J. Black - The Shop

Back in the car, Riley slumped against the wheel. “Oh, God. I am so screwed.”

She looked shaken. Scared. Nothing like the Riley Zoe knew. It scared her. Zoe wanted to say something comforting, but the words stuck in her throat.

Riley started to cry.

Then Zoe had an idea. “Maybe Aunt Jolie can help us.”

“Aunt Jolie? You mean the cop?”

“She’s a detective. Jolie’s a good friend of Mom’s. Maybe she could find out who has the phone and see if she can get it back.”

Riley wiped her nose and looked over at Zoe. “You think she could do that?”

“I bet she could pull some strings.” Although suddenly, she wasn’t so sure.

“Call her,” Riley said.

18

Jim Akers wasn’t the family man Jolie assumed him to be.

Nobody at the Gardenia PD was surprised that Maddy Akers had killed her husband.

“Did you ever know him to threaten anybody?” Jolie asked Acting Chief McClelland.

McClelland sighed. “I saw him threaten a confidential informant once, back when he was a deputy. Going on fifteen years ago. Said if the guy didn’t stop torquing him around, he’d kill him.”

“ Kill him?”

“A lot of people say that. Like, if you do that again, I’m gonna kill you. Hell, I’ve said it. But he meant it.”

He was clearly uncomfortable with the conversation. “Couple of weeks later, the CI went missing. Found him in a canal not far from here. His head bashed in.”

“You think it was Chief Akers?”

“Well, that’s open to conjecture. But I do think Jim was capable.”

“Would he ever threaten his wife?”

“Now, that I don’t know. He never talked about her. I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but Jim acted like he wasn’t married. Once in a while he’d bring her to a cookout. I’m sure she talked to the ladies, but I don’t recall ever having a conversation with her. Whether that was her fault or his, I don’t know. But it kind of felt like he was hiding her.”

Jolie had bought it—Akers as the quintessential small-town police chief.

Maybe Maddy, manipulative as she was, really believed her husband planned to kill her.

Jolie went looking for Davy Crockett. She had a number of questions about the motel standoff, and she could trust Davy to be straight with her. They’d worked together many times over the past few years on cases that required interagency cooperation.

And Zoe’s call earlier today was on her mind—Davy was the only guy at the Gardenia PD who might help her.

Davy Crockett was a giant black man with a bullet-shaped head he shaved every morning. In deference to the name his parents gave him, Davy had a moth-eaten coonskin cap tacked up on the wall above his desk. Davy was the PD’s only detective, what was known as a “generalist.” He worked homicide, but he also worked auto theft, smash-and-grabs, and domestics. Davy had been a good friend of Dan’s when they were both deputies with the sheriff’s office. They grew up together, kind of (Davy lived in the black neighborhood in Port St. Joe), and played on the same football team in high school.

When they were through with official business, Jolie said, “Would it be out of line if I asked to see an evidence list?”

“For who?”

“Luke Perdue. I’m looking for his phone.”

“You want to tell me why?”

Davy had three daughters. She thought he’d sympathize. “There’s a teenage girl who’s worried about some photos of her on his phone. Sexting.”

“That ain’t good. Tell you what, I’ll go check the list. As I recall, that whole thing went down a week after Memorial Day?”

“June eighth.”

“Don’t seem like it was that long ago. Time sure flies in this business. If and when they release the phone, I’ll let you know. Who they releasing it to?”

“Next of kin would be his sister, Amy Perdue.”

Davy shook his head. “Kids. It sure was a lot tamer when I was growing up.”

“You ever take naked pictures of your girlfriend?” Jolie asked.

“Sure. And hid ’em away in a drawer. But these days…” He tapped the folder he’d been carrying against his leg. “Doesn’t she know she’s gonna end up on the Internet?”

Davy came back to the break room ten minutes later with a printout of the evidence list for Luke Perdue. “Talk about a wild-goose chase,” he said.

Jolie took the pages from him. There were a number of pieces of evidence the police had confiscated from Luke Perdue’s apartment. “No cell.”

“Nope. Thought that was kind of strange myself.”

“It wasn’t on him when he was killed?”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

“Well, I know he had one. The girlfriend was very clear about that. Do you know who went to his place that day?”

“Crowley and LeFave. Just before noon on the day.”

Jolie checked her watch. She wanted to call Judge Sharpe and see about the search warrants. She worried Maddy would have already destroyed whatever evidence remained. As Davy walked her out, she asked the same question she’d asked Acting Chief McClelland. “Do you think Chief Akers would threaten his wife? Threaten to kill her?”

Davy said, “He was into control, I know for a fact. Secretive, too. He didn’t share what he was thinking with anybody else. The truth is, I have no idea what he would do and what he wouldn’t do.”

“Most people, you have a general idea,” Jolie said.

He nodded. “Not the chief, though. He kept himself to himself.” He added, “He had one hell of a temper. It was like a nasty storm brewing—everyone could feel it coming, and nobody would know what would touch it off.”

19

ASPEN, COLORADO

This RadioShack was like RadioShacks anywhere, Landry thought. The interior was one long oval connected to a smaller oval, like a child’s drawing of a cat. Fluorescent lights in boxes were set into the ceiling, the lighting harsh and muted at the same time. Sparse shelves. A quiet atmosphere. Only two men in the store, a clerk and a customer discussing iPod models.

The RadioShack was the same, but the shops around it were upscale. The scenery was spectacular.

Landry bought two wireless lapel microphones, $49.95 each. Inside each box was a single-channel mic, built-in compander noise reduction, with a two-hundred-foot operational range. Each box contained a lapel microphone transmitter, a receiver, and a 9-volt AC adapter. He bought four sets of AA batteries for the transmitters (two extra) just to make sure. The microphones were cheap, but that didn’t matter. For certain occasions, you could get just as good stuff at RadioShack as you could going high-end. In the military they even had an acronym for it: COTS—commercial off-the-shelf. And Landry liked a bargain.

Stepping outside into the diamond-hard sunshine, holding the RadioShack bag with the boxed microphones inside, Landry looked in the shop window next door. He gathered the store sold clothing for the new generation, casual stuff you could wear to class or on a skateboard. Navy hoodies were displayed in the window, a photo above showing an unshaven twenty-something rappelling down from a helicopter. The clothing line was called “SEALS.”

“If you only knew,” he said to the display. The kid in the ad would likely want no part of SEALs training he’d endured at the Naval Amphibious Base on Coronado.