Walker stood in the gaping opening to the club’s large
garage.
There was a clank and a clatter and then a rolling
sound as someone pushed out from under a van to their left
that was marked with the club’s simple, classy logo.
Daniel Grace lay on his back on the mechanic’s dolly.
His hands and his blue work coveralls were covered in
grease and grime. He squinted up at them from where he lay
on the dolly, his hand resting on his stomach and still
holding the wrench he’d been using. “Officers,” he greeted
dryly.
“Detectives, actually,” Morgan corrected as Sam
restrained a smirk.
“Well, come back when you’re a captain, Detective
Morgan, and we’ll celebrate,” Grace drawled as he sat up and rested his elbows on his knees.
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“Captain Morgan. That’s original,” Sam returned in the
same dry tone Grace was using. He moved further into the
hangar-like garage and looked around idly. “We’ve never
heard that one before. Next you’ll be calling me Johnny, I
guess?”
Instead of another smartass comment like Sam was
expecting, Grace simply stared at them expectantly,
unmoving as he sat on the dolly. His patient demeanor was
unsettling, and Sam found himself torn between liking him
and disliking him. Disliking him quite a lot.
Morgan cleared his throat and glanced at Sam. “Do you
have time for a few more questions, Mr. Grace?” he asked as he looked back down at the club’s head of maintenance.
Grace shrugged negligently and set his wrench aside. He
hefted himself smoothly to his feet. Sam noticed with a
certain sort of admiration that the dolly upon which he’d
been sitting didn’t even slide on its rollers as Grace stood away from it. Nothing about the man was wasted or
unintentional, it seemed. Sam wondered if it was his military background or if it was just a quality that was ingrained in the guy’s nature.
Either way, it was a little unnerving.
“Anything you want to know, Detectives,” the man
offered as he walked over to a mechanic’s workstation and
reached for a bottle of Lava soap. Sam watched him wash his hands and slowly followed along. He didn’t like that the man was moving, guiding them and forcing them to tag along as if he controlled the interview. From the look on his expressive partner’s face, neither did Morgan.
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Morgan moved around to Grace’s other side and they
flanked him as he washed the grease from his hands
methodically.
“Don’t you have mechanics who do this sort of thing?”
Morgan questioned curiously.
“Some things you just have to do yourself,” Grace
observed in answer.
“What kinds of things?” Morgan asked with a cock of his
head.
“All kinds of things, Detective,” Grace answered
neutrally.
Sam and Morgan shared a bemused look. Sam wouldn’t
want to have to drag Grace into an interrogation room. The
guy might like it too much.
“How well do you know the Bainbridge brothers?” Sam
asked Grace. He reached to fiddle with a pencil sitting in a coffee mug. It had a troll doll with pink hair where the eraser should have been. Sam fluffed the hair up and shook his
head, not even finding it odd that the thing was in here.
“I know them well enough not to call them that.” Grace
chuckled as he turned off the water and dried his hands on a cleaner rag than the one he had hanging from his back
pocket. “What do you want to know?” he asked obligingly.
“How long have you worked for the club?” Morgan
inquired.
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“About ten years,” Grace answered, his voice that
strange combination of gravel and silk that Sam found so
unusual.
“So you started during the period while Addison
Satterwight was gone,” Sam observed in a seemingly
distracted voice.
“Yep,” Grace answered shortly.
“Anything strike you about him when you finally met
him?” Morgan prodded.
“That kid was sharp as a carpet tack,” Grace answered
wryly. It seemed to Sam that everything Grace said was some sort of private joke. The tone of his voice made him sound
perpetually amused. “Don’t get me wrong,” Grace continued.
“Brayden Bainbridge is a smart guy; observant, methodical,
kind of stressed out all the time, though,” he murmured, his eyes never leaving the rag and his hands as he dried them.
“But Addison,” he shook his head and hummed. “There’s a
mind that never stopped working. You could see it behind
his eyes when you looked at him, little hamster on a wheel, always running. He used to play chess with the members,
sometimes, before he got too strung out to sit still that long.
Not one of those old bastards ever beat him. Kid could use a pawn like I’d never seen,” he mused.
Sam frowned and met Morgan’s eyes again. If Grace was
trying to tell them something, he was being very vague about it. A straightforward guy like this, Sam didn’t think he’d use subtlety to get his point across. He was probably merely
relating to them the only story he knew about Addison
Satterwight firsthand.
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“Chess, huh?” Sam asked as he leaned against the
sink’s counter.
“You play chess, Detective Walker?” Grace asked.
