Wrong Question, page 9
“What happened, Sheriff?” I asked, not really curious because all I wanted to do was run inside my trailer and cry.
“I was hoping you might be able to shed the light on the mystery of how your car came to be on the bottom of the Salamander Ravine,” he said.
“I’ve no idea where that is, Sheriff.”
“About a mile past Frankie’s Diner, there’s a left fork in the road that’s not traveled that often. It’s a bit of a local lover’s lane but hasn’t been used that much since the county put up a gate about half-a-mile in. Whoever drove your car crashed through the gate as well, and then the car just headed where its nose pointed. Ben’s road crew came with a tow truck and a decent winch and rolled her up.”
I looked at Ben who seemed to be content to hover on the periphery of the conversation. “Thank you. You said something about repairs but if what Sheriff showed me is what’s left of my car, I don’t think I’m going to have it repaired. Just have it delivered to the local scrapyard. I’d appreciate if you took a few more pictures of it, for my insurance company,” I said but the sheriff was shaking his head.
“Can’t let it go to the scrapyard, Miss; not yet anyway. We don’t have the lab here or the staff to do forensic work so the samples were sent to Boise. We have to wait until the results come in,” the sheriff said.
“Results of what?” The whole situation felt unreal.
“The blood we found in the trunk of your car.”
“Blood?” I must have looked witless because the sheriff scrolled through his cell phone again until he found what he was searching for and showed it to me.
“Some people put roadkill in their trunk, particularly if it’s worthwhile to be taken to the taxidermist, to make into a trophy, but I wouldn’t have thought you’d be the type,” he said.
“I’m not and I didn’t kill anything; not on the road or anywhere else. I don’t know how the blood got there. I didn’t take my car to work this morning. I left it right there,” I pointed at the clearing.
“Ben here is willing to let you have his loaner for a while so I’d be careful about driving at night,” the sheriff said and I knew he didn’t believe me. He was a portly man, with a fleshy face that actually hid his expression better than if he’d worn a mask. Truth was that once I arrived in the Idaho paradise, and unloaded my luggage into the trailer, I had no need to open the trunk. My single trip to CostMart was sufficient to keep me stocked with frozen food until next year; maybe until the end of my contract. I made three trips to Frankie’s Diner for lunch but picking up grilled cheese and pop did not require me to open the trunk. Of course that didn’t mean that someone else might not have popped my trunk while the car was parked outside. The place was a truck stop. Nothing short of a bomb going off in the middle of the parking lot would look suspicious.
I turned to Ben. “I appreciate your loaner, I really do but I don’t think I need it. In fact I don’t think I will need a car at all; not as long as I have to work here. If I need to go somewhere, my colleagues will give me a ride, I’m sure.”
He didn’t argue at all. In fact, his face was as inscrutable as the policeman’s. His SUV and sheriff’s police car left just as Jake’s truck pulled in and parked.
“What happened?” Jake got out with those words.
“My car was stolen then crashed and now it’s just a heap of metal, ready for the scrapyard. But the sheriff won’t let it go to scrapyard until the lab in Boise sends back their results. Seems there was a lot of blood in my trunk. They’re testing it, I guess,” I gave him my best compressed version of my plight.
“What are you not telling us, Bree-Ann?” Melina came around.
If I told them, confessed my whole tortured story, I’d feel better. At least some of the load would be off my shoulders. They would try to help, maybe even involve the police—not the local cops or sheriff’s people but the FBI because hacking email accounts of The New York Times employees, even if they were just interns, placed the crime in their jurisdiction. Instinct told me it was not what the creep wanted. Not unless I cleared it through him first. It’s how he wanted to play the game, being in charge.
If I told my colleagues, I would place their lives and livelihoods in jeopardy. Someone who could steal a car or have someone else steal a car for him, then reduce it into a heap of metal, was not above doing the same thing to people. His message said: There will be consequences. The car itself was not the consequences; at least not all of them. The blood in the trunk was the consequence that was to assure my obedience when the next scenario came in the email. I didn’t think the blood would turn out to be human. That would bring me in for questioning faster than I could say, “I want a lawyer.” That’s not what my subscriber wanted.
I couldn’t tell my colleagues without endangering their lives. I couldn’t tell my parents without doing the same. He was mobile to a frightening degree. I couldn’t call corporate back in New York and tell them because they’d want me to capitalize on it. Was that what he wanted? It was possible but it just didn’t feel like it. New York would probably send their senior investigative reporter to Kinematic. That kind of scrutiny was not what my subscriber wanted. I couldn’t call anyone in New York; not my flatmates, not my friends that I used to date, and definitely not any of my professors who gave me their business cards and urged me to keep in touch. My subscriber was isolating me. But that was only part of his game.
I couldn’t even tell Ben because I was still sitting on the fence about his involvement. Yes, he had a garage and therefore it was a natural thing to own a tow truck, but making it so conveniently available to the police when they found my car at the bottom of a ravine…? Who found my car, anyway?
I shrugged to underscore my sincerity. “I don’t know, guys. One day when I decide to walk to work, my car gets stolen and lands on the bottom of a ravine. Probably some punks.”
