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Chapter 1
IN A RURAL
county fifty miles east of Nashville, Sid Chance
turned his restless gaze to the front window. The
rustic cabin perched like a stalking bobcat high on
a wooded hillside. After the rain had moved on, a
few slivers of moonlight revealed indistinct
outlines of tall hardwoods that crowded the steep
slope. Though small, only two rooms, the cabin
provided everything he needed. He had found he could
do without electricity or running water.
The odor of seafood and soy sauce lingered in the air. He had
cooked supper on his camp stove around eight, a stir
fry concoction fashioned from canned vegetables and
shrimp. That was when the rain started. After eating
and cleaning up the mess—though not the tidiest of
cooks, he didn’t like feeding bugs—he turned down
the oil lamps and tried to relax in his homemade
recliner. It wasn’t easy. This return to the
hideaway where he had enjoyed a peaceful life for
nearly three years left him wondering if he’d made
the right decision in leaving. Going back to the
type of work he had pursued for more than three
decades left him exposed to the same flawed humanity
that had chased him up here in the first place.
The warmth of dying flames in the small fireplace soothed
muscles weary from a day of lifting rocks and toting
logs. Nature was unforgiving if you ignored her for
long. Despite the doubts that plagued him, the
fire’s warmth and the lullaby of rain chattering
musically on the roof proved more effective than a
Valium. He soon dozed off. He awoke around two in
the morning.
With the commitments he had made, he knew it was time to get
back to the city. He lit the stove, put on a pot of
coffee, gathered up the few things he had brought
along and stuffed them into his duffle bag. After
pulling on his boots, he donned a flannel-lined
windbreaker, slogged out into the soaked underbrush
and closed and locked the heavy wooden shutters over
the windows.
Back inside, the zesty aroma of Colombian coffee pervaded the
room. He filled a large mug emblazoned with a brown
bear and the initials NPS and drank it slowly, like
a condemned man savoring his final cup. And, like a
condemned man, his thoughts slipped back to the
source of his greatest agony, the false bribery
charge that had tainted his good name, costing him
the job he hadn’t planned to give up until
retirement. Lurking in the back of his mind was the
unfinished business of putting a name to the person
who had set him up.
Soon it was time to hit the road.
He snuffed out the lamps and doused the smoldering
logs, slung the duffle over his shoulder, grabbed a
garbage bag and his battery lantern and trudged
downhill to where he had parked his truck. Despite
efforts to clear part of the meandering trail, it
remained treacherous in the dark tangle that
remained of late summer’s erratic growth. Regardless
of what it had or had not accomplished, this brief
return to the basics was over.
THE PATROL CAR cruised slowly through the remnants
of a chilling rainstorm. At the wheel was a bored
Metro Nashville park policeman more concerned about
winding up his shift without getting soaked than in
looking for trouble. He found it anyway. As he
watched the rain tap-dance on the asphalt up ahead,
something odd caught in his peripheral vision. Off
to one side, where everything should have been green
or brown, lay a splotch of red. His eyes snapped
open wide. He braked to a stop, backed up, swung his
spotlight around. The bright beam picked out a sight
that ruined his night. A body clothed in a bulky red
jacket sprawled beside the road.
The officer shrugged into his raincoat, pulled on his cap,
and trudged out into the shower. A young cop with
more experience at changing diapers than in
confronting trauma on his beat, he approached the
still figure with the caution of a hunter unsure if
his target was alive. The man’s cap had fallen off,
leaving black hair matted against his head. When the
officer’s flashlight played over the jacket, he saw
what appeared to be bullet holes in the cloth.
Not pausing to check for a pulse, he hurried back to
his car and called in an apparent homicide.
EAST PRECINCT Homicide Detective Bart Masterson
stood outside the glow of portable floodlights set
up beside the road in a secluded section of Shelby
Park. Had it been daylight, he would have looked
across at the railroad trestle that spanned the
Cumberland River. Though the rain had passed, the
clouds masked any hint of stars or moon and a musty
dampness lingered in the air. The chill led him to
poke slender hands into the pockets of his navy
jacket. A six-footer with the tenuous build of a
scarecrow, he wore a black mustache like an inverted
V. It gave him the look of legendary Old West lawman
Bat Masterson, who might well have been an ancestor.
