Reasonable Degree of Certainty

By Richard Stein

When Dr. George Weiss, the expert witness in a medical malpractice case, is bludgeoned to death in his Nashville hotel room, the law firm of Mason, Bradshaw, and Colson hires former singer-songwriter Elana Grey of Aaron and Associates to investigate the crime and keep the police from uncovering the firms secrets. Elana has secrets of her own and they surface as she attempts to find the killer and steer the police away from Tony Colson, a senior partner in the law firm. With the help of her husband, Nashville promoter and part-time investigator, Jonah Aaron, Elanas efforts lead her towards a potential showdown with someone far more dangerous than a cold-blooded killer her own narcissistic mother.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781479777204

Richard Stein

Dr. Richard Stein is an emeritus professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University. He and his wife live in the Forest Hills section of Nashville but spend winters in Del Mar, California. He is the author of six previously published novels, including The Dana Twins & Related Matters, Angels from Rikenny, three Jonah Aaron-Elana Grey mysteries, and one previous Caitlin Logan mystery entitled Spoiler Alert.

Book preview

Chapter One

April 7, 2009

Every year scores of hopefuls descend on Nashville intending to succeed as singers or songwriters. I’m Elana Grey. One might logically, but incorrectly, assume that I was once one of them. According to my 2005 CD single and my Wikipedia biography, I was born in Cody, Wyoming on May 4, 1986, and I was raised in a trailer park by my late grandmother, Lucinda White, who home-schooled me and insisted that I get my G.E.D. before I headed off to Music City at the age of eighteen. That would make my song-writing and screenwriting accomplishments impressive if it were true, but it isn’t.

I was twenty-one in June 2004 when I enrolled in summer school at Vanderbilt after completing my junior year at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. I became a senior pre-med English major and by the time my triple-platinum recording of (She Thought She Could) Fly reached the top of the charts in April 2005, I had been accepted at Vanderbilt Medical School. An unfortunate incident had led me to find refuge in the Music City. That event was compatible with a career in country music. In fact, under most circumstances it would have been a publicity bonanza. However, graduating Vanderbilt with high honors was far too nerdy an image for a country singer, hence the phony biography.

(She Thought She Could) Fly, was a Country Music Association song of the year. As my husband and co-writer Jonah Aaron likes to say, once we were nominated, we were a cinch for the CMA award. First of all, Fly sold over three million copies and stayed atop the country charts for nine weeks. Secondly, we were up against a drinking song, a cheating song, a song about how he drinks because she’s cheating, and a song about how she’s cheating because he’s always out drinking.

We cornered the market on serious songs that year with our memorial to AJ Golden’s suicidal leap off the Caruthersville Bridge. Jonah calculated that less than three seconds after going over the railing, AJ, the blonde beauty that the tabloids had labeled Shotgun Sister, would have hit the cold water of the Mississippi River one hundred and ten feet below at a speed of sixty miles an hour. That is very serious indeed.

Ten months before her fatal plunge, AJ had leapt to fame when she rescued herself and her sister Amy Elizabeth by breaking free of her bonds, winning a race to the gun safe in her stepfather’s suburban Chicago home, grabbing a shotgun, and blasting the two serial killers who had invaded their home into oblivion. The press noted that during the crime, Amy Elizabeth Golden had been brutally raped and beaten and that AJ had not been harmed physically; she only had been made to watch and wait her turn. Only. She only was made to watch and wait her turn. The attack occurred five years ago and I still get chills thinking about it, so I try not to think about it—much.

No one knows for certain why AJ would have taken her life. Clearly she didn’t want publicity, at least not the kind of publicity that came with being considered Shotgun Sister or AJ Bang Bang, as the tabloids called her. Since her step-father was Congressman James Miller, the rape and the shooting on Woodland Hills Lane in Highland Heights, Illinois, put the Golden sisters on the front page of USA Today—with AJ above the fold. No one offered Amy Elizabeth anything but pity, but AJ rejected offers to appear on Leno, Letterman, and 60 Minutes. She never responded to the six figure offers from Penthouse and Hustler to pose nude within the pages of those magazines. She declined book offers as if her sixty-one seconds of violence—the time was estimated by a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times—would have made for anything other than a very short story.

