Love and Lies: A Jake Badger Mystery Thriller Read online

  Loves and Lies

  A Jake Badger Mystery

  Book1

  Glenn Rogers

  Copyright

  ©

  2014

  Glenn Rogers

  No Part of this material may be copied in any form without the express written permission of the author

  ISBN 978-0-9903940-2-0

  Published by

  Simpson and Brook, Publishers

  Estherville, IA

  Chapter 1

  It was five after seven on an unseasonably cool Wednesday morning in the middle of June. Wilson, my four year-old black and white border collie, and I had finished our four-mile morning run and returned home. I’d fed Wilson his breakfast and was pulling together what I needed to fix myself an omelet, when someone knocked on my door. It was my neighbor, Heidi.

  “Hi, Heidi,” I said stepping back and opening the door so she could come in. She was wearing tight jeans and a red tank top that highlighted her substantial femininity. Her shoulder-length blond hair framed her pretty, tan face and provided a nice contrast to her sky blue eyes. Wilson came to greet her as she came in and she paused to give him a good two-handed scratch behind his ears. Wilson liked Heidi.

  “I'm sorry to bother you so early,” she said, “but when you come home in the evening, I'm usually at work.”

  “No problem,” I said. “Want an omelet? I've got plenty of stuff.”

  “That sounds good, but it’s way too early for me to eat. You go ahead though. I don't want to hold you up.”

  “Okay. What's up? You talk and I'll cook.” I began breaking eggs in a bowl.

  Heidi sat at the table. Wilson sat down next to her so she could scratch his ears while she talked with me. Wilson valued multitasking.

  “Well,” Heidi said, “it's a little embarrassing, but I'm really kind of freaked out about something.

  I looked up. “What is it?”

  “You know I'm tending bar at Bailey’s, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, there's this guy who's been there every night for a week now. He comes in around nine and stays until closing. He sits at the bar and watches me. All night. He just watches me.”

  “Have you asked him not to?”

  “I'm afraid to. He's creepy.”

  “You guys got a bouncer?”

  “Yeah. Jimmy.”

  “Ask Jimmy to say something to him.”

  “Okay,” Heidi said, somewhat tentatively. “But that's not all.”

  I waited for her to explain.

  “Last night when I left, he was sitting in his car, waiting for me to come out. I think he followed me home.”

  “You're not sure?”

  “No. It's hard to tell at night. You can’t really see the cars; all you can see are headlights.”

  She was right about that. Spotting a tail at night is not easy to do.

  “But he may have followed you home,” I said.

  She nodded. “I know he pulled out of the lot behind me, but then I couldn't tell if he followed me all the way home or not. When I got home and got out of my car, I didn't see him.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Tell Jimmy. Have him talk to the guy. If that doesn't work, call me. You've got my cell number.”

  “You won't mind?”

  “Of course I won't mind.”

  “Thank you, Jake. I feel a little silly, but he's really got me spooked.”

  “He's probably just a lonely guy smitten by your charms, trying to work up the courage to talk with you.”

  She looked uncertain.

  “How old is he?” I asked.

  “Old,” she said. “Fifties maybe.”

  I smiled, thinking about how my father would react to that characterization.

  “Big guy?” I asked.

  “No. Average. Smaller than you. How tall are you, anyway?”

  “Six three.”

  “Wow. Tall. How much you weigh?”

  “Two forty.”

  Her eyebrows went up. Then she said, “No, this guy’s a lot smaller than you.”

  “Probably harmless,” I said.

  I didn't really think he was harmless, but I didn't want to frighten Heidi any more than she already was. If the guy had waited for her in the parking lot after the bar had closed and then followed her out of the lot, even if he didn't follow her all the way home, he was not harmless. I hoped Jimmy would be able to handle it.

  *****

  “What's bothering you, Jake?” Mildred asked.

  Mildred is my office manager. Her morning office routine includes a cup of coffee, visiting the AARP website to see what new concerns may have cropped up overnight, and a stock market website so she can monitor her retirement portfolio. Mildred is sixty-seven, has gray hair, stands maybe five-four, is a little overweight, looks like a kindly grandmother, and is tough as nails. She talks everyday about retiring, but I don't believe she ever will. I hope she doesn’t. She would be impossible to replace.

  I had just taken a sip of my second cup of tea when Mildred stepped through the open French doors into my side of our side-by-side office suite, sat down in one of my guest chairs, and asked her question.

  I said, “What do you mean, what’s bothering me?”

  “You've been distracted and distant for days. What's bothering you?”

  “Distracted and distant?”

  “Have you paid the bills yet this month?”

  “No.”

  “Did you remember to pick up Wilson's flea and tick medication?”

  “No.”

  “Have you called your father back yet?”

  “That's different.”

  “Did you remember, but put it off? Or did you forget?”

  She had me. Grudgingly, I said, “I forgot.”

  “Right. But you don't usually forget much of anything. So what's bothering you?”

