Designed to Kill (Greg McKenzie Mysteries) Page 2

  After a few moments, she managed a thin smile. “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  I gave her an indulgent look. “Tim is using the condo. Remember?”

  Tim was the son of our closest friends in Nashville, Sam and Wilma Gannon. We had bought the two-bedroom condo in a development called Gulf Sands not long after our move to Tennessee following my retirement from the Air Force. The beachside condominium was Jill’s idea. I grew up in St. Louis, a long way from any balmy shores. But Jill was a native Nashvillian and had been a regular Florida visitor as a girl, vacationing there every summer with her parents.

  We hadn’t spent all that much time at Gulf Sands for a variety of reasons. But whenever we were down there, Jill loved to sit on our second-floor balcony and watch the black shapes of playful dolphins bobbing in and out of the water beyond the churning surf. Sam and Wilma had visited us there on one occasion, and we had let Tim use the place several times over the past eighteen months to oversee work on a major resort project he had designed. The luxury condominium was being built just up the beach from us.

  Admittedly, I’ve enjoyed some aspects of Perdido Key, particularly the seafood we gorged ourselves on. But let’s face it. Without an election contest and a flock of chads to fight over (pregnant, dimpled, hanging—were the ballots all female?), Florida doesn’t hold that much excitement for me. Swimming and fishing aren’t among my passions. And at my age I’m not thrilled a bit by large round-eared rodents. Additionally, after I’d suffered a bout with actinic keratosis (scaly places on my face), the dermatologist warned me to avoid the sun like the plague. All in all, I looked on Florida as a place where I could easily be bored to death. And boredom was exactly what I did not need, having lately wallowed in more than my fill of it.

  I had retired in the mid-nineties as an agent with the OSI, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. About three years ago, I landed an interesting job as an investigator for the DA’s office in Nashville, only to get ousted over a nasty incident involving a newspaper and a bull-headed Murder Squad detective. That was more than a year ago. Since then, I’d practically worn out a recliner reading all I could stomach of encyclopedia-length thrillers by the likes of Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum. I also watched enough TV specials on geography and nature to earn a degree in scientific trivia. And despite Jill’s best efforts at finding an antidote for my restlessness, I had begun to wander about the house like a caged tiger—she would probably have said a cooped rooster. Hell, I had never really learned to enjoy leisure, forced or unforced.

  “Tim was going down there primarily for some kind of party last night, wasn’t he?” Jill asked.

  “Right. But he wasn’t sure exactly when he’d be coming back.” There were some problems he needed to look into, he had told me when I gave him the key.

  Jill twisted onto her right side and swung a silky smooth leg over mine. That was a come-on if I’d ever seen one. Rotator cuff surgery may be disabling for some things, but not the important ones.

  “If he needs to stay a while longer, he can use the front bedroom,” she said in her most persuasive tone. This lady could charm a dragon. She’s been practicing her magic on me for more than thirty-five years. “Tim won’t be in our way, and we shouldn’t be in his.”

  Obviously, there was plenty of space for the three of us. I knew Gulf Sands would be a nice place for Jill to continue her recuperation, though she still faced at least a couple of more months of getting her arm pulled and stretched and elevated and rotated by PT’s (an acronym for Painfully Thorough, she contended), a regimen that took around an hour twice a week.

  “I’m sure Dr. Vail would take a dim view of your missing a bunch of therapy sessions,” I said.

  She shrugged. “I’ll just have to find a rehab center near Perdido Key.”

  Before I could come up with a counter to that, the phone rang. I reached for the bedside table and answered.

  “Greg?” a tentative voice asked.

  I was fairly certain who it was, though he sounded under considerable stress. “Sam?”

  “Yeah. I’ve got some terrible news.”

  He hesitated, a reluctance that was not at all like the normally upbeat and talkative Colonel Samuel Gannon, retired Air Force command pilot. “What is it, Sam? Anything we can help with?” I was really getting concerned now.

  “It’s Tim.” I could hear him draw a deep breath. “He’s dead.”

  I looked at Jill, shocked. “What happened?”

  “They say he committed suicide.”

  2

  Tim’s wife, Tara Gannon, was a short, attractive woman with long black hair and dark, inquisitive eyes. However, when she met us at the front door of her modest two-story brick house, those normally lively eyes blinked red-rimmed and hollow. And though she had always appeared neatly dressed, her pink shirttail hung outside her jeans in back.

  She spoke in a dull, lifeless voice. “Thanks for coming.”

  Using her good arm, Jill gave Tara a consoling hug.

  “How’s the shoulder?” Tara asked with a bit more animation.

  “It’s coming along fine, thanks,” Jill said. “I’m so sorry about Tim.”

  I took Tara’s hand and squeezed it. I’ve never been good at dealing with situations like this, where people close to me are involved. As an Air Force criminal investigator, I sometimes had to question family members after tragic deaths, but since they were usually complete strangers, I was able to approach the task with a dispassionate objectivity.