“I’ve been known to, from time to time.”
“Always thought of it as a rich man’s pastime, myself,”
Grace responded with a negligent shrug as he scrubbed at
his callused hands. “You might challenge Addison to a
game,” he suggested evenly. “Him or Brayden; either one can beat a man with their eyes closed.”
“When have you had occasion to play a rich man’s game
with Addison or Brayden?” Morgan asked pointedly.
“Even rich men get bored of losing,” Grace answered
with a smirk.
“Have you ever been involved with Addison Satterwight,
Daniel?” Sam asked with a cock of his head.
“Not exactly my preferred gender, Detective,” Grace
answered with a wry smile. The man was completely
unflappable.
Sam nodded but didn’t continue the line of questioning.
“How did everyone around the club react when Addison
came back?” he asked instead after a long moment.
“Oh, I don’t know. Lots of people were just surprised he
hadn’t gone and got himself killed. Mr. Bainbridge…
Brayden, that is, not his daddy, was especially… I wouldn’t say excited,” Grace murmured thoughtfully. “He doesn’t get
excited. But he was desperate to keep Addison here once he got here.”
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“What about their father?” Sam asked curiously.
“What about him?” Grace asked as he finally set the rag
down and turned to face Sam, turning his back completely
on Morgan. Sam could not remember a person ever having
intentionally turne
d away from one of them during an
interview. If anything, it unnerved both detectives even
further.
Morgan twitched uncertainly but didn’t move, instead
standing stubbornly behind the man and watching Sam over
Grace’s shoulder incredulously. Sam was hard-pressed not
to smile at the look on his face.
“Was he happy to see Addison come home?” Sam asked
as he cocked his head at Grace, dutifully ignoring Morgan.
Grace actually laughed at the question.
“Reggie was never happy unless he had control,” Grace
murmured with obvious distaste for his subject. “And from
what I hear, that kid was just like his mama. They were the only things Reggie could never get under his foot.”
Sam pursed his lips and glanced over Grace’s shoulder
at Morgan pointedly. His partner shrugged. What Grace was
saying confirmed what several others had told them about
Addison, his mother, and the elder Bainbridge.
“Was he abusive?” Morgan asked.
Grace glanced over his shoulder and then looked back
at Sam with a raised eyebrow.
“You knew who Reggie Bainbridge was. You seen
pictures. He was a big man, and I’m not just talking his
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personality,” he answered in his oddly soft manner. “Brayden Bainbridge is almost four inches over six feet and he still had to look up at his daddy when they stood toe to toe. The guy had to drive himself around in the golf carts ’cause his
shoulders were too wide for another person to sit beside him.
If that man had been smacking Addison Satterwight around,
you’d-a been burying that kid a long time ago,” he surmised bluntly.
Sam nodded almost unconsciously. He had met Reggie
Bainbridge in person once. The man had been the size of a
bull. Grace was right; if he had been physically violent there would be nothing left of Addison, whose wiry frame barely
cleared six feet. But that kid was all kinds of fucked up.
Something had to have made him that way.
“What about the mother?” he asked Grace. “Did Reggie
smack her around?”
“Now that, I couldn’t say. That was before my time,”
Grace answered with another shrug. “Rumor was she was
fooling around on him and he found out. Next thing anyone
knew, she was going for a midnight swim in the ocean after
drinking one too many and drowned.”
Morgan moved away thoughtfully, looking back at Sam
with a frown. Sam met his eyes and nodded almost
imperceptibly. He knew what Morgan was thinking. Natalie
Satterwight was a bit of a thorn in their sides. To a man,
everyone they’d spoken with remembered her as a sweet,
caring mother and a wonderful, free-spirited woman. By all
accounts, she had lived a full life, though it had been short.
It wasn’t her life they were concerned with, though; it was her death that troubled them. Some people told them with all 85
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confidence that she had killed herself. Most insisted the
accident had been a tragic thing that had taken a mother
from her children too early. Others hinted at the fact that she may have been helped along by her overbearing, evil-tempered husband.
At a glance, it was easy to dismiss it as something that
had happened more than twenty years ago and move on, but
if Reggie Bainbridge had killed Addison’s mother when he
was little, it could point to yet another motive. Even if Reggie hadn’t done it, all it took was for Addison to believe he had and they could pin it on him as a reason to kill his own
father. The inheritance would never hold up if that was all they brought to court. Reggie’s treatment of Addison’s lovers was a step in the right direction but still flimsy when put in front of a jury that would be looking at Addison Satterwight’s big brown Bambi eyes as they made their decision.
