Fatal Distraction Read online

  Helen waited for him to work it out for himself. After all, like Mac said, he wasn’t stupid. In a few moments, her faith in him was rewarded.

  “The arsonist watched the fire and the ranch house from the tree. He knew about the tree because he knew Todd,” Mac said.

  “And Oliver,” she added. And me and maybe Eric, too.

  Mac processed that for a couple of beats, then nodded as if she’d voiced her thoughts aloud. “The arsonist killed Todd before he started the fire because he knew Todd would see him and maybe put the fire out and save Jake and the other horses.”

  Helen’s voice was quieter, “And maybe save Oliver, too.” The feeling of safety that had wrapped around her earlier disappeared like a magician’s flourish. She shivered.

  Mac misunderstood. “Let’s go inside, where it’s warmer.”

  It was Todd’s wrongful death that chilled her. It made her want to hurry back to Oliver’s side and never leave the ranch house again. Had Frank ordered all openings in the house electrified and ordered the agents to shoot to kill every person who approached from any entry point, she’d still have felt unnerved.

  “I need to get back.”

  Mac nodded and fell into step with her as they retraced her route. “Eric was a good boy, Helen,” he said as they approached the tree where her son had played. “Ryan, too. They went astray a bit as teens, that’s all. Not unusual for boys. They’d have come around.”

  Helen was grateful for Mac’s kind words. She’d been thinking about Eric’s last couple of years, his trouble with school, the street drugs she’d found in his room more than once. “I often wonder if he’d have even gone to that party if we hadn’t taken his car away, Mac. Or, if he’d been driving his own car, would he have been more careful? He knew better than to drink and drive. He’d never done that before.”

  They’d almost reached the ranch house, but Mac laid a hand on her shoulder to stop her while they could talk in privacy. She turned her gaze toward him, knowing her pain was visible to her old friend, and that he understood. Ryan Jones had been his wife’s nephew, after all. His family had suffered too.

  “Listen,” Mac said with feeling. “Listen to me, Helen. Eric hit his head when he fell from that tree. He injured his brain. The symptoms he exhibited were all related to that frontal lobe injury. They had nothing to do with you. There was nothing you could have done to change him. Eric’s death—” he stopped a second, remembering his nephew, she knew, “—was not your fault.”

  Before she could respond, Frank came out of the front door of the ranch house. “Helen,” he said, moving quickly in her direction. “There’s been a problem at Tommy Taylor’s funeral. A serious one. You’d better come in.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Thornberry, Florida

  Sunday 2:00 p.m.

  SEVERAL HOURS HAD PASSED since Oliver first realized that his grief counselor had tried to kill him. He could tell the time from the big red numbers on the LED clock across the room. Each time his eyelids popped open without warning and before they closed again of their own volition, he checked the digits. Time was passing, and no one had been in to see him for a good long while.

  The last visitor had been Helen. He’d been unable to squeeze her hand or speak to her, but he’d felt her soft lips on his cheek and her reassurances had calmed him. He knew he could trust Helen. He could rely on her. She would figure this out. She would be able to help him.

  If only he could make her realize he was aware, alert. If only he could warn her of the danger.

  Oliver had spent much of the past few hours digging through the rubble of his memories to uncover the buried artifacts of the past few years. Each uncovered shard fit neatly into his near completion of the Ben Fleming puzzle.

  Oliver recalled he first met Ben Fleming at Papa’s Bar on Front Street. Ben was with Milton Jones. Ruby wasn’t dead yet, but she was a bag of bones, wasted by cancer and chemo, and everybody knew where she was headed. Ruby, Ryan, and Milton had moved into the guest rooms at the Sullivan ranch where Oliver and Helen could help Ruby through the last stage of her illness.

  Helen was in Tallahassee that day. Ruby had asked Oliver to find Milton and bring him home for dinner, which in Thornberry, meant lunch. Neither one of them expected Milton to eat anything, but Oliver did as she asked. He knew right where to find Milton. Everybody in Thornberry knew where Milton Jones was every day of the week.

  Milton sat on a stool, leaning on the bar with both elbows to avoid falling onto the floor. It was one o’clock in the afternoon, but Milton hadn’t been sober in months, maybe years.

