his hand, and stared at me.

  “Yeah, I heard. You aren’t here to confess, are you?”

  “No.”

  He smiled. “Had to check. What do you think of it?”

  “Think he was probably a prick in all areas of his life, so not too hard to imagine a guy wanting to whack him.” I paused. “Cops came to see me.”

  “About Jefferson?” Joe got to his feet. It took him some time, and some effort. At the start of the summer, we’d gone running several times a week, Joe breathing easily as we’d pushed up the hills, laughing at me, and at each of his sixty years. A long walk could wear him down now.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Joe walked out of the living room and into the kitchen. I sat there alone for a second, then got to my feet and followed. He’d poured a glass of water, and now he leaned against the sink and took a sip, a few drops sliding down his chin onto his sweatshirt. He was wearing gray sweatpants and a Cleveland Browns sweatshirt. Until the last few months, I could count on one hand the number of times I’d seen him without a tie on a weekday. While he drank the rest of the water and poured another glass, I looked out the window, watching leaves scatter along the sidewalks and blow out into Chatfield Avenue.

  “They give you much of a hard time?” Joe asked.

  “The cops? Nah.” I turned away from the window. “Karen called, too.”

  He lowered the glass and swished a mouthful of water around for a bit before swallowing it, as if an unpleasant taste had suddenly come upon him.

  “Karen,” he said. “No kidding.”

  I nodded. “Wanted to apologize for the police, she said. And to ask a favor.”

  He set the glass on the counter and sighed, as if he’d been expecting to hear this last bit. I told him what Karen wanted, and he listened quietly until I was done.

  “You said you’d do it?”

  “Eighty grand, Joe. For a locate. We need the money.”

  “Eighty grand is insane, LP.”

  “I know it. But if there’s one thing she’s got, it’s money. I saw that much from the house.”

  “You’re actually going to take it? Take eighty thousand dollars for a job that you’d normally do for under a thousand?”

  I met his eyes. “I told her it was too high. But if she cuts me the check, you better believe I’m cashing it.”

  “She owes you that much, eh?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Thinking it, though?”

  I shrugged. “We could use the money, and she’s not going to miss it. End of story.”

  “Okay,” he said. “You are the boss, after all.”

  “Till your return, at least.”

  He didn’t say anything to that, just dumped the rest of the water down the sink and moved back into the living room. I stood where I was and watched him. His shoulder was still in bad shape, yes. His range of motion was poor, and there was substantial pain, but his condition was much improved now. He could drive a car; he could sit at a desk and answer a phone and work a computer. Still he stayed here, doing his exercises, reading books, watching ESPN Classic. We’d never discussed a timetable for his return, but I’d always been sure a return would be made. In the last few weeks, however, I’d started to wonder.

  I walked back out of the kitchen and followed him into the living room. He had settled into the old armchair in the corner and put his feet up. I sat on the couch and looked at him. I wanted to ask him, flat out, when he was planning to come back. I didn’t ask, though. Maybe because I was trying to be patient; maybe because I was afraid to hear his answer.

  “I don’t have much of a starting place for finding Jefferson’s kid,” I said. “Weird scenario. He took off five years ago, apparently, before Karen married into the family, so she doesn’t know much about him. No contact since then. She said she can provide some identifiers, but that’s all I’ll have.”

  “Computer databases will give you a start, once you get those identifiers.”

  “Yeah. We’ll see how far they can take me, though.” I cocked my head at him. “Not going to tell me to stay away from this one?”

  “You already made the decision to step into it. Looks like a simple enough job, too.” He picked a book off the table beside him and set it on his lap. I’d expected questions about my emotional response to Karen, warnings about the risks of getting involved—but the conversation, it appeared, was done.

  “I guess I better head out,” I said.

  “Okay.” He opened the book. “Good to see you.”

  “Right.”

  I was halfway through the kitchen when I heard a rustle of movement. I glanced back to see Joe pulling a blanket over his legs as he settled in with the book. I stood where I was for a moment, frozen. His gray head was bent over the book, his shoulders poking at the sweatshirt, the blanket wrapped around his legs.

  Joe Pritchard looked old.

  He lifted his head then, noticing me standing there, and I looked away quickly, as if I’d been caught at something, and walked to the front door. I left the house and went back to work, alone.

