Rock Wolf Investigations: Boxset

by Dee Bridgnorth

  “All right, I’ll do that.”

  Ellie frowned at Ron Skaggs and then left him to his preparations as she headed back toward Adam Cathcart’s office. She was confused by what Ron Skaggs had just said, and not just about the request the old man had made about Titus either. It was more. It was the fact that Ron Skaggs was suspicious of Adam Cathcart. If Ellie could not trust Adam Cathcart in this case, then who could she trust? Adam didn’t seem at all like the sort of man who would be behind a dishonest attempt to cover up something for a client; he was far too concerned for Kari Jo. Although, his concern might be feigned. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had attempted to pull the wool over her eyes.

  “There you are,” Adam said, smiling as she walked into the office. “I think I might have a name for us.”

  “You do?” Ellie was surprised. This whole thing was a real shot in the dark anyway. There wasn’t generally a single patron who used a credit card six times to see the same show when he was planning to do something nefarious like leave suggestive stalker-like notes while he was there.

  Adam was waving a page in front of him like a white flag. “Come and see. His name is Westin Bainbridge. He’s twenty-five years old and he has been to see the show every single week this month, including last night.”

  “That’s all rather convenient,” Ellie murmured as she peered over Adam’s shoulder in order to see the highlighted information.

  Sure enough, on paper this Westin Bainbridge guy seemed like the real deal. He was only a few years older than Kari Jo. Plus, he saw the show multiple times. How much of a stretch was it for them to suggest he was somehow obsessed with Kari Jo?

  “I don’t know,” Ellie mused as she looked at the report that Adam had compiled. “It’s almost too perfect.”

  “So, the only thing to do is to go talk with him, right?” Adam was already standing up.

  Ellie frowned. She could not stop thinking about what Ron Skaggs had said about Adam Cathcart. And Skaggs knew Titus, but how? How did all of these pieces go together? Ellie decided then and there to take the next step of this case on her own.

  “I need to go talk to my boss. Skaggs had a few interesting things to say,” Ellie began slowly.

  “Oh?” Eyes alert, eyebrows lifted, face totally closed and devoid of any emotion, Cathcart looked interested. “About Kari Jo?”

  “No. Actually, it was about another case entirely. I need to go back to the office, relay a few messages to my boss, and then make a few inquiries. I want to check past records on this Westin Bainbridge character. Once I have a full dossier, I want to run a full background check on him, but not until then. He might be the wrong suspect.”

  “The wrong suspect?” Adam looked confused.

  Ellie made a face. “For the wrong case. Right suspect, wrong case. I need to make sure I’m on the right track here. Just research. You know?”

  “Right.” Adam looked flat and sounded flatter. “So, I’ll just stay here then?”

  “Sounds great!” Ellie told him eagerly as she headed out of the office. “You could keep going through the audits. There might actually be more than one. If you find someone else, call me. We’ll cross reference and see if there is any connection between them. We might discover there is a whole group of people who come to see the show more often than seems normal. They might even be fans of the Garth Brooks Tribute or even of Ron Skaggs.”

  Adam snorted. “Maybe, but I doubt it. Kari Jo is the real star here and everyone knows it.”

  Chapter Eight

  Something was wrong. Adam could not put his finger on it, but he was almost certain something had happened between Ellie and Ron Skaggs to make her suddenly discover the need to go back to her office.

  Adam sat in his office and leaned back in his chair as he tried to puzzle it through in his head. Ron was ridiculous. Sometimes it seemed like the old man was completely off his rocker. At other times he seemed totally lucid. That suggested a strong possibility that Ron had said something to send Ellie scurrying back to her office to check out some bullshit rumor or other such nonsense.

  With a big sigh, Adam pushed his way into a standing position and left the audit trails on his desk as he headed for the green room where the old man was prepping for his show. There was only one way to find out what Ron had said to Ellie and that was to ask him.

  “Ron?” Adam called out as he moved into the green room. The old man had been there only a moment or two ago, but now he seemed to be gone. Adam frowned. “Ron Skaggs! Where did you run off to?”

