The Kidnapping of Aaron Greene by Terry Kay

Author:Terry Kay [Kay, Terry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
Publisher: Untreed Reads Publishing
Published: 2012-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Two

The telephone conversation with Cody had been brief—“I don’t know anything new, Cody, and you can quote me. Now, stay the hell out of my hair. Goodbye.”—and Menotti had left his office to drive to the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library. He needed peace. A warning from Clifford Russell had been delivered earlier: Any lapse in the investigation resulting from his friendship with Cody Yates would be a matter of inquiry from Internal Affairs. The son of a bitch, Menotti thought. He was covering himself with an official warning, with another memorandum-to-file that he would pull out like a rabbit from a magician’s hat at the first rumbling of discontent from his higher-ups. There was more fiction in Russell’s memoranda-to-file than in afternoon soap operas, and he used them like hand grenades. Marty Keeler. Russell had gotten Marty Keeler with one of his memoranda-to-file. Had had Marty escorted from the building over paperwork failure, and Marty had been a damn good cop for eighteen years. But Russell didn’t want good cops; he wanted his will obeyed. The son of a bitch was incredible.

Menotti found an isolated table in the monastic silence of the library. He opened his notepad and wrote Ewell Pender, and below that he wrote Aaron Greene. He held the point of the pen over the two names, waiting for the pen to move on its own, like a divining rod. It did not. “Shit,” he muttered. He slashed X marks through the names. Then he wrote Jew-boy, and beside it he drew a crude rendering of a telephone. His fingers quivered and he placed the pen on the table and leaned back in his chair. He had listened that morning to the recorded tapes of the muffled calls that someone had made to Nathan and Ruth Greene’s home, threats against the “Jew-boy,” and there was something disturbing about the disguised voice. It seemed almost familiar—not in tone, but in arrogance. The profile-makers from the FBI had said it was the voice of an educated adult, most likely middle-class Caucasian, and not the ranting of someone like Howard Edwards. They had guessed his age between thirty-five and forty-two. His profession was a dart-throw against a wall of possibilities—anything from doctor to actor. Certainly he was someone accustomed to public speaking. The profile-makers were sure of one thing: The calls were carefully planned; the calls were meant to distress or distract, or both.

The profile-makers from the FBI were remarkable people, Menotti reasoned. Compared to them, Sherlock Holmes would have had trouble finding his pecker with a road map, a Seeing Eye dog, and Dr. Watson. The profile-makers could take a single strand of hair or a clipped fingernail and build a scale look-alike out of modeling clay. They were far superior to the courts that heard their astonishing discoveries, or to defense lawyers who hissed bitterly about inadmissible evidence.

Menotti rocked his body close to the table and placed his elbows on it and tucked his head in his hands. He closed his eyes and tried to remember the voice on the tape.

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