  The phrase “missing person” carries with it connotations of kidnapping and abduction, mystery and mayhem. I work about ten missing person cases a month, though, and most of them don’t fall anywhere near those categories. In my experience, the person is usually missing only to a small portion of his or her world. People travel; they marry, divorce, and remarry; they take jobs and lose jobs. Along the way, they drop out of contact with certain areas of their lives. It’s my job to find the area they haven’t lost contact with and use the resources there to track the missing ones down. Sometimes, they want to be hard to find. These are the people leaving problems behind—legal troubles or unpaid debts or unwanted family responsibilities. Other times, they simply fade out of sight because nobody cares enough to pay attention to where they’re going.
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  I had no idea which category Matthew Jefferson fit into, but I was feeling good about my chances of finding him quickly and easily. He came from prestige and money; he’d have active bank accounts, cars registered in his name, maybe a mortgage. The hardest people to find are the sort whose lives are in constant disarray. They have suspended driver’s licenses, no assets, no credit, and they live with family or friends or whomever they can bilk out of a free month’s rent. I didn’t anticipate that the son of one of Cleveland’s most prominent attorneys would fall into that lot.

  I was wrong. Wrong, at least, in assuming he’d be easy to find. Karen had left me a voice mail with Matthew Jefferson’s date of birth, Social Security number, and driver’s license number. Where she came up with that, I didn’t know, but it also didn’t help me. The driver’s license had expired three years earlier, when Jefferson was twenty-six. He was twenty-nine now, and the last computer record I could find on him put him in Bloomington, Indiana. There were several addresses for him in that town, all apartments. Bloomington was home to Indiana University. Maybe Matthew Jefferson had gone to school there.

  Amy Ambrose had once provided me with a great link to newspaper Web sites all around the country. I went to that page now and tracked down a student newspaper for Indiana University, ran a search for Matthew Jefferson, and got a few pages of results. There was a Matt Jefferson who appeared to be something of a track star, and then a reference from several years earlier to a Matthew Jefferson who’d won a few academic honors at the law school. In one, his hometown was listed beside his name: Pepper Pike, Ohio.

  “Got ya, Matt.”

  I ran a check through the Indiana and Ohio bar associations, as well as two national databases, and couldn’t find an indication that the Matt Jefferson I was looking for had ever taken up the practice of law.

  Next I put his Social Security number through Ohio Department of Motor Vehicle records, and got nothing but the expired license. Surprised, but not concerned, I tried a live credit header search. Contrary to popular belief, private investigators can’t access personal credit reports, but we do have access to the “headers,” a portion of the credit report that includes the address and the reporting date. If you apply for a credit card, a loan, or anything else along those lines, at least one of the major credit bureaus tracks the date and the address you use. Matthew Jefferson’s Social Security number generated an address match in Indiana, for a town called Nashville, reported six times in the last few years.

  I pulled a road atlas out and flipped through it until I found the Indiana map. Nashville was a small town in Brown County, maybe a five- or six-hour drive from Cleveland.

  “I suppose I’ll make the trip,” I said aloud. “There’s certainly enough money in the budget.”

  I laughed at that, but nobody laughed with me. I was talking to myself more regularly, particularly in the office. Sometimes, like when I laughed at my own jokes and no one joined in, it wasn’t that different from having Joe around, at all.

  The phone rang, and I answered on speakerphone.

  “Turn that thing off—it makes you sound like you’re in a cave,” Amy Ambrose said.

  “I only turn it on for certain callers. People I know will talk so long I’ll get a neck cramp if I actually hold the phone.”

  “Hilarious. Joe back yet?”

  “No,” I said, and some of the humor went out of my voice. “No, and he’s given no indication of when he thinks he will be. To be honest, today I was about to ask him if he ever will come back. I’m not sure anymore.”

  “You should have asked.”

  “Probably.” It was quiet for a moment, and then I changed the subject. “Hey, what are you doing the next two days?”

  “Writing great stories, per the norm.”

  I’d first met Amy when she was working on a newspaper story about a murdered high school student who’d been a member at my gym. After a contentious start, we’d become friends, and now she joined Joe in the small circle of people I trusted completely.

  “Any of those stories crucial?” I asked.

  “Not particularly. Why?”

  “Take a road trip with me. Scenic southern Indiana.”

  “Ugh.”

  “Come on, corn is gorgeous this time of year. Supposed to make the ladies swoon.”

  “I see. So this means you’re finally taking it up a notch, proposing romantic road trips instead of making sophomoric remarks about my ass?”

  “I was thinking of a package approach.”

  She hesitated. “Are you serious about this?”

  “Absolutely. I’ve got a client throwing tens of thousands of dollars at me to locate a missing heir. Hell, I can probably bill you out as a subcontractor. I’ll let you contribute somehow—holding my gun, maybe.”

