by Blake Pierce
“I’m really sorry,” Greg said, looking to them, his eyes ping-ponging back and forth between the three women. “I usually sleep somewhere along the edge of the lake, but when the tourists aren’t around it gets sort of scary.”
Kate turned to face the wall, mainly to hide her disappointment. Yes, there was certainly some sort of mental condition at play here. It made her wonder why he was not somewhere to receive help rather than wandering the streets of Estes and the surrounding areas.
As she got her thoughts under control, she listened to DeMarco do her best to salvage the conversation. “Mr. Seamster, where else have you been sleeping lately?”
He was quiet, prompting Kate to turn around. He was looking at them as if he did not trust them. He looked almost pleadingly at Armstrong.
“It’s okay, Greg,” Armstrong said. “Look, you may be in some trouble for punching Agent DeMarco, but we won’t press any charges for the sleeping situation—though you and I are going to need to have a conversation about that. Maybe even with your mother.”
He nodded gravely and then looked at Kate and DeMarco. “The house you found me in today…I’ve been there for three nights. I usually leave during the day but I slept too late today…and usually they don’t do any showings until later in the day.”
“And what about before that house?” Kate asked.
“A few nights at my mom’s house, one night on a bench out on the public loading area right by the lake over by Harker’s View. There were a few nights the nice man over at the Lake Breeze Hotel let me have a room. But he stopped doing that.”
Kate nodded and then looked to Armstrong. “Can we speak to you out in the hall?”
Armstrong nodded, looking as if she had been expecting this exact request. The three women filed out of the room and clustered together in the hallway.
“What’s his story?” Kate asked.
“It’s a pretty bad one. He technically lives with his mother, but it’s a terribly strained relationship. I’m sure you can tell that he has some mental issues, but honestly, aside from the charges I told you about, he’s not a bad guy. Every single one of the charges on his record is the result of his mental issues and neglect from his mother.”
“From the way you’re speaking to him, it sounds as if he’s been busted for squatting before,” Kate said.
“He has. I can look into his story. If Sam over at the Lake Breeze Hotel can verify when he was allowing Greg to keep a room, it could eliminate him.”
“That would be appreciated,” DeMarco said.
This spurred a thought in the back of Kate’s mind. She let it linger there for a moment as she started to dissect it.
“Do you need me to hold Greg any further?” Armstrong asked.
“I don’t think so,” DeMarco said. She looked to Kate for confirmation, and Kate gave a shake of her head.
Armstrong looked appreciative, giving a quick little nod as she opened the door and walked back in to speak with Greg. Kate couldn’t help but think she had taken a swing and missed—and that she might be in Estes a bit longer than she had hoped.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Most people enjoyed the sunsets and sunrises over the lake. He supposed he understood that; there was a simple beauty to the play of faded colors of light dancing on the water. And sometimes, especially in the mornings, it could look like something right out of a dream.
But he preferred the midday. Even now, as summer came to its end, there was still an oppressive heat. He had not lived at the lake for very long, but he knew there was some special way the heat seemed to enhance the smell of the water; it was fishy and sort of muddy but not in an unpleasant way. Even from where he was parked, about a mile away from the lake, he could smell it on the air. The sky was a perfect powder-blue, a meager little breeze pushing the scent through the open windows of his car.
The car was facing a large house that sat on the edge of a cul-de-sac. It had been placed on the market two days ago, but he had been watching the same real estate agent go inside for several days now. She was quite pretty, but in a mousy sort of way. She was also very conservative, dressing in a way that showed no cleavage and very little leg. She also wore her hair down, as if to cover up any portion of her neck that might be showing.
As he watched the house, he also spied the car currently pulling into the driveway. The house was enormous, and the two-car garage looked more like a four-car garage when the agent parked her little Nissan in front of it. The car sat there for about a minute before the driver’s side door opened and the agent got out.
Her name was Dhayna Tsui, and she was a petite Asian woman. He knew nothing about her other than the way she looked and that she was an employee of Crest Realty. He also knew her schedule, as he had been following her for the last few days. She was preparing to show the house she was walking into, though not today. There was still no FOR SALE sign in the yard, just one of those little clear-sleeved signs that offered a printout of the house’s details.
And really, that was all he needed to know.
He sat in his car and waited for her to go inside. He then thought briefly of his mother, wishing she was still with him. Of course, he had grown up and moved away from home years ago, but she had died five months ago and there were times where he could feel her absence like a cancer tearing through his body.
He watched the real estate agent closely, noticing that after unlocking the house and stepping inside, she took the little hide-a-key with her. That likely meant this was going to be a quick trip; he’d seen similar methods and shortcuts with the other two women he had followed and thought he knew the routines well.
Having the hide-a-key with her meant several things: first, she was not staying long; second, the door was not locked. If it was like the case with the woman he had accidentally gotten stuck in the stupid chandelier, the door might not even be all the way closed.
It was almost too easy.
