The Buck Stops Here Page 8

  “No, I’m quite settled where I am,” I said. “But thanks for the offer.”

  “We don’t get workers of your caliber anymore, Callie. Good grief, this latest batch all dresses like the lawyers on TV, with short skirts and stringy hair and everything. The other day I even spotted a belly button. It’s crazy.”

  I laughed, knowing a lot could change in a few years’ time.

  We concluded our call, and after I hung up the phone, I felt the silence of the room closing in on me. Needing to do something, I put my pen and paper aside, plugged in my laptop, and went online.

  Using several of the databases I subscribed to for my job with the foundation, I looked up Silmar Systems of Atlanta, Georgia, James Sparks’ former employer. They were almost impossible to find until I went back several years prior to Bryan’s death, when the company went belly-up. That didn’t make much sense. Why would James have claimed to work at a place that didn’t even exist at that time?

  I wrote down the names of Silmar’s registered agent, and then I tracked down the home telephone number of one of the members of the board.

  I looked at my watch as I dialed, feeling bad for calling someone at 9:30 at night. The man was home, however, and I seized the opportunity to ask him if he could give me any information about a former employee, a Mr. James Sparks. He didn’t remember anyone working there by that name, but he did provide me with contact information for the former office manager, who had been with the company from beginning to end and knew everyone.

  Fortunately, I was able to reach the office manager as well. Unfortunately, he had never heard of anyone named James Sparks.

  “So you don’t know when Sparks might have worked there?” I asked.

  “No, you’re not hearing me,” the man said. “No one named James Sparks ever worked there.”

  He was irritable and insistent, so I let it go and asked about the name Tom Bennett.

  “Strike two,” the man said. “Never heard of him either.”

  By the time I hung up the phone, I was thoroughly confused. Had Sparks faked his past? This information had been provided to my law firm by James himself during a deposition. Was it possible that none of it was really true? Had he perjured himself?

  Heart pounding, I used one of my online databases to access Georgia State’s alumni records. I had to take a guess at the year of his graduation, based on his age, but he wasn’t listed there. I decided to look forward and backward ten years in each direction. It was slow and tedious work, but in the end I had to conclude that James Sparks had not graduated from Georgia State, nor did I see any evidence that he had ever matriculated there at all.

  What on earth was going on?

  Ten

  The first thing the next morning, after checking out of the hotel, I drove all the way to the Richmond office of Virginia Mutual and asked to see Lance Burkett. I had questions about the quick and simple insurance settlement they had paid to me on behalf of the Realtor, and I hoped he would be the man to answer those questions.

  Once he had the file in front of him, he reacquainted himself with the case.

  “I remember this…” he mumbled to himself as he flipped through the pages. “Oh, yeah, I remember…”

  He was a warm and friendly guy but extremely short, and it felt odd to be sitting across from him and looking down. I thought if I were him, I might build myself a little platform behind the desk to put me at an eye level with everyone else.

  “Just between you and me,” he said, his voice low, “this was one of the most surprising cases I’ve ever handled.”

  “Really?” I asked, leaning forward. “Tell me about it.”

  “Well, we got your firm’s complaint—no big surprise—and I was in the middle of drafting a denial when I got word that we would not be contesting the complaint after all. The settlement would be paid in full, through us but funded by an outside third party.”

  My pulse quickened.

  “An outside third party?” I asked, feeling in my gut that it must’ve been Tom. “Who?”

  “Uncle Sam,” Lance whispered. “The U.S. government.”

  I sat back, utterly perplexed.

  “The government?” I asked. “The five hundred thousand dollars I was given as a settlement was paid by the U.S. government? Why?”

  “Don’t know, don’t ask, don’t tell,” he said. “It was just a relief to pay your claim without having to go through a lengthy court battle. I’m always happy when we can settle out of court, especially early on in a case before we’ve already taken up resources and…”

  His voice droned on but I tuned him out, thinking instead about the implications here. If the government paid the insurance claim, then James Sparks might have been working for the government at that time. Was it possible?

  “Mr. Burkett, what do you know about James Sparks personally?” I asked. “The man who was driving the boat?”

  “Oh,” he said, surprised by my question. “Nothing. We represent the Realtor. And, by the way, you’ll be happy to know that they did institute some new protections on that boat once the settlement was reached.”

  “Protections?”

  “Safety precautions. Now whoever rents it gets a one-hour orientation of the boat by the Realtor and they have to sign off on a whole checklist of…”

  Again, his little voice droned on and I tuned him out. He seemed eager to chat, but I had to pursue this new knowledge. My settlement was paid by the government. Did that mean that Sparks had been an employee of the NSA as well? Had he been one of Tom’s coworkers?

  I thanked the man for his help and managed to extricate myself from his office. Back on the interstate, I headed south once again, toward Riverside. I needed to pay another visit to the police station there.

  As I drove, I had a bit of trouble with my cruise control. The button was acting funny and wouldn’t kick in, which caused me to slow down and then speed back up several times. Finally, I realized that I had accidentally turned the switch to “off.” Once I put it to “on,” I accelerated to the speed I wanted to go and then set it there.

