Read Tina Whittle_Tai Randall Mystery 01 for Free Online Page B

headache.
    Trey stood. “I’m fielding a conference call with your brother and Landon tomorrow morning. You’re welcome to join us. In the meantime, wait here. Yvonne is on her way with the last of your paperwork.”
    He walked around the desk and stopped right in front of me, uncomfortably close. I stood too, toe to toe, refusing to be muscled.
    “Look,” I said, “I want to work with you on this. A woman is dead, and my brother is involved, which makes me involved, like it or not. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is this: I’m sorry I threatened you with a sword, and I’m willing to forget the whole thing if you are.”
    He shook his head. “I don’t forget.”
    And then he walked out of the office, not even looking over his shoulder, leaving me standing there furious, but unsurprised.

Chapter 7
    I had a perverse desire to trash his office, maybe dump his pencils on the floor, toss some paper around. Instead I sat at his fancy desk and put my feet up, then took off the stupid badge and threw it in his in-box.
    Trey Seaver. Who the hell did he think he was?
    Who the hell was he?
    The hallway was quiet, the door half-closed. The opportunity was irresistible. Keeping my eye out for Yvonne, I tried the file drawers on Trey’s desk. As expected, they were locked up tight. But then I tried his top drawer, and to my utter astonishment, it slid right open.
    Too damn easy, I thought. Probably a trap, probably being recorded on some hidden camera. I didn’t care. If anyone asked, I would say I was looking for a pen.
    There wasn’t much to inventory, however. One bottle of prescription medicine—Topomax, half-empty—and two bottles of over-the-counter pain reliever. A black silk tie, neatly laid out. Four fountain pens. A box of pencil lead. And two manila folders, one labeled LEGAL and the other labeled MEDICAL.
    I checked the hallway. Still deserted.
    The first folder contained a stack of official papers, including a last will and testament, a power of attorney, and a living will, all of them in Trey’s name and recently updated. In every case, the name Dan Garrity featured prominently, as beneficiary, as executor, as carrier of Trey’s final wishes concerning his departure from this world.
    The medical file was even heavier. I paged through an ominous alphabet soup of words: Glasgow coma scale, Serum S 100 B readings, ICP monitor. There were copies of x-rays and MRI scans too, head shots, all of them listing the patient as Trey Seaver, and all of them featuring gray squiggles and gray fuzzy spots and gray blotches.
    What was it Garrity had said the night before, about Trey?
This explains some things, but not all.
I hadn’t had a chance to ask him what he meant then, not with Landon stomping around like Alexander the Great. But I knew one thing—I was gonna make that chance as soon as I got out of Phoenix. Most people didn’t have a desk drawer full of cranial scans, and I wanted to know why this one did.
    “Miss?”
    I jerked. A man slouched in the doorway, silver hair swept across his forehead, white teeth brilliant under a matching slash of a mustache. I casually slipped the folder back into the drawer, but one of the papers slipped to the floor. I covered it with my tote bag.
    Then I stood. “May I help you?”
    “I was looking for Trey.”
    “He just stepped out, Mr.…?”
    If this gentleman knew I was snooping, he wasn’t showing it. He had an odd face, like Cupid gone bad, but the rest of him was tastefully dressed in stone-colored trousers, white shirt open at the neck. His entire manner said that even though it was obvious I knew who he was, if I wanted to play like I didn’t, he could be a regular joe about it.
    He came into the office and stuck out his hand. “Mark Beaumont.”
    He was right—I should have recognized him. Mark Beaumont was Atlanta’s version of Donald Trump, and he walked, as they say, in tall cotton. If I remembered correctly, he was the owner of Beau Elan, the apartment