However Many More

by Bo Thunboe

  All they needed to do was find the silver. April didn’t know where it was, but Lynn was certain she would figure it out. No one knew Henry better than April did.

  She got out of bed and made a pot of coffee and some buttered toast. But she lost interest after the second bite.

  “Mom?”

  April’s voice came through the wall from her bedroom, and the sound of her fatherless daughter’s voice broke another sob loose from deep inside Lynn. Her baby was going to miss her dad. They’d always been so close, even when April entered her teens and things had gotten pretty ugly here.

  “Mom? Come here! You gotta read these texts from Conner.”

  Lynn rose and walked to her daughter’s bedroom. But as she reached for the knob, the door popped open so fast the air swept Lynn’s hair into her face. April grabbed her arm and pulled her inside, then held out her phone.

  “Start here.”

  Lynn took the phone, warm from April’s hands. It was the first time she’d been allowed to touch it since she’d given it to April the previous Christmas. The thought her daughter trusted her enough to read a text from her boyfriend brought a small smile to her face.

  By the time she’d finished reading Conner’s string of texts her smile had faded.

  That detective is here. Houser. Talking to my dad in his office.

  Dads blabbing about his writing crap.

  Cop led him into a trap about buying the storage junk.

  Now the cop brought up the little bars and my dad lost it. Mom saved his ass as usual. Kicked Houser out of the house!!!

  “Jake knows about the little bars,” Lynn said, her stomach twisting. “He’ll find out your dad gave me some of that money. He’ll be mad I didn’t tell him when he asked if I knew about anything new in your dad’s life.”

  “Just say that it wasn’t new—it was over the summer.”

  Lynn nodded, but she’d rather lie. She didn’t want to get into anything about the silver. “Maybe he won’t ask me. Maybe he won’t ever figure out I know about the silver. Right?”

  April took her phone back. “He’s pretty smart, Mom.”

  “Maybe he won’t talk to me again.” Lynn sure as hell hoped not. “When he was here yesterday he said he wanted to talk to you next.”

  “I’ll call him. Maybe I can figure out what he’s thinking.”

  “Good idea.” April was a lot better under pressure.

  “But I think you’re going to be okay, Mom. It sounds like Mr. Houser thinks it was Conner’s dad. And it could have been. His mom was on a work trip that night, so Mr. Bowen was home alone. And he knew about the big bars.”

  “Jesus,” Lynn said. Conner’s dad. The idea that she might know Henry’s killer sent a flutter through her stomach. “I’m sorry, April.”

  “Don’t be sorry. I’d rather have Mr. Houser chasing after Mr. Bowen than chasing after you.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Jake started the car and ran the heater. What had Bowen wanted to keep from his wife? She’d known about both the storage unit business and the silver, so Bowen had been worried about something else.

  Jake took a minute to write down Bowen’s exact words while they were fresh in his mind. When Jake brought up the silver, Bowen immediately denied doing anything wrong and said “Henry’s the one who—” Then the wife barged in and saved him.

  What had Henry done?

  Something with the silver, clearly. When Jake raised the possibility of a dispute about it being a motive for the husband to kill Henry, neither Bowen denied it. And why the odd tension between them when he asked for an alibi?

  Jake would come back at Bowen when he knew more. He would shake the truth out of the man.

  He dropped the car in gear and headed back toward Redhawk Court. As he turned the corner he spotted a white crew cab pickup parked at the curb up the block. Fog covered its windshield except for a circular patch on the driver’s side where it had been wiped away. Someone was sitting in the truck. Jake kept it in the corner of his eye as he finished the turn, and he caught the silhouette of a large man sitting inside, wearing a baseball hat.

  Cowboy. And he’d been watching Bowen.

  Jake slowed, checked his side mirror, and saw the truck cross the intersection behind him, a cloud of diesel exhaust swirling in its wake. Jake swerved into a driveway to turn around and follow, but got stuck there while a short bus passed.

  “Come on!” He banged the wheel until the bus cleared his bumper, then backed out with a squelch of rubber, shot back the way he’d come, and turned up Bowen’s street.

  The truck was gone.

  He sped down the block, stopped in the next intersection, and looked down each street. Nothing. He spent a few minutes cutting back and forth across the neighborhood, but there was no sign of the truck.

  He pulled to the curb, called Erin, and asked her to put out a citywide BOLO on the truck. It was a big vehicle, and he had no doubt a patrol officer would spot it. Cowboy would be stopped and identified and questioned about what he was doing and where he was staying. Then Jake could have a nice chat with him.

  “And I need you to dig up whatever you can on James Bowen and his wife, Susan.” Jake explained who they were and their odd reactions to his questions.

  “I’ll get right on both,” she said. “One other thing. About the dinner we had scheduled for tonight.”

  “What din—” But then he remembered. Erin had been pushing him to “get back out there” ever since he’d moved home to Weston. Once or twice a year he agreed to meet one of her friends over dinner. He always insisted Erin and her husband come along to keep it casual. Jake had no interest in a relationship and zero interest in “hooking up” with one of Erin’s friends. “Oh–yeah. Can we cancel it?”