  “You can hold your own gun, soldier.”

  “No bonus for you, then. I’m serious, though. Want to go along for the ride? Take a day down there, a day coming back.”

  “I guess. I’ve got an interview to give early, but I could probably leave by ten.”

  “Good,” I said, and although the idea had been spontaneous, I was glad she’d agreed. I was tired of working alone.

  “Who’s the client?” Amy asked.

  “Karen Jefferson.”

  Silence.

  “You’re working for the woman you were once engaged to,” Amy said mechanically. “She of the recently murdered husband. Same guy she left you for.”

  “That’s her.”

  “Are you out of your mind? Why would you possibly put yourself in this situation?”

  “Easy money. Nothing more to it.”

  “Oh, please, Lincoln. That’s so weak.”

  “It’s not weak if it’s the truth, Ace. The cops came to question me about Jefferson; she found out about it and called to apologize. Then she asked me to find Jefferson’s son. He’s in line to inherit a few million and doesn’t know it. Doesn’t know his father’s dead, either.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Hang on to the skepticism as long as you’d like, Amy, but the only reason I’m doing this is for the money. There’s a lot of it promised to me, and the agency can certainly use it with Joe out of work, stacking up medical bills.”

  “Okay,” she said, and then it was quiet again.

  “I’ve got things to work on,” I said eventually. “I’ll see you in the morning? You can give me shit for taking this case for the entire drive if you’d like.”

  “See you in the morning,” she said and hung up.

  I sighed and turned the phone off. I hadn’t expected Amy to be particularly impressed with me for this one, but hopefully she’d decide against taking my suggestion to heart and berating me for the entire drive.

  I spent a few hours finishing the only case report I had to write. You can afford to spend a little extra time on polish when you’ve got nothing else waiting ahead of you. It’s a luxury most small business owners aren’t hoping to encounter, however. When that was done, I locked the office and walked back up to my building, changed clothes, and went down to the gym to work out. I lifted for an hour, then left the gym and went for a run. The air had a chill to it when I returned, the sun fading and leaving my building dark with shadows. I stood on the sidewalk and stretched, looking up at the two stories of old stone that became my home after my fist connected with Alex Jefferson’s face and ended my police career. I thought about Karen in the extravagant house near the country club, and how empty it had felt that morning. I wondered if it felt emptier still when the sun went down.

  4

  Amy came by my apartment at ten the next morning, as planned. She pulled her Acura into the spot beside my truck, came to a jarring stop when her tires ran into the parking block, and then put it in reverse and backed clear again.

  “She’s landed,” I said. I was standing in the doorway to the gym office, talking to Grace, who was asking me to diagnose a car problem that began with a “thwackity thwak” sound and progressed
to a “clankity clank” upon reaching highway speeds. I’d recommended taking the vehicle to an actual mechanic, and, when that was dismissed with a snort, I’d suggested she wear headphones when she drove.

  “Hey,” Amy said. She was wearing jeans and a thin jacket over a white cotton shirt, sunglasses tucked into her hair above her temples. She’d straightened her dark blond hair about two months earlier, and I still wasn’t used to it. It looked great, but there was something carefree about the natural curl that I missed.

  “Traveling light?” I stepped into the parking lot with her. She had a small purse over her shoulder but nothing else.

  “No,” she said, leaning against the hood of her car and stretching her legs out in front of her. “I don’t think I’ll be making the trip.”

  I frowned. “You have to work, or did something else change your mind?”

  She gazed up at me for a moment, then away.

  “Are you backing out on this just because I’m working for Karen?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Okay. It’s not that, and it’s not work, and yesterday you were up for it, but today you’ve changed your mind. What’s the deal?”

  She sighed and tugged the sunglasses free from her hair, then ran one hand through it. “Why do you want me to go along?”

  I tilted my head and looked at her, puzzled. “Thought it would make the trip more enjoyable for me, and thought you might enjoy it, as well.”

  “Why?”

  “Why would you enjoy it?”

  “And you? Why would you enjoy it more because I was along?”

  When I was a kid, I went to a camp once where they had a row of small platforms scattered across a pond. Some of the platforms would float when you landed on them; others would sink immediately. You’d try to cross the pond by jumping from one platform to the next. Each leap had the potential to sink you, but you didn’t know which one would do it. Right now, the conversation had that feel.

  “Why would I enjoy it more?” I echoed. Anytime you start repeating questions when you’re talking to a woman, you’re in trouble.