“Did the brothers blame their father for her death?” Sam
asked Grace carefully.
“I couldn’t say,” Grace answered with a careless shrug.
“Never seemed like it.”
“Do either of them ever mention their mothers?” Sam
dug. “Have any pictures of them sitting around?”
“They never mention them to their staff,” Grace
answered with a wry smile and a shake of his head.
“What about their chess partners?” Morgan asked
pointedly.
“I only play a losing game once, Detective,” Grace
informed Morgan with the same amused tone he’d kept
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throughout the interview. “I didn’t go back for a rematch.
Besides, they don’t talk personal stuff with anyone.”
Sam nodded and pursed his lips. That was just about
the same answer everyone gave them. It was hard digging up
dirt on a family that so carefully guarded its privacy. The only real friends the brothers had seemed to be fiercely loyal, like Micah Parrish. That, or they were all more scared of the Bainbridge brothers than they were of the policemen asking
the questions.
“What else can you tell us about Reggie?” Morgan
questioned softly as he moved further away.
Grace shrugged and looked away at the open garage
door. “You think his boys poisoned him with antifreeze,” he observed softly.
Sam raised an eyebrow in surprise. They hadn’t released
that information, but he supposed the man they had
questioned about the antifreeze would have figured that
much out.
“I know one thing about Reggie,” Grace continued as he
looked back at Sam and met his eyes unerringly. “He hated
his boys just as much as they hated him. More than that,
though, he was scared of ’em. If one of them had handed him a drink and said ‘here daddy, I made you this’, ain’t no way he’d a drunk it. You’re barking up the wrong tree, going after those boys. You ask me who the evil bastard is here, I’d say to you it’s Reggie Bainbridge.”
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THE doorbell rang at a time it didn’t usually ring. In fact, Addison wasn’t sure he’d ever actually heard the doorbell
ring. He sat up and forced his eyes open, squinting against the bright light that streamed through the windows facing
the beach.
The sun coming off the ocean was something Addison
hated with a passion. The moon was supposed to glint off the waves. The sun was supposed to mind its own business.
He turned his head and stared at the time on the clock
as the doorbell rang again. 9:08. On his day off.
“Got to be the cops,” he muttered to himself as he
pushed at the blanket that had wound itself around his legs.
“What is it?” Micah muttered sleepily from under his
pillow.
“Don’t worry about it,” Addison advised as he pushed
himself out of bed. He couldn’t quite remember how or why
they had ended up at his place instead of Micah’s last night.
He just remembered Micah bitching about wanting clean
sheets.
He grabbed the robe that hung on a hook near the door
and shrugged into it as he trudged through the bungalow.
The doorbell rang again. Addison shivered in the cool
morning air and tied th
e robe around himself, moving toward the kitchen. He wasn’t in a hurry. At 9 a.m. whoever it was could fucking wait.
He poured himself a glass of orange juice, taking a sip to
test if it was still good as the doorbell chimed again.
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It was an odd sound. Not the usual ding-dong. It was a
little annoying, actually. If he thought he’d ever have to hear the sound again he might consider having it changed, but no one ever rang Addison’s doorbell. It wasn’t every day the
cops came calling to sniff around for a motive for murder.
He sighed and carried his glass of orange juice with him
to answer the door.
He wasn’t surprised when he opened the door to find
Detective Walker standing there. He was surprised, however, to see that he was alone. His partner, whose name Addison
was certain had been something to do with pirates but at the moment escaped him, wasn’t with him.
“Detective,” Addison greeted drolly. “What can I do for
you at this ungodly hour of the morning?” he asked politely.
“I’m sorry; did I come at a bad time?” Walker asked
knowingly.
“No, I was just about to slip arsenic into Micah’s
toothpaste,” Addison deadpanned. “You just saved his life.”
Walker raised an eyebrow. “Funny,” he commented
flatly. “May I come in?” he requested.
Addison took a sip of his orange juice and pondered him
for a moment. Sarcasm was an easy and sometimes
entertaining way of testing people. If they returned it with sarcasm of their own, Addison tended to like them. If they
took it literally, Addison wrote them off as idiots and went on his way without another thought about them.
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The group that gave Addison trouble was the people who
recognized the sarcasm as what it essentially was; a lazy
man’s attempt at cleverness.
Addison pursed his lips and nodded. “Do you need to
come inside to surreptitiously observe my home and
belongings, or can we take this to the patio and leave Micah out of it?” he asked seriously.
“Is there anything I need to observe?” Walker responded
without blinking an eye. “You could just show it to me and