Thanksgiving in Paradise

by Kathi Daley

  “You asked about the chess set that used to be in the basement. We never did look for it last night. We can look now if you want.”

  I shook my head as I poured a second cup of coffee. “I’d like to find the chess set, but it can wait. We talked about the idea that Lloyd might have been the target of the bombing last night, but we got sidetracked talking about a random act of violence. While possible, I really don’t think a random act of violence is what is going on.”

  “I agree. We did let ourselves get sidetracked. I spoke to Jeff, and he said that while he didn’t know why the emergency meeting had been called, based on what was said after he arrived, he had the impression that Lloyd was the one to call it. If you add to that the fact that Lloyd was the council member sitting closest to the bomb and that he is undeniably the most controversial councilman, I think taking a closer look at his business dealings might be a good idea.”

  “Why would Lloyd call a meeting and then blow himself up?”

  “I’m not saying that is what happened, but the more I think about things, if there was a single member of the council who angered someone enough to blow up an entire building, it would be Lloyd. If it turns out his business dealings were not the cause, so much the better, but we really have nothing at this point and looking into his current projects seems like as good a place as any to start.”

  “Okay, so what do you want to do?”

  “Let’s see if we can get into his house and his office and take a look around. It would make sense that someone would have confiscated his computer by now, but if not, we’ll take that as well. I’m sure his phone was on him and is most likely in a million pieces by this point. I can pull his phone records to see who he spoke to on the day of the blast.”

  “Should we call Roy?”

  Kyle nodded. “I’ll call him to let him know what we are doing. If he has a concern about our plan, he can let us know.”

  “Okay. I’m going to run upstairs and jump in the shower. Maybe we can grab something to eat while we’re out.” I turned and headed toward the stairway. I paused and turned back. “I wonder what happened to Lloyd’s car. I wonder what happened to everyone’s car.”

  “Mine was in my driveway when we arrived home from the hospital. I guess someone, maybe Roy, might have had it towed over.”

  “So maybe the other cars in the lot were towed to the homes of their owners as well. We’ll look for Lloyd’s when we check out his house. I’m not sure that locating the vehicles which had been parked in the lot is even important, but maybe one of the vehicles can provide a clue.”

  Kyle was on the phone with Roy when I arrived back downstairs. The men seemed to be discussing permits of some sort, so I headed into the other room to check in with Ashley and Gracie. I knew they’d been terrified when they’d learned about the explosion and the fact that Kyle and I had both been taken to the hospital. I could understand their fear. Our mother had been taken to a hospital four and a half years ago and never came back. When I’d learned that I’d been assigned as their guardian, I was even more terrified than they were, but somehow we’d gotten through the crisis and become a family.

  “Hey, Gracie, I’m just checking in. How is everything?”

  “Everything is good. Cuervo and Snowball got into a fight, but Papa broke it up. He said that Cuervo is missing you. I’m missing you too. When will you be home?”

  “In a day or two.” Cuervo was my angsty orange tabby who most definitely was not a fan of change. “Is Snowball okay?”

  “She’s fine. Papa is going to have Cuervo sleep with him and Rosalie since you and Echo are both gone.”

  “That sounds like a good idea. Cuervo hates to sleep alone, especially when it is cold.”

  “You got a package today.”

  “A package?” Suddenly, all I could think about was another bomb. “What sort of package?”

  “I don’t know. A man brought it to the house.”

  “Does Papa know about the package?”

  “No, he is over at the stables with Rosalie checking on the new baby colts. The man who brought the package just left it on the porch, but it’s snowing, so I brought it in.”

  “Is Grandpa there?” I could feel the panic begin to build. Since we lived at a resort, we had a lot of deliveries, so normally receiving a package was a yawn-worthy event, but with everything that had happened this week, I didn’t want to take any chances.

  “Grandpa is in the den. He is watching a movie.”

  “Can you put him on the phone, please?”

  “Okay. Hang on.”

  I listened as Gracie ran down the stairs and across the living room floor. In my mind, I couldn’t help but imagine the innocent looking package blowing up. I held my breath as I waited and listened for the sound of a loud bang. Less than a minute after Gracie went to find him, Grandpa came on the line. I explained about the package and suggested that he might want to check it. I told him to be careful, and he said he would. He continued to talk to me as he headed toward the entry where Gracie had left the box sitting on the table.

  “I see it. Hang on while I get my knife to cut the tape.”