  I took a deep breath and said, “Something June Morrison said.”

  “June Morrison,” Mildred said. “Last month?”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “What did she say?”

  June Morrison had been a client who’d hired me to discover why her identical twin sister had walked away from her life thirty years before. The case turned out to be a lot more complicated than either of us had anticipated at the beginning.

  “We’d gotten to be friends,” I said, “and she asked why I didn’t date. I explained about Elaine and she seemed to understand. But then, after a few moments, she asked if I had found the mole inside the agency.”

  “The mole? “

  “Yeah.”

  “Inside the FBI?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Someone inside the FBI informed the syndicate that your weapons deal was a sting operation?” Mildred asked.

  “That’s what she was suggesting,” I said.

  Mildred took a moment to digest the idea. Mildred’s husband had been a cop on the LAPD for thirty years, over twenty of those in homicide. Six months after he retired he had a heart attack and died. She’d come to work for me a month after the funeral. Over the years she’d been married to a cop, she’d heard so much that nothing surprised her.

  She said, “And that's bothering you because?”

  “Because the more I think about it, the more I think she’s right.”

  Mildred studied me a moment and then said, “So what are you going to do about it?”

  Until she asked me, I hadn't been sure. That's probably what had been distracting me. But once she asked ... “I'm going to find out if she's right,” I said.

  “And if she is?” Mildred asked.

  “Then whoever it was is going to
answer to me.”

  Chapter 2

  Now that I had decided to look more closely into the mess that my sting operation had become—a firefight in which Elaine had been shot to death—I needed to talk with Alex. Alex is a SAC, a Special Agent in Charge, in the Los Angeles office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He is also my best friend. We'd gone through the academy together and had been assigned to the organized crime unit in the L.A. office. We were never officially partners, but we worked together whenever we could and kept each other informed as to what we were working on. After I left the agency, Alex and I continued to help each other out whenever we could. If I was going to investigate the FBI, I was going to need Alex's help.

  I called Alex and suggested we meet for lunch at 800° Pizza on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood. It was close to his office. Traffic had been congested, so I was a few minutes late. Probably an accident somewhere. But it was a nice day. Clear sky, gentle breeze. Typical Southern California. When I got there, Alex was waiting, wearing his FBI uniform: dark suit, white shirt, conservative blue and red-striped tie, black wingtips. He looked more like an accountant than a guy who could shoot your eye out with a forty caliber Glock from forty feet away.

  “I ordered you a Coke Zero,” he said as I sat down. “I also ordered us a large pepperoni pizza.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “So what's new in the world of organized crime?”

  We chatted a few minutes about his latest case and about office gossip.

  Our pizza came and we dug in.

  After a couple of swallows, Alex said, “So I heard you helped put Monica on a case that involved a nice recovery fee. Nine hundred thousand.”

  “A stolen Andy Warhol,” I said. She couldn’t stop smiling. I think she's gonna use the money to buy a house.”

  “I also heard you had to shoot a guy.”

  “So did Monica.”

  “Yeah,” Alex said, “but she doesn't mind like you do.”

  “Couldn't be helped,” I said. “It was either I shoot him or he shoots Monica.”

  We ate some more pizza.

  Then Alex said, “I also heard that you went to dinner with Monica afterward.”

  “And from whom did you hear that?” I asked.

  “From Monica.”

  “I see. Was she bragging or complaining?”

  “That woman's got it bad for you,” Alex said. “You know that, right? Of course, so does my sister. Personally, I don’t see it.”

  “On the contrary,” I said. “They're both sensitive and intuitive women with excellent taste in men.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Speaking of the ladies,” I said, “you work up the nerve to ask out that professor?”

  “The criminal justice professor at Cal State L.A.?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We went out last week,” he said.

  “And?”

  “Dinner and a movie,” he said. “It was nice.”

  “And you asked her?” I said. “You actually called her and asked her out?”

  He took a breath. “Okay, actually she asked me.”

  I smiled. “Who paid?”

  The question annoyed him, but I was having fun.

  “She paid. Okay. I offered to pay, but she said that since she invited me …”

  “Invited?”

  “Invited. That’s what she said. Since she invited me, she should pay.”

  I kept smiling at him. “You kiss her good night?”

  “What are we, in junior high?”

  “Who initiated it?

  “What?”

  “Who initiated the kiss?”

  He took another deep breath. “I did.”

  I looked at him.

  “Okay, she did. But I was close. I would have if she hadn’t.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “All right, enough with the dating crap. Can we move on?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “Really. You think this is helping? You call this helping?”

  We ate some more pizza and talked for a while about our vacation plans. Then Alex said, “So what was it you really wanted to talk with me about?”

  Alex always knew when I had something I needed to talk about. He can read people like a book. It's a gift he has and it's a huge advantage when interrogating a suspect or questioning a witness.

  “I've been thinking a lot lately about the sting,” I said. Over the last three years we’d talked about it a lot and that's how we referred to it—the sting. It was a sting operation that I planned and organized involving the purchase of illegal weapons. Turns out we were the one's who got stung.

