Racing the Devil Read online

  “Which? The singer, or the blond guy?”

  “The singer. Blondie would look like hell in drag. Not that he isn’t gorgeous.”

  I looked more closely at Blondie. His knuckles sported jail-house tattoos, LOVE on one hand and HATE on the other. Probably the black sheep boyfriend Birdie had mentioned. I wondered why, if he was Valerie’s boyfriend, she had planted a long hot kiss on Ian Callahan.

  I wondered about the man who had used my name to rent a motel room and then killed a woman in it.

  “Gorgeous aside,” I said. “Does that guy look anything like me?”

  His gaze swung from me to the blond guy and back again. “You’re of a type,” he said.

  “Enough so a motel clerk might think he was me?”

  He shrugged. “Fake beard, cowboy hat, ponytail tucked under to make the hair look shorter . . . your hair’s a little darker and your teeth are better, but if they weren’t paying attention, I guess maybe.”

  I made a mental note to learn more about Blondie.

  After the final prayer and as the congregation poured out onto the sidewalk, Ashleigh thrust her microphone into Tara Hart-well’s ashen face. Kneeling beside the child, Ashleigh said in her sweetest voice, “Sweetheart, is there something you’d like to say about your mama?”

  There was a long silence. Ashleigh, knowing the value of a dramatic moment, waited. I saw Calvin Hartwell’s hand tighten on his daughter’s shoulder.

  Tara said sadly, “My mama’s in Hell.”

  “What?” Ashleigh blinked. Her mouth twitched, as if it couldn’t decide whether to protest or smile.

  In other circumstances, I would have enjoyed seeing Ashleigh gaping and speechless on live TV. But I couldn’t get that kid’s face out of my head, or that small, lost voice.

  Then the moment was gone. Calvin Hartwell picked his daughter up and whisked her away to his car. Katrina, the twelve-year-old, scurried after them, one hand clutching at the tail of her daddy’s jacket.

  IT ISN’T ALL THAT HARD to follow a man who doesn’t know he’s being followed. On Friday morning, after I’d taken care of the horses and left a message from Ian Callahan on Reverend Avery’s answering machine, I sat in my rental car, my Sony digital camera and a briefcase full of surveillance equipment on the seat beside me, and watched Cal Hartwell and the girls leave their house bright and early the next morning. I gave them a lead of half a block before pulling out behind them.

  The tricky part was while we were still in Hartwell’s neighborhood, because traffic was so thin it was almost nonexistent until we turned onto Lebanon Road. Technically, it’s the Sergeant Lance Fielder Memorial Highway, but no one calls it that because it takes almost as long to say as it does to drive. I know, I know. If someone had named a road after my dad, I’d want people to know it. But it’s been Lebanon Road for as long as anyone can remember. Old habits die hard. Look at the metric system.

  I stayed three or four cars behind the champagne Park Avenue, except on the side streets, where there were no cars for cover and I had to drop back almost out of view.

  Cal dropped his daughters off at an elementary school not far from their house. Welcome to Fun Factory, said the sign out front. Summer Activity Program. I’d figured a guy like Hartwell would put his kids in a private school, but here they were, the younger girl in pink slacks and a SpongeBob SquarePants T-shirt, the elder in a light blue jumper. They got out of the car, and Cal called them back for a final hug. Then they entered the building hand in hand, clutching the straps of their backpacks like two lost souls.

  They didn’t look back.

  For a week after Dad died, Randall stayed home from school. He says he still remembers his first day back in his third-grade classroom. It looked exactly the same, but he felt strange and different from the other children. Something terrible had happened to him and his family, and it set him apart. He couldn’t have said how or why, but it was true. “I’m half an orphan,” he remembers thinking, “and my daddy is a hero.”

  Something terrible had happened to the Hartwell girls, but they couldn’t console themselves with the thought that their mother was a hero. Instead, they would have to cope with prying questions and judgments. Why was your mother at that motel? Why was she with another man when she should have been at home with you?

  Watching them go into that big building all alone made my stomach feel hollow.