AJ vanished from the public eye after that incident. Only a handful of people know where she went to find the obscurity that she had lost. Personally, and it’s only my opinion, I don’t think AJ wanted to escape from fame as much as she wanted to escape from the snappy tabloid nicknames. If she had become famous for being a writer or a doctor or an attorney, I suspect she wouldn’t have minded fame at all. However, AJ didn’t have to kill herself to escape publicity. Ten months after Amy Elizabeth had been raped, ten months after AJ had rescued herself and her sister, both women had nearly been forgotten by the public.

From what is known, AJ had every reason to live and the suicide note gave no explanation for her act. Left in the back seat of her Miata, atop a pile of her clothing, the signed note written to her sister Amy Elizabeth simply said I can’t go on. Sorry. Lo siento. Lo siento, Spanish for I’m sorry, is also what AJ said to Rodrigo Diaz before she placed a shotgun under his chin and pulled the trigger, sending his head into the ceiling of Congressman Miller’s front foyer. The lo siento part of the story wasn’t in the newspapers, but I know for an absolute fact that it’s the truth.

Amos Bunden, the FBI’s leading expert on serial killers, wrote about AJ in one of his books. Roberto and Rodrigo Diaz, the men AJ killed in her stepfather’s home, had raped and murdered twelve women prior to encountering the Golden sisters. Amos Bunden wrote that AJ almost certainly had post-traumatic stress disorder and should be regarded as their thirteenth victim. It is a far more intelligent analysis than the idea that AJ thought she could fly when she went over the railing. However, in case one hasn’t been paying attention, Country Music Association awards are not given for intelligent ideas. Does anyone other than Lady Antebellum think that getting drunk at a quarter past one and calling your ex-boyfriend to come over and talk makes any sense? I love that song by the way, and truly wish I could write something as good as Need You Now.

Six hours after Judge Joseph Ancell and his daughter Kristi reported that they had seen a naked blonde woman go over the railing of the Caruthersville Bridge, country star Skylar Jones and I, with a little help from my then fiancée, Jonah, completed the song we affectionately call Fly. Three days after that, Amy Elizabeth Golden gave a televised eulogy for her sister and started down the road to becoming Amibeth, the Queen of Talk Radio. Today, Amibeth is to rape survivors what Lance Armstrong is to cancer survivors. Just as Lance sells yellow wristbands with the word Livestrong, Amibeth sells white wristbands emblazoned with the words No Cause for Shame. That is the name of her foundation to help the victims of abuse and sexual violence. I have never been sexually abused, but, like tens of thousands of women, I wear my white wristband with pride.

Amibeth has become a media superstar. I, on the other hand, after once being called the hottest redhead on the Nashville music scene, have become a one-hit wonder—by choice. I have yet to record my second song. However, life is long, hopefully, and I am only twenty-six—twenty-two if one believes my official biography—so the door hasn’t slammed shut on that option.

I never planned to become a singer. I grew up wanting to be a screenwriter. I decided to become a doctor because I wanted to help others and it seemed a safe way in which to make a respectable living. After the events that led me to Nashville, I decided that safe might not be for me, which brings me to my husband Jonah.

I was twenty-one when I met Jonah. Just as I have never set foot in Wyoming, the romantic story in the fan magazines about how I met the love of my life isn’t true either. I was not visiting my best friend, the darling of Bozeman, Montana, country music star Skylar Jones, when I ran into Jonah in the elevator of Skylar’s condo. Skylar is my best friend—now, and her condo is upstairs of our condo in The Gulch area of Nashville in a building called The Infinity. The truth, however, is that on my first day in Nashville, Jonah met me in a karaoke bar and asked me to dinner. We went to dinner; I went home with him; I never left. Our protracted first date, as we once called it, is continuing after five plus years.

When I met Jonah, he was a very mature twenty-five year old, four years older than I was, and he carried a business card saying, Jonah Aaron, Private Investigator. I quickly recognized that Jonah and I were kindred spirits and that he might return a sense of order to what was becoming my chaotic life. I am not a romantic woman who believes in a soul mate. However, I realized almost immediately that Jonah had considerable potential as a partner. He was good looking enough to be a rock star and smart enough to be anything he wanted to be. He was a good listener, a lover who brought the fire wave, and he made me laugh. I fell in love with him even though I thought he was a full time investigator who might have trouble earning a living.

