Chapter 10
Ten
Mendoza left us with a last scratch behind the ears for Edwina—nothing but a nod for me—and I climbed into the Lexus next to the dog, and headed for Music Row.
Morning rush hour had started while I was inside Diana’s kitchen, so the trip took at least three times longer than it had going the other way earlier.
But when I got there, the office itself was still empty and closed.
It was too early for Rachel, and since Zachary’s car wasn’t in the lot, I assumed he’d gone home to his mother’s house to sleep last night, after cruising the Russian neighborhood looking for strip clubs.
Given his excitement over the assignment, he’d probably stayed out much too late, and wouldn’t be coming in until noon.
Which left me with very little to do.
While Edwina squatted on a patch of dirt, I let myself into the lobby and turned on the lights.
Everything looked the way it had last night when I left. Not that I had expected anything different.
I scooped some food into Edwina’s bowl and refreshed her water, and left her to eat while I headed down the hall to my own office.
The email account yielded little of interest. An offer for free paper with purchase of ink and toner from the office supply store we use, which I forwarded to Rachel.
A reminder that I had a doctor’s appointment a week hence, along with a—separate—suggestion that an online order of Viagra might seriously change my sex life for the better.
My sex life is non-existent at the moment, and has been since David left me for Jackie-with-a-q. I had a strong suspicion that it would take a lot more than an order of Viagra to fix it.
I didn’t expect much from the office phone—everyone who knows me, knows my cell phone number—but when I picked it up, the canned voice told me we had a message. I pushed the button to play it back and leaned back in my chair to listen.
It took a second, and then a male voice came on. “Yeah. Um… Gina. This is… um… Steven.”
He said it as if there was a question mark at the end. I sat bolt upright in my chair as he continued.
“Steven Morton?” As if I hadn’t already figured out that part. “I know we haven’t actually met, but… um… I recognized you yesterday. And the detective. Mendoza. Diana helped him with his divorce a couple of years ago.”
Or more accurately, she’d helped Lola, Mendoza’s wife. I’m not quite sure how the two of them ended up being friends through it all. It would have made more sense for Mendoza to resent Diana.
“She’s probably worried,” Steven continued, his own voice betraying a hint of worry, too. “And I can’t call her. So I thought maybe you could tell her—”
At that point, there was a noise in the background. Maybe a door opening? Or someone walking into the room? I heard a female voice, but not what it said.
“Nothing,” Steven said, and then the line went dead. I deduced he’d disconnected the call so the woman he was with—Anastasia?—wouldn’t realize he was talking to anyone.
If he was on his cell phone, all she had to do was check his calls to see what he’d been doing, of course. But maybe he wasn’t.
I thought about dialing *69. That’s still a thing, right? But what if the phone rang back there, and Anastasia realized that Steven had called someone last night? If she hadn’t realized it already?
So I called Mendoza instead. “Will the telephone company tell me who called me, if they didn’t leave a number?”
There was a moment’s silence while he must be sorting through my question and figuring out what I wanted. “Who called?”
“Steven,” I said.
“From where?”
“That’s what I want to know. He left a message on the office machine in the middle of the night. If he wanted to talk to me, I have no idea why he didn’t call my cell phone instead…”
“Maybe he didn’t want to talk to you,” Mendoza said. “Maybe he just wanted to leave a message.”
Maybe.
“What did he say?”
“Not much.” I repeated the few sentences Steven had said. “Here. It’s on the recording. I’ll play it back and let you listen to it yourself.”
I made sure the recording was ready to go, and then held my cell phone up to the other phone while it ran.
When the recording had finished, I put the phone back to my ear.
“That’s it. I guess the blonde came in at the end.
Or someone did. I couldn’t make out what she said, but Steven said ‘Nothing,’ and hung up, so she probably asked what he was doing, or something like that.
I have no idea what happened after that. ”
“And how would you?” Mendoza said. “Did you try dialing *69?”
I told him I hadn’t. “I was afraid the phone would ring back there. And that something bad might happen.”
“Try it now. You’re on your cell phone, right?”
I was. So with that in one hand, I pushed *69 on the desk phone and waited. The phone rang, and rang, and rang. Nobody picked up.