He turned away from the indistinct tree line as a
hound bayed in the distance.
The detective stared at the prone figure lying face down on
the soggy ground. What had been a living, breathing
human being only hours ago now amounted to little
more than deteriorating skin and muscle and
decomposing organs of no intrinsic value to anyone
but a forensic pathologist. It was a sight he had
encountered way too many times, but, as with all the
others, he wouldn’t rest until he dug into every
corner it took to find the killer.
The scene had been exhaustively photographed. A technician
from the Medical Examiner’s office, a short man with
tousled hair and a pinched brow, knelt beside the
victim, checking the random pattern of small holes
in the red jacket still soaked from the rain. He
rolled the body onto its back and studied the front
of the jacket.
“I count five entrance wounds in the back,” he said without
looking up. “Don’t see but three exits in the
front.”
“Good,” Masterson said. “Maybe you’ll find some lead.”
“Hopefully. My guess is it was a .38.”
“Let me know when you have something definite.” The detective
turned to a crime scene officer standing nearby with
a large flashlight. “You got anything?”
“Negative. We’ll check again in the daylight. There’s
definitely no brass. He was probably pushed out of a
car.”
Masterson shook his head. “Five slugs. Somebody damn sure had
a grudge against him.”
IT WAS STILL DARK when Sid Chance pulled off I-40 at
the Old Hickory Boulevard exit. He turned his
vintage brown pickup toward Madison, a rambling
middle-class suburb on the northeast side of
Nashville. A big man, every bit of six-six, he had a
headful of black hair and a short beard to match,
both laced with threads of silver. The last time he
had glanced in a mirror, the glower he saw made him
think of a troll. He recalled an old admirer saying
he looked like a Hollywood hero when he smiled. He
wasn’t so sure. He hadn’t done all that much smiling
in recent times.
Though most of the area’s workers remained asleep or just
getting started on breakfast, traffic moved at a
moderate pace on the circumferential highway. After
crossing the Cumberland River, Sid took the cutoff
north to Gallatin Pike, Madison’s Main Street. His
office, a grudging requirement of his new life,
occupied a corner in a glass and stone building near
RiverGate Mall, anchor for the community’s primary
shopping area. One strip center after another lined
both sides of the street, deserted mini-cities at
this time of day.
He glanced at his muddy boots and smudged jeans as he ambled
toward the front of the building. He needed a shower
and clean clothes, but that could wait. He figured
his chances of encountering someone now little
better than those of holding a winning lottery
ticket. Nobody was fool enough to come in at this
time of day except a habitual early riser, something
he’d been since service with Army Special Forces in
Vietnam. That’s where he learned to exist on a
minimal amount of sleep. Inside, he turned toward
his office and glanced at the “Sidney Chance
Investigations” sign on the door. It brought one of
his infrequent grins. How cool would it have been if
they had named him Random instead of Sidney.
The answering machine chirped its practiced greeting as he
walked in. Welcome back to what most people would
call the real world, he thought. Maybe a few more
months of civilization would rekindle his
appreciation for the marvels of modern technology.
Right now they seemed more an annoyance. A computer
glitch that had gobbled up three days of painstaking
work was the kicker that sent him back to the cabin
for a cooling off period.
He found six messages on the machine. Two from Jaz LeMieux
wanting him to return her calls, two from guys he
didn’t know and doubted he wanted to, one from a
process server, and one from a lawyer seeking his
help. He played that one again.
“This is Arnie Bailey, with the law firm of Bailey, Riddle
and Smith. Jasmine LeMieux highly recommended you
for a job I need done. She said you were good at
finding missing persons. This is a little different,
however. It’s a missing company. My client faces a
major financial disaster if we can’t find the
organization involved. It’s a chemical pollution
case around Ashland City. I’d appreciate your
calling me as soon as you can.”