Two weeks after we met, two weeks after the start of our first date, we were lying in bed enjoying the afterglow of fantastic sex, and I volunteered to get a waitressing job to help out with our expenses. I was falling in love with Jonah, and I thought money was going to be a problem. Jonah laughed, kissed me on the forehead, got out of bed, and brought me the financial statement from his investment account. After I finished checking the commas, and caught my breath, he explained the source of his wealth—his work as assistant sound engineer and more for the Dana Twins, those androgynous blonde pre-teen boys who topped the pop and country charts between 1995 and 1996, and his work on Richard Dinsmore’s classic sci-fi movie, Angels from Rikenny.

Jonah is a licensed private investigator, he just doesn’t earn a living that way. I did not become a waitress. Instead, Jonah gave me a living allowance so I could devote myself to school and to our budding relationship. I would have repaid every penny had we not pooled our resources when we married three years ago. I am not a gold-digger, but, if I had I been, finding Jonah would have represented hitting the mother lode.

Before the night I met Jonah and let him pick me up, I had never done anything that rash before. In high school, at the age of seventeen, I gifted my virginity to a boy I had dated for five months. I had a second boyfriend shortly after that, and was celibate for the next three plus years until I met Jonah five days after the events that led me to come to Nashville. To say that I was an emotional mess at that time is an understatement. On our first night together, Jonah and I didn’t have sex; I simply slept in his arms and felt safe. It is a dangerous world and Jonah is a kind, caring, loving, dangerous man. It is comforting to have danger as my ally instead of my enemy.

It was not until the morning after that first night together that Jonah and I got friendly. Under the circumstances, I consider that to be considerably restrained. Despite my one-time image as the hottest redhead in country music, I am not a slut.

What I am is a medical school dropout—technically on leave of absence—and the senior scriptwriter for the highly rated comedy drama, Jonah Slammer. Jonah Slammer, starring country singer Rickey Stone in the title role, is the story of a depressed police detective who is trying to succeed in the music business. As a bit of blatant self-promotion, allow me to add that with the help of my husband, I also wrote the script for The Dana Twins: The True Story, a movie scheduled for release in 2011. Jonah is one of the few people who knows the true story of the boys who disappeared on the way to their first concert appearance in Reno, Nevada, in 1996. In the movie, we are going come as close to the truth as anyone has a right to expect for eight dollars a ticket.

There is something else that I have to share with you about Jonah and me. As an investigator, Jonah solves problems that affect people in or around the country music industry. One of his biggest challenges involved helping Amibeth jump-start her career. I realize that Amy Elizabeth Golden now has a master’s degree in psychology, but anyone who has heard her on the radio has to agree that what she does is performance art.

After being raped in her home on Woodland Hills Lane, Amy Elizabeth Golden—who was a recent college graduate—wanted to use her fifteen minutes of fame to immediately launch a career as a public speaker, talking about rape and sex abuse. Some people are famous for their accomplishments; some people are famous simply for being famous; Amy Elizabeth realized that she could make a career out of having been raped. Milton Brandenburg, the Music City agent who became her manager, had the radical idea that she could extend her career by going to graduate school and knowing what she was talking about. Try selling that radical idea to some of those right wing radio loonies. Milton all but demanded that Amy Elizabeth get several months of therapy after the rape before she launched her new public persona, Amibeth.

Fame is fickle. In the ten months that elapsed between the rape and the start of Amibeth’s first speaking tour, the world had almost forgotten about the Congressman’s blonde step-daughter who had been raped by a serial killer. To put Amy Elizabeth back in the public eye, AJ Golden, had the idea of faking a suicidal jump off the Caruthersville Bridge in west Tennessee not far from the Golden girls’ original home in Kenton. If all went as planned, the faux-suicide would lead to a eulogy delivered by Amy Elizabeth and return her to the public eye just in time to kick off her tour.

Jonah says that the suicide hoax was the most difficult thing he ever had to arrange. Of course it was AJ who had to do all the heavy lifting—literally. After being seen at a rest stop just east of the bridge, AJ had to strip naked, then stop her car on the bridge, run out of her car, and take a flesh colored sex toy weighed down with twenty pounds of cement out of the trunk of Jonah’s car—which had parked in front of hers.