“And the blood in the trunk?” Jake asked.
“Probably hit an animal and that scared them so they tossed it in the trunk and then ditched the car, literally,” I said.
“You don’t think it’s someone who is trying to muscle in on your blog?” Emilie asked.
“What do you mean?” She almost nailed it but I couldn’t betray myself.
“Your blog—it’s murder of the week which for all intents and purposes could be stealing someone’s thunder.”
“I’m not sure….”
“Bree-Ann, even the police in this place has a blog. The Mayor has two but I think someone else writes them for her. Every establishment seems to be blogging about something but you’re the only one who is blogging about murder. Some people might be jealous.”
“I have a handful of subscribers, Emilie,” I tried to laugh it off but the theory had some merit.
“A lot of people don’t want to sign up for email notice but that doesn’t mean they don’t read your blog. You don’t know how many, but I’d bet you anything you already have thousands of readers.”
That was a dangerous line of thought and at the same time I wanted to believe it more than anything else. Thousands of people reading my blog equalled success—in a satellite office in small town Idaho.
“In the morning, I’m driving my truck to work and the two of you are coming with me,” Jake said. I knew Emilie would drive in with Noah so I agreed.
The next day, we had a surprise visitor. Ben came in, followed by two of his service staff carrying baskets and trays heaped with food; it looked like they came to cater a banquet.
“I feel very bad that something like this happened to you,” he said to me. “I think you should take the loaner but if you don’t want to, I’ll back off. I can’t have your wreck picked up.
Justin will give you fifty bucks for it when the sheriff clears it for scrapyard. I could fix it, you know, but I doubt it would be worth your while.”
“You were offering to fix it before,” I said. “You sent me email.”
“That was before I actually saw it. Milt, my tow truck driver called it in but I should have known better. Milt can make a race car from a heap of metal. He thought I should give it a try. Once I saw it, I knew better.”
I wanted to believe him, and I did…all the way until he answered Emilie who wondered whether the Kinematic police kept items they retrieved from the glove box or the central console.
“They collect whatever’s possible to collect and it goes into evidence,” he said. “If you left something in Bree-Ann’s car it didn’t make it. There wasn’t anything coming out of that wreck except maybe glass shards, but even those—there wasn’t enough of them to fill that shot-glass that’s supposed to pass for a cup holder.”
It was possible that Ben Doublinth had sat in other Nissan Sentras, but not in one that was twelve years old and had a make-shift cup holder because the model did not come with one. According to what he let out, Ben Doublinth only saw my Sentra when it was already trash-compacted beyond repair. It’s how he revised his original estimate. So, how would he know the car had a make-shift cup holder unless he sat in it when it was still in good condition?
“He likes you,” Melina remarked when Ben left.
I don’t know what she saw on my face because she clapped her hands and laughed. “You really don’t see it, do you?”
I grimaced. “He just feels bad for me because of what happened to my car.”
“Sure,” Melina said and hid her face behind the desktop monitor.
“I don’t know about the rest of you, but to me this kind of thing just feels all wrong for this place,” Noah said.
“Cars get stolen everywhere, Noah,” I said.
“Yes, but I was referring to the degree of vandalism. Your car was smashed up pretty good before it went over the edge and into that ravine,” he said.
“How do you know that?” The Sheriff showed me the state of my car but he didn’t send the images to my cell phone. Heck, he didn’t even ask for my cell phone number.
“I’m looking at it, on my monitor. Extreme vandalism.”
I walked over to see. His screen was filled with images of what happens to a car that is subjected to ‘extreme vandalism,’ as Noah called it, and then crashed into the ravine.
“How did you get these pictures, Noah?” I asked.
“I assumed you sent them to me. Did you?” He looked up at me.
“The police must have posted them…but why would they do that? For them it’s an ongoing investigation. At least that’s what they told me.”
“Maybe that’s the way they do things here, in Idaho,” Jake said.
I agreed with him but only to steer the conversation away from the topic of my wrecked car.
“You have to call New York and tell them what happened,“ Jake said.
“No. The car was in great shape but it was twelve years old. I don’t want to give Ganz even a slightest reason to blame me.”
“Blame you?” Emilie echoed, shaking her head. “Don’t be silly. Why would it be your fault?”
“Ganz would say that I provoked whoever it was who stole and crashed my car. I think he’s having second thoughts about offering me the internship,” I said.
“Now you’re not being just silly but paranoid,” Emilie maintained.
“Maybe, but I’m not going to put in an insurance claim. I just want to put this behind me.”
“What are you really afraid of?” Melina pinned me with a direct question. She was either going to have a stellar career as an investigative journalist or she was going to be planted somewhere out of sight because her directness made people uncomfortable. In this field there was no happy middle ground.
“Noah said this kind of extreme vandalism feels wrong for this place so it stands to reason it’s not someone from around here. And if it’s a stranger, then it’s best to keep a low profile. If it was some criminal element, that goes doubly so.”
I knew my colleagues were not convinced but they left me alone for the rest of the day.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Dig deeper, Ben had advised me. He meant for me to be more thorough, more detailed in my research of what would make a good murder scenario. So far, the three I managed to post did nothing for my morale. In spite of what Emilie thought, I don’t think that thousands of people were reading my blog—without bothering to subscribe to it.
