Deadly Illusions Read online

  “He might rough her up a little,” Orman said. “Nothing worse than that.”

  I was getting frustrated. “He’s using Damon Saint’s identity—name and Social Security number. From what we found at the house he moved out of, he may be dealing in crystal meth.”

  “Are the cops after him?” Orman asked.

  “No. We don’t have enough to get them involved yet.”

  “So all you have is some suspicions and some guesses.”

  That was too close for comfort. “Well-founded suspicions,” I said, “and educated guesses. What do you think happened to Saint?”

  “From what you say happened in Indianapolis, I’d guess he went off his rocker and took himself out.”

  I stared at him hard enough to punch a hole through his skull. “I think you’re making a major mistake, Mr. Orman. You could cost a young woman her life.”

  “Don’t think so.”

  He had the look of a man who was suddenly out to lunch. I had been turned off completely. It was a cinch I would get no more out of him. Grabbing Jill’s arm, I swung her toward the doorway. “I hope you sleep well tonight,” I snapped and headed out to the sidewalk.

  ———

  As if the conclusion to our interview had not been bad enough, the flight home was the pits. Air Traffic Control had to route us around several storms, and we wound up landing at Nashville in a pouring rain. If I’d had a security blanket, I would have crawled under it for the entire trip.

  We had grabbed a bite at the airport before boarding the Cessna and really had not found time to discuss what we’d learned from Ray Orman. Having finally settled my nerves with a cup of lousy machine-made coffee at Cornelia Fort, I brought up the subject as we drove home. With the rain still pouring, the waning afternoon looked more like an early stage of evening. Taillights painted cryptic stains on the wet pavement.

  “Let’s see what we can fathom from Mr. Orman’s performance,” I said.

  Jill grimaced. “He’ll get no Oscar votes from me.”

  “The big question is, how did Chad Rowe pick up Damon Saint’s identity?”

  “Perry Vanatta said he sent the house proceeds to Saint at an Atlanta post office box. Maybe Rowe ran into him in Atlanta.”

  “We might check the Atlanta police for unsolved murders around seven years ago.”

  “Do you think Rowe murdered him?”

  “I don’t think a guy would assume another’s identity unless he was damned certain the original was not around any longer.”

  “That scares me,” Jill said.

  “Why?”

  “If Molly’s husband has already killed an old Vietnam buddy, he sure wouldn’t hesitate to kill her.”

  “I wonder...”

  I let my thoughts wander over what she had just said. According to Orman, Rowe and Saint were both in the sergeant’s outfit. He said Rowe had already had enough trouble. And he said something earlier about another buddy of Saint’s who had spent time in Leavenworth.

  “What are you wondering?” Jill asked.

  “Remember the buddy of Saint who’d been in prison but was apparently doing okay now?”

  She nodded slowly. “And you’re wondering—”

  “If he could be Chad Rowe. He sounded like someone Orman would be reluctant to cause any more trouble.”

  “So we check Leavenworth for a former prisoner named Chad Rowe,” Jill said.

  “Right on, babe.”

  “I’ll bet Phil Adamson could check that out for us.”

  “If he had the time, which he doesn’t. See if you can get Ted Kennerly on the cell phone.”

  Jill left a message for him, and we were nearly home when Ted returned the call. After chatting with him for a moment, she handed me the phone.

  “This Molly Saint case is really heating up,” I said. “The guy who claims to be Damon Saint appears to be an ex-con named Chad Rowe. He probably did time at Leavenworth for bank robbery.”

  “Want me to check on him at the prison?” Ted asked.

  “Right. He should have been out for somewhere between seven and ten years. I’d like to know when he was released, where he’s from and where the robbery took place.”

  “I think I’ll put my FBI friend onto it. He should be able to find the answers in their computer.”

  I called the office as soon as we got home to check for any messages. I found one from Grant Crenshaw, Molly’s boss, requesting that we return his call. When he answered, he got right to the point.

  “You’ve been looking for one of my employees, Molly Saint,” he said. “I trust you’ve determined her whereabouts.”