  Noting the homey smell of wood smoke, I looked around and saw flames licking up from charred logs in a brick fireplace below a mantel lined with ceramic bric-a-brac. Books, games and toys had been stacked beneath a nearby window. Through a gap in the drapes, a pointed shaft of sunlight spilled onto the carpet. Sam and Wilma sat on the sofa, consoling fifteen-year-old Tom, thirteen-year-old Ted, and the “baby,” Tony, just turned eleven. The boys’ faces were tear-streaked. They did not look up at us.

  “Is there anything at all we can do for you?” I asked, dropping down in a chair beside Jill.

  “Just being here to support us is all we could ask,” Wilma said. She was tall and thin like her husband, with bouffant white hair. She sheltered young Tony in a comforting hug. “Your kids aren’t supposed to go before you do.”

  Sam unfolded his lanky frame from the sofa. “Let’s go try some of Tara’s coffee, Greg. She just brewed a fresh pot of decaf.”

  As I followed him into the small kitchen with its curved breakfast nook, I noticed the slump in his shoulders. Sam had retired as a bird colonel, first flying combat missions in Korea, last assigned to monstrous transports like the C-5. My OSI career had, thanks to my somewhat perverse nature, stalled out at the rank of lieutenant colonel.

  He nodded toward a table beside the bay window. “Sit down and I’ll get your coffee.”

  I sat and gazed out at the yellow leaves falling from a large maple in the fenced back yard.

  After Sam had placed the mugs on the table and sat down beside me, he shook his nearly balding head. “I still can’t believe it. Tim had no reason to kill himself.” He looked across at me, his brow rumpled. “But that’s what the officer claimed.”

  “You said it was a sheriff’s deputy?” That was about all I had gotten out of him on the phone.

  “Yeah.”

  “When did he call?”

  “It was around seven-thirty. He called Tara. A Sergeant Payne, I believe.”

  “What did he tell her?”

  “He said they had found Tim’s body in his car at a national park. It was near The Sand Castle project.”

  “The Gulf Islands National Seashore?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “The entrance is just beyond The Sand Castle. It’s about a mile from our condo.” I took a sip of coffee, not tasting it, thinking of Tim. “What time did they find him?”

  “I don’t think he said. Or if he did, Tara was too shaken to remember.”

&nbs
p; “Did he tell her anything else?”

  “He said Tim’s gun was found on the floor.”

  I’d had experience with a number of suicides. I had seen cases where the victim still clutched his weapon and others where the gun had fallen beside him. I might mention the use of “his” and “him” here is not male chauvinism, something I’ve been guilty of on occasion. It’s just that for some reason, most suicides by firearms are men.

  “They’re sure it was Tim’s gun?” I asked.

  He looked down at his coffee mug, turning it slowly with his long fingers. “I don’t know. But I do know he kept a gun in his car.”

  “Really?”

  He shrugged. “I have no idea what in particular precipitated it. He told me a couple of months ago that he had bought a pistol—it was similar to the one he was issued in the Navy. He said he was concerned about crime in the area.”

  “What area?”

  “His office. Seems I recall maybe a carjacking or a holdup around there. He never mentioned any specific threat.”

  “A lot of people carry guns these days.”

  Sam nodded. “I had noticed a subtle change in him the past few months, though I doubt it had anything to do with the gun. But something seemed to be bothering him. I can’t say if it was personal or professional.”

  I could hear the pain in his voice, see it in the tautness of the skin across his jaw. Sam and I had been friends for three years now. Along with our wives, we belonged to the same Sunday School class at Gethsemane United Methodist Church. I wasn’t sure about Sam’s motivation, but I had wound up there following a long siege of coaxing by a wife who had developed persuasion into a fine art. Anyway, the Gannons and McKenzies had traveled to the Holy Land the previous November. That trip led to a fateful incident that nearly cost Jill and me our lives and no doubt resulted in her shoulder injury. As I sipped the coffee, I also recalled how it had prodded me back into the smoking habit I was struggling to kick.

  At this point, I wasn’t sure what to believe. Most of what Sam had said certainly pointed to the likelihood that Tim Gannon had killed himself. But I didn’t want to discount Sam’s feelings. And years of training and experience had taught me one unforgettable lesson: few things are ever as simple as they first appear.

  3

  I took a long swallow of coffee before going on.

  “I didn’t know Tim really well,” I said. “Just what I’d seen of him a few times at your house, and when we had everybody over at our place. And, of course, the times we arranged for him to use the condo. But he seemed very intelligent and likeable and...well, a sharp young guy with a lot going for him.”

  “Exactly.” Sam warmed to the subject. “His business was doing great. He had added several new people for this Sand Castle project. And he was determined to make New Horizons Architects and Engineers a major consulting firm. You know the story behind that condominium, don’t you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Remember that big church he designed and engineered in Franklin?”

  I nodded, recalling the classic facade with its soaring columns and towering steeple. We had driven by the church, located in the next county to the south, shortly after our move to Hermitage, a suburb on the eastern edge of Metropolitan Nashville named after President Andrew Jackson’s historic mansion.

  “Tim won an architectural award for that church,” Sam said, “and was written up in a national magazine. The article mentioned that he had also done a seven-story apartment building. The developer of this high-rise condo in Florida read about it and invited him to submit a design idea. They wound up choosing Tim for the job, both the design and the engineering. It was quite a coup. The total cost of the project was something over twenty million dollars.”

