“The same,” I said. “She has a way of getting paged anytime I have a dinner date with her. Happened again last week-I was actually cooking dinner for her at my house. Just as the coals were getting hot-in more ways than one-she got beeped.”
“Maybe you should let me fix you up with Sheri,” he said.
“Who’s Sheri?”
“One of the accountants at my firm. Completely unavailable three months out of the year, but starting April 16, she’s got a lot more time on her hands. And I have never, ever paged her. Not a whole lot of emergencies come up on tax returns. Except for yours.” This was an unexpected and unwelcome turn in the conversation. “Dad, I’ve been through this box of what passes for your financial records, and I can’t find bank statements for August, October, or December.”
“Look again,” I said. “They must be in there somewhere.”
“Dad, I’ve looked twice.” I could tell he was upset; he tended to preface his sentences with “Dad” whenever he was put out with me. I heard “Dad” a lot every year at tax time. “I’ve sorted and organized everything. Dad, they are not there.”
“Dang,” I said. “Then I have no idea where they are.”
“Clearly.”
“Maybe they got lost in the mail,” I offered. “Can’t you just call the bank and ask them to send you copies?”
“No,” he said, “they can’t do that; it’s not my account. Why don’t you just go online and download copies, then e-mail them to me?”
“Online? That stuff ’s online?”
“Only for about the past ten years,” he said. “You should have a user name and password filed away somewhere.”
“Well, I don’t know where. Check that stuff I brought you. Maybe somewhere in there.”
“Dad, you’re hopeless,” he groaned. “I’d fire you, except that I’m the only thing standing between you and the complete loss of my inheritance.”
“And what makes you think you’re in my will, smarty-pants?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Lucky guess, maybe. Or maybe it was that copy of the will that was stuffed into this pile of papers.”
“Ah,” I said, “I was wondering where I’d put that. Hang on to that for me, would you? I need to see how best to cut you out of it.”
“Right. Okay, I’m hanging up now. Good night. See if you can program yourself to dream where those bank statements might be. Oh, and Dad?”
“Yes, son?”
“Good luck with Dr. Carter.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Good luck with my tax return.”
The next morning I called Jess at her office. “Hey,” I said when she picked up, “thanks for leaping to my defense on the news.”
“Do I get Brownie points for that?”
“Thousands,” I said. “What were you doing there? I didn’t even know you were in Knoxville.”
“Quick trip,” she said. “I came into the morgue early that morning. Couple unattended deaths up your way, and things were quiet down here, so I dashed up on the spur of the moment. I was just getting back into my car to head back to Chattanooga when Miranda came rushing out and asked for a ride to campus. She made the Darwin poster on the drive over.”
“Well, I appreciate the show of support,” I said. “I just hope they don’t cram a pie in your face, too.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t mind that part. I like banana cream pie. It’s the other stuff I’d like to avoid.”
“What other stuff?”
“I got half a dozen phone calls last night,” she said. “Same guy every time.”
“What guy? Did he say his name? Did you recognize his voice? Did you get a number on your caller ID?”
“No name, blocked number, muffled voice.”
“Tell me about the calls.”
“Well, after the nasty names he called me during our first chat, I decided to let the rest of the calls go to voice mail. Some of the messages just consigned me to a very unpleasant afterlife. Others promised me some pretty hellish experiences this side of the grave. Leading to the grave, too.”
“Death threats? My God, Jess, did you call the police?”
“Naw, it’s just some pissed-off coward blowing off steam,” she said. “Not worth wasting any more time or energy on it.”
“Don’t take any chances,” I said. “Call the cops.”
“If I called the cops every time somebody hassled me, I’d be the girl who cried wolf. If it keeps up, I’ll call the phone company and get a block or a trace. If anything else happens, I’ll tell the police. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, but it didn’t feel okay.
“Uh-oh,” she said. “I gotta go-Amy’s making her ‘Somebody important is calling’ face at me. Talk to you soon.”
“Okay. Be careful, Jess,” I said. “Bye.”
“I will. Bye.”
CHAPTER 19
AS I REACHED INTO my briefcase, I thought, This could be my best work ever. Thirty seconds later, I was certain I’d been right.
I’d just taken a huge bite of my masterpiece-possibly the finest sandwich ever made-when the phone on my desk rang. I briefly considered spitting the mouthful into the trash, but the individual ingredients were splendid on their own-smoked turkey, smoked Gouda cheese, spicy brown mustard, crisp kosher pickle, and tomato on nutty oat bread-and the whole was even tastier than the sum of its parts. In short, I couldn’t bear to waste it. Instead, I gave three quick chews as I reached for the receiver, then two more as I slowly raised it, jamming wads of food into my cheek pouches. “’Lo, ih Dah Rockuh,” I mumbled.
“Bill? Is that you?” I was relieved to hear that it was just Art.
“Eh, ih ee,” I grunted.
“Are you sick? Are you hurt? Hang on. I’m calling 911.”
“Nuh,” I said. “’Ait ussa min’t. Ea’in unh.” I gave a few more hurried chews, then swallowed the first of three installments. “’orry. ’ang on.” Chew chew swallow; chew chew swallow. “Okay, sorry. Had a mouthful there.”
“Bill, Bill, have you forgotten everything you learned from Gomer Pyle?”
“What? Gomer Pyle? You called me up to talk corny old sitcoms?”
“No. I’m just thinking you did not chew thirty-four times before swallowing, like Grandma Pyle taught Gomer to do. Shame, shame, shame, shame, shame.”
“Well, Shazam,” I said, “call Barney Fife and have me arrested.”
“Wrong jurisdiction. Barney’s over in Mayberry. Anyhow, the reason I called is, we got lucky on the prints.”
“Tell me,” I said, my sandwich suddenly forgotten. “Who was he?”
“Well, for starters, he was a teacher.”
“So his prints were on file from his background check? Damn. I hate to think a teacher got killed just because he liked to dress funny.”
“He had another set of prints on file, too. The guy was also a pedophile, Bill. He had an arrest record for aggravated sexual battery.”
I sat bolt upright in my chair. “Jesus Christ,” I said. “I thought that wasn’t supposed to be possible. I thought the whole point of the background investigations and fingerprint checks was to keep people like that from working with kids.”
“It is,” he said, “and it did. Sort of. The system worked, within its limits. The guy was a teacher first, and a pedophile second. At least, that’s the order in which he was printed. Reality is, he probably became a teacher so he’d have easy access to kids. But he’d never been caught at the time he was hired.”
“How much information did you get?”
“Enough to know the basics and start tracking down the details. Guy’s name was Craig Willis; thirty-one years old. He applied for a teaching job three years ago-in Knoxville, by the way, not Chattanooga. Got hired just down Middlebrook Pike from you, at Bearden Middle School.” I felt my insides go cold. That was the school my son had attended. Jeff was there three de cades ago-he was a student at Bearden Middle around the time this Craig Willis was born-but the coincidence brought the danger closer to home somehow. “He taught English and social studies for two years,” Art went on. “Then, last summer, he was arrested for molesting a ten-year-old boy at a day camp where he was a counselor.”