Obviously, they also couldn’t arrest Brian simply on the basis of finding a gun, or they’d undoubtedly have done it. Just owning a gun is no crime, and I doubt there’s any law against gun storage in a soap box if that’s what you find appropriate. The gun would have to be tested to determine if it was the murder weapon and checked for fingerprints. The soap box no doubt would also be checked for fingerprints as would the box of shells for the gun.
“Where did the gun come from?” Kathy asked, her voice almost a whisper. She seemed dazed.
“Where did they find it?” Brian asked.
“In the laundry room.”
Brian headed that direction. Kathy followed. So did I. They didn’t seem to notice. Good. Being an invisible LOL sometimes comes in handy. Peering between them through the door of the laundry room, I saw powdered soap scattered across the top of the washer and spilled on the floor.
“They must have found it in that soap box the deputy took,” Brian said.
“But how did it get there?” Kathy ran a finger through the spilled soap powder. “The box was sitting down there on the floor, way back in the corner. It was almost empty. I always use that liquid kind now.” She pointed to a large plastic jug of a bargain brand on top of the dryer.
“Somebody put it there,” Brian growled. “Just like I told those dumb cops, somebody planted it there. Who’s been in here?”
“No one!”
I figured that included Brian. I doubted he even knew how to turn on the washer. Both of them suddenly seemed to become aware of me behind them and turned to glare. I could also see their minds churning around a ridiculous impossibility. Me, or maybe Mac, planting a gun in their soap box.
I launched a counterattack. “I didn’t even know you had a laundry room! You need to look for someone who had the motive, means, and opportunity to get inside the apartment. Maybe someone who knows how to pick a lock to get inside.”
“Weren’t you two going to do some cleanup out in the park?” Brian growled. His glare said we were shirking our duty.
“Yes, I believe so.”
“I’m going to go lie down again.” Brian planted a hand on his stomach, and he really did look as if he didn’t feel well. Which is how I presumed he would feel if he figured the sheriff now had an incriminating gun to make a murder charge stick. He stalked back toward the bedroom.
Kathy wiped her hands on her apron. “I believe I’ll clean up the kitchen. They left a terrible mess.” She put a finger to her chin with a distracted air when she added, “I think I’ll make some raisin cookies.” I noted that she didn’t repeat her earlier offer of cookies for us.
We exited the house and picked up rakes in the carport. And then realized we didn’t have a key to the gate. Not inclined to go back and ask for it, we returned the rakes and got in the pickup where BoBandy was waiting. Cookie-less, we drove home to Sheila’s place.
“So, what do you think?” Mac asked when we were sitting in our room with coffee from the jar of instant we’d bought in McKinleyville, and I was wishing I’d bought ingredients to make cookies. By now I had a real yearning for cookies. Peanut butter. Raisin. Chocolate chip. Anything.
I gave Mac’s question a moment’s thought and then gave the obvious answer. Except it came out a question. “Brian shot Renée and then hid the gun there?”
“You believe that?”
“Hiding the murder gun right there in the house doesn’t seem too smart. Wouldn’t he have been more likely to get rid of it?”
“But you don’t think it’s his gun anyway.”
I had to nod. No, I didn’t think it was Brian’s gun. I didn’t like Brian any better today than I ever had, but my dislike still didn’t make him a killer. I didn’t doubt the gun found in their soap box was the murder weapon, but I still doubted it was Brian’s gun.
I wished I could wrap it up neatly in my mind with a simple sequence: Brian killed Renée. The gun was Brian’s. He’d hidden it in the soap box. End of story. But, like a book with pages missing, I just couldn’t make this fit.
“How about Kathy?”
“I suppose she’d hide a gun somewhere if Brian told her to, and the soap box would be a logical spot for her. But I think the gun was a big shock to both of them.”
“Their surprise could have just been an act,” Mac pointed out.
“Would Brian have told them to go ahead and search if he knew the gun was hidden there in the house?”
“He could have thought he’d hidden it so well they’d never find it. Another preemptive strike because he figured they were going to search no matter what he said,” Mac said. “What do you think about his claim that someone planted the gun there?”
“Who could have gotten inside to plant it? Kathy keeps the outside door locked even when she’s right there at home.”
“A biker with a criminal past might know how to pick a lock and get inside.”
Yes indeedy. But if Ric Echol knew how to pick a lock, would he have gotten himself sent to prison for blowing up the back side of a warehouse to get to a safe inside?
The uneasy thought occurred to me that Ric Echol might have greater success finding us than we’d had finding him. Hopefully, he didn’t have a big supply of leftover explosives on hand.
***
The next morning we were outside doing more cleanup work, Mac being careful of the knee that was still giving him occasional twinges, when a car drove in beside Sheila’s house. A stocky man got out and went to her door. He received no answer to his knock, of course, and he drove on back to where we were working.
“Mrs. Weekson is away for a few days,” Mac said when the man got out of the car. BoBandy ran up to sniff him. Koop was off hunting in the grass. He isn’t much for eating what he catches, but he likes to bring us gifts. “We’re looking after the place for her, but her garage sale won’t be open today.”