He grabbed the piece of lumber he had taken from the first house, the one on Leander Drive. He’d been keeping it stowed beneath the passenger seat of his car ever since, blood stains and all. He reached under the seat again and took out the rope.
He had already tied it into a noose.
He hefted the piece of scarred lumber in his hand for a moment and then got out of the car. When he walked down the sidewalk—the yard to both sides recently cut and seeded—he knew the house was not a new build. It was about five or six years old according to the detail sheets contained within the plastic sleeve on the Realtor sign out front.
Aside from the things he was carrying in his hands, he might look like any random and uninteresting person heading inside to check out the house. And that’s exactly how he wanted it to appear.
He walked up the porch in the same way, with a slight bounce in his step, and saw he had been correct…Dhayna had not closed the door all the way. She really did intend to be out of here quickly. She was probably just taking a few pictures of some of the rooms.
He made his way into the house. It opened up to a large foyer that presented a staircase almost right away. It was a gorgeous house, likely owned by someone with a considerable amount of money. And he was willing to bet that the owner was only selling it to make more money. Assholes like that only bought houses to improve upon them and then sell them again. They did not need a home or a shelter. As far as he was concerned, it was the very height of arrogance.
But he had no time to dwell on such things. He could instantly hear footsteps coming from the other side of the stairway, the sound of heels clicking on hardwood.
He went in that direction and saw her standing by the counter in the kitchen. Her back was to him, which made his job much easier.
He raised the piece of lumber as if it were a baseball bat and swung.
In the final moment, just before the wood connected with her head, he thought she had heard him moving. There had been the slightest little tilt of her head, but that had been it.
The lumber connected, roc
king her head hard to the right and filling the kitchen with a sound very similar to the cracking of a baseball into center field.
Dhayna hit the counter and rebounded to the floor. She was whimpering, making odd sounds through the currently distorted right side of her mouth. He wasn’t sure if she saw him or not as he dropped the lumber to the floor and slid the noose around her head.
In the back of his mind, he thought of a house he had once stepped inside with his mother. His mother had wanted to buy the house, but they had not been able to afford it. The much younger version of himself who had been with her had been bummed; there had been a very cool upstairs bedroom he could have done a lot with.
He thought of that room as he cinched the rope tighter. He took a moment to enjoy the panic in Dhayna Tsui’s eyes before he set about finishing up his work.
CHAPTER EIGHT
By the time Greg Seamster had been captured, brought in, and released, there were only six addresses left to check over, and Armstrong’s men volunteered to knock them out. So far, they were reporting nothing suspicious, other than an apparent rat infestation in one of the homes closer to the lake. A few of them had made it known that they felt as if they were wasting their time. But with a killer on the loose and the FBI in town, they had no real choice but to obey.
Kate and DeMarco meanwhile found themselves once again hunched over the map back in the little conference room, trying to come up with some other approach to locating the killer.
“Sorry about Seamster being a bust,” DeMarco said, adding with a smile, “That was hardly worth running across a roof, was it?”
“No. But it was fun, all the same.”
“Any ideas? Theories?”
“Maybe one,” Kate said. “I’d like to talk to the owners of the properties. And what about contractors? The house Bea Faraday was killed in had been sitting on the market for a while, right? We need to find the owner and/or contractor who worked on the house…and remember, someone was already squatting there, or so it seemed.”
“Now that’s a good point,” DeMarco said.
Kate knew it was a good point, and was honestly a little disappointed that DeMarco had not been able to come up with it on her own. She sorted through the files, looking for the detail sheets on each of the houses. The contractor names weren’t on them, but the phone number and business locations of the builders were. She wasn’t too familiar with construction practices, but knew that the builder and the contractor weren’t always one and the same.
She called the number listed on the sheet for the first house, but it went straight to voice mail. She left a message and promptly called the number on the second sheet—the detail listing for the property on Hammermill Street. This time, the call was answered after two rings by a bubbly-sounding woman.
“Thanks for calling First Choice Construction. How can I help you?”
“I’m looking for the name and number of the contractor for the property at 157 Hammermill Street,” Kate said. “And I need the information urgently, please.”
“Can I ask what this is in regards to?” the woman asked. Her tone indicated that she was well aware that the house in question might be of particular interest to people with morbid senses of humor or those wanting to play pranks.
“My name is Kate Wise, and I’m an FBI agent.”
She went on to give her badge number and the name of her direct supervisor. That seemed to do it. She had the name and number of the contractor—who also happened to be the house’s owner—right away. While she was on a roll, she figured she may as well try pushing a bit farther.
“I was wondering…could you perhaps get me the information for another property? Even if it’s not one you built. Do you have some kind of a system for that sort of thing?”
“No, we don’t. But it just so happens that the name I just gave you—Donald Dewalt—owns several properties and plots of land that other contractors and construction companies have worked on. It’s a long shot, but if you give me the address, I can check to see if it’s on his list of properties.”
“That would be great,” Kate said. “Thank you.”