  “Don’t worry. I already rescheduled it. You have two weeks to come up with a new excuse.”

  “Thank you,” Jake said. “I don’t think either of us would be good company right now.”

  “No, we wouldn’t.”

  They sat silently with the line open between them, Jake drawing comfort from the connection. But he had work to do. “I have to go.”

  He ended the call, but the phone vibrated before he could get it back in his pocket. He answered it.

  “Hi, Mr. Houser.”

  It was April, her voice low and soft like he remembered it when he used to take her to church. They would always go out for a treat afterward, and she would ask for extra marshmallows in her hot chocolate.

  “How are you, April? I’m so sorry about your dad.”

  “Thanks. Mom said you wanted to talk to me about Dad? Can we just do it by phone?”

  “I… okay. I assume your mom told you your dad was… killed?”

  “Yes.” A sob burst from her. “She told me.”

  A phone call wasn’t going to cut it. She needed him to be there. As her dad’s friend and as her godfather. “You know what? I’m coming over right now.”

  He hung up and was dropping the car into gear when his phone buzzed with a text from Beck: Call me.

  He hesitated, thinking about April, but then made the call. Beck might have found something to unlock this thing.

  Beck answered with a sleepy “hello” that ended in a stretched-out yawn.

  “What do you have for me?”

  “You know the printout you gave me from the coin shop? The guy told you it was for a hundred-ounce silver bar, right?” Beck’s voice gained energy as he talked. “I checked, and the spot buy price for silver that day was $23.12 an ounce. That’s what he paid Mr. Fox for it. By check, made out to Mr. Fox, not to the LLC, by the way. Even though Mr. Fox deposited cash into his business account. But according to the paperwork he gave you, the coin shop guy sold the bar for $3,312, which was ten dollars an ounce higher than its value. An even thousand dollars over what he paid for it. And on
his printout the sale amount was underlined, which probably means it’s clickable on his system to information about his sale of the bar. He didn’t give you any information on that sale.”

  “Did the spot price go up before he sold it?”

  “Nope. It was flat.”

  Jake mulled that for a minute. “He said the bar was a commodity worth only what it weighed in silver, not like a coin, which is a collectable and sells at a premium.”

  “Maybe there was something special about this bar that made it collectible.”

  “What could make a silver bar collectible?” Jake wondered. “They’re all the same.”

  “Provenance, maybe. Those picker guys on TV are always willing to pay up for stuff if there’s proof it once belonged to someone famous. Cars. Clothes. Sunglasses, even.”

  Jake thanked Beck for the update, then headed for April’s house. But his mind was once again on silver. Why had someone paid Griffin a thousand-dollar premium for the bar? And why did Griffin make his check for the silver bar payable to Henry rather than to the business, like he did for everything else he bought from Henry?

  The answer to that second question seemed obvious: Henry had decided to keep the money for the silver separate from the business, so he could keep it all to himself. But then something must have changed his mind, because he deposited the cash into his business account and split it with Bowen.

  What changed his mind? Bowen must have discovered Henry’s deception and forced the split.

  Henry’s attempt to cheat Bowen out of his half of the proceeds was the thing Henry had done wrong that Bowen had started to explain before his wife burst into the room and shut him up. Or maybe… maybe she had shut him up to keep him from talking about what happened next. When Bowen found out there had been more than that one bar, killed Henry, and took them.

  Plausible.

  Bowen was quick to anger and didn’t have an alibi.

  And the silver was a great motive, especially if there were a lot more bars.

  None of this put Henry in a great light. Cheating a business partner—or trying to, anyway? It didn’t seem like the Henry Jake knew.

  But everyone had secrets.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Jake parked the car short of the leaf pile the Fox women had built at the curb. He sat for a minute, trying to focus on what April needed from him—as her dad’s friend and her godfather—instead of what he needed from her. When she was growing up there’d been a lot to his role as her godfather—religion classes, first communion, confirmation—but nothing since then. Yet now…

  If she wanted to talk about God and death and the hereafter, he owed her his best effort.

  As he walked up the driveway, the cold wind whipped through his pant legs. More leaves had fallen and a wind-blown berm blocked the front door, so he headed around back. The twang of an old Garth Brooks song came from the house and faded as he rounded the back corner.

  He gave the door a hard rap to pierce through the country music. A half minute later the door swung inward—Lynn, wearing baggy gray sweatpants and a Redhawks hoodie, her hair flat on one side, a pillow crease on her cheek, her eyes red.

  She was grieving; that was clear. Jake could only imagine how much worse April would be taking Henry’s death. She still loved her dad and had spent as much time with him as any teenage girl Jake knew. Lynn, on the other hand, had divorced Henry because she thought he was a failure.

  This was not going to be easy.

  * * *

  Lynn wished Jake had just talked to April on the phone. But April thought this visit gave them a good chance to point him at Bowen. Lynn just hoped she could pull it off without spilling about the big bars.

  She pointed Jake to a chair, then went to the counter and poured him a cup of coffee. Her hand shook, and she grabbed the cup with both hands to steady it. She took a breath, pulled her shoulders back, and turned back around to give him the coffee, only to find him still standing in the doorway, looking at her with flat pity in his eyes. She knew she looked like hell.