  “Be careful,” I said again. “It’s probably just something I ordered and forgot about but given what’s happened…”

  “I know. Hang on.”

  “It’s a box full of cash,” he said a few seconds later.

  “Cash? How much cash?”

  “I’m not sure. If you want to hang on, I can count it, but it looks like at least several thousand dollars.”

  “Is there a note?”

  Grandpa took a moment before he answered. I supposed he was looking through the box. “No. Nothing is in the box other than the cash.”

  “Okay, I’m going to have Roy come by and pick it up. I don’t know what is going on, but having someone send a box of cash to me is definitely suspicious. Given everything else that is going on, Roy will want to look for prints and other physical evidence. Given the timing, the cash is very likely to be related to the destruction of the town hall in some way.”

  “Related how?”

  “I have no idea, but it isn’t every day that one receives a box of cash. I think that until this bombing case is wrapped up, we should tell both Ashley and Gracie not to accept the delivery of any packages, or to bring any packages left on the porch inside unless they check with an adult first.”

  “Yeah, that’s probably a good idea. I’ll put the box up until Roy gets here. How’s Kyle doing today?”

  “He seems to be hanging in there. I can tell his ribs hurt, but he never complains. He’s talking to Roy right now, and then we are going to head over and check out Lloyd’s place.”

  “Do you have new evidence to suggest that he was the target?”

  “No. But Jeff told Kyle that he was pretty sure it was Lloyd who’d called the meeting, he was the closest to the blast, and he was the most controversial council member. If there is a scandal to uncover, chances are that it will link back to him.”

  After I hung up with Grandpa, I went in search of Kyle, who was just hanging up with Roy. I stopped him and asked him to let me speak to Roy. After I told Roy about the cash, he agreed to head to the resort and pick up it up. Five minutes after he hung up with me, he called me back to let me know that a box had been delivered to Jeff in his hospital room, which had also contained a lot of cash.

  “What on earth is going on?” I asked Kyle, as he grabbed a few tools he thought he might need to break into Lloyd’s place.

  “I don’t know, but I don’t like it. I wonder if anyone else received cash.”

  “Roy didn’t mention anyone else, but I suppose that others could have boxes waiting for them that they haven’t discovered yet. The fact that both Jeff and I received the cash makes me feel like the deliveries are linked to the explosion. Of course, if that were true, then you and Bookman wo
uld receive packages as well. I know you haven’t, but I wonder if he has.”

  “Call Helen and ask her.”

  I called Helen while Kyle drove us to Lloyd’s. She confirmed that they hadn’t received any packages, but said that she’d keep an eye out. Talk about a crazy twist to this crazy story. When we arrived at Lloyd’s place, I couldn’t help but gasp. His residence was really more of an estate, and what an estate it was. Lloyd had been a developer in the area for a lot of years, and during his career, he’d managed to rake in a lot of money. The three-story home he’d built on the eastern shore of Paradise Lake had been featured in both Architectural Digest and Lakefront Living. Kyle and I didn’t have a key or an alarm code, which would have allowed us to access the home, but the estate was pretty isolated, so surprisingly, Kyle, who’d never been in favor of breaking and entering during past investigations, suggested we take a chance and break in. I kept an eye on the front drive while Kyle found the power source to the house and disabled it, thereby disabling the security system. He then jimmied the lock on the garage door. Once inside, Kyle was able to verify that the generator was not tied into the security system, so he used tools we found in Lloyd’s well-stocked tool room to break into the house through the back door.

  “Wow, this place is gorgeous,” I said, as I walked through the house to the back where a wall of windows looked out over the lake. The house was situated on the property to provide a view of either the mountains or the water from pretty much every window.

  “Lloyd was very creative with the design, and while in any other circumstance I might take my time and look around, today I just want to find his office and get out of here. Let’s split up.” Kyle suggested. “You look on this floor, and I’ll head upstairs. If you find what we are looking for, give a holler, and I’ll do the same.”

  The bottom floor of the home was laid out for entertaining. The entry opened into a great room that, based its size, would have held a hundred guests. The huge gourmet kitchen was separated from the great room by a long counter lined with barstools, and beyond the kitchen was a game room with a pool table and video games. Lloyd was single. As far as I knew, he’d never married nor had children. I had to wonder why he’d wanted such a huge home. I knew there were at least five bedrooms and eight baths, so maybe he used his residence to entertain clients.