  With the girls safely at Fun Factory, Cal took I-40 West toward downtown and turned left off the Broadway exit. Another surprise. Calvin had been quoted both in print and on the evening news as saying he worked as an architect out of an ultramodern, glassed-in suite not far from the Convention Center. But to get to the Convention Center, and thus to his office, he would have had to turn right onto Broadway.

  So where was he headed?

  I trailed him past the fork where Broadway split and turned to West End. Past Stone Mountain, Nashville’s best known psychedelic-retro-hippie head shop. Past the little strip mall that housed a big-box bookstore and P.F. Chang’s.

  He turned onto a side street just as the light turned red. If I’d been closer, I would have gunned it, but there were three cars between my rental and his Park Avenue. I fretted through the red light, drumming on the steering wheel and swearing under my breath until the stream of ongoing traffic broke enough for me to bolt through.

  Of course, I lost him.

  I drove straight for about three blocks, and when I didn’t spot the Park Avenue, swung left onto a residential street. I cruised slowly up and down the cross-streets, driving a grid like the one I’d walk if it were a crime scene. Then something happened that I’d almost given up on since I’d met up with Heather in the First Edition Bar and Grill.

  I got lucky.

  I spotted the Park Avenue just as Cal was starting up the walkway of a three-story traditional-style brick house with ivory lace curtains and a dried-flower wreath on the door.

  Suddenly, things got interesting.

  The woman who met him at the door wore tight jeans and a see-through blouse with no bra underneath. My telephoto lens showed a gold cross nestled between her breasts. The hello kiss she and Cal exchanged said more than just hello.

  I thought, You son of a bitch.

  Had he strayed from the straight and narrow after Amy went to work, or had he been dipping his wick in someone else’s oil the whole time his wife was at home scrubbing toilets and popping Prozac?

  I snapped a couple of photos of the lip-lock at the door. Then, when they had gone inside, I took pictures of the front of the house with the Park Avenue in front of it, so that the license plate and house number were clearly visible.

  It didn’t prove anything, except that Calvin Hartwell was a hypocrite, but it might be enough to raise at least a few doubts about my guilt in his wife’s murder.

  I got out of the car and skulked around the house until I ascertained that, a) I couldn’t see or hear whatever Calvin and the woman were up to, b) I’d gotten the woman’s name—G. Mathis—off of the mailbox, and c) if I stayed around much longer, I’d either be caught trespassing or be late for my preliminary hearing. I laid my camera gently on the passenger seat and drove away.

  Of course, I wasn’t late. I could have waited several hours and still had time to spare, because nine-tenths of most people’s court dates is spent waiting. Since my case fell late in the schedule, Randall, Jay, and I sat in the gallery and listened to a dozen cases before my name was called.

  The D.A., with a little help from Frank and Harry, presented all the evidence, both physical and circumstantial, that the state had amassed against me. The judge ruled that, yes, there was plenty to justify sending the case to the Grand Jury, at which time Frank and Harry would present their evidence again, and the Grand Jury would almost certainly decide that, yes, there was enough to justify a trial and set a date for one.

  In the meantime, I was a free man, and if I wanted to stay that way, I had to solve Amanda Hartwell’s murder. It sounded simple until you
realized that a murder unsolved after forty-eight hours is unlikely to ever be solved. It was a crucial window, and I’d already missed it.

  Frank followed Randall, Jay, and me out of the courtroom. “Got a minute, kid?”

  Randall’s face flushed a virulent red. “No, he doesn’t have a minute. What did you think you were doing up there?”

  Frank sighed and ran a hand through his silver hair. “My job, Randall. Just my job.”

  “Yeah? If my job was railroading my friends, I think I’d go home and shoot myself.” Randall had drawn up to his full six-two. He looked puffed out, like a rooster about to fly into a cockfight.

  I laid my hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “He’s just doing what he has to. In his place, I’d do the same thing.”

  “Like hell, you would. I want to hear him say he thinks you’re innocent.”

  Frank looked like he’d swallowed a fish hook. “I’d like to think that, Randall. But the voice print . . . That hurts.”

  Randall set his jaw. “Innocent until proven guilty, remember?”

