At Fault (Southern Fraud Thriller) Read online

  Tricia had never seemed to take much of an interest in getting justice and closure.

  I sighed internally. If I told the absolute truth, maybe I was the one who needed the closure, and not Tricia.

  No, I corrected myself. She needed justice too. She might not realize it, but she needed to know that her attacker was punished for what he did. There had to be something empowering about knowing your rapist was suffering in jail.

  Last night’s conversation with Helena leapt to mind. In seeking Slidell, I was taking a big risk. My actions could shove Tricia right back into drinking, and even though my head knew that there was nothing I could do to prevent her from it if that’s what she wanted to do, my heart kept warning me that my quest for justice could totally screw up her progress.

  Or worse, I could push her away from me, ruin our relationship, and lose my own sister.

  I gave myself a hard mental shake, and with great effort I tuned back into what Tricia was saying.

  I heard Tripp’s name, but I didn’t catch the rest of it, so I just said, “Uh-huh.”

  “Sissy,” Tricia said, “have you been listening to me at all?”

  “Of course,” I lied.

  “I was asking if you’ve heard from Tripp lately,” she said. “He promised to visit me once I got settled here, and he hasn’t been by once.”

  “Oh, yeah, I’ve spoken to him a couple of times. He’s been busy at work,” I said, not ready to reveal the full truth of Tripp’s absence from her life. “And speaking of busy, I’ve got to go too. I’ll call you later, okay?”

  “Sure,” Tricia said glumly. “I think that show’s over now anyway. Maybe I can take control of the remote from Mom while she starts on the food. I’d kill for a little Wheel of Fortune right about now. God, how sad is that?”

  I laughed and said, “Buy a vowel for me.”

  After disconnecting with Tricia, I tossed my phone onto the nightstand, threw the covers back, and faced the morning chill. It was time to get on with what had to be done.

  Eight

  Before settling down to search for Marnie Jacobs, I decided to check my eye. As I expected, it looked worse than the previous night. My face was puffy, and my black eye was barely open.

  My phone trilled again, and I decided I would just have to celebrate the fact that my good eye was now fully open and no longer drooping with sleep.

  Cheers for being able to see.

  I hurried to my bedroom and picked up the phone from the bedside table. The caller ID revealed a number I didn’t recognize. I answered anyway.

  “Special Agent Jackson?” a male voice whispered.

  “Yes,” I confirmed, my forehead wrinkling in confusion at the hushed, urgent voice.

  “Ted Insley gave me your number,” the voice continued in a whisper. “Said to contact you if I thought I was in trouble.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Stephen Keller. Dr. Stephen Keller.”

  The DOI’s fraud source, I realized.

  “Are you in immediate physical danger, Dr. Keller?” I asked, gripping the phone tighter, wondering if my Sunday plans were about to change. “Is someone there with you?”

  “What?” Dr. Keller asked, sounding baffled. “No, I’m not in physical danger, but my wife is home. I don’t want her to overhear.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling my body’s adrenaline begin to wane. He was just hiding from his wife.

  Nice.

  “Your wife doesn’t know you’re working with the DOI?”

  “No, I just couldn’t tell her. Couldn’t let her know the truth…about me.”

  So he wanted to hide the fact that he’d gotten himself tied up with an organized crime ring. Of course he wouldn’t want his wife to know about his fraud, short lived though it may be.

  Coward.

  But then, who was I to judge the guy for keeping secrets?

  “You believe yourself to be in trouble,” I said, refocusing on the most pressing matter. “Why?”

  “I got a call this morning from my contact. He knows about the papers I gave Ted on Friday. He knows.”

  “Did this contact make threats against you?”

  Dr. Keller hesitated and then stuttered a bit before saying, “No, no threats. He just said the boss knew what I’d done, that I’d been talking to the cops. He said I’d better rethink that decision, stop while I was still ahead.”