“Actually, I’m looking for an Ivy MacPherson.” The man gave me a speculative look. I didn’t jump to identify myself to an unknown visitor.
Up close, he wasn’t just stocky; he was chubby. He also had a few strands of hair in a careful comb-over on his otherwise balding head. A nice suit. Identification dawned. He couldn’t be, but—
“You drove all the way out here from Missouri?” I gasped. Or maybe it was a squeak.
“Actually, I flew to San Francisco and drove up from there in a rental car.” He motioned to the midsize Ford behind him. “I stayed in Eureka last night. I can see you know who I am.”
“Private Investigator Megalthorpe.” I couldn’t tell if there was a gun in a shoulder holster under that nice suit, but now I did recognize that melodious voice.
“Exactly.”
“But how did you know—” The return address on the rock we’d sent him, of course.
“I believe I mentioned I was willing to come out here—?” True. But we hadn’t expected him to show up in our driveway unannounced. “And the matter did seem rather urgent once the lab notified me of what they’d found. Could we sit somewhere and talk about the rock?”
We invited him to our upstairs residence. He got a briefcase out of the car and brought it along. I offered coffee, specifying that it was instant, and he accepted. He didn’t get right to the point, which I presumed was PI technique. He chatted about seeing storm damage and inquired if such storms were common in the area and how long we’d lived here. Mac didn’t elaborate on our living arrangements or mention the motorhome, just said, “Not long.”
I heard Mac’s impatience, which was how I felt. Get on with it, Mr. Private Investigator.
Megalthorpe mentioned that he and his wife usually vacationed in Florida, but they might have to try a vacation here sometime. “Beautiful area.” Finally he got down to the point of this visit. “About that rock you sent me. Might I inquire how you acquired it?”
“Why don’t you just tell us if the rock showed any fingerprints. Presumably it did, or you wouldn’t be here,” Mac said.<
br />
“Yes. Well. I took the rock to a reputable lab in the area. Getting fingerprints off rock surface isn’t easy and can’t always be done. But they did indeed get fingerprints off your rock. I don’t know what name he’s using now, but the fingerprints are those of Andrew Higman.”
He made the statement so casually that it took a moment for the information to sink in. When it did, I was stunned and yet not really surprised, if that’s a possible combination.
“Kathy’s . . . Genevieve’s dead husband,” I said.
“Not so dead, apparently,” Megalthorpe pointed out. “But someone is definitely dead. Mrs. Higman had a body cremated.”
“What did she do with the ashes?” I asked.
“Unknown.”
“How did they have Higman’s fingerprints to compare with the fingerprints on the rock?” Mac asked.
“How about if I start from the beginning with what I know? In trying to find what became of John Anderson, my client’s uncle, I’ve done considerable research on the Higmans.”
We both nodded. Now I really wished we had some cookies.
“Genevieve, whose last name was Smith before she married Andrew Higman, was a bookkeeper for many years. She never married in those younger years and spent several years caring for her mother in her mother’s final years. She received a considerable insurance payoff when her mother passed away. Not long afterward she married Andrew Higman.”
Megalthorpe didn’t spell out a connection between the insurance money and the marriage, but he obviously thought there was one. Older woman, anxious not to drift into her later years still single; devious man, willing to marry for available money. And, since then, a woman willing to do almost anything to hold onto the husband she’d snagged?
“Did you find out anything about how Genevieve and Andrew met?”
“No, I can’t say that I did.” Megalthorpe sounded regretful.
“But you investigated Andrew Higman’s past?”
“Yes indeed. An interesting, if somewhat checkered, past. Mr. Higman first made a considerable amount of money selling a large parcel of commercial real estate in New Jersey that he inherited from his father. He spent it, as the saying goes, like a drunken sailor, and rather quickly lost the remainder of the money in another real estate deal. His wife at the time divorced him. He was then involved in several get-rich-quick schemes where it was difficult to tell if he was the con man or the man being conned. At one time he was caught in the middle of a mining stock fraud, for which he served time.”
“And his fingerprints went on record,” Mac said.
“Right. That was before he and Genevieve got together. After their marriage, the Higmans invested Mrs. Higman’s insurance money in a soft drink business in Alabama and lost it all. At some time in there, Mr. Higman developed a heart problem and was under a doctor’s care at the time they rented a small home in an area where you, Mrs. MacPherson, formerly lived. But Mrs. Higman, perhaps cognizant of the payoff she’d received when her mother died, had taken out a rather large insurance policy on her husband soon after their marriage.”
“Before he developed heart problems,” Mac suggested.
“Yes. And she, rather fiercely I’d say, managed to hold onto the policy through the ups and downs of their financial situation.” Megalthorpe paused and cleared his throat. “I am, I should advise you, now working with the insurance company on this case.”
“An insurance company willing to finance a trip out here?”
“Well, yes. But what I have to say from here on is not proven fact. Merely my educated speculation on the matter.” He lifted his eyebrows in a questioning gesture to make sure we understood that. He hadn’t, I noted, mastered that difficult one-eyebrow-raised technique. Or maybe it’s a genetic trait, although I think grandniece Sandy may have it and no one else in the family does.
Mac and I both nodded.
