An Absence of Motive

by Maggie Wells

  “You’re saying I’m cocky?” he teased.

  She shook her head with vehemence. “No. Will is cocky. You’re confident. Totally different things.”

  “Will,” Ben said, his inflection dripping with derision.

  “I know,” she said with a laugh. “I get the feeling Henry was making two points at once in inviting Will tonight.” She raised one finger. “To make it absolutely clear to him and everyone else that I am the only person who would be inheriting Timber Masters and everything that goes with it.” She took a shuddering breath, reality sinking in. “Two, that all of Will’s jostling and positioning himself beside Henry was for nothing. Unless, of course, he decides to marry me.”

  “Over my dead body,” Ben growled.

  She tilted her head to the side, then smiled wide and bright. If he had to testify, Ben would swear the sun reappeared in the darkening sky. “So, can you see how the whole ‘I can’t be involved with you but any other man would have to step over my dead body to get you’ thing might be confusing to me?”

  “Are you staying or are you going, Marlee?” he asked, his eyes boring into her. “Because Atlanta... Atlanta is not an option for me. It never will be.”

  “You probably feel the same way about Atlanta as I do about Pine Bluff—”

  “No. It’s not the same.” He grasped both her hands in his and waited until he was sure he had her full attention. “I can never go back to Atlanta because I made a deal in exchange for my life.”

  “What?”

  “I was undercover. Things went bad. Really bad. I crossed a man named Ivan Jones. A really bad dude. The only way I could get out alive was to leave and promise to never come back.” He squeezed her hands. “Trust me, the people who work for him are watching.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They send messages every now and then, make it clear they’re keeping tabs on where I am and what I’m doing.”

  “Can’t the DEA do anything?”

  His expression hardened. “Maybe, but they won’t. They let me go when my cover was blown.”

  “They can’t—”

  “Yes, they could. Trust me. I broke rules. Most agents who live deep undercover do. It comes back to bite some of us. In my case, they used it for cause.”

  “But—”

  Indignation fired the blue flame in her eyes. He released her hand and pressed his fingertip to her lips. “It’s done, Marlee. I’ve moved on.” He gave a laugh, but it sounded tight. “I moved here. The one place you can’t stand to be.”

  “Ben, if it means being with you—”

  Whatever she said was cut off by the crackle of the police radio on his dash. “Sheriff? Do you read me?”

  It was Lori calling for him, and the jerky cadence of her call told him something was wrong. He snatched the mic from the clip. “Read.”

  “Can you... I need you to come here. We, uh, we have a situation.”

  Ben scrubbed his face with the palm of his hand. “What kind of a situation?”

  “Uh, I went to the Abernathys’ to get their computers and stuff. Mrs. Abernathy tried to refuse to give them up—”

  “Did Mike get the warrant?”

  “Yes. We had it, and we got the stuff,” Lori assured him. “But Mrs. Abernathy is making a stink.”

  “What kind of stink?” he asked, rubbing his forehead.

  “She’s telling all the neighbors you’re sleeping with Marlee Masters and that’s why she hasn’t been arrested for murdering her brother, Clint Young and Bo Abernathy.”

  * * *

  WHILE BEN DEALT with the widow Abernathy and her accusations, Marlee cornered her father. She needed answers, and if there was anyone in this town with answers, it would be her father. Thankfully, Will Thomason was nowhere in sight when she got home.

  “How did Bo make all his money?” She hadn’t bothered to knock on Henry’s office door. “I mean, the insurance business is good and all, but his folks didn’t have a pot of money. How could he have amassed enough to even buy into the insurance agency?”

  Her father opened his hands. “How am I to guess?”

  “I understand Mr. Behrend’s retired, but they don’t hand over an insurance agency to anyone who applies,” she continued, pushing away from the door and making her way to the guest chair in front of his antique desk. “When did he get a license? Last I heard, he got his diploma and nothing more. No college, no plans. When we graduated, he had a job changing oil at Hewes Brothers garage. How does Bo Abernathy go from nothing to building a house on the lake?”