He glanced at his watch. It was way too early to call a
lawyer, even somebody who sounded as anxious as this
one. He decided to go home and shower, eat
breakfast, then come back and have another go at it.
No doubt the calls from Jaz related to Bailey’s
problem.
Sid lived in the ranch-style brick house his mother had
called home for twenty-five years. She died around
the time his career as a small town police chief
crashed and burned. The house stood near the river
at the end of a quiet street in a neighborhood of
mostly young couples and a few retirees. The sky had
begun to brighten by the time he pulled into his
driveway, though dirty gray clouds seemed to hang
within arm’s reach.
He reveled in the soothing spray of the shower. It drummed
against his back like a masseur’s fingers, easing
some of the troubled thoughts that had knotted up
his mind on the drive back from his hillside
retreat. Despite a lot of jury-rigging, he had never
come up with a reliable way to get a hot shower in
the backwoods. He dressed and settled into the
compact kitchen for breakfast. As he poured milk
onto his cereal, the phone rang.
“Glad you finally decided to answer.” Jaz LeMieux’s voice had
an edge.
“I just got home a little while ago.”
“From where?”
“The cabin.”
“Don’t you answer your cell phone?”
“When it’s turned on.”
There was a pause. “I think you’re reverting to your mountain
man persona, Sid.”
He said nothing.
“Have all my efforts been wasted?”
“I did a lot of pondering last night,” he said. “But I came
back.”
At first he had credited his financial mentor, Mike Rich,
with the responsibility for luring him out of
self-imposed exile. Lately he had begun to lean
toward Jaz.
“Have you talked to Arnie Bailey?” she asked.
“I went by the office around 5:30 and got his message off the
answering machine. What’s the story?”
“You’ll have to get the details from Arnie.”
“He a friend?”
“He’s a good guy. He’s done legal work for us.”
At forty-five, she served as chairman of the board of Welcome
Traveler Stores, a lucrative chain of truck stops
her father had founded. She was also a sharp,
attractive, persuasive woman who knew how to get
what she wanted. Sid wondered how much pressure she
had put on the lawyer.
He settled back in his chair. “Bailey says you told him I was
good at finding people.”
“You are. You’ve navigated those databases like an old pro.”
“Fine, if the computer would quit eating the results.”
“I told you I could fix that.” Jaz held a computer science
degree as well as an MBA. She knew the inner
workings of the machines as well as arcane methods
of mining the Internet’s secrets. “Is that why you
went traipsing back up the mountainside?”
“Partly. There were other issues.” Sid rumpled his brow.
“Bailey mentioned a pollution case.”
“There was a story in the paper, but I didn’t get a chance to
read it. Do you plan to call him?”
“Yes. But I doubt he’d be around this time of day.”
“I know he gets to his office early. Maybe not this early,
but he likes to be well prepared before court
opens.”
“Okay, Jaz, I’ll talk to him. That’s a promise.”
“Good. Let me know what he says.”
Sid placed the portable phone back onto its base. Despite
occasional disagreements, he couldn’t help but like
her. She had no reason to continue pushing him
other than a belief that it was in his best
interest. Jaz had been the key to his entry into the
PI business. With his background, he had slipped
into the role as smoothly as pulling on a pair of
comfortable sneakers. He found running
investigations for private clients a convenient and,
so far, profitable way to stay involved in police
work. About the only drawback had been a feeling
that sometimes Jaz’s efforts skirted the boundaries
of his independence.
After finishing breakfast, he realized a couple of days away
from his exercise routine had left him sluggish. He
settled on an abbreviated version of his morning
run. He didn’t want to have to shower again.
APPROACHING THE office a little later, he saw cars
and pickups clustered around the mall’s entrances
like mice at a cheese shop, parked by mall walkers,
mostly seniors, who swarmed the corridors before
time for the stores to open. Considering his own
exercise routine, Sid wondered if the lawyer might
stop off at a place like this before appearing at
his office. No matter, he called Bailey, Riddle and
Smith at 7:30 and found the senior partner at his
desk.
“Glad you called,” Bailey said. “I’ve been on spikes and
nails all night.”