  His whisper had intensified, and he sounded on the verge of panic, so I tried to stick to the blunt facts.

  “Do you know the name of this contact?” I asked, reaching inside my bedside table drawer for a pen and paper.

  According to what Ted told us, Dr. Keller had only received anonymous phone calls from his contact, but my years in law enforcement had taught me that it never hurt to ask again.

  Sometimes sources had convenient lapses of memory, and given that Dr. Keller was hiding the truth from his wife, it wouldn’t surprise me if he were also playing fast and loose with the details he gave Ted.

  “Uh, well,” he stuttered again. “I don’t know much, but my contact is a guy called Eddie. He gives me all the orders, things to do, charges to add to bills, additional treatments to recommend.”

  I scribbled down the name, searched my memory for an Eddie associated with this case, and recalled Eddie Wohl, the runner from the previous day.

  “Last name?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Did you tell Ted about this Eddie?” I asked, already knowing the answer but still wanting him to say it.

  “No,” he said.

  “Why not?” I asked, frustrated that Vincent and I had known only part of the story before going undercover.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been a confidential source before. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I thought I’d just have to tell Ted what was happening on Polk Highway and that would be it. I didn’t know I would be this involved.”

  I shook my head. He didn’t think we’d want all the information possible?

  “You said Eddie knows you are working with law enforcement. How do you think he found out? How does he know about the papers?”

  “Someone’s watching me. Inside the practice. Someone’s watching,” he said, his voice growing quiet again. “I know it sounds paranoid, but it’s got to be true.”

  “Do you have any evidence of this? That someone is watching you?”

  “On Friday, I made a list for Ted and delivered it to him. I thought I wasn’t observed, but I must have been. I went straight from the office to the city club to meet Ted and hand it over. I didn’t stop anywhere, make any calls, nothing. Someone at work must have seen me.”

  “What was this list?” I asked, though I suspected it was the file Ted had shown us on Saturday.

  “A list of patients who came to the Accident Care Clinic by referral. I figured they might have been sent by others in the fraud ring.”

  “We have that list,” I confirmed. “But you say someone else knows about it, and you suspect one of your employees?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I can give you a list of names of people who were in the office that day.”

  He began rattling off names, and I scribbled down the information as he spoke, already in a hurry to figure out the identity of the ring’s inside man.

  “About these referral patients,” I said when he finished, “Ted showed me the list yesterday, but I only had a moment to look at it. What I didn’t see was who referred these new patients to you.”

  “I don’t know. Couldn’t exactly ask them, could I? Most I can tell you about the majority of patients is that they were referred to us by a third party and didn’t happen to see my sign or TV ad.”

  “And the employees at the clinic on Friday—can you safely get me a list of their hire dates?”

  “Uh, sure,” he said. “My office manager handles that, but I can access the computer file from home. I can email it to you. I’ll need a little time.”

  I gave Dr. Keller my email address and assured
him that the DOI was working hard to end the investigation as soon as possible.

  “What about me?” he asked. “What do I do about the inside man? How can I go to work and pretend nothing’s wrong?”

  Dr. Keller did sound like he was poised to take a flying leap off the edge of reason. Maybe avoidance was the answer.

  “Perhaps it would be best if you lay low this week. Stay home, out of sight of your employees,” I suggested. “Just until we get this sorted out. Can you come up with a plausible reason to reschedule your patients?”

  Dr. Keller paused and then whispered, “My daughter’s school has a winter break this week. I can tell the clinic that my sitter fell through, and my wife couldn’t take off work. Does that sound good?”

  “Sounds believable to me,” I said. As long as it kept paranoid Dr. Keller out of the way of our investigation, I was fine with any pretext he used.

  After disconnecting with Dr. Keller, I called Vincent.

  “Julia,” he said, his voice low and rumbly even in my tinny speaker. “Wasn’t expecting to hear from you today. Something up?”