  It was then that I noticed a blue sedan about two car lengths behind me. Everyone else who had been behind me was now in front of me, thanks to my cruise control problem. But the sedan had stayed back, always keeping a few cars between us. As one who knew how to tail someone myself, it made me suspicious. As I thought about it, I began to grow angry. Tom had told me the FBI wouldn’t be tailing me anymore. Now here they were, back at it again. Good grief.

  I took the Melville exit and wasn’t surprised to see the sedan take it as well. From there, I had about a 30-minute drive on a highway that would take me to the town of Riverside. Melville and Riverside were both congested areas, but in between the two towns lay many miles of nothing but farmland—miles where no one would be around to see if something were to happen. I would have to lose the tail before leaving Melville.

  I drove slowly, my mind racing, trying to think of some way to do this. I was pretty good at losing a tail, but this town wasn’t exactly the most complex when it came to traffic lights or one-way streets. Finally, I tried to think of what Eli had taught me, that a forward chase didn’t always have to move forward. I decided to do his “switch and brake” maneuver.

  First, I got in the left lane of traffic and waited until the sedan was also in the left lane with two cars between us. When the light turned green, I moved forward. Then, suddenly, as soon as I saw a break in the right lane, I pulled to the right, put on my flashers, and simply stopped my car in the middle of the road. Though my maneuver earned the honks of the cars behind me, it forced the sedan to pass me by. As it did, I looked hard at the driver. He was a young man with black hair and a goatee, his features bland, his eyes pointing straight forward at the road. My stomach did an odd flip-flop as I got the feeling he wasn’t FBI after all. I faltered, a chill passing through me.

  Then I decided to turn the tables on him. Flicking off my flashers, I pulled ahead, glued myself to his bu
mper, and followed him.

  “All right, buddy,” I said angrily as we drove. “Let’s see how you like it.”

  I wasn’t surprised when he made a U-turn. I followed suit, making sure that he saw me in his rearview mirror. I had a feeling he was going back to the interstate, and, sure enough, as we approached the overpass, he turned onto the northbound entrance lane. I watched to make sure he went all the way up the ramp, and then I quickly made another U-turn and headed off toward Riverside. As Harriet would say, I needed to get while the getting was good!

  I sped quickly through the country, reaching Riverside in record time. Once there, I drove straight to the police station, found an available parking spot a few doors down from it, and hurriedly went inside.

  Officer Darnell Robinson was at his desk, and he looked up and saw me before I could even ask for him. I had come here to talk to him, but the look on his face was so odd that I hesitated. As I looked at him, he widened his eyes and then tilted his head toward the door I had just come in. Then, to my surprise, he discreetly raised one hand to his ear, thumb and pinky sticking out, in the universal symbol for “telephone.”

  “Help you?” the man at the desk asked, oblivious to the entire exchange, his attention focused on a newspaper sports page in front of him.

  “I, um, I just wondered if I need a permit to have a garage sale,” I said, flustered.

  “You’ll have to ask at the township building,” he said, “up on Pecan Street, next to the library.”

  “Thank you,” I said. Giving a sharp glance to Officer Robinson, I turned and left, going back to my car. Once there, I pulled out his card and dialed his number on my cell phone.

  “You know where Park Lane meets Woodland?” he asked, without even saying hello.

  “I can find it,” I said.

  “I’ll meet you there in ten minutes.”

  Heart pounding, I started up my car and sat studying my map for a moment. The meeting point wasn’t very far away, and I used a zigzag of back streets to get there.

  I found myself facing a small neighborhood park. I pulled to a stop in one of the parking places and sat with my engine running. On the other side of the park was a lone mother, trying to handle an active toddler and a big dog, a Lab. Finally she got the toddler into a swing and then let the dog roam free as she pushed the swing. I kept my eyes open, but I never saw the blue sedan.

  A few minutes later, a police cruiser pulled up next to my car. As I watched, Officer Robinson got out and climbed into mine.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I thought this might be better.”

  “Of course,” I replied. “Should I drive us somewhere?”

  “No, I think we’re okay here. This won’t take long.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “Something’s definitely fishy.”

  I listened as he described his morning. First thing, he was called into his captain’s office and asked why he had put out a request for the file on James Sparks.

  “I explained that the victim’s widow had been in asking questions, but that I couldn’t really help much until I got a look at the file. He told me the file was no longer available to our office and I was to drop the matter.”

  “Drop the matter? What about me?”

  “I was directed to tell you that no further information is available at this time.”

  “But—”

  “Listen, the more I thought about it, the more I remembered about the whole thing. I figured if I can’t check any of the details out in the file, at least I can tell you what I recall. There were some strange things about that case. Definitely some strange things.”

  “Like what?” I asked, eyes wide.