  “Believe it or not, I don’t make a habit of prying into other people’s business.”

  Switching tactics, she nudged a stack of file folders perched on the edge of his desk. “How about Will Thomason? Where’d he come from?”

  “I believe his people hail from the Marietta area.”

  “I didn’t mean his family,” Marlee said, pinning him with a stare. “How did a guy who didn’t even grow up here end up next in line for Jeff’s job?”

  “He’s not next in line for Jeff’s job,” Henry corrected. “You are.”

  “You realize he doesn’t think so,” she said, smirking as she recalled the look on Will’s face at dinner. “He’s pretty sure he can make you change your mind.”

  “Then he’s mistaken,” her father said, folding his hands in front of him.

  “I have no intention of marrying him so he can run the family business.”

  “I won’t insult you by pretending the thought hadn’t crossed my mind, but I think you’ve made it clear your interests lie elsewhere.”

  “How did he end up here?” she persisted. “Most of your managers and foremen are homegrown.” She studied her father closely. “How did this guy make it into the inner circle?”

  “Through your brother.”

  “Jeff?” She couldn’t mask her surprise. It was hard to imagine her quiet, studious brother being friends with Will Thomason. “Wow.”

  “I don’t think they were close friends,” Henry conceded, following the trail of her thoughts easily enough. “Will graduated from UGA a couple years ahead of Jeff. I believe they were in the same fraternity. When he applied for a foreman’s position, Jeff confirmed Will had indeed graduated from the Warnell School of Forestry.”

  “He wanted to be a mill foreman?”

  “He didn’t want to work for one of the large paper conglomerates,” he corrected, sitting up straighter in his leather executive chair. “Believe it or not, lead positions at Timber Masters are highly sought after. We can offer hands-on experience the larger companies cannot.”

  “As long as you’re willing to work at a company with limited opportunity for advancement,” she added. “I’m not trying to give offense, Daddy,” she said in a rush. “I’m only wondering why a man with other options would choose to climb a ladder with such a low ceiling.”

  Henry shrugged, slightly mollified but clearly still miffed. “He was unhappy in his previous position and didn’t want to go to work for the big boys. With everything happening around here, I was getting dragged into town business more and more. Jeff seemed to trust him, so I was happy to take him.”

  “So he came here right about the time the whole DEA thing was happening,” she concluded.

  Henry nodded.

  “You don’t find the timing odd? That someone would want to move into the area when all the unsavory stuff was happening around here?”

  This time, her father gave no more than a jerky shrug. “When you put it in those terms...” He ran his hand over his face again, and her heart slammed into her breastbone. Here, with the light from the desk lamp casting dark shadows across his face, her father looked haggard. Old. For the first time ever, she realized he’d been carrying the weight of their whole world on his shoulders. Her brother’s death, her mother’s grief and inability
to cope, her unwillingness to come home to help.

  “It does seem odd the Abernathy boy would fall into such a plum position,” he said with a sigh. “I guess... I’m not sure. It’s been such a strange time.”

  Marlee’s stomach knotted. The urge to reach across the desk and squeeze his hand had her balling her fingers into a fist. They didn’t have a touchy-feely relationship.

  “I would think there would have to have been some sort of influence exerted,” she mused.

  “Excuse me?” Henry pulled himself from his ruminations.

  “He couldn’t walk in off the street and take over an agency. There are licenses to be obtained, courses to pass,” she said, gesturing impatiently. “Either someone with a good deal of money or influence placed him there.

  “Bo was always smart in a sly sort of way,” Marlee continued quietly. Her father let out a short laugh, and she couldn’t suppress a rueful chuckle herself. “Bright but lazy.” A surge of power rushed through her as the bulb went on in her brain. “I told Ben how Bo loved shortcuts. What if he had someone backing him? Someone with some money—”

  “Who?” Henry interrupted. “His parents couldn’t hang on to two nickels at the same time.”