  I had a sudden vision of him barefoot and bare chested as he relaxed on the couch on his day off. Yum.

  Brushing that image from my mind—well, saving it for later—I said, “I just got a call from Dr. Keller. He says someone associated with the fraud ring named Eddie contacted him today. Says they know that he’s working with law enforcement.”

  “Eddie Wohl?”

  “That’s my guess,” I said. “Keller suspects a man on the inside, so I told him to lay low, stay home for the week and let us handle it.”

  “I suppose that means we should handle it fast,” he said. “If they’re onto him, they may already be starting to cover their tracks. And him not coming to work won’t make them any less suspicious.”

  “Yeah, that means we’ve got to work fast,” I said, “but I can’t bear going into the office again. Want to meet here at my place? I brought the files and work laptop home with me.”

  Vincent didn’t respond immediately, and I wondered if I’d interrupted something. Maybe he was fishing or with Justin…or on a date.

  God, what a horrible thought. Maybe he’d already moved on from me and I hadn’t realized it. Maybe I had already lost my chance to fish.

  I was going to kill Helena for that fish or cut bait metaphor.

  “If you’re busy—”

  “Not busy,” he said. “Not in a good way at least. I’ll be there in an hour. With food.”

  After disconnecting, I showered, dressed, and blow-dried my hair. Then, vanity demanded that I try to brush on enough concealer to cover my bruised face. I may not be the girliest girl, but I did have some standards. If I could help it, I didn’t want to look like I’d gone ten rounds with a heavyweight boxer.

  Once I did the best I could with the makeup I had—there probably wasn’t enough makeup on the planet to get the job done—I gathered the day’s supplies and lumbered my way downstairs to the kitchen.

  By the time I had extracted the files from my workbag and gotten the laptop up and running, Vincent had arrived with a tray of to-go coffees in one hand and takeout from one of those twenty-four-hour breakfast places in the other.

  “Morning,” I said as I ushered him into the kitchen and tried not to notice how well his jeans fit his assets.

  “I brought waffles and coffee. Figured I’d call it brunch since it’s almost noon,” he said, setting the bag on my kitchen table beside the computer and papers.

  “Now it’s a good morning,” I said as I pulled the warm to-go cups out of the cardboard container and handed one to Vincent.

  He leaned against the edge of the kitchen counter and took a sip of coffee, studying me over the rim of the cup.

  “How’s the eye?”

  I gave him my best sardonic smirk.

  “Can’t even tell it’s there, can you?” I asked, deadpan.

  “Yeah,” he said, laughing slightly, “you’ve managed to tone down the black to a subtle shade of purple. Classy.”

  I laughed too.

  “I guess I’ll never win that best makeup Oscar,” I said. “Or be mistaken for a beautiful supermodel.”

  “Probably not—”

  I huffed in mock offense.

  “But I like a bit of rough-and-tumble in a woman. Means she’s not going to wilt at the first sign of trouble. To me, that’s real beauty.”

  I felt myself blushing, and even though I knew I couldn’t hide from Vincent, I looked away.

  “So,” I said drawing out the word and deciding to change the subject back to the task at hand, “I’ll get plates for the waffles. I’m waiting on an email from Keller about the employees on duty the day he left with the list, but my money’s on Mary Fallsworthy since the paramedic named her specifically. We should start with her.”

  When Vincent did not affirm my plan to begin with the nurse practitioner at the Accident Care Clinic, I looked at him—really looked at him, not just ogled him—for the first time since he arrived.

  He was unshaven, giving his cheeks a rough and reddish appearance. Dark circles lurked beneath his eyes, and the wrinkle of concern that was usually so infrequent on his face seemed to have taken up permanent residence.

  “Hey,” I said, forgetting about plates for the waffles and coming closer to examine him. “You okay?

  “Fine,” he said, looking down and away from my scrutiny.

  “You’re not fine,” I insisted, placing my hand on his where it rested on the counter beside his forgotten coffee. “Is it the gunshot wound?”