Crouched between the two cars so she couldn’t be seen, AJ had to launch the sex toy over the railing of the bridge. AJ was five feet six inches tall and weighed one hundred and twenty six pounds. The railing was six feet high, and the twenty pound sex toy had a broom handle wedged up its butt like a javelin. It was not the easiest of tasks. Then again, there had been a number of undress rehearsals for the event.

After tossing the cement laden sex toy over the railing, AJ had to get in the trunk of Jonah’s car without being seen. All Jonah had to do was convince Judge Joseph Ancell and his daughter, Kristi, uninvolved bystanders who stopped at the scene, to stay and report the suicide, then drive himself and AJ off the bridge.

Getting in the trunk of Jonah’s car might well have been the hardest thing for AJ. The blonde woman who stood up to two serial killers was afraid of the dark and of small spaces. AJ came by her claustrophobia the hard way. As fans of Amibeth know, there is a third and oldest Golden sister named Andrea. She shared a bedroom with AJ and Amy Elizabeth when the girls were growing up in Kenton, Tennessee. From the time Andrea was ten until Andrea was fourteen, their father, the Reverend Nathaniel Golden, used to come into their dark bedroom every other week or so and rape Andrea. AJ was three and Amy Elizabeth was four when their father began molesting Andrea. The Reverend Golden never molested Amy Elizabeth or AJ. They only had to lay in the dark and wonder if it would ever be their turn. Only.

Since the events on the Caruthersville Bridge, AJ Golden has become a cult hero. Every June at the annual No Cause for Shame fundraiser, scores of young women—including me—put on blonde wigs, blood red T-shirts, and blood red short skirts, and chant AJ Lives, AJ Lives, AJ Lives. The press has labeled them Ay-Jayers. They try to look just as AJ did when she appeared on the front porch of her stepfather’s house having rescued her sister and having dispatched the Diaz Brothers to hell. In the iconic poster commemorating the event, AJ appears to be wearing a red T-shirt and a pair of red panties. In truth, the photo was digitally altered. AJ was naked and covered in the blood of the Diaz Brothers when the photo was taken.

By the way, there are a couple of differences between me and the other Ay-Jayers. First, while I attend the yearly fundraisers, until 2009 I had never attended the similar festivities, if they can be called that, at Westfield Cemetery on the anniversary of AJ’s death. That was too morbid for me. Secondly, when the other Ay-Jayers chant AJ Lives, they mean that AJ’s defiant spirit lives on. They don’t believe that AJ is walking around above ground. I do. After all, my husband was the one who helped AJ fake her disappearance.

Two years ago I got an investigator’s license. I thought it would help with my writing career, especially with regard to my detective show, Jonah Slammer. I don’t do much investigating. However, sometimes, when my husband Jonah is offered a case and doesn’t want to take it, the client gets to work with me. That became the case when Dr. George Weiss was bludgeoned to death in his Nashville hotel suite while in town to serve as an expert witness for the law firm of Mason, Bradshaw, and Colson.

I think my investigative skills are good enough to get me by, and I generally dress in a professional manner. However, when necessary, I will wear my jeans a little too tight and have my neckline be a little low. I paid eighty-four hundred dollars to improve my cleavage, and it helps me look like a completely different person. I don’t see anything wrong with showing off a little. I said I was not a slut; I didn’t say I wasn’t hot.

Male clients never complain about getting me as their investigator when they contact Aaron and Associates even though they don’t know much about me other than the fact that I used to be a country singer and that I write for television. I think they assume that anyone coming out of a trailer park in Cody, Wyoming must be tough. Of course, as I already mentioned, I didn’t come out of Cody, Wyoming.

In my line of work, things don’t often get physical, but if they do, there is no reason to worry about me. I carry a gun and I know how to use it. My driver’s license and my private investigator’s license may say that my name is Elana Grey but I was born Abigail Josephine Golden. My friends used to call me AJ. Believe me, if I have to, I can take care of myself. Just ask Roberto and Rodrigo Diaz.

Oh, I guess no one can do that. Lo siento.