  I said, “I think the syndicate had someone inside the FBI who passed on information to them about the sting.”

  Alex swallowed the bite of pizza he'd been working on. “Why do you think so?” he asked.

  “June Morrison.”

  He waited for an explanation.

  “That evening you came by the office and met her that first time,” I said. “I’d told her the story and she asked if I’d discovered who the mole was. It just seemed so clear to her that that’s what happened. I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. It was so obvious to her. The more I think about it, the more sense it makes.”

  “The internal investigation ruled that out,” Alex said.

  “It did, didn't it?”

  Alex studied me for a moment. “You think they missed something or that it was a cover up?”

  “I don't know. But if it was either, I want to know.”

  Alex took another bite of pizza and thought while he chewed. He nodded, swallowed, and said, “Okay, I'm in. I assume you want to see the investigation files.”

  “We already know what the official report says,” I said.

  Alex nodded. “Yeah, but we need to see the original investigation files.”

  “You sure you’re okay with this?” I asked.

  “I’m a SAC,” he said. “If there’s an informant among my agents, I need to know. If there’s a leak it needs to be plugged.”

  Chapter 3

  On the way back to my office, I stopped at the pet supply megastore and picked up some flea and tick medication for Wilson. He doesn't have fleas or ticks, and he and I want to keep it that way. When I got to my office, I paid the bills. That took care of two of the three things that I'd let slip in my recent distraction. The third thing was getting back to my father. I had a pretty good idea of what he wanted, and I was pretty sure I would not be interested. However, he was my father and I loved him. He wanted to talk to me and I needed to get back to him. Since I hadn't seen him in several days, I decided to drive to Santa Monica and see him in person.

  My father is the founding partner of Badger, Reagan, and Ridley, a law firm specializing in estate planning, criminal defense, corporate accounting and taxation, and patent and copyright law. His plan was for me to come into the firm and take over as managing partner when he retired. I disappointed him by having a plan of my own. Actually, it wasn't so much that I had a specific plan, it was just that I didn't want to be a lawyer.

  My father has no idea why I do what I do. It's not so much that he disapproves, he just doesn't understand how I could not be the least bit interested in doing what he has loved doing all his adult life. I think part of his disappointment is also that the firm he put his life into building will not grow into some sort of family dynasty—father to son to grandson and so on. Part of me would love to indulge my father’s dream, but I'd be miserable in the practice of law and that's no way to live, no matter how much money you make in the process.

  Badger, Reagan, and Ridley had their offices on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica not far from Ocean Boulevard. They occupied the fourth floor of a tall steel, concrete, and glass citadel that, when I was a kid, looked like a giant monolith emerging from deep within the earth’s core. But that’s not where I was going. I was going to my sister’s home in Santa Monica, abou
t five minutes from the firm’s offices. Last year my father had a stroke that left him partially paralyzed on his left side and completely without the ability to speak. He now lives with my sister and her family.

  My sister, Della, is five years older than me, which means she’ll be forty this year. She’s married to Finton Edgewater, an attorney in my father’s firm. Finton specializes in estate planning. My father thinks Finton’s a twit, but hired him because of Della. Simply because he’s part of my father’s twenty-seven million dollar firm, Finton has become quite wealthy. I’m pretty sure Della knows that. Della and Finton have two children, Hannah, twelve, and Taylor, nine. Good kids.

  Dad was seventy-two when he had his stroke. When the doctors told us that his physical disabilities were permanent, Della immediately said she’d take care of him. I was grateful she’d volunteered, but I wasn’t sure she understood what it was going to be like. People like my father don’t do well with the restrictions of a handicap. After working as a assistant DA in Los Angeles for a couple of years immediately after law school, dad struck out on his own, setting up a firm in Santa Monica, serving the legal needs of the wealthy and powerful. In the process, he became wealthy and powerful himself. He is brilliant and driven, decisive and forceful, used to doing exactly what he wanted to do, when he wanted to do it, how he wanted to do it. Being limited in what he can do and how, generates a great deal of frustration for him and makes him difficult to deal with.

  I pulled into the driveway of my sister’s house and drove around to the back entrance and went in. Della was in the kitchen getting a roast ready to go into the oven. She tip-toed up and kissed me on the cheek.

  “Dad’s in the family room,” she said.

  I went through the kitchen into the family room where Dad sat at an oak game table typing on his laptop. When it became evident that dad’s speech functions were permanently damaged, I began looking for a program for his computer that would read what he typed. I found a good one that boasted a human-sounding voice and installed it on his computer for him. It is not a perfect solution but it does allow him to carry on a conversation. It allows him to remain at least partially active in the management of his law firm. He has an associate managing partner, Colin Reagan, with whom he has a daily phone conference, passing on his wisdom for how Colin ought to manage the firm. Certainly not ideal as far as Dad is concerned, but it is better than the alternative.