  “Come on, Milton,” Oliver said kindly. “Ruby’s got dinner ready.” He approached Milton, put an arm around his shoulders, and tried to move him to his feet.

  Milton was surprisingly strong. He resisted Oliver’s efforts. “I’m not hungry, Oliver. Ya’ll go ahead without me. Tell Ruby I’ll be home for supper.”

  Oliver hadn’t expected Milton to object. Milton was always easy-going, even before he became a drinker. Oliver knew his old friend was hurting. He didn’t know how he’d react if Helen was in Ruby’s situation. So Oliver tried again. “Ruby doesn’t have a lot of time left, Milton. She needs her husband to show her some respect. Ryan’s there, too, waiting for his daddy. You come on home now.”

  Milton had done one of the most unexpected things Oliver had ever seen him do. He burst into tears. He dropped his head onto his folded forearms and bawled like a little boy. Oliver was embarrassed for him, knew Milton would be embarrassed for himself when he straightened up. Still, Oliver stood by him and tried to help, but Milton kept sobbing.

  Ben Fleming was seated next to Milton at the bar. While Milton sobbed, Ben turned to Oliver and said, “I’m Milton’s doctor, Benjamin Fleming.” The two men shook hands and Oliver introduced himself. “Milton is having a bad time at the moment. It’s probably not going to help Ruby or Ryan very much for him to go home in this condition. Why don’t you leave him here and I’ll see that he gets home by this evening, as he said.”

  Oliver had been impressed with Dr. Fleming that day. He’d handled Milton expertly; more to the point, he’d gotten Oliver off the hook. True to his word, Dr. Fleming brought Milton home in time for supper.

  After that, Oliver and Milton had discussed his grief therapy with Dr. Fleming many times. When Ruby died, when her parents took Ryan in to raise, all the months and years Milton needed to get himself back on track. During all of that, Ben Fleming was there, for which Oliver had been grateful at the time. He realized how wrong he’d been.

  What a fool you are, Oliver Sullivan. You couldn’t see that Ben was making Milton worse? You deserved for Milton to shoot you, you jackass.

  Helen’s instincts had been right on. Oliver should have stopped confiding in Ben long ago. He felt stupid, duped, betrayed.

  Oh, quit wallowing. He’s done with you; he thinks you’re a vegetable. He’ll go after Helen next. You’ve got to warn her. What are you going to do now?

  He thought about it a while longer, but deduced no other possibilities. He had to figure out how to communicate. He’d heard enough of the doctor talk the past few hours. They didn’t think he was conscious. They were talking about pulling out his feeding tube, letting him die.

  He didn’t object to dying, but he wouldn’t leave Helen alone at the mercy of Ben Fleming.

  For two hours, he’d attempted to lift his fingers, separate them, move his thumbs, his hands. He could feel the blanket against his palms, but no movement. He tried his feet, toes and ankles next with the same results. The effort was exhausting, but he couldn’t give up.

  He’d been Eric’s little league coach and he remembered how to prod young boys into performance. Come on, Oliver. You can do it. You had a stroke, for Christ’s sake. You bounced back from that. Just open your eyes. Go on.

  He tried again to force his eyelids up, a simple maneuver for most of his life. He’d never attempted to analyze how one opened one’s eyelids. In years pas
t, he just did it. Blinked hundreds of times a day. Now, he couldn’t blink once.

  When he’d failed repeatedly, he tried raising his eyebrows instead. Maybe he could lift his eyelids with his brow muscles. Ten, twenty, thirty tries, but his lids didn’t open.

  How much more time did he have before Ben came for Helen?

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Dentonville, Florida

  Sunday 2:30 p.m.

  WHILE MIKE KEPT FILMING at her instruction, and while Prescott and Berger remained caught up in the chaos surrounding Vivian, Jess quickly searched the chapel for Ben Fleming. Failing to find him, she walked out into one of the common entry areas where more mourners gathered. The Taylor funeral appeared to be the only viewing in the mortuary today.