  I drummed my fingers on the kitchen table. “I’m sorry, Mr. Crenshaw, but we’re still working on it. We don’t have anything to report as yet.”

  “Really? Your wife talked to me last Thursday. Surely you’ve heard something by now.”

  I didn’t like his tone of voice, which seemed to question our competence. “I trust you’re aware that neither Molly nor her husband told anyone where they were going. They haven’t been easy to trace. But I’m sure they’ll do something soon that will give us a lead.”

  “Well, the minute you have something, I want you to call me. I’ll give you my private number. The calls are forwarded to me wherever I am.”

  I wasn’t working for Grant Crenshaw, though I acknowledged his interest in finding Molly. From my standpoint, it had been a rather grueling day, and I didn’t want to argue. So I agreed and hung up.

  When I repeated the request for Jill, she tapped a finger against her chin. “He just asked if we knew her whereabouts, not if we knew whether she was okay?”

  “That’s right, babe. When he wasn’t chastising me, I didn’t detect much sentiment in his voice. He was very unemotional, sounded like his main interest was in locating her, for whatever reason.”

  “When I was at his office, he talked like he was quite concerned about her. He wanted to know just what her problem was, why she’d felt she had to take some time off.”

  Mr. Crenshaw’s behavior disturbed me for some reason, and I didn’t think it was just his apparent disparagement of our efforts to find Molly.

  A short time later, Jesse Logan called.

  “Well, they did it,” he said. “The cops arrested everybody on our hit list.”

  “Good. How are things going at the restaurant?” I asked.

  “Smoothly. I had a new interim manager waiting, and we’ve augmented the serving staff from other units in the area.”

  “What about the hostess?” We had no evidence that the Sunday hostess was in on the take, but it looked pretty suspicious.

  “I gave her the option of moving to another location or resigning,” Logan said. “She quit. Thanks to the job you and Jill did, everything looks in good shape. If you ever need a reference, be sure and have ’em call me.”

  After I had done a replay of the conversation for Jill, she gave me a questioning look. “Then we can figure up all of our expenses tomorrow and send him a final bill?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “So congratulations are in order, Mr. McKenzie.”

  I threw my arms around her and gave her a monstrous kiss. “Congratulations to you, babe. You were the heroine on this case.”

  She had a gleam in her eye. “I think we make a pretty good team.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” I said. “Don’t we have a little champagne in the fridge?”

  She brought two glasses of bubbly into the living room, where we sat on the love seat and toasted ourselves.

  “Now if we can just come up with some more cases where we don’t have to fly off someplace to solve them,” I said.

  “Actually, I was rather proud of you this afternoon. Even with all those storms around, you didn’t turn green a single time.”

  “I don’t turn green. With all that punishment, I turn homicidal. You’re lucky you’re still alive.”

  “Don’t joke about that subject, dear,” she said. “I keep wondering wh
ere Molly is, what’s happening to her.”

  “We’ll find her, babe. That’s a promise.” I just hoped she would still be alive and well when we did.

  21

  Tuesday morning’s newspaper carried a story, quoting anonymous police sources, reporting an African-American deliveryman for a computer store was being questioned in the Bernstein murder. The suspect was identified as Larry Inman, an ex-Marine who lived on the northeast side of town.

  “Do you think he did it?” Jill asked.

  I wasn’t prepared to offer an opinion at this stage. I just hoped I had provided the cops with a decent lead. “If they’re leaking the story, they must have more than just my speculation.”

  “Would Phil tell us what they’ve learned?”

  “I don’t plan to ask. He’s already told us enough to get him in trouble if his boss knew about it. Anyway, I want to stay as far away from that investigation as I can.”

  We had been in the office only a short time when Heritage Car Rental’s Art Finley called.

  “I tried to reach you yesterday afternoon but got your answering machine,” he said. “I hate those damn things.”

  “Did you have something for us?”

  “A young black dude came by asking about Damon, where he’d moved to, if I knew how to get in touch with him. Stuff like that.”

  “The guy have a name?”

  “Yeah, Tommy…or Toby. I don’t remember. I didn’t pay that much attention, but then I got to thinking it might be something you’d be interested in.”

  “Would the name have been Tony? Tony Yarnell?”

  His voice perked up. “Yeah, that’s it. You know him?”

  “He’s a local con man. He came by our office last Friday asking the same questions about Damon’s wife. I trust you haven’t heard any more from Damon?”

  “Not a word. Of course, he’s been gone like this before.”

  “On trips to help an old Vietnam buddy?”

  “He tell you about that?”

  “Right. Anyway, thanks for calling.”

  What was Tony Yarnell after, I wondered? Was he really looking for Molly, or was it Damon?

  A few minutes later, Ted landed in the phone queue.

  “The Feds came through,” he said. “Warner Chad Rowe served ten years in Leavenworth for robbing a bank in a Kansas City suburb in 1980. He was released in 1991. You’ll be happy to know his hometown is Gallatin, Tennessee.”

  “Damnation. That’s great news, Ted.”

  “Yeah. You think that might be where he’s hiding out?”

  “Possibly. We’ll get right on it. Did you by any chance find out who the agent was who handled the case?”

  Ted chuckled. “I know you, boss. I figured that might be your next question. His name is Frank Nichols. He was a young agent back then. Now he’s special agent in charge at the Memphis Field Office.”

  I told Jill what Ted had learned, then put in a call to the FBI office in Memphis. It took a little con job with my OSI background, but I soon had SAC Nichols on the line. I explained briefly who I was and that I was investigating a guy living under an assumed name who was actually an ex-con he had arrested at Kansas City in 1980.

  “Yeah, I remember the case,” Nichols said. “The son-of-a-bitch made off with over a hundred thousand we never recovered.”

  “Was he working alone?”

  “No. He had a partner, but he refused to identify the guy. As I recall, Rowe was an ex-Green Beret from Vietnam. We suspected he was working with an Army buddy, but despite everything we tried, he wouldn’t talk.”

  I had an idea who the buddy might have been, but I left that one alone. “How did he screw up and get caught?”

  Nichols said there had actually been two bank robberies. The first one was in a small town outside Kansas City and netted only about $20,000. Rowe used part of the loot to buy a car, which he titled in his own name. Then Rowe and his buddy picked a larger bank that handled paychecks for a nearby plant. They stole a car for the getaway and abandoned it at the location where they had left Rowe’s car. Someone saw them switch cars and wrote down the license number. When they heard this on their police scanner, Rowe and his buddy decided to ditch the car and split up.

  “Did they split the loot?” I asked.

  “No. They drove to a supermarket where they bought a bunch of plastic food storage bags. We found that out in the investigation. They also bought a small camper’s shovel at a nearby sporting goods store. The clerks remembered them, but they were wearing disguises. So we couldn’t get a positive ID on the accomplice.”

  “How did you catch Rowe?”

  “They buried the cash, then headed in opposite directions, intending to meet up later and recover the loot. Rowe realized he was missing a motel receipt on which he had written an incriminating note. Thinking he had left the receipt in the car, he hurried back to the shopping center where they had ditched it. He arrived at about the same time as the police.”

  “You already knew his identity, if the car was titled in his name,” I said.

  Nichols chuckled. “Yeah, the idiot wasn’t too smart in that respect. Of course, we might have considered that car stolen, too. But we would’ve been on his trail pretty soon. Anyway, we got lucky.”

  “So it looks like the partner made off with the cash,” I said.

  “Yeah. We confirmed it after Rowe was released from prison. We followed him to a cemetery not far from the shopping center. He dug around a grave but found nothing. When we questioned him, he gave some cockamamie story about looking for something a wartime buddy had left. The grave was actually an ex-soldier’s, but not from Vietnam. We kept a tail on him for a month or so, but it didn’t lead anywhere. Let us know if you find a stash of cash around him.”

  “Be happy to,” I said. “I just hope we can find him. I’m afraid his wife’s in real danger.”

  “Sorry I can’t help on that,” Agent Nichols said. “But good luck.”

  I hung up the phone and turned to Jill. “I think I know what happened to the real Damon Saint.”

  22

  The local daily newspaper had been my undoing back when I was with the DA’s office. After making some off-the-cuff remarks about Detective Mark Tremaine at a friend’s retirement party, I was shocked to find my comments splashed across the front page by a young man I had met at the dinner. Turned out he was a reporter. It cost me my job and resulted in other grief among the Nashville police that still lingered. Tremaine was from a cop family. His dad was retired from the force. An uncle was in communications, and his brother-in-law was a patrol sergeant. That no doubt accounted for a lot of my troubles with the department. But the newspaper tried to make amends, I guess, with a nice feature story a few months ago after Jill and I had solved the murder of a young Nashville architect/engineer down in Florida. The guy who interviewed us and wrote the story was Wes Knight, a veteran reporter with an unruly mop of salt-and-pepper hair and a who-gives-a-damn attitude. After we opened McKenzie Investigations, he called to say he’d like any tips we could give him on newsworthy cases.

  “Hi, Wes,” I greeted him when he answered the phone. “This is Greg McKenzie. How’s the news business?”

  “Pretty dull at the moment. This Elliott Bernstein story has some possibilities, but the most exciting thing has been the battle between the local cops and the FBI. Seems there’s been a lot of wheel spinning. Maybe this deliveryman thing will pan out for them. You heard anything new?”

  “Sorry, I’ve been too wrapped up in my own work.”

  “Anything I could use?”

  “Not yet. But I might have something before long.” I thought about the King Cole’s case, but I didn’t want Jesse Logan going into cardiac arrest. “I could use a little help with some background on a guy whose name I came across.”

  “Somebody from Nashville?”

  “Gallatin.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Got caught for a bank robbery in Kansas and did some time. It was aro
und twenty years ago. Think you’d have something in your files?”

  “Very likely. What’s his name?”

  “Warner Chad Rowe.”

  “Shad Roe?”

  Shaking my head, I spelled it for him.

  “Anything else you can tell me about the guy?” Wes asked.

  “He’s a Vietnam vet and he spent a few years in Leavenworth. That’s about it.”

  “Okay, Greg. I’ll see if we have anything. Want me to fax you whatever I find?”

  “That’d be great, Wes.”

  “Are you in a hurry for this?”

  “Actually, I am. I really appreciate your help.”

  “Just remember me when you break something.”

  “I’ll remember.”

  I had considered the possibility of giving Wes what we had on the man posing as Damon Saint for a little speculative news story. No doubt that would shake the missing car ferryman out of the bushes, but after that threatening phone call, I didn’t like the idea of his sneaking out to Hermitage and burning down our house in the middle of the night. He was obviously not a man to toy with.

  “If Molly’s husband tracked down his old Army buddy and killed him for taking all the bank robbery proceeds,” Jill said from her desk across the way, “don’t you think that’s enough to warrant a call to Detective Phil Adamson?”

  “If we had a way of proving it,” I said.

  “What if we took this wedding photo to Indianapolis and showed it to that carpet cleaner, Perry Vanatta?”

  “We already know Molly’s husband isn’t Damon Saint. There’s a possibility Vanatta may have seen Rowe with Saint, but he told us he has no idea what happened to Saint just before he disappeared.”

  “So there’s nothing we could accomplish in Indiana.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  She came over and perched on the edge of my desk. “Okay, Mr. Detective, tell me how we could accomplish something besides sitting here on our derrieres.”

  “If we wanted to use a lot of your aviation gasoline and lots of our high-priced time, we could fly to Indianapolis and start questioning everybody around Saint’s old neighborhood. We could also question people around his old place of business. We might turn up something, and we might not. After this many years, neighbors could have moved. And chances are those who didn’t would have forgotten who they saw around Saint seven years ago.”