I put my hands down on the keyboard. Dig deeper. I certainly will, I thought and googled Ben Doublinth, of Kinematic Town, Idaho.
For someone who owned a restaurant-bar, a gas station and repair garage, Ben Doublinth did not seem to have much of a social presence. “Be Paradigm” was famous for its Wednesday night rib-fest. It had solid social presence, including its entire menu, but its owner and bartender, next to none. Jake and Melina told me that Ben spent time in the police ranks, with Seattle PD. Fifteen minutes later, I knew as much about Seattle PD as many of its rank members, maybe more. Mr. Ben Doublinth was never in the Seattle PD ranks. Not as a beat cop and not as a detective. Suddenly I didn’t want to dig deeper and knew I had to.
Jake said Ben’s family in Boise was ‘old money.’ Doublinth was not a common name so it should be easy to track down. I googled a dozen sites in Boise and all over Idaho. The somewhat unique Doublinth family name was connected all over the western part of the country. They were not just in lumber business, bus construction, financing and real estate. The Doublinth clan was a closet-knit family, all one-hundred and five of them but none were named Ben or Benjamin. If anything, Doublinths loved to keep it simple. John James Doublinth Sr. would hand down his name to his son, and Junior would keep the tradition going by naming his son John James Doublinth, III and so on. There were only half a dozen male and female names going in the family. Their repetition was a tradition in itself.
“You would suck as an investigative journalist,” I told myself and knew it was my fear talking. I could call my Dad. He had a ton of contacts in the police ranks, from coast to coast, but then I would have to tell him why I needed him to make a discreet inquiry into Kinematic citizen, named Ben Doublinth. Dad’s research would be vastly superior to mine because he’d go straight to the source—in Seattle.
I had five days to post my next murder of the week. Two of those day were weekend. In Kinematic Town, weekends were family nights—at CostMart or at the Paradigm—in the non-drinking section. I’d spent my last three weekends in the barn with windows, procrastinating and feeling sorry for myself. When I could no longer wallow in pity, I’d hop in my car and drive for five minutes then hop in my trailer where I’d sleep, surf the web and eat, in no particular order. If one of my colleagues dared to knock on the door, I’d ignore them or shout for them to go away.
Perhaps this weekend I should do something totally out of character and ask my colleagues whether they wanted to do something as a team.
I was about to issue an invitation to my colleagues when the desktop pinged. An incoming email was the last thing I wanted to see right now. It was quitting time. The email could be from only two sources—Ganz or my villainous subscriber. I wanted to deal with neither. I counted to five then looked at the screen. The email was from the sheriff’s office. What a relief. Then again, depending on what the lab found, the opposite could be true.
I forced myself to read what was some clerk’s interpretation of the official lab report. The blood was deer’s. I hoped the Sheriff wouldn’t want to know what happened to the animal carcass. I just didn’t feel like spinning creative stories. I filed the email in the folder to take it out of my queue and prepared to shut down the computer when another ping sounded.
There was no way I was going to get waylaid by someone else; not on a Friday night. I hit the backup icon to copy everything to my laptop, and once I had it all in my portable library, I powered down both computers.
“Guys, what do you do on Friday night in Kinematic Town, Idaho?” I announced at the top of my lungs. It was meant to solicit replies and invitation to come along wherever my colleagues went on the weekend. Instead, I got a report from each of the four on their immediate plans and none of them included me.
Jake was going to dinner—by invitation. He’d met a girl in CostMart who was from Belize. She was hired as a nanny by a couple who bought one of the experimental houses. He was leaving his truck for Noah and Emilie who were going to Boise for the weekend, and Melina was going to test the WiFi at the Paradigm; from the sound of it, all night long or at least until it closed.
“Come with me,” Melina said. “Take your laptop. We’ll sit in Ben’s kitchen, work and watch TV. We’ll go easy on the drinks, have plenty to eat and who knows, we might even have a good time.”
I thanked her and said I’d take a rain-check. The last person I wanted to see tonight or any night, was Ben Doublinth…or whatever his real name was. I’d spend the night productively, in my trailer, with my defrosted dinner beside me, a plastic glass of wine in one hand, while the other would be on the mouse, scrolling. Now and then it might reach for a bottle of something else, but that just went with the lonely landscape of fear. I needed to hold on to a moment of clarity, a memory of who I was and what I was capable of. A moment that would feel as if I was a super-girl, from another planet and New York was all around me. Strangely, as a presence, Starbucks never faded regardless where I was; not in my thoughts and not in my taste buds.
Melina gave me a ride to my trailer and tried one more time to convince me to come with her but I shook my cell phone at her and said that if I changed my mind, I’d call her.
“He makes very good coffee,” she said.
“Who?”
“Ben. Come with me. We’ll have fun.”
“It’s Friday night. It’ll be busy. The place will be a madhouse. I don’t feel like being social tonight,” I said.
“The place is always full. But they have live entertainment on Friday nights.”
I made a face at her.
“He gets bands from California, and stand-up comedians with a decent routine. Come on, it’ll be fun.”