“I believe the Higmans, aware of the troublesome fact that even though Mr. Higman had heart problems and they couldn’t collect on his insurance unless he actually died, conceived a plan to make it possible to collect without Mr. Higman actually having to go through the unpleasant process of dying.”
“They moved to what was for them a new city in a new state, and they made sure everyone knew Mr. Higman had heart trouble,” I said as details scrolled through my mind. “Mr. Higman managed to find a male patient in an adult care home, a man with heart trouble and dementia. He befriended this man and eventually took him to his home where Mrs. Higman passed him off as her husband, who had become bedridden. Apparently, because they were new in the area, also doing this successfully with a doctor who had never met the real Andrew Higman. So, when this man—”
“John Anderson, I believe,” Megalthorpe put in.
“Then when this man died, he died as Andrew Higman, not John Anderson.”
“Exactly. And Widow Higman collected on Andrew Higman’s insurance. She did, of course, by then have a legitimate death certificate with that name on it.”
“That’s not an easy scheme to pull off,” Mac said skeptically.
“True. But it appears they did pull it off. Mr. Higman, or, rather, the man whom Mrs. Higman was passing off as her husband, had a heart attack and died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. With his heart problems already on record, there was no autopsy, and his death certificate shows acute myocardial infarction as cause of death.”
The same death certificate grandniece Sandy had located for an Andrew Higman.
“Wouldn’t x-rays or other medical records look different for two different men?” Mac questioned.
“All I can think is that the Higmans somehow managed to keep incriminating earlier records away from the new doctor.”
“But now, with fingerprints proving Andrew Higman is still alive, the insurance company is unhappy that they paid off on a death that wasn’t really the death of their insured,” Mac said.
“Yes, that’s their suspicion. Although there is another serious matter involved here.”
“Andrew Higman’s—or, more accurately, John Anderson’s—death,” I said. “Was it a natural death, and the Higmans just waited until it happened, or did they tire of waiting for him to die and hurry it along?”
Megalthorpe nodded. “There are various substances that might induce a heart attack, particularly in a man who already has heart trouble. And, with a man already known to have heart trouble, there’d be no suspicion that it wasn’t a natural heart attack. As I said, there was no autopsy. The fact that Mrs. Higman had him cremated quickly isn’t necessarily suspicious, of course. Many cremations are done quickly. But she did have it done quickly, and cremation would do away with the body ever being autopsied or tested for any substance he may have been given. She then, for all practical purposes, disappeared.”
“She and the still-alive, real Andrew Higman took the money and ran,” Mac said.
“With new identities,” Megalthorpe agreed. Identities which, at this point, he still didn’t know.
I tied all this in with the limited information Kathy had given about her past with Brian. An indefinite marriage date. Perhaps Brian had said they need not do it again because they were already married, even if their names were different. Although they’d had a honeymoon in Tahiti. On insurance money from Brian’s “death”? Money that had also been used to purchase a Porsche? But since then they’d apparently lost most or all of that money in another of Brian’s get-rich-quick schemes and had been living in the little travel trailer when they arrived at the dinosaur park. I thought of that array of pills on Kathy’s kitchen counter. Brian’s pills for a heart condition, I was now reasonably certain. And now Brian, apparently working with Renée, had some new scheme going with the Kate’s Kabins and the dinosaur park properties. Except Renée was dead, and he may have killed her . . .
My head reeled with the effort of trying to keep everyone straight in this complicated situation. A dead Andrew Higman and a live Brian Morri
son. Genevieve Higman back in Missouri and the Kathy Morrison of now.
Mac had another thought.
“But isn’t it rather difficult to change identities and get all the paperwork necessary for a new life? Would Br—I mean Andrew, be able to do that?”
“From what I understand, buying a new identity isn’t all that difficult if you have the right connections, which Andrew Higman probably did, given his criminal record. I think the going rate is about three thousand dollars, and for that you get a phony birth certificate and everything else you need. Of course, simply having papers for a new identity isn’t infallible. It takes some diligence to pull it off, but Mr. and Mrs. Higman seem to have been successful at living quiet, inconspicuous lives under the new identity in this area.”
Except Magnolia came along and identified inconspicuous Kathy Morrison as Genevieve Higman. And now there was also the matter of a dead woman in a burned cabin and an exploded Porsche. Which were hardly inconspicuous.
“What you want from us, then, is the name the Higmans are currently using,” Mac said. “And exactly where they can be found.”
“That’s why I’m here, yes.”
“It doesn’t sound as if there’s any way to prove murder in the death of John Anderson,” I offered. “The heart attack may, in fact, have been quite natural.”
Although the thought also occurred to me that I might not be so eager to eat Kathy’s cookies after this.
“That’s true. I was at more or less of a dead end and about to close the case as unsuccessful when I received your call. Now I believe we can at least prove insurance fraud because Andrew Higman is definitely alive and Mrs. Higman collected on the insurance policy for his death. Unless you somehow managed to acquire the fingerprints of a dead man?” Megalthorpe’s question was not without facetiousness. He was getting a bit impatient with us.
“We need a little time to talk this over,” Mac said smoothly.
Detour Page 22