After a minute—or maybe it only felt like a minute but was actually less—I spoke into the cell phone. “Did you hear that?”
Mendoza grunted.
“If I call the phone company, will they be able to tell me where Steven called from? Will they want to? Or is it better if you do it?”
“I’ll probably need a subpoena to access phone records,” Mendoza said. “It’s better if you ask.”
“You could just go there in person. As long as the receptionist is female, you’ll get all the records you want.”
He didn’t respond to that. “Let me know what you find out.”
He didn’t give me time to say anything. I refrained from sticking my tongue out at the phone screen and went to dig up the number for the telephone company’s customer service line.
Getting the information I wanted took much longer than it should have, of course.
I spent a long time on hold. And when someone finally answered, she said she couldn’t help me.
In accented English, so Mendoza probably couldn’t have gone to where she was even if he’d wanted to.
I was probably talking to India. I was tempted to ask, but instead I asked to speak to a supervisor, and spent more time on hold.
When the supervisor came on—if, indeed, it was the supervisor, and not just the customer service rep in the next cubicle pretending to be the supervisor—I was annoyed.
“All I want is to know where a call came from. Someone called me last night. He started to leave a message and got cut off. I tried *69, but no one’s answering. All I want to know is where my friend called me from, so I can go there and make sure he’s all right.”
“If you’re concerned about someone’s well-being,” the supervisor said snottily, “it’s a matter for the police.”
“I’ve already spoken to the police. Specifically, Detective Jaime Mendoza with the Nashville PD.
Homicide. He told me he could get a subpoena and the information, but that it would be quicker for me to get it myself.
” And I wasn’t even lying. “Of course, if you want to refuse to tell me where the call to my phone originated, while my friend is lying in a pool of blood somewhere…”
An image of Griselda Grimshaw appeared, unbid and unwanted, and I ground to a halt while I tried not to imagine Steven in that same position, prone on a floor somewhere, with blood soaking his shirt.
He hadn’t sounded scared last night. He hadn’t sounded like he was in danger.
But of course that could have changed in the hours since he’d made the call.
And had changed, if the ransom note was real.
The supervisor heaved a long-suffering sigh, but agreed, very clearly against her will, to provide me the information I probably had the right to know. “When did the call come in?”
“Just before one this morning,” I said. “To this number.” I rattled off the office phone number and waited while she tapped buttons in the background. Eventually she came back with a number. It was local, judging by the prefix, but unfamiliar.
“Any chance you could look it up? Reverse lookup, or whatever? Find out where it belongs?”
It didn’t sound like a cell phone. Around here, they mostly start with the same few numbers, which this didn’t.
She sighed again, more deeply this time. I heard tapping.
“1843 Blackburn Drive,” she said.
“1843…” I stopped in the middle of writing it down. “Are you sure?”
“I’m positive.” She sounded irritated that I’d ask. Of course, she’d been sounding irritated about everything else, too.
I finished writing the address on the same piece of paper where I’d scribbled the phone number. “No chance you’re mistaken?”
“None.” She bit the word off in a way that indicated she’d like to bite me.
“I appreciate it,” I said. “Thank you for—” your time…
She’d already hung up. This time I did not contain myself, but made the worst face I could manage, right at the phone. And then I called Mendoza back. “It’s me.”
“I can see that.”
This time the background noises indicated that he was driving.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I’ve dropped the note off at the lab and put out the BOLO. I’m in the car, on my way to Franklin to talk to your friend.”
She wasn’t exactly my friend, and under other circumstances I would have said so. Now I had more important concerns. “You’ll have to turn around. I got through to the phone company. The call came from 1843 Blackburn Road.”
There was a beat. “That’s my crime scene,” Mendoza said.
I nodded. And then said, “Yes. Mrs. Grimshaw’s house.”
“They’re messing with my crime scene?”
They probably weren’t messing with it. They’d probably gone there to look around. Or maybe because they figured it would be safe, that no one would look for them there.
Or maybe they’d gone back to Araminta Tucker’s house, and something had spooked them, so they’d taken refuge in Griselda Grimshaw’s house next door. Where there was dried blood on the floor and a murder had taken place.
Maybe that didn’t make a whole lot of sense once I started thinking about it.