  “Son,” Frank said. “We can prove him guilty. We can prove it beyond any reasonable doubt.” He turned to me. “Officially, this case is closed. Nobody wants to look like they’re trying to protect you just because you used to be one of us. Plus, there’s a lot of ill feeling over how you left. The story the Arneau bitch did on you made the whole department look bad.”

  I grimaced at the memory. “I understand.”

  “Mac.” He searched my face. Met my gaze and held it. “No head games. Just a simple yes or no. Did you do it?”

  “No, Frank. No, I didn’t.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “What? Suddenly you believe me?”

  “Don’t make me regret it.” It was the second time he’d said that to me. His hand clapped my shoulder. “You get what I’m saying? Unofficially, I’ll do what I can.”

  I nodded. Wondered what it meant to our friendship that he’d thought me capable of murder. If it could be mended by a word of encouragement and a hand on the shoulder. “Whatever you can do,” I said. “I appreciate it.”

  Randall looked away. “I hate this.”

  “I know,” Frank said. “We all do.”

  I told him about Cal Hartwell’s morning liaison and the pictures I had taken of it. He told me the lab had found gray carpet fibers on Amy Hartwell’s body.

  “The carpets at the motel are sandy-colored,” he said. “The ones in the Hartwell house are mauve and cream. The carpet in the Hartwell cars is taupe for the family car, and red for Amy’s. The carpets in Jay’s house are blue, and your truck has a gray interior, but not the right gray.”

  “So we have mystery fibers.”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  How many gray carpets were there in Nashville? Only about a million. But if we found a good suspect, and we could link him to a gray carpet, we could match the fibers.

  “What about the phone call?” I asked. “The one she got that night just before she went out?”

  He shook his head. “Came from a pay phone downtown. A couple of blocks from your office.”

  I forced a laugh. “It just never gets any better, does it?”

  Harry stood beside the courtroom door, looking embarrassed, and I wondered if he thought I’d murdered a woman and taken pornographic pictures of her child. He noticed me looking and glanced away.

  Frank scuffed at a smudge on the floor with the toe of his shoe. “You might want to know, we got your lab work back. Traces of Rohypnol. So you were right about being drugged.”

  I nodded.

  Randall looked from Frank’s face to mine. “That’s good, right? It means he’s telling the truth about being set up.”

  “Not necessarily. The D.A. is already working on the theory that he took the drug himself. It’s not that unusual. You can get a hell of a high from roofies and alcohol—if it doesn’t kill you. And it would make sense, if he was trying to make it look like he was being framed.”

  “What about the glasses?” I knew this was important. I just wasn’t certain why.

  “Residue in both. And traces of the same drug found in the victim’s body. None of which is any help to you.”

  “What about my motel room? If my glass with the drug residue was found at the murder scene, what did I put the roofies in when I took them back at my motel?”

  He shrugged. “Dropped it down the garbage chute, carried it out with you when you left. Or maybe you took ‘em before you left.”

  “How’d I drive back to the motel, if I’d already downed the drug?”

  “I dunno. Guys drive high all the time, but it was a hell of a chance to take. The good news is, the Rohypnol doesn’t hurt your case. The bad news is, it doesn’t help either.”

  Which was what I’d known all along, but it still hurt like hell to hear him say it.

  AN HOUR AFTER THE HEARING, I was at Ms. Birdie’s kitchen table eating grapefruit salad and nibbling on Italian wedding cookies. “You said Hartwell was late the night Amy was killed,” I said. “What time did he get home?”

  “It was after two.” She pressed her lips together to show her disapproval. “The girls were sleeping in the spare room, and instead of waiting until morning to wake us all up, he came a-pounding at the door about two-thirty. Said Amy wasn’t back, and wanted to know where she’d gone. I said I didn’t know where she was and furthermore, if I did know, I wouldn’t tell him. He barged in and took the girls, and after a cup of tea, I went back up to bed and went to sleep.”

  “How did he seem? Rumpled? Disheveled? Any blood?”

  “Flustered. Angry. His tie was loose. But I don’t think I’d call him rumpled. I didn’t see any blood, but he was wearing a dark suit, so I mightn’t have seen it anyway. I do remember that his cuffs were white, and I didn’t see any bloodstains on them.”