  There were piles and piles of discarded and unused props scattered. Thanks to Harvey Lightman’s refusal to throw anything away lest it be useful somewhere down the line, the props from every single season of any given act that had performed at the Ozark Star in its twenty years on the strip were probably housed inside the theater somewhere. It was getting crowded. Evidently, it was even crowded enough to lose an old man and a puppet.

  “What are you doing in here?”

  Adam spun around to find Ron staring at him with no small amount of suspicion on his grizzled expression. It was hard to seem composed when you were so decidedly not, but Adam did his showbiz best. “Hey there, Ron. I was just looking for you.”

  “Oh?” Ron glowered a bit. Then he pointed at the hallway. “I slipped up to the front desk to have a word with Margo about my share statement from the gift shop.”

  Adam’s mind was consumed with wondering about the conversation between Ron and Ellie, but there was no doubting the fact that Ron’s words about Margo and the share statements were also an item of interest and totally distracting. Ron held up his hand. “You found a discrepancy in your statement, too?”

  “Yes, I surely did,” Ron said quickly. He made a little moue with his mouth and then looked as though he was trying to decide whether or not to say more. “I… well this was the third month that I found a discrepancy.”

  “What?” Adam felt as though someone had poured ice cold water down his back. “The third month!”

  “Yes, don’t you check your statements every month?”

  “Well yes, but…” Adam realized what Ron Skaggs was suggesting. Adam had caught the mistake this month because he wanted to specifically check the sales of a new T-shirt they had requested be added to the inventory in the gift shop. The mistake on sales for that item had been enough that Adam had decided to check the entire inventory and match it to the sales statement. Ron evidently did this monthly? That would take hours! “You get an inventory from the gift shop every month and go over your statement to make sure they audit correctly?”

  “Yes. Don’t you?” Ron made a clucking noise and shook his head. “See? That’s why I don’t hire a business manager. There’s no point, is there? That’s what I would expect a hired business manager to do and I’d be best of doing it myself.”

  For just a moment, Adam felt as though Ron was pointing the finger at him personally, like Adam was too lazy or ignorant to do his job correctly. “I audit ticket sales from the outlets and from the box office. I look at the gift shop sales and I compare it to the last month’s sales in order to make sure they’re like. But no, I don’t usually audit the entire inventory.”

  “Well, I do. And I’m glad too because in the last three months I’ve saved myself close to three thousand dollars.” Ron’s satisfied nod of self-approval was emphatic enough to make his puppet lose its hat.

  “Are you telling me they’ve been a thousand dollars off every single month?” Adam could not believe what he was hearing. “How is that possible?”

  “I don’t know.” Ron’s expression turned mulish. “I’d ask Margo. That’s what I keep doing. She seems to be the one holding all the cards in that department. Personally,” Ron drawled, “I don’t trust Margo as far as I can throw her. And old as I am, that probably isn’t far.”

  Adam huffed out a big sigh. I’m going to have to go back and redo the last several months’ worth of statements, aren’t I?”

  “If you want to
find out if they were shorting you, too, then yes.”

  Adam shook his head. “I can’t believe Lightman or Margo would do that on purpose. For three thousand dollars? That’s chump change to Lightman! Do you really think he’s going to risk his reputation for three grand?”

  “No, but I told you that it’s Margo that I don’t trust,” Ron retorted. “And you need to be thinking about your bottom line a little more since it’s pretty well the word on the street is Kari Jo is about to fire you.”

  Now Adam drew back and felt the shock on his own face. “Excuse me? I don’t know where you heard that, but it’s not true.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I have a contract with Kari Jo.”

  “Yeah, but contracts can be broken,” Ron pointed out. “And if you’re not doing your job as her business manager and making sure she’s not getting shorted all that merchandising cash, then you’re probably in breach of contract anyway.”

