Andrew Gross - 15 Seconds

“What are you talking about, Dr. Steadman?”

I told her how it came to me during the night, this town where a patient of mine had come from: Acropolis, Georgia. Not a patient actually, a prospective one, and how I’d just bumped into the name kind of randomly as I searched through MapQuest. How he’d been in my office a couple of weeks back at the same time as Mike happened to call about my trip.

I opened the iPad, and showed her what Maryanne had sent me.

“Vance Hofer…” Carrie muttered to herself. “Acropolis. I don’t understand, what’s his connection to you?”

“There is no connection!” I sank onto the bed across from her. “At least none I can identify. Only that you asked last night if I knew anyone from around here and then I saw this town on the map where he said he was from, and it’s only about thirty miles from here. And then it hit me that he happened to be in my office the day Mike called in. I took the call while he was sitting right there in front of me. And I’m certain I mentioned the conference I was going to and about playing golf; I’m not sure, but I may even have mentioned Atlantic Pines… And I even think I told Mike to e-mail me his address in Avondale… I’m sorry”-I could barely hold myself together-“but I’m not really into coincidences right about now…”

More seemed to fit together the more I recalled.

“Go on,” Carrie urged.

“I remember him being kind of odd… I don’t know…” I got up, my blood racing, like I was on speed. “I can’t exactly put my finger on it. Just not my usual kind of patient. He came in about some rhytid tissue on his neck. Heavy wrinkling. I told him what I could do. I even told him I could recommend someone closer to his home if he wanted. That’s why I recall where he was from.” I stopped pacing. “I never heard back from him.

“But it all kind of fits. It’s the only thing that has fit! I don’t know what his connection to me is, or any motive, only that he was there! He heard all those things on the phone. And he’s from fucking here …”

Carrie nodded, slowly at first. I wasn’t sure she was totally buying it.

I told her, “I’m thinking we can take this back to Fellows and see if he knows him…?”

Then she looked up at me, blue eyes beaming, resolute. “I’m thinking I can do you one a whole lot better than that.”

She grabbed her cell and found a number on her speed dial, and I sat on the bed, expectantly. The person picked up.

“Jack - I need you to look someone up for me,” Carrie said, cutting right to the chase, “and I don’t want to have to tell you why, or how come the JSO isn’t able to do it for me. I just need you to do this for me-no questions asked. Okay? If it’s what I think…”

She stopped herself, and looked at me, one knee curled to the side, like a yoga position. “If it’s what I think it is, I may have a headline here for you.”

She waited, seeming to gird herself for the barrage she was anticipating.

“I know. I know. I know all that, Jack…” After a pause, she exhaled with exasperation. “I can’t tell you that, Jack. And I can’t tell you where I am either. Only… Just write this down, okay?” She spelled out Hofer’s name. And his address. And she gave him his SSN. I heard a trace of excitement in her voice. I knew she was putting herself out on a line. This wasn’t exactly part of the community outreach routine.

My blood throbbed with the certainty that we were finally getting close to the truth.

“Just e-mail what you have back to me as soon as you have it. Whatever you can find on him. With a special emphasis on anything that might have caused him to become violent, okay? That’s not important,” she said. Then, in answer to another question: “That’s not important either. You just have to trust me on this. Like ol’ times… And, Jack…” She waited. “This is important. This has to stay one hundred percent between us, okay? I need your promise on that.” She nodded. “Thank you, Jack. And I will be careful. I promise…”

Carrie hung up and looked over to me, a crooked, little girl’s smile conveying, I hope that was smart. That this was terrain she had never been down before.

Neither had I, for that matter.

“Someone you work with?” I asked curiously. “At the sheriff’s office.”

“Brother.” She shook her head. “At the FBI.”

There wasn’t much Carrie and I could to do until we got more information on Vance Hofer, and that could take hours.

So we agreed that the best thing to do was to drive back out to the Fellows property and talk with him again.

This time I stayed in the car and let Carrie do the talking. What could I have offered, anyway, that was any more persuasive than a Jacksonville police ID?

Fellows was outside watering plants when we arrived. He didn’t seem exactly eager to see who it was who had come back a second time.

The conversation was brief. He was even more guarded and distracted than he’d been the day before, trying to ignore us. But Carrie showed him the photo of Hofer that Maryanne had sent me, which made him brusquely turn away, his glare pretty much saying, I think it’s time for you two to get the hell out of here now…

Then Carrie came back to the car with a look of frustration and disappointment on her face, but also a gleam of something promising too.

“Well…?” I asked her.

“He said he never heard of him. At first.” Carrie backed out of Fellows’s drive and continued about a hundred yards or so before stopping and turning to me. “But then he basically admitted he was lying.”

“How? What did he say?” This could save me!

“He asked to see my ID again. Then he told me, ‘Next time, come back here with a real cop, and I’ll tell you.’ ”

Carrie’s brother reached us back at the motel.

She put her hand on mine, motioning for me to stay silent, and put the call on speakerphone.

“Are you with someone, Carrie…?” I heard her brother ask.

My heart was beating so loudly I was worried he could hear me through the phone.

“Don’t worry about that, Jack. Tell me what you found?”

“You wanted to know if anything could have possibly made this guy resort to violence?”

“Yeah…”

“Well, find your ticket, sis. I think you hit the lottery.”

Carrie and I locked on each other’s eyes.

“I’m looking through it now. The guy lost his home, a year and a half ago. His wife died, which pretty much broke him. He’s been living in a trailer since. Not to mention his job… The past ten years he worked as a lathe operator in some metalworks plant in South Carolina which went under…”

“Do you happen to have the name of the place, Jack?” Carrie’s eyes lit up with anticipation.

I heard the sound of a page being turned. “Lemme see. Here it is. Liberty Machine Works. Bamberg, South Carolina. Mean anything?”

Carrie stared at me hard, her eyes expansive. “Yeah, Jack. It does mean something. That’s where Fellows worked as well.”

“Who? ” her brother said through the phone.

“Never mind, Jack. Sorry.” But her look to me was lit with elation. And vindication. Fellows had been lying. He and Vance had worked together! That was how they knew each other.

That was how Hofer would have come upon the plates.

“That enough, or you need any more?” her brother asked, as if he were daring her to say yes.

“Keep it coming, Jack. You’re on a roll.”

“Seems your guy is an ex-cop as well. He was with the Florida State Police for almost fifteen years. Accent on ex, though-he was dismissed in an IA investigation back in 1999. He seems to have taken the fall for his role in an excessive-force incident.” I heard a whistle. “ I’d say…! It says here he held down a burglary suspect and busted both his hands with a nightstick. All caught on film. It all happened back in Jacksonville. Right in your own backyard.”