Chapter Two

Like many investigators, I live by rules. Rule Number One is Never take love for granted. Rule Number Two is If you think you might need your gun, carry it and be prepared to use it. Rule Number Three relates to intimate behavior and there is no need to share that one. Rule Number Four is Pay attention and take good notes. If something doesn’t help me solve the case on which I am working, I’m likely to observe something that can be tossed into a script someday.

Since I work as an investigator for Aaron and Associates, the firm that Jonah founded, my Rule Number Five is When in doubt regarding an investigation, defer to Jonah’s rules. He has, after all, been doing this a lot longer than I have.

When Jonah was eleven years old he constructed Jonah Aaron’s Rules for Investigators. He used the most authoritative of sources, television detective shows and the detective novels of Robert B. Parker and Sue Grafton. He watched and read how his role models got themselves into trouble and established principles that enabled him to make what he considered more imaginative and original mistakes. He neatly printed the rules on index cards and kept them in the top drawer of his desk.

Jonah’s Rules are different from mine, and his Rule Number 7, is Don’t bother to have a private office. It just gives the bad guys a place to find you and threaten you, and it’s a waste of money. It’s not a bad principle, except that we could easily afford an office and if we had a private office, we could have it set up with trap doors and other devices to deal with miscreants. Also, if we had an office, instead of being summoned to a meeting, I could invite someone to our professional quarters. Given the lack of an office, and the need for a private meeting, I had to go downtown to the law offices of Mason, Bradshaw, and Colson for my one o’clock meeting with Owen Bradshaw and Donna Colson.

The Mason in Mason, Bradshaw, and Colson was Anthony Mason, who would be one hundred and four years old if he were still alive. The Colson in the aforementioned law firm was Donna’s father, Anthony Colson. Donna was only a junior associate with the firm. She was three years out of law school, and five years removed from being Jonah’s girlfriend, which is why Jonah passed the case along to me. I’ll explain that, along with Jonah’s Rule Number Twelve, a little later.

Five years ago, Donna had decided that Jonah’s life was associated with so much violence that she no longer wanted him to be a part of her future—or her present. Donna and Jonah started dating when he was twenty and they broke up when he was twenty-four. He had been a seventeen year-old prodigy in the science of expunging criminals from the face of the earth when he rescued Milton Brandenburg’s two kidnapped children, Terry and Joey Brandenburg, and pitched a life-saving 4-0 shutout in a contest of kill or be killed. Donna knew nothing about that. Except for Jonah, Milton Brandenburg, Kyle Ford—an investigator who was at the scene, Terry, Joey, and me, no one knows that full story.

Donna, and the rest of Nashville for that matter, did know was that when Jonah was twenty-four, his ability to use a handgun saved three police officers from being murdered by methamphetamine dealers. The police had been kind enough to bring Jonah on a ride-along to demonstrate how real police handled things. Thanks to their desire to show Jonah what an amateur he was, he managed to save their lives. The East Nashville Shootout, as the press called it, placed Jonah in the good graces of the Nashville Police Department, and made him a local hero. That was when Donna Colson labeled him a violent man and unceremoniously tossed him out of her life.

Fortunately for me, four months after Donna Colson exited Jonah’s life, while Jonah was still romantically unattached, I came to Nashville. Since Jonah and I both regard me as a substantial upgrade, neither of us bore Donna Colson any ill will for dumping him. I hated the bitch for something else.

In any case, getting back to Rule Number 7, if I had an office, I could have asked Donna and Owen Bradshaw, one of the two living senior partners in the law firm, to meet me there. As it was, I had to drive to the downtown office of Mason, Bradshaw, and Colson. I could have walked the mile and half, but rain was in the forecast, and since I was meeting my husband’s former girlfriend for only the second time, I wanted to arrive looking my professional best.

In this case that meant applying the minimal make-up I wore when I attended classes at Vanderbilt, putting my hair in a ponytail, wearing a tailored shirt buttoned almost to my clavicles, a pair of loose fitting black slacks, and flats. At the last minute I decided to wear my multi-colored Suzani Styles embroidered high heel boots. I decided I wanted to look as classy as a lawyer, but I didn’t want to be mistaken for one. I dabbed some of my Delices de Cartier