  “Maybe he was making some extra money on the side,” she postulated. “And Will. How was he able to buy in to the club on a foreman’s salary?”

  Henry blew out a gusty breath. “I can’t say. I assumed he had some family money. He has all sorts of connections in Atlanta. Worked for a sort of a brokerage place. Perhaps he made his money there?”

  “And then moved to the sticks to oversee second shift at a lumber mill?” She shook her head. “What was the name of this firm?”

  Henry rolled his eyes heavenward, then shrugged again. “I honestly don’t recall. I can check his personnel record.”

  Marlee nodded as she stood. “Yeah. Let’s do that first thing. I want to poke around a bit, see if I can follow the paper trail on the land sale.”

  Her father rose too. “The land sale? Why?”

  “Wendell said the firm who acquired the land was a real estate holding company. I want to see who they contracted with as the developer, and who is actually leasing the land to Will, Bo and Jared Baker.”

  “It seems odd we haven’t heard one word from Jared Baker since all this started,” Henry commented. “Then again, he’s mainly in contact with Will.”

  Marlee paused in the open doorway to look back at her father. “Another coincidence.” She bit her lip and shook her head. “This place is lousy with them.”

  * * *

  “CRYSTAL FOREST CORPORATION,” Wendell said as he leafed through a file. They’d all gathered at the attorney’s offices bright and early. Even Ben. “The name of the company who actually owns the land at the moment is Crystal Forest Corporation,” he clarified. “After Henry called last night, I called in a couple of favors from more technologically adept friends, and they chased it down.”

  “I thought you said it was some law firm acting on behalf of a trust,” Ben chimed in, his confusion evident.

  “But the original sale was actually made to White, Pinkman, et al., correct?” Marlee’s forehead puckered in a way her mother would surely have chastised.

  “Yes. It has gone through a couple more transfers and has now landed with this Crystal Forest Corporation,” Wendell confirmed.

  “Why does that sound familiar to me?” Henry wondered aloud.

  “Didn’t Will Thomason work there prior to coming to Timber Masters?” Marlee scrambled to pull the personnel file she’d shoved into her leather tote free. “I read it in here somewhere.”

  “Crystal Forest,” Ben repeated, his eyes focused on something beyond her shoulder. He let out a snort, then said, “No way.”

  An odd note in his tone caught her attention. “What?”

  He dropped his gaze to the polished conference table, but his voice was still distracted when he shifted to sit up taller. “Nothing... The, uh, name struck me.”

  “Struck you how?” she pressed.

  Ben looked up and straight into her eyes. “Crystal meth,” he said flatly.

  Her jaw dropped as the pieces began to fall into place, but one bit of his conjecture didn’t quite fit. “But how would Jeff tie in?” When Ben leveled an unblinking look at her, she shook her head vehemently. “My brother would never get involved in the drug trade.”

  “People do things they may not want their family—”

  “No.” She all but spat the word at him as she shot from her chair. “Not Jeff.”

  “Marlee.” Ben rose as well, but she backed away.

  “No!” All three men jerked when she shouted the denial. Her voice trembled with rage. “Of all people, you should know.”

  “Why me ‘of all people’?” Ben’s voice rose as he circled the end of the table, moving steadily toward her with his ridiculous assumptions.

  “Why did you join the military, Ben? What made you want a career with the DEA?” Oblivious to Wendell and her father, she tipped her chin up. “Jeff wasn’t the bad guy in this scenario,” she hissed. “He was a guy like you—the kid whose parent was half out of it most of the time.”

  Henry started to rise from his chair. “Now, wait a—”

  But Marlee was on a roll, and she wasn’t stopping until she knocked over every rock in her path. “You’re assuming my mother took up popping pills when my brother passed, but that isn’t the case. She’s been up and down her whole life—”

  “Marlee Kathleen—”

  She ignored her father’s attempt to interject. “Pour some booze on top and stir in a husband who cared more about his kingdom than he did about his family—”

  “Enough!” Henry Masters roared, inserting himself between Marlee and Ben.