  “Sit,” she said, her voice louder than she intended.

  Jake sat and took the cup from her. “How are you doing, Lynn?”

  “Fine.” Lynn sat down across the corner of the table from him. April had told her to hide her lies behind as many truths as she could—especially truths that looked bad. “No, not fine. I can’t decide what to do.” Truth. She laughed softly. “Shower? Get dressed? Cry some more?” She shook her head, then tried to smile. “How are you doing?”

  “Well, I’m…” Jake stopped. “I’m more concerned with you, and with April. She called me to talk. That’s why I’m here. How is she?”

  Lynn pulled her mug to her chest. “She’s strong. Stronger than me. She’s going with me to Everson’s this afternoon.”

  “They’ll take good care of you.”

  “You know… I…” Lynn shook her head. “April said I came off kind of desperate yesterday.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Let me get this out.” Tears welled and spilled onto her cheeks. She hadn’t planned that, but it would help sell what she had to say. Honest emotion. “I’d been living on those child support payments, and I wasn’t ready when they stopped.” She wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “But I get nothing from his death.” Truth.

  “What can you tell me about the silver Henry found?”

  Lynn looked down at her cup and took a long breath. “He gave me half of his share. That money kept me out of bankruptcy.”

  “Half of how many?”

  “Ten bars. He gave me half of what he got for them. A little over ten thousand dollars.”

  Jake nodded like he was adding the information to a list. “Why did Henry give you half? His child support obligation had ended, right?”

  “You know why.” Her tears started up again. “Because he’s so damn good.” She sniffled and grabbed a tissue from a box on the table and dabbed at her eyes. “Was so good.”

  “You’d filed another child support petition that claimed he lied about his income and asked for tuition to Northwestern?”

  “Henry basically told April he’d pay for her to go to Northwestern. Why would he do that to her? Pure nonsense. So I threw it back in his face. I dropped it when he shared the silver money with me.” More truth. “Do you think he was killed because of those bars? That was months ago, and he sold them all to that coin dealer on fifty-nine. The leprechaun guy with the TV commercials.”

  “Not all.”

  Shit. Did he know about the big bars? Lynn took a long breath to calm herself. “What do you mean?”

  “He had a partner. A guy named Jim Bowen.”

  Perfect. “Bowen got half because he was Henry’s partner in the storage unit business. When Henry started that up I thought, ‘Here we go! Another Fox classic!’ But then he made money on it.” Everything Henry touched since their divorce had turned to gold.

  “Fox classic?”

  “Like the shit-shoveling thing he did. That book was my idea, you know. I told him if he was such an expert he should write a book about it. God, that book was embarrassing. Everyone knowing he liked to dig through other people’s shit. Like it was okay because the shit was old. It was still shit.”

  “The book turned out pretty well.”

  She shook her head. “I deserved a piece—”

  “Mom?”

  April stood in the doorway leading into the hall. Lynn set down her coffee mug, sprang up, and held her daughter tight. “Good timing,” she whispered.

  “Good morning, April.”

  “Thanks for coming over, Mr. Houser.”

  “I’m glad you feel up to talking to me.”

  “I hope I can help.”

  “I’ll be in the living room,” Lynn said. She pushed through the door into the hall, but stayed there after it swung
shut. She needed to hear this.

  * * *

  Jake’s mind thrummed with Lynn’s disclosure that there’d been twenty bars and Henry had given half to Bowen. If that was true—and he no reason to doubt it—Bowen had no motive to kill Henry and was an unlikely suspect, despite his bizarre behavior.

  “Mr. Houser?”

  Jake yanked his attention away from Bowen to April. “Yes?”

  “Can I ask you a question?” April slid into the chair her mom had used. She looked tired, her cheeks pale, her eyes dull and sunken.

  “Of course.”

  “I’ve been trying to, you know, pray. For my dad? And I don’t remember—not exactly, anyway—how to do it.”

  Jake smiled; he could handle that question. “Do you remember the prayer we did in church? All together holding hands?”

  “Our Father who art in heaven? That one?”

  “Exactly. All you have to do is recite that prayer, and God will look into your heart and know what you’re asking of Him.”

  “He looks inside me and knows?” She licked her lips and her shoulders curled forward.

  “That does sound too simple, doesn’t it?” Jake said. “If you want to, you can talk to Him like He’s a friend.”

  She sat up straighter. A small smile. “I’ll try it.”

  “Good.”

  “I overheard you talking to Mom about Mr. Bowen.”

  “His name came up. He was a business partner of your dad’s.”

  She nodded. “For a while. Then they quit it.”

  Jake kept his expression neutral. “Do you know why?”

  “That silver you asked Mom about? My dad found twenty silver bars and didn’t share them with Mr. Bowen. Not at first.”

  “Do you know why that was?”

  “Dad said he found them in a pit, you know, an outhouse hole. But Mr. Bowen said Dad found them in a storage unit.” She shrugged.

  “And because they were partners, Mr. Bowen thought he was entitled to half.”