  “Like the man I arrested. James Sparks. He never said a word to me from the moment I got there till we had him locked up in the jail. Wouldn’t give his name, his address, nothing. Woulda thought he was a mute, ’cept he used his one phone call to talk to somebody. I ran his prints myself and came back with nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Well, there was information there, but it was restricted.”

  “Restricted?”

  “Like, he had a record, but we weren’t allowed to access it. I’ve seen that once or twice before. There’s usually some legal reason their facts are protected, at least until we go through the proper channels—jump through a few hoops, you know—to get at them.”

  “So did you go through those channels?”

  “No. Here’s what’s weird: I didn’t have to. The next day, he still wasn’t talking, so my boss told me to run the prints one more time the regular way. Lo and behold, this time I got a full, unrestricted record on the guy—name, age, social. He’d been arrested for driving under the influence more than ten times in the past. Later that day we got back his blood work, which showed an intoxication level of one point two.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “Yeah, especially considering that when I arrested that man, he wasn’t even drunk.”

  “What?” I asked, my heart pounding.

  “He didn’t smell like alcohol, he wasn’t weaving around, he didn’t display any of the characteristics we look for. Only reason they took blood is because it’s mandatory in vehicular homicides. I barely even glanced at the lab report when it came back in, so when I saw one point two, I nearly flipped.”

  “Did you talk to anyone about it?”

  “Nah, I was working double shifts back then, trying to pay off my car note. I just remember thinking, you never know. You never know.”

  “So what happened after that?”

  He shrugged.

  “I didn’t have any other involvement,” he said. “I fielded a few calls from the press, but otherwise I went on to other things. I’m sorry I can’t tell you more than that. But I hope at least this much is a help to you, whatever you need the information for.”

  I nodded, thinking about the kind officer sitting next to me, wondering what motivated him to speak to me despite the edict of his boss to cut me off.

  “Why did you tell me all of this?” I asked finally, wondering how I could repay this debt.

  He exhaled slowly.

  “Because I remember you,” he said, his eyes sad as he gazed off across the park. “I responded to the scene of the accident first, before they called me over to the Docksider. I heard you screaming. I watched you clinging to your husband’s dead body, even as the paramedics were trying to pull him away from you.”

  “I don’t remember much about that day,” I admitted softly.

  “That’s funny,” he replied. “Because I’ve never been able to forget it.”

  Eleven

  I was in a daze once the officer left, my mind reeling.

  James Sparks hadn’t been drunk after all? Surely, that couldn’t be true. I looked in my notes for the phone number of Harry Stickles, the man who had chased down the speedboat in his own boat and then tackled James Sparks on the dock.

  His wife said he was out in the yard, working on the car, and that he would have to call me back. I told her it was urgent, so she asked me to hold on and then set the phone down with a clunk. I listened as she yelled for her husband. After about two full minutes, it sounded as though he had come inside.

  “Don’t get grease on the phone,” she said in the background.

  “I won’t,” he said irritably. Then he spoke into the phone. “Hello?”

  “Mr. Stickles,” I said, “this is Callie Webber again, the one who called about the boating accident. I’m sorry to bother you, but I just have one more question for you.”

  “Oh, it’s no bother,” he replied. “But call me Harry, please.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Harry. I just wanted your impression of James Sparks that day you caught him at the Docksider.”

  “My impression?”

  “About his…about him being so drunk. His blood alcohol level was very high. I’m sure he must’ve been pretty out of control?”


  “Naw, on the contrary,” he said. “He was upset at first, but then he got real quiet. I was surprised when the paper said he’d been drunk at the time. Sure didn’t seem drunk to me.”

  “Did you smell alcohol on him?”

  “Not that I noticed, but then again, I had already had one beer myself, so maybe I wouldn’t have smelled it anyway.”

  “I see.”

  “He sure wasn’t out of his head, though. I mean, I know drunks. I’ve seen my share around here, that’s for sure.”

  He cracked up laughing, his laugh finally turning to a cough. I waited for the spell to be over before I spoke again.

  “So you would say he definitely did not seem drunk at the time?”

  “That is correct. He did not seem drunk at the time, though I guess he might’ve been. Some folks is quiet drunks, you know. Takes all kinds.”

  I thanked him for his help and concluded the call, knowing what I had to do next. The time had come to see Sparks in person. I didn’t feel that I had any other choice.

  After stopping in a convenience store for a small fruit salad in a cup, I drove back to Melville and then hit the interstate once again and headed south toward the state prison in Surry.

  I had a little trouble finding it once I got there, because the road to the prison wasn’t well marked. Still, that came as no real surprise. Most counties didn’t exactly like to advertise the locations of places that brought down property values.

  Finally, I found a small, brown sign that simply said “Virginia State Prison, Next Right.” I turned and followed a long road that wound through deserted farmland, finally reaching a checkpoint with a guard and a tall barbed-wire-topped fence branching out on both sides. Large signs warned that both my vehicle and I were now subject to full search.

  “May I help you?” the guard asked as I pulled to a stop.

  “I’m here to see a prisoner,” I said.

  “Are you on his list?” he asked.