  Jess began a systematic check of all the rooms. When she reached the restrooms, she asked a man coming out to check for Ben Fleming inside. “There’s no one in there, ma’am,” he said. She thanked him and continued her canvass into the back of the mortuary.

  Double doors exited to a short flight of stairs and a covered driveway. A hearse was parked closest to the exit, followed by a black limousine, and several passenger cars lined up for the final trip to the cemetery after the service.

  Jess had no idea what type of car Ben Fleming drove or where he might have parked. There were no empty spaces in the funeral line. She saw a few people milling around outside.

  Two men about Vivian Ward’s age were talking quietly between cigarette puffs near an outside ash container. She hurried up to them and asked, “Do either of you know Dr. Ben Fleming? Have you seen him?”

  To her surprise, the taller man said, “You just missed him.”

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  “No, ma’am, he didn’t.”

  Jess paused a moment, realizing that this was the second time in less than three minutes that an older man had called her ma’am.

  “Did you see which way he went? It’s urgent I find him.”

  The other man answered. “He turned south on the Interstate, toward Tampa.”

  “Thanks,” Jess said. She turned and ran up the stairs before she stopped, realizing that she needed one more piece of information. “What kind of car was he driving?”

  The shorter fellow laughed, but Jess didn’t understand the joke. “He’s in a white Toyota Camry. You’ll recognize it right off. The plate says FLEMING.”

  “Thanks,” she said again before rushing into the chapel. She skipped the closest entrance that would have put her in the center of the melee. Instead, she hurried around the corridor to the front entrance again and pulled on Mike’s arm. “Come on. We’ve got to go.” He didn’t move immediately, so she said, “Now, Mike. Hurry up.”

  Once settled into the SUV with Jess driving, Mike said, “Where are we going?” His tone was mixed. He sounded a bit peeved at missing the news occurring at the mortuary and excited about whatever adventure Jess had in store that might be better.

  “Can you view your video on that camera?”

  “You mean now?”

  “Yes.” She had pulled onto the highway and traveled as fast as she dared in the opposite direction from the sirens headed toward Vivian. Ben Fleming had at least a ten-minute head start and she had no idea where he was going. If she hurried, she might catch him. At least she was headed in the right direction and she could improvise her plan as she moved.

  Mike unfastened his seat belt and turned around to tug the heavy camera in the back seat. He maneuvered the camera until he could reach the precise location to open it and pull out the disk. He continued rummaging until he found his laptop, then settled back into the front seat with the laptop and the disk.

  He popped the disk into the computer and after a few moments, the scene at the chapel was on the screen. “I don’t know how much time we have left on this battery. I forgot to recharge last night.”

  “That’s just great.”

  “Yeah?” he snapped back. “Well if I’d listened to you, I wouldn’t have been filming at all, so what’s your beef?”

  Jess glanced briefly his way, taking her eyes off the road only for a moment. She was speeding along the Interstate, watching the road ahead for a white Toyota Camry with a vanity plate. The kid was right. What had happened to Vivian at the mortuary wasn’t his fault. There was no need to take it out on him just because Jess felt angry and frustrated.

  Besides, she’d done the same thing with her cell phone. It was dead as a rock. That’s why she hadn’t simply called Frank Temple when she first realized Ben Fleming was missing. It seemed more urgent to get on the road. Which reminded her that she needed to find her cell and plug it into the car adapter. But she couldn’t do that at ninety miles an hour, and Mike was already occupied.

  “I’m sorry, Mike. I didn’t mean to bark at you.” She felt her eyes squinting in the unrelenting sunlight reflecting off the pavement. She reached for her polarizing sunglasses and slid them onto her face eliminating the harsh glare. Although the sunglasses improved her ability to see, they didn’t conjure up Ben Fleming’s car.

  To his credit, the kid accepted the apology with a nod and didn’t pout. “So what are you looking for? I might be able to skip right to it. And we need to be quick about it.”

  “Find the spot about ten or twenty minutes before Vivian died and check to see what you have recorded,” she instructed him as she swerved to pass a slow-moving sedan.

  Mike pushed a few buttons on the keyboard and moved around the mouse pad. “Got it.”