  Adam felt the blood drain from his face. For a moment or two, he actually felt his knees wobble as though he was going to pass out. Was Ron right or was the old man just messing with him and trying to make him feel off balance? But why would Ron Skaggs do that? What benefit would it be to the old guy to make Adam think he was about to lose his most lucrative client? Ron Skaggs was a local man with literally nothing to gain from such a move.

  The sly expression on Ron Skaggs’s face suggested he was enjoying the fact that he could make Adam squirm. Adam pursed his lips. Time to beard the dragon. “What is all of this really about, Ron?”

  Ron casually tilted his shoulder as though he had no idea what Adam was talking about. “Just thought I’d mention the rumors going around. That’s all. It’s not like you’re unaware of the fact that your client is about as flighty as they come. She’s a brainless bird of paradise, that one. Pretty, but not a whole lot of sense.”

  Ron wasn’t wrong about Kari Jo, but Adam was confident his client wasn’t going anywhere until her six months at the Ozark Star were up. At that point, Adam was going to be passing her onto another agent anyway. He just hadn’t mentioned anything to Kari Jo yet because he didn’t want to deal with her whining that she wanted the big leagues right now. Ron was right; Kari Jo didn’t have the sense to see how breaking her current contract with Harvey Lightman to pursue some new opportunity in Nashville would hurt her in the long run.

  “Eh?” Ron began to nod with an annoying sort of know it all expression on his grizzled face. “You see what I mean. I know you do.”

  Fortunately for Adam, he was saved from having to respond to Ron’s asinine question by someone very unexpected walking down the hallway toward the green room. Hilary Allenwood was a reporter with the Branson Register. It was agreed upon in the Branson show scene that while nobody liked Hilary, you didn’t want to do anything about it because if you pissed her off she was guaranteed to punish you for it. And Hilary’s punishments usually made headlines.

  “Good morning, Hilary,” Adam said with a rather forced, if pleasant smile. “I’m surprised to see you back here. Were you scheduled for an interview? I’m sorry to say that I didn’t have it on Kari Jo’s calendar.”

  Hilary smirked. She looked straight at Adam and ignored Ron Skaggs completely. “A little bird told me that your precious princess is being stalked. I thought I would come get a statement from you on the subject. Would you care to comment, Mr. Cathcart?”

  Adam felt his smile freeze on his face. Hilary was a redhead with thin, tangled shoulder-length hair she kept pulled back into a scraggly ponytail. Her complexion was milky white and covered in freckles. Her sharp blue eyes sat above a blade thin nose and her chin was pointed. Her slender build never really looked particularly feminine in anything, especially since she usually favored the khaki short pants and polo shirt combination with sandals, which was what she was wearing now. But Adam could not help but notice she looked a little grubbier than usual. Then he noticed a stray leaf or two in her hair.

  “Have you been crawling around outside in the bushes?” Adam asked bluntly. He made a gesture toward his head. “You have leaves in your hair.”

  “Huh?” She absently swiped at her head. “Just doing a little story about one of those zip line places.”

  “Which one?”

  “Read the story,” she retorted. “And stop trying to distract me from what’s really going on here.”

  Adam frowned. “And what’s really going on?”

  “Your client has a stalker,” Hilary snapped. “Remember? You’re going to make a statement about it or I’ll be happy to tell my readers it’s all very hush-hush because the police believe Kari Jo is actually fabricating these notes herself.”

  Adam was dumbfounded. He was still sputtering when Ron Skaggs chimed in. “Don’t be stupid, Hilary. Kari Jo isn’t smart enough to come up with a scheme like that!”

  “Not on her own,” Hilary agreed. “But if her mother or her manager helped her, she might be able to arrange something.”

  “Doubtful,” Ron said with a snort. “The girl is as dumb as a box of rocks and you can quote me on that.”

  “Ron!” Adam shushed the old man with a look and then he turned to Hilary. “And I’m not going to be commenting on anything except to say that it’s an on-going investigation and at the advice of our private investigator, we aren’t willing to make statements right now.”