Sid translated that as needles and pins. Evidently Bailey
liked to be creative with his clichés.
“You mentioned a pollution case,” Sid said. “Before we go any
further, you need to be aware of where I stand. I
spent eighteen years in law enforcement as a
National Park Service ranger. I do not like people
who mess with the environment.”
“Excellent. Miss LeMieux assured me you were the man for the
job.”
“You don’t understand. What I meant was, if your client is
responsible—”
“No, no . . . you’ve got it all wrong. My client is being
saddled with a pollution mess another company
created before he bought the property. It involves
trichloroethylene that’s polluted water in Cheatham
County.”
“I’ve encountered TCE before.”
“It’s bad stuff.”
“Can be lethal.”
“I’d like to talk to you in person before we get started,
Sid. Okay if I call you Sid?”
“That’s what my mother called me.”
Bailey gave a slight chuckle. “I have a client due here in a
few minutes, and I’ll be in court until noon. Could
you meet me here for lunch? I’ll have my secretary
order us some food.”
With that settled, Sid called Jaz and related the
conversation.
“Are you going to take the job?” she asked.
“Why not? The subject is one I’m somewhat passionate about.”
“I thought it would be. Oh, I had a call from Bart Masterson.
He wants to know if you’d like to host the poker
club at your office Friday night?”
The poker club was a group of six people with present or past
ties to law enforcement who got together
occasionally for a friendly game of cards. Jaz had
invited Sid to join them at their last session. She
said it would give him an opportunity to make some
good contacts in the field.
“Sure,” he said. “Is everybody coming?”
“Bart’s checking. He said he’d demand to be off. They called
him out in the wee hours this morning, right after a
messy rainstorm. It was a homicide in Shelby Park.”
“What happened?”
“To quote Bart, it was a case of overkill. The man was shot
five times with a thirty-eight.”
“He find any clues?”
“Nothing. And what’s weird is the guy worked on a Metro
garbage truck. Who would do that kind of killing in
that kind of place with a guy like that?”
Chapter 2
SID SWITCHED ON his computer. While waiting for it
to boot, he swiveled his chair, resting his gaze on
the windowless beige wall beside him. It was covered
with photographic memorabilia of multiple careers
from Special Forces in Vietnam to policing various
National Parks to providing law and order in the
small town of Lewisville. Located a little over
fifty miles to the southwest of Nashville, it was
named after explorer Meriwether Lewis of Lewis and
Clark fame. Lewis died nearby on the Natchez Trace
in 1809. Some said he was murdered there.
When the Internet browser flashed on the screen, Sid checked
his email. Jaz had engineered a website with the
help of the Welcome Traveler Stores’ webmaster. It
gave people a place to request on-line help. At the
moment everything worked like a well-greased axle.
He found two missing person search requests prepaid
by credit card. That was easy cash.
Using Internet data bases and a few phone calls, he spent the
next couple of hours tracking down people who had
disappeared from friends’ and families’ radar scopes
several years back. It helped that he’d had
experience with missing person cases while the top
cop in Lewisville. He emailed results of his
investigations, then returned to the computer with a
stack of notes to re-create the files that had been
lost earlier in the week. He stayed with it until
time to drive downtown to keep his luncheon
appointment.
Sid pulled into the garage beneath the building that housed
the offices of Bailey, Riddle and Smith around noon.
As expected, the first parking floor was already
packed like dominoes in a box. Near the entrance,
some character in a green VW Beetle had backed into
a parking space for the disabled, making it
impossible to tell if he had a special license
plate. Since Sid was no longer a sworn officer of
the law, it was none of his business. But as he
passed, he glared at the driver, who still sat in
the car. An NRA sticker graced the bumper, but no
disabled parking permit dangled from the rearview
mirror. Sid shook his head. Some people . . . .
He finally located a parking spot two levels down, crossed to
the elevators, and sped up to the twentieth floor.