  “The office is up here,” Kyle called down from upstairs after he’d been searching for a few minutes.

  I abandoned my tour and headed toward the staircase. The office, like every other room in the home, was huge. It not only featured a floor to ceiling fireplace, but two of the walls were lined with floor to ceiling bookshelves.

  Kyle headed directly to Lloyd’s desk. He’d brought an empty box with him, so rather than looking at every item on the desk and in the drawers, he simply began filling up the box. Once the desk had been emptied, he turned to the file cabinets, but they were locked. Kyle tried the keys on a keyring he had found, but none of them unlocked the cabinets.

  “We’ll start with this,” Kyle said, scooping up a stack of files from a tall table behind the desk. “Do you see his laptop?”

  “No, but to be honest, I would have thought he’d have a desktop computer in his home office.”

  “We’ll probably find his desktop in his office in town. He may have had his laptop with him. Let’s start with what we’ve found. If we feel like we have cause, we can come back and break into the file cabinets.”

  “Are we going to break into his office in town?”

  Kyle held up the keyring he’d been using to attempt to open the file cabinets. “I’m hoping one of these opens the office, and we won’t have to break in.”

  “It is probably alarmed.”

  “Maybe, but we may find a way around that. If not, we’ll come up with plan B.”

  We tried to get into the office, but the keys we had didn’t work and, unlike the estate, it was located in a public place with a lot of auto and pedestrian traffic. We couldn’t cut the power as we had at Lloyd’s home, so we took the items we’d recovered from this home office, and headed back to Kyle’s house. Kyle called Roy, and he confirmed that Lloyd’s car had been towed to the impound lot. He didn’t know if the crime scene unit had gone through it yet, but said that he would find out and then he’d get back to us. While Kyle had been on the line with Roy, he’d asked if law enforcement personnel had searched Lloyd’s office. Roy answered that Kate had been gathering information relating to each of the victims while he had been working with the crime scene unit in an attempt to nail down the specifics of the blast. She hadn’t come into work yet that day, but when she did, he’d ask her for an update.

  Chapter 5

  “So did we find a smoking gun?” I asked after Kyle had taken everything from the box and laid it out on the long dining table.

  “I’m not sure if I found a smoking gun, but I may have found something,” Kyle said. “According to a notepad Lloyd had left on his desk, it looks like he had a meeting with James Kingston on Tuesday afternoon.” Kyle paused and then continued. “I guess it makes sense that Kingston might have reached out to Lloyd. As a developer, Lloyd has tended to support investors in the area. He is usually pro anything that is real estate related. Maybe James met with Lloyd to try to come up with a strategy to suppress the movement to ban the vacation rentals.”

  “So does that make James even more of a suspect than he already was?”

  Kyle tilted his head slightly. “Not really. Chances are that Lloyd sided with James regarding the ban on vacation rentals, so James would have no motivation to kill him. I guess I’ll just pass this information on to Roy. If he feels it warrants further investigation, he can talk to James.”

  “Makes sense. Anything else?”

  Kyle looked at his computer. “I pulled up Lloyd’s phone records. He received a series of calls from a burner phone in the three-day period leading up to the bombing. The first call from this particular number showed up on Sunday. There were five other calls from the same number on Sunday, seven on Monday, and four on Tuesday. The last call Lloyd received from this number came in just an hour before we received the text that an emergency meeting had been called.”

  I leaned forward and rested my arms on the table in front of me. “That seems like it might be a promising lead. Has the number shown up before?”

  Kyle shook his head. “I went back into Lloyd’s cell records for three months, and the first time the number showed up was Sunday. Given the fact that I traced the number back to a burner phone, I’m not sure that is going to help us, but I’m going to do some poking around and see if I can find any additional information relating to the calls. If the calls originated from a consistent location, like a home or office, I might be able to figure out where they were made.”

  “At this point, it really does look like Lloyd and/or James might have been involved in whatever occurred, although it seems as if there are a lot of holes in every theory we have come up with.”

  “I have to agree with that. Lloyd did die as a result of the blast. If he was involved in any way, then it seems obvious that something went very wrong. By the way,” Kyle added. “Roy picked up the money that was sent to the resort. The amount of cash inside was exactly six thousand dollars. Does that amount mean anything to you?”

  I shook my head. “No. Not off hand. Did Jeff get the same amount?”

  “Jeff received fourteen thousand, seven hundred