She was placed on hold as Sheriff Armstrong poked her head into the office. “I just spoke with Greg’s mom. I told her that if she can’t keep him at home, he’ll have to spend some time in a holding cell the next time he gets into trouble.”
Kate had many thoughts on that, namely that the local PD was being too flexible with the Greg Seamster situation, but she said nothing. Even if she had felt the need to speak it out loud, she would not have had the chance. The woman on the other end picked the line back up and seemed quite proud that she had news to deliver.
“Turns out Mr. Dewalt does own that property,” she said. “Looks like it’s about ten years old and was recently put on the market.”
“Yes, that’s correct. How many of these properties does Mr. Dewalt own?”
“Well, there are about twenty houses here in Estes, but he owns quite a few rentals out on the lake.”
“You’ve already given me his number,” Kate said. “Would you happen to know if he’s around anywhere?”
“That I couldn’t tell you. But he’s always been something of a homebody.”
“Do you have a home address?”
“Sure, one second.”
As she was placed on hold again, Kate peered over at Armstrong. “You know of a guy named Donald Dewalt?”
“Oh yeah. Big landowner over on the lake. I think he owns upwards of twenty-five percent of the rental properties and runs some of them through a no-name little rental agency. But lately, he’s been phasing that out and doing the whole Airbnb thing…making a fortune from what I understand.”
“But he’s not into construction?”
“No, not that I know of.”
Kate considered this for a moment. There was certainly nothing wrong with someone buying up land in an area where the land could then be sold at a profit, improving them and then making bank. But when that ventured into common real estate and two of the properties he owned or contracted on were the recent murder sites, things certainly got much more interesting.
The woman at First Choice Construction came back on the line and gave her the home address for Donald Dewalt. She seemed a bit nervous about giving the information out and ended the call rather quickly.
“So,” Kate said, stepping away from the map on the table and plugging the address into her phone. “Looks like we’re going to be paying Dewalt a visit. Sheriff Armstrong, do you know anything about him? Is he going to be helpful or a hindrance?”
“Based on what I’ve heard, you may have to show great restraint to not knock his teeth down his throat.”
Kate and DeMarco glanced to one another, sharing a smirk. “Well,” DeMarco said, “it’s a damned shame neither of us is particularly good with restraint.”
CHAPTER NINE
Donald Dewalt lived nearly half an hour outside of Estes. As Kate drove toward the address, she noticed that the route she was taking wound away from the lake at an almost harsh angle. The farther away from the lake they got, the better the houses looked. They passed high-end subdivisions and two golf communities until they reached the even smaller town of Pebble Row.
As far as Kate was concerned, the town was nearly as pretentious as its name. It was small for the sake of being small, populated with homes that overlooked enormous backyards. None were decorated to look beachy, as that sort of style would likely somehow lessen the appeal of the expensive homes. No, these homes were far too good for that staged beach look. If Kate had to venture a guess, she’d place each home in Pebble Row a little north of the million-dollar mark.
It was slightly after five in the afternoon by the time Kate pulled the car into Dewalt’s driveway. The home had a long, paved driveway that led to a three-car garage. The door to one of the sections was opened, revealing an expensive speedboat. There was no porch but a gorgeous strip of landscaping running along the front of the house, complete with odd
-looking Japanese trees and color-coordinated flowers.
Kate almost felt like some ruthless vagabond as she rang the doorbell. She rolled her eyes at the church-like bell chime that sounded inside. She was sure a house like this had a great security system and felt certain that there was a screen or app or something that allowed those inside to see who was ringing.
It took about twenty seconds before anyone made it to the door. It was answered by a teenage girl, barely even looking at them as she answered. Her head was craned down toward the phone she held in her hand. She looked to be fifteen or sixteen and quite pretty, though it was clear that she was wearing a ton of makeup. Her generous cleavage was on display, hugged tight by a black tank top.
“Yeah?” she asked, her eyes darting between the two women standing in front of her and whatever was currently on the screen of her phone.
“We’re looking for Donald Dewalt,” Kate said.
The girl briefly looked up at them again and nodded. “That’s my dad,” she said, as if it pained her to admit it. “Hold on a second.”
Without waiting for another word, the girl shut the door in their faces.
“Cute kid,” DeMarco said.
They waited on the doorstep, Kate hoping the father was a bit more hospitable than the daughter. When the door was opened again about two minutes later, the man standing in front of them didn’t give her much room to hope, though. He was dressed like he had just come off of the golf course. He looked to be in his late fifties. He was ruggedly handsome, his hair having gone a salt-and-pepper shade. The expression on his face when he saw two women at his door was a smug one. It made Kate think he likely got whatever he wanted when it came to women and he was not seeing them as much of a hindrance…other than that they had interrupted his afternoon.
“Who are you?” the man—presumably Donald Dewalt—asked.
Kate was more than happy to show her badge and ID to the glaring man. “We’re Agents Wise and DeMarco with the FBI. We’d like to ask you some questions about a few certain properties you own.”