“Mr. Bailey just called from the courthouse,” his secretary
said as she ushered Sid into the walnut-paneled
conference room. A grandmotherly woman with
neatly-coiffed white hair and an Aunt Bea smile, she
pointed to an assortment of sandwich meats, cheeses,
bread, lettuce, raw veggies and dips, potato chips,
cookies and slices of cake that filled trays at one
end of a long shiny table. “He said you could go
ahead and start eating. What can I get you to
drink?”
“A cup of coffee would do fine.”
Sid looked out a broad window at the dwarf-like lunchtime
figures scurrying along the sidewalk below. After
several years as a small town police chief, followed
by three years of isolation at his cabin in the
woods, he found it difficult to adjust to
Nashville’s booming growth, both downtown and in the
suburban counties. New skyscrapers had changed the
skyline, and the planned 70-story Signature Tower
would usher in a whole new wave of changes.
Developments like Nissan North America’s new
international headquarters in Brentwood reshaped the
suburbs. It was hardly the quaint Southern town he
remembered from his youth.
Arnie Bailey arrived a few minutes later. The polar opposite
of Sid, who had a solid frame, broad shoulders, and
a modest waist, Bailey launched his short, chubby
body through the door like a well-dressed groundhog
storming out of hibernation. He pulled off his navy
blazer and draped it around the back of a chair.
“Been waiting long?” he asked.
Sid held out his cup. “Long enough to get started on your
version of Starbucks.”
The lawyer headed for the food display. “Grab a plate and
fill it with some of this grub. I have to be back in
court by one-fifteen. We need to get busy.”
Sid chose turkey and Swiss on wheat and assorted veggies. He
grimaced at the pile of food that filled Bailey’s
plate. Though ten years older than his host, Sid
flexed muscles where Bailey collected fat. Most guys
had passed their prime by the time they reached
their fifties, but most guys didn’t take care of
their bodies like Sid did. He followed a daily
running routine. Workouts in the gym. He would never
forget the gunshot wounds that halted his Park
Service career, injuries received in a multi-agency
drug case fourteen years earlier. He didn’t intend
to get caught short in a situation where physical
conditioning could make the difference between life
or death.
“How about giving me the particulars?” Sid said when they
were seated at the table. “It took place in Cheatham
County?”
“Right. My client is Wade Harrington. He’s around forty, a
veteran of the Gulf War. He runs a small company
just outside Ashland City that makes specialty
shipping boxes. They’re designed for specific
products.”
“Like cartons for computers and such?”
“Exactly. He started the company—it’s called HarrCo
Shipping—about ten years ago, with money he’d been
saving. He found an abandoned plant nobody seemed to
want and bought it at a good price. An uncle loaned
him the rest of the cash he needed to get it going.
He’s paid that back.”
Bailey said HarrCo only occupied part of the plant at first,
but as the business caught on, the operation
expanded until most of the building was now in use.
Everything looked great until people who lived in
the area began to complain of headaches, nausea, and
dizziness. Others reported bouts of clumsiness that
made them appear drunk. Tennessee Department of
Environment and Conservation inspectors found
trichloroethylene, or TCE, in the well water. It had
also seeped into streams that fed into the local
water supply.
They tracked the TCE back to an area at the rear of the
HarrCo Shipping plant. When the ground was tested
there, they discovered it was soaked with the
hazardous chemical. With no way to determine just
when the spill occurred, the state came after Wade
Harrington to pay the hefty clean-up bill, which
could run into the hundreds of thousands. It would
bankrupt a thriving small business with lots of
promise for the future.
“Trouble is, Wade’s plant never used TCE or anything like
it,” Bailey said.
“You’re sure about that?”
“Dead sure. There’s no need for that stuff in the shipping
business. Besides . . . ” He rummaged through a
folder in his briefcase, emerged with a paper
scrawled with barely decipherable letters and
numbers. “Here’s a list of every chemical they use.
Right down to the carpet cleaners.”
“So it was the previous occupant?”
“Had to have been. They went out of business a couple of
years before Wade bought the plant. He heard it had
something to do with the automobile business. They
must’ve used TCE some way in the process. How that
much wound up on the ground is anybody’s guess.”
“The people Harrington bought the place from should be able
to tell him what he needs to know.”