  “Do you see Ben Fleming on there?”

  “He’s talking to you.”

  She let out a breath. Okay. So far, so good. “A few minutes before he stopped me, where was he?”

  “Don’t know. That was close to the time we arrived and I’m panning the crowd . . . and the casket . . . and Mrs. Taylor.”

  Strike one. “Do you have any footage of Vivian before she died?”

  Mike pulled at his lower lip with his left hand while he continued to manipulate the laptop with his right. “Yep. There she is.”

  Jess exhaled a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. “Anybody with her?”

  “Let me look.” After a few moments, he reported, “I only have a few frames. She’s sitting on the end of the aisle in her wheelchair and people are stopping by to talk with her. Two women and a man. I’ve never seen any of them before.”

  Damn. Jess slapped the steering wheel with her palm, and the SUV swerved slightly to the left and onto the shoulder. The tires made a loud noise as they ran over the ridges in the pavement to warn her she’d left the road. She glanced at the speedometer, slowed down to eighty, and moved the SUV back into the fast traffic lane.

  “I’ll mark this spot so we can show it to the cops. Maybe they’ll use their face recognition software or something to find out who these people are.” Mike was a child of the technology age, to be sure. “Anything else you want?”

  She shook her head, still unwilling to give up on Fleming as a suspect. With several of his patients in the chapel and Vivian dead, Ben Fleming had practically fled the building, heading for the only Interstate available. In her mind, that made him guilty of something. Or, Jess wondered, was she grasping at anything that might give her a reason to believe she hadn’t failed Vivian today, too?

  “Hmm,” Mike said. “I found something.”

  “What?”

  “Ta dah,” he said with a theatrical flourish, turning the camera’s small screen toward her.

  In it, she saw Ben Fleming’s car leaving the mortuary. Mike’s shot had been close enough to capture the white Camry’s license plate clearly. Just as the men had told her, it read FLEMING.

  She congratulated him, pretended he’d made a new breakthrough, and Mike soaked up the praise. “Hmm,” he said. “A Manatee vanity plate, at that. Did you know that white’s the most popular color for passenger vehicles in Florida? They’re supposed to stay cooler in the summer. And the Camry’s—”

  Mike stopped m
id-sentence.

  “What?” Jess asked, looking over to him.

  “There! Ahead of us. A white Camry!”

  Jess floored the accelerator, raising the SUV’s speed to ninety-five. The wind buffeted the top-heavy vehicle. She struggled to keep the tires on the road, hands firmly gripping the wheel and eyes watching every nuance of the roadway. She closed the gap between her SUV and the white Toyota. “Can you read the plates?”

  Mike looked at the sedan in the right lane just in front of them. “Not him,” he said. “But there’s another. Maybe not white, though. I can’t tell for sure.”

  She moved up to pass the green sports car and it swerved out into her lane to pass the Toyota before ducking back in front of the slower car.

  Jess pressed the brake and the SUV fishtailed. She struggled to right the vehicle, then moved up on the second Toyota, which wasn’t white but silver. Mike squinted. “It’s even got the Manatee plate, but nope. Not him.”

  A black truck was in the fast lane in front of her doing the speed limit. Jess slowed the SUV down as a second white Toyota moved further ahead in the right lane.

  “Can you see the plate on that one?” she asked.

  “Not yet.”

  She hit the accelerator, running up as close to the bumper of the truck as she dared. She heard a loud whining noise from the oversized tires on the truck. It was up in the air so far she could see underneath the chassis to the open air in front.

  The truck continued to travel in the left lane, doing the speed limit. Jess felt like the SUV was crawling at seventy. The third Toyota moved ahead of the truck, the big tires blocking their view.

  The green sports car had moved in front of the truck, and Jess hadn’t seen it. She pressed the accelerator to move around the truck on the right at the same time as the sports car decided to move into the right lane out of the truck’s path. Jess stomped the brake harder than necessary and the SUV swerved off to the right shoulder.

  The three vehicles were traveling almost side-by-side, Jess on the right shoulder, the sports car in the middle, and the truck in the outside lane. The whining of the truck tires echoed the tightness in Jess’s nerves.