  So Hartwell didn’t have an alibi for the night of Amy’s murder. Or maybe—I thought of G. Mathis—he did. The million-dollar question was, even if she did give him an alibi, how reliable would it be?

  I finished my lemonade and gave Ms. Birdie a kiss on one withered cheek. The skin was dry and soft and smelled of violets.

  “I’ll be seeing you, Ms. Birdie,” I said.

  She reached for my plate and stacked it on top of her own, crossing our forks on top like swords. “I’ll have the lemonade ready.”

  “WE’RE NOT ALLOWED to talk to strangers.” Tara Hartwell jutted out her jaw and poked a chubby finger in my direction.

  “Hush,” Katrina said. “He’s just a reporter.”

  I rested my arms on the Hartwells’ backyard fence and shrugged. “How about I stay way over here, and you stay way over there. That way, you’ll know I don’t have anything nefarious in mind.”

  A little line formed between Tara’s eyebrows. “What’s nefarious?”

  Katrina said, “It means ‘bad.’ ”

  I nodded. “Bad. Wicked. Nefarious means evil.”

  There was a swing set in the yard, and Tara scooted onto one of the narrow plastic seats and scuffed at the dirt with the toe of her shoe. She was a sturdy little girl in pink shorts and a Snoopy T-shirt, buttered-toast hair bleaching to honey, tanned skin with Peanuts Band-Aids at the elbows and knees.

  Katrina wrapped a slender arm around the swing set’s support pole and rested a pale cheek against the metal. “What do you want?”

  “It’s been a rough couple of weeks for you,” I said.

  Tara nodded. “My mama’s gone to Hell.”

  “Shut up,” Katrina said. “She hasn’t.”

  “Has.”

  Katrina looked at me and rolled her eyes. “She’s got this idea in her head.”

  Tara pouted. “Reverend Avery said so.”

  “Reverend Avery doesn’t know everything.” Katrina gestured in my direction. “What do you think?”

  I pretended to consider it. “I don’t think she’s in Hell.”

  “I don’t either. Are you a reporter?”<
br />
  “Detective.”

  She tilted her head to one side and raised one eyebrow. “Oh.”

  “I know it’s hard. But do you think you could go over it again? What happened that night?”

  “Huh.” Tara gave a little grunt. “Mommy went out with Aunt Valerie. Then she went out with her boyfriend. Then she got killed-ed. Then she went to Hell.”

  “Killed,” Katrina corrected. “You’re so naïve. She didn’t go out with Aunt Valerie. She just said that so we wouldn’t know she was going to meet her boyfriend.”

  From the house, Calvin Hartwell called the girls.

  Tara pushed herself out of the swing and ran toward the house, but Katrina sidled closer to the fence. “Do you believe in Hell?” she asked.

  “Only for bad people,” I said. “Really bad.”

  She sucked at her lower lip. “Like adulterers?”

  “Like murderers,” I said. “Rapists. Child molesters.”

  “That’s what I think too,” she said, and was gone.

  On Saturday, I finally reached Asa Majors, who gave me directions to his farmhouse in Smyrna. I put on my Ian Callahan disguise and drove out to a modest farm a few miles southeast of town. The barn was weathered, with traces of peeling red paint, but it looked sturdy. In back were a round pen and a small arena. I saw half a dozen horses, one of them a foal, grazing in the side pasture.

  A black man with graying hair and a wiry mustache sauntered out of the barn, wiping his hands on a grimy bandana. “Mornin’,” he said. “You must be Callahan.” He stuffed the bandana into his back pocket and stretched out a hand.

  I shook it, stepping in close enough to smell alcohol on his breath, if there was any. There wasn’t.

  He said, “You say you’re looking at a horse I trained?”

  “Two-year-old bay Arabian. Owner calls him Dakota.”

  His eyes narrowed. Hardened. “He’s a good horse. Or was, before he lost his eye. Best I ever worked, maybe. But I haven’t seen him in awhile.”

  “Owner says you almost blinded him with your belt buckle.”

  He stared out across my shoulder, and a muscle in his jaw twitched. “She said that, did she?”