“The guy who handled the sale said he didn’t know anything
about the company that previously used the plant.
Somebody else was involved with that deal. It wasn’t
local.”
Sid reached for the coffee pot and refilled his cup. No doubt
Harrington faced a real problem. Somebody created a
bad situation behind his plant, one that did serious
damage to the environment. It was a bit different
from the concerns he had encountered in the Park
Service. A few national parks suffered from water
pollution, but the greatest problems they faced
stemmed from air pollution, primarily acid rain.
“Harrington hasn’t learned anything about the previous
owner?” Sid asked.
“Wade is completely in the dark. He hasn’t turned up anything
about the company other than a vague hint. He can’t
find who owned it or managed it, or what happened to
them. It seems nobody around there knows what went
on. He’s really between a boulder and a brick wall.”
More cliché adaptation. “What was the company’s name?”
“Don’t have that either. Sounds like a phantom operation.”
Sid’s look flashed a caution sign. “You realize phantoms can
be hard to chase down. That can get kind of
expensive.”
“Do whatever you have to. Just find the culprit. It’ll be a
lot cheaper than whatever he’d have to pay the
state.” Bailey reached into his file, pulled out a
large photograph. “Here’s something they gave Wade.
It’s just a sample of what some irresponsible
asshole caused.”
Sid stared at the face of a small girl with curly blonde
hair. Her mouth twisted up on one side. Her right
ear appeared only as a gnarled stub. Large hazel
eyes gazed out as part of a grotesque smile.
Sid looked at the lawyer, then back at the disturbing image.
The little girl could smile now, unaware of what was
to come. A cousin of his had been born with similar
malformations years ago, after her mother took
thalidomide during pregnancy. Attempts to correct
the defects proved unsuccessful. Unable to take the
stares and ridicule, the girl had committed suicide
as a teenager.
“If that little girl was mine,” he said, “I’d be looking for
somebody’s scalp.” He handed the photo back to
Bailey.
“That’s how I feel, too.”
“Have you told Harrington about me?” Sid asked.
“I talked to him this morning right after you called. I told
him I was meeting with you here for lunch. You’ll
want to get with him, of course, but he was headed
out of town. He’ll be back tomorrow.”
“What sort of time frame are we looking at?”
The lawyer referred to a sheet among the papers in front of
him. “They’ve scheduled a hearing in two weeks. I
need everything you can give me before then.”
“Okay, I’ll head down that way and start shaking the trees.”
Sid pulled out of the garage and turned up the hill north on
Third Avenue. Nashville was built on a series of
hills. Not as steep as San Francisco’s, but steep
enough to give anyone’s legs a workout who chose to
hoof it about town. He had just made the turn behind
the Courthouse when he noticed a dark green VW
Beetle in the rearview mirror. It looked similar to
the one he had seen at the garage on the way in.
Checking back as he approached the bridge, he
spotted the NRA bumper sticker. That cinched it. He
could think of no reason anyone would be tailing
him, but he kept an eye on it as he crossed the
river and turned toward Ellington Parkway. When he
reached the Hart Lane exit, he veered off and
watched as the VW followed. After swinging into the
street leading to a Highway Patrol Driver Testing
Station, he turned into the parking lot and drove up
to the building.
Glancing around as he walked, he saw the Beetle had backed
into a parking space in the last row toward the
street. He strolled into the building, turned,
and looked out to see if anyone got out of the car.
No one did. After waiting a few minutes, he returned
to his car and drove out of the lot. He looked back
toward the green vehicle to check the license
number, but it had already pulled out.
He headed toward Ellington Parkway and took the long, curving
exit onto I-65. He threaded into the HOV lane on the
far left and jammed the accelerator. It was only two
miles to the RiverGate exit, where he cut across two
lanes, hit the succession of traffic lights just
right and swung into the parking lot entrance at his
building. He saw no sign of the VW.
It had been years since he’d encountered anything like this.
Why now? And who could it be? He walked across to
his office knowing there was nothing he could do
except keep an eye out for anything else that
sounded a discordant note.
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