  “Uh huh, because you hired Rock Wolf Investigations,” Hilary rushed on. She was now holding a tape recorder in front of Adam’s face. “Have you spoken with Titus Holbrook? What did he say? Did he have any particular advice that you found disturbing?”

  “Disturbing?” Adam was mystified at how the conversation had suddenly taken such an odd turn. “Why would their advice be disturbing? To keep quiet and keep the story out of the news? How is that weird? And I didn’t speak to Titus Holbrook. We’re working with Ellie Pierce. She’s extremely professional, astute, and right on top of what we need to get this case moving in the right direction.”

  “Beautiful,” Hilary said with a tilt of her head and a smirk on her lips. “Just like a press release. Fine. I’ll let it go for now, but you should really know the entire town is saying your girl is about to hit rock bottom in a big way.”

  “Who is saying this stuff?” Adam fumed. He could not believe there was so much misinformation going around about his client. It was preposterous. All of it. “I would like to know who it is that feels it’s okay to spread a rumor that has a young woman who is going through a very serious time right now. You’re trying to say she’s stalking herself? Seriously! You’re that mean and jealous of Kari Jo’s success that you’re trying to make it look like she’s nothing but an attention-seeking brat? That’s a little ridiculous, don’t you think?”

  Once the words were out, Adam wished he could take them back. The truth was that Kari Jo was an attention-seeking brat and everyone knew it. But Adam refused to back down on this. There wasn’t enough information about the stalker, the letters, or anything else having to do with this case to say definitely one way or another what was going on. That meant it wasn’t time to be making assumptions.

  Hilary made a face. “Fine. You want to play it like this? We will. We will all make nice and pretend that poor Kari Jo Mounds is just a victim. We’ll let her have her moment of public pity and pathetic pandering. But after that, when the truth comes out, Adam Cathcart, you had better be ready for the entire town to throw the book at Kari Jo Mounds. Branson is tired of divas like Kari and we’re ready to make an example out of her.”

  Adam was stunned by Hilary’s speech. When the redheaded reporter turned on her heel and stalked back toward the front of the theater, Adam could do nothing more than stare after her gaping in shock. Once Hilary had disappeared through a door, Adam turned to look at Ron Skaggs. Maybe he was hoping to see a similar expression on Skaggs’s face. But he didn’t. Skaggs looked smug instead.

  “It’s Margo,” Skaggs said suddenly.

  “It’s Margo, what?”
<
br />   “Margo is the one who is passing information to Hilary and feeding the rumor mill,” Ron said with authority.

  Adam blinked. He hated to admit that such a horrible possibility could be true, but it actually made some sense. Margo was certainly a fly on the wall for a lot of the stuff that went on in this theater. “What makes you say that?”

  “I’m an idiot,” Ron Skaggs told Adam. “That’s what they all think anyway. So they say things around me they maybe wouldn’t say otherwise.”

  Adam pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index fingers. He could feel a huge headache coming on. A massive migraine. He could tell. It was going to hit hard and fast and he wasn’t going to be able to do anything about it.

  “Have you heard Margo spreading lies?” Adam demanded curtly. “Have you actually heard this or are you just spreading more rumors that you’re only fifty percent sure are true?”

  “I’ve heard enough,” Ron decided. “You’re the one who seems to need enough to convince a jury of a murder conviction. The rest of us are all on civil case code. Preponderance of the evidence, man. I am fifty-one percent sure and that’s enough to convict her.”

  What a thought. Fifty-one percent for a conviction. How many things was Adam fifty-one percent sure of these days?

  Chapter Nine

  “Wait, are you running a full background check on that guy who came in here earlier and hired us to look into the stalker letters?” Duke Dunbar asked. He was standing over her left shoulder gawking at Ellie’s laptop screen for at least the last fifteen minutes or more. “That’s your client. Right? You don’t trust him?”

  “I just like to make sure I know who I’m dealing with. That’s all,” Ellie murmured. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but the little talk she’d had with Ron Skaggs had made her kind of skeptical about everything she’d been told regarding just about anything.