Secret of the Scroll (Greg McKenzie Mysteries) Read Online Free Page B

Hopefully it’s all behind me now.”
    It was a rather lame hope.
    The binge eating was part of my reaction to the trouble I had been suffering through, and quitting smoking hadn’t helped. Gorging was self-destructive, of course. I had worked hard at getting myself back on a sensible path. Still, the pain remained. It came from being tossed out of a job I enjoyed. It came from being accused of things that were untrue. And it came from harassment that was merciless.
    After my retirement from the Air Force in the mid-nineties, Jill and I had bought an RV and set out to bum our way around the country, seeing all the sights we had missed during my two-and-a-half decades in the military. We wintered in California , then summered through Idaho , Montana and the Dakotas . When the weather turned coolish again, we headed for Florida . Wanderlust took us to Mexico , where we joined a jacaranda-scented enclave of the American military retirement community around Guadalajara . But Jill soon began to long for a return to her Tennessee roots. So we came to Nashville , bought a house and settled in.
    Even without my Air Force pension, I would not have had to work. Jill’s father, Daniel Parsons, was a highly successful life insurance salesman and had left her a stable of thoroughbred investments. A good businesswoman, a financial genius compared to me, she had groomed them into a portfolio that pretty well gave us carte blanche to buy whatever or go wherever we wanted. But when I heard the Davidson County DA had an opening for an investigator, I decided I had loafed long enough. I skipped the leisure pursuits and went back to work.
    Things moved along fairly well at first, though some of the prosecutors weren’t totally ready for my brand of “tell it like it is.” I had developed this habit of pursuing cases wherever they led, sometimes trampling on toes that got in the way. A few of the DA’s assistants appeared a bit skittish at times, but I produced the results they wanted. Then a case came along in late summer that led to disaster. Oddly enough, it wasn’t even one in which I was involved.
    Tessa Peterson, the wife of a young CPA, had disappeared. She was bright, attractive, a successful interior designer with a small son. Her husband, John, reported she had gone to visit a friend but had failed to return to their fashionable home in Brentwood , an upscale suburb that straddled the county line on the southern edge of Metro Nashville. Tessa’s car was found a couple of miles away, with no sign of forced entry, no evidence of trauma. This was easily big enough to make a lead story for the evening news, but there was more. Tessa was the daughter of Harlan Walker Blackford, president of one of the largest banks in the city. Further, it quickly developed that the marriage was going bad.
    The typical reaction in a case like this is an outpouring of sympathy for the family, in this instance the husband and son. Only later, when the stories begin to unravel, does the finger-pointing begin. But thanks to the banker, John Peterson was targeted immediately. It seems that Harlan Walker Blackford had never liked his son-in-law. The lead investigator, a bull-headed homicide detective named Mark Tremaine, made no secret of his suspicions. And though young Peterson denied any connection with his wife’s disappearance, the police charged on, searching the couple’s house inch by inch and digging several exploratory holes in the yard. On an unsubstantiated tip, they dragged a small river a few miles away. They brought in body sniffing dogs and summoned a nationally known private search group that boasted a high success rate in locating victims. But no trace of Tessa Peterson was ever found.
    That was no help to her husband. Detective Tremaine, who I’d had an unfortunate encounter with on an earlier case, continued to leak stories about various theories of what John Peterson might have done with his wife’s body. The news media played it