  I raised my other hand, but then resisted the urge to trace over the spot on his chest where the sniper’s bullet had entered. If he was sore, he certainly didn’t want anyone to touch him.

  “No,” he said softly. “It’s not the bullet wound.”

  “What then?”

  “Got a call from Justin’s mother,” he said.

  I felt his hand ball into a fist beneath my touch. He was not a fan of his ex-wife, and neither was I. From what I could gather, she was a manipulative, awful woman whom I hoped never to meet in person.

  “Haven’t heard from her in years, and she called me last night. Told me Justin had been expelled from Central Georgia College for stealing copies of tests and selling them.”

  “Stealing copies of tests?” I repeated, dumbfounded.

  “And selling them,” he confirmed. “Quite a nice business venture, I’m told.”

  I’d heard of test banks when I was in college: collections of old copies of tests provided by students. Many universities have compilations of such study aids, and every student knows about their availability. I was willing to bet that the administration was also aware, but, unless students obtained the tests without the professor’s consent, they couldn’t do anything about it.

  As a criminal justice major, I’d somehow felt that using the test banks was beneath me. You know, justice and morals and all that. But lots of people I knew used this system, and I’d always figured if a professor was too lazy to change his tests or take them up, then it was sort of an expected result.

  But some students took things a step further by stealing copies of tests, either by breaking into professors’ offices, hacking their computers, taking their own tests when the professor did not intend for them to leave the classroom, or copying or photographing them.

  “Apparently, Justin took over a large-scale operation that his fraternity began decades ago, but he took it to a new level, stealing tests and selling them. The new administration decided it was time to crack down.”

  “And Justin was out,” I said. “Have you talked to him?”

  He shook his head. “That’s the other problem,” he said, pulling his hand from beneath mine and pacing across the kitchen, stopping with his back to me. “We don’t know where Justin is. Seems he was expelled a month ago, but he’s been taking his mother’s money as if he were still going to class. Living off it somewhere.”

  “Jesu
s,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I’m sure you can find him. It is your specialty, after all.”

  “Yeah, but is it my place?” He ran a hand along the back of his neck. “Sure, I’d like to find him and tell him he’s being a dumbass and wasting his life, but he’s an adult, and this is really between him and his mother.”

  “But you’re his father. It’s your duty to tell him he’s being a dumbass, isn’t it?”

  He shrugged. “His mother blames me because somehow I took the good boy she raised and turned him into a thug in the five minutes I spent with him before she interfered. Told me not to see him again.”

  “What did you say?”

  He turned and raised his eyes to mine.

  “That’s not appropriate for a lady’s ears.”

  “So you told her to go to hell,” I surmised.

  “More or less. I think I was a little less eloquent.”

  “I’m worried about him, but I don’t”—he paused, his back stiff—“I don’t know how to talk about this without sounding like a hypocrite. I was out of his life for years, and now I don’t know what my place is. Do I stay out of it? Do I look for him? And when I find him, what do I do then?”

  Personally, I was for calling Justin a dumbass, but I’d already made that clear, and Vincent was not in the mood for levity. His expression was no longer stoic, and his eyes were wide with regret and fear. God, it tore me up inside to see those emotions in him, especially when I had no idea what to say.

  “I can’t help but think,” he said, scrubbing a hand along the stubble on his jaw, “this is my fault. If I had been a better father. If I had been a father at all….”

  “Mark,” I said, wanting to cross the room and hold him, but knowing it would probably be an unwelcome gesture at the moment.

  “It’s true, isn’t it? I am a deadbeat dad. Justin grew up without a male role model. Boys need a father figure, right?”

  “That’s what the textbooks say,” I said softly. “But you had good reasons for leaving. It would have been worse for Justin if you’d stayed. He would have been a pawn in his mother’s sociopathic need to control you. That doesn’t mean you have to stay away now. You are his father.”