  The three of them stood in a breathless triangle, tempers high and eyes blazing as they each tried to rein it in.

  “I can assure you all Jeffrey was not involved in the drug business.” Wendell’s voice floated up from behind them, calm and gentle as a spring breeze.

  Ben shot the older man a skeptical glance. “How can you be certain?”

  “Because I was the one who helped him clean up the mess it left. He loathed what was happening around here.” Wendell nodded, then flipped open one of the many files stacked in front of him and hit Marlee with a hard stare. “Now, if you’re done bickering amongst yourselves, I can also tell you the Baker Law Firm has handled each of the transactions.”

  “There’s something else,” Henry insisted. He ran his hand through his gray-blond hair, then looked directly at Ben. “Jared Baker was the one who gave me your name for the sheriff’s job.”

  Silence fell over the room like a shroud.

  Wendell flattened his palms on the polished table. “I would say we seem to have two persons of interest at this point.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “When we get in there, let me do the talking,” Marlee said as they approached the offices of the Baker Law Firm. Her father looked as startled by the demand as she felt. “Right now, we only need to confirm how this all came about, but I have a gut feeling.”

  Henry frowned at her. “What kind of gut feeling?”

  “I’m not entirely sure. Trust me on this?”

  He eyed her closely for a long minute, then nodded his assent. Marlee tried her best not to preen as she gestured to the door, but her father’s approbation was more rewarding than she had ever expected. “Shall we?”

  “Let’s get this over with,” Henry said impatiently.

  Within minutes, they were seated in a sleekly appointed conference room. Marlee mumbled her thanks for the bottle of water placed in front of her by the efficient woman who’d shown them into the room, then took a moment to drink in the industrial-chic surroundings. The exposed brick and conduit made the firm feel hip and edgy to her. Most of the bi
g downtown firms matched their chrome-and-steel furnishings to the skyscrapers housing them or went for a more staid, conservative decor. They screamed establishment. She saw the distressed oak conference table for exactly what it was—set dressing.

  “Hello.” Jared Baker strode into the room, a broad welcoming smile on his face and his hand outstretched. He shook with her father first, then worked his way around to her. She tried not to bristle at being placed at the bottom of the implied pecking order as he shook her hand. “We finally have a chance to meet.” He greeted her smoothly, gesturing for them all to take their seats again. “What can I help you with today?”

  Marlee made an effort to relax her shoulders as she maintained eye contact with Baker. “A couple years ago, you handled a land purchase for one of your clients.” She flipped open her portfolio and consulted the photocopied page. “Crystal Forest Corporation?”

  Jared nodded. “Sounds familiar.”

  “It ought to. You bought into a leasehold with them.” She drew out a sheet of paper with the names of the Sawtooth Lake Sportsmen’s Club members listed in a neat column. “We’re making an offer to buy the land back.”

  The other attorney’s smile faded by a watt or two. “Excuse me?”

  “The land. It’s been in my family for generations, and other than setting up a club which has only drawn yourself and people from local families—” she inclined her head “—it can’t hold much meaning for your client. I’m sure the Sawtooth Lake property is just another parcel in a vast array of holdings,” she continued. “We would agree to honor the existing leaseholds, of course. Including your own.”

  Baker sat back in his seat, his elbows propped on the arms of his chair. “Hmm.” He steepled his fingers beneath his bottom lip, giving the notion his full consideration. “Well, I’m not entirely certain my client would be interested in selling.”

  “We’d be willing to pay fair market value for the acreage, plus cover any closing costs or other expenses related to the sale.” She saw her father stiffen, but thankfully, he remained silent. She flipped to a page in her portfolio, then extracted a proposal she’d typed up and printed on a sheet of Timber Masters letterhead she’d swiped from Wendell’s offices. “Here’s our offer, but I’m afraid we have a ticking clock on this. The assets we have liquified need to be reinvested by Friday, which means we only have about forty-eight hours to come to an agreement.”