  “Must have been a pretty big leap for Tim.”

  “Definitely.” Sam got up and headed for the kitchen counter. “How about a little more coffee?”

  I nodded, quietly gauging my friend, the stress of his loss.

  When Sam came back with the steaming pot, I asked, “Wasn’t Tim a bit intimidated by the size of the project?”

  “The boy had no fear. Some of his engineer friends thought he was over-extending himself, but he staffed up for the job. It was what he had always said he wanted to do—get into big-time construction.”

  I scratched my head thoughtfully. “He was a former Navy pilot, right? Why’d a hotshot Top Gun type give that up to go into the construction field?”

  Sam spread his hands. “That Navy business was something he got carried away with in college. Wilma had a brother in Knoxville who steered him toward the University of Tennessee. Tim had graduated from high school at sixteen. He was exceptionally bright. Really ambitious, too. He insisted on studying both engineering and architecture.”

  “That’s a bit unusual, isn’t it?”

  “Right. Engineers are practical application guys who get their kicks attaching Part A to Part B. Architects are concept types who like to think in the abstract. Anyway, by the time he got his degrees, a couple of his classmates had gotten him all fired up with this idea of being a naval aviator. Of course, he had lived on Air Force bases and been around airplanes most of his life. I tried to talk him out of it, but he was always a determined kid.”

  “I believe he told me he was stationed at Pensacola for a while,” I said.

  “Right. He ended up a flight instructor down there. That’s a demanding assignment, but not one with much glamour. I think it helped him decide to end his Navy career and get back into engineering. He worked for a consulting firm in Nashville for a few years, qualifying for his professional engineer’s license along the way. Then he apprenticed with an older architect, got his license in that field and went into practice.”

  “When did he start his own business?”

  “About five years ago. He’s a...” Sam hesitated, realizing he had slipped into the present tense. “He was a good organizer, a good people person. He knew how to get the best out of his employees. The business was a success from the start.”

  As I looked out the window, sipping on my coffee, I saw Tom, the oldest boy, kicking slowly through the clutter of brown leaves in the yard. He reminded me of his father. Tom was polite and soft-spoken, with the same dark hair and slightly bemused expression. At least that’s the way he had been. Now he walked with head down, hands jammed into his pockets. It was enough to bring tears to a hardass like me. It also reminded me of something Tim had mentioned. I turned to Sam.

  “When I gave Tim the condo key a few days ago, I got the impression he was concerned about the amount of time The Sand Castle project had taken him away from his family.”

  Sam nodded. “It was definitely troubling. Particularly that he didn’t have time to take the boys fishing back in the summer. That may have contributed to the change in him I had noticed. But he was completely wrapped up in that condominium project. I’ve never seen him more determined. That’s one reason I can’t believe he would have shot himself.”

  “Did the cop say anything about a suicide note?”

  “No.” Sam gripped his hands and rubbed them in a gesture of helplessness.

  Listening to Sam, I was persuaded there were sufficient grounds for questioning whether Tim had committed suicide. I decided it might be useful to look into the matter a little deeper for Sam’s benefit as well as my own. “Would you like me to call this Sergeant Payne and see what I can find out?”

  His face brightened. “Would you? You know a lot more about this sort of thing than I do.”

  Sam knew my background included experience as a deputy sheriff in St. Louis County, Missouri after finishing college. My original plan to join the Air Force was put on hold when my parents died in an airliner crash on the way to my graduation. An uncle who was chief of deputies steered me into the job with the sheriff. But after enjoying four years of knocking heads with a variety of lawbreakers, I tired of the politics involved and followed my initial instincts, going into the service.


  Five minutes later, using a portable phone, I had the deputy on the line. His name, I learned, was Sgt. J. W. Payne. Sam listened in on an extension that hung on the wall beside the refrigerator.

  “This is Gregory McKenzie in Nashville, Tennessee,” I said. “I’m a close friend of Sam Gannon, whose son Tim was found in his car at the National Seashore this morning.”

  “Did you get my message?” the sergeant asked in a deep voice that carried authority.

  I frowned, confused. “What message?”

  “I’ve been calling your house. Left a message on your machine.”

  “What about?”

  “I was told that Timothy Gannon was staying at your condo down here.”

  “That’s right.”

  “The Gulf Sands office gave me your number. I’d like permission to go inside your apartment and look for a suicide note.”

  That answered my question. They had found nothing in Tim’s car. “I have no objection, Sergeant. The people at the condo office can let you in. I should think a superficial search is all you’d need to do.”

  “Don’t worry, Mr. McKenzie. We won’t be going through your personal belongings.”

  “Frankly, I don’t think you’ll find anything, Sergeant. Neither his dad nor I can believe he committed suicide. He was a young man with a great future ahead of him.”

  “Are you aware of what happened here last night?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The penthouse balcony gave way at The Sand Castle. It was in the midst of a big party thrown by the developer. Two people got killed and several more were injured. What Mr. Gannon had ahead of him, if you ask me, was a bunch of hefty lawsuits. If you’d’ve seen the look on his face last night, you could believe suicide.”