A.P. Greenwood - Writer, Author & Story Teller

Private investigator, Nat Pendleton, had been a good friend and mentor to Rhett and Toni Sanders when they’d launched their careers in private investigation. On a Friday evening in his Houston office, Nat was executed by Joseph, “Mad Dog,” Sullivan, a professional hit man; with his trademark two bullets to the heart. Rhett and Toni believe they can determine who was responsible for the murder by solving the cases on which Nat had been working, including one case they’d referred to him. There were three cases for them to investigate in all, including one involving a wife who had disappeared with $2 million dollars of her irate husband’s money, one involving wealthy and loving grandmother who wanted to know all she could about her granddaughter’s fiancée , and one in which a young naive husband suspected his wife of having an affair. Rhett and Toni’s investigations takes them to Santa Fe, New Mexico, San Angelo, Texas, Memphis, Tennessee, and their home town, Houston. As usual, there are twists and turns along the way, and all the while, Rhett and Toni understand that at some point they will have to come face to face with a professional killer.

Friday Evening. Fourth Floor of the River Oaks Bank Building. Houston, Texas.

Sitting alone in his office on the fourth floor of the 13-story River Oaks Bank Building, Nat Pendleton spoke aloud to himself, “It’s a process of elimination. Be patient, Nat, it’ll just take a little more time.”

It had been a busy week for the veteran private investigator. On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, he’d been out of town working on one of his three active cases; the one involving a missing wife. A wife who’d withdrawn the balance of a joint money market account that had just over two million dollars in it, and then had disappeared two weeks ago. Her name is Patricia Morison. She’s thirty-two years old. Her angry husband, Nat’s client, is Barry Morison.

Barry had provided a list of U.S. vacation destinations that he and Patricia had visited after they’d wed six years ago, the ones that his wife had said were her favorites, places she loved. Maybe she’d gone to one of those places. Neither Nat nor Barry thought Patricia had left the country, because she’d not bothered to pack her passport before she left their six-million-dollar Tanglewood home when Barry had been in Midland on business. Barry, like his father, was in the oil business. He owned an exploration and production company. While he could certainly afford to lose a couple of million dollars, he didn’t like losing money that way.

Those vacation destinations included Aspen, Colorado, Park Cities, Utah, and Sedona Arizona, so Nat’s travels this past week were not awful. But after three days of airline flights, motels, fast food restaurant meals, rental cars, and a lot of quality investigative work, Nat Pendleton was certain that Patricia Morison was not living in any of those beautiful places.

The process of elimination was often a part of his job as a private investigator. Nat accepted that.

If there were ten suspects involved in a case, he’d check the alibis of each one and be able to narrow the list down to a more manageable number, maybe one or two suspects. In this case, there were a lot of places Patricia Morison may have gone. He’d eliminated three of those possibilities this week.

Yesterday, he’d worked on one of his other cases, the one where a young husband suspected his beautiful wife was having an affair. Last evening he’d seen that wife at the Marriott Marquis Hotel downtown, and it hadn’t been the first time. Nat was making progress on all three of his cases, but believed that he was closest to solving that one.

Each case Nat was working on needed some attention. On his desk were three legal size manila folder files, one for each case. As he always did at the end of each work week, Nat began writing notes to himself on index cards -- directing his next efforts to solve his cases. There was one card for each case.

For the Morison case, he instructed himself to interrogate the runaway wife’s girlfriends, either current ones or those from the days before she’d married Barry, to come up with another list of places where the runaway wife might have disappeared. That would provide more fodder for his process of elimination routine. He used a paper clip to attach the index card to the inside of the front of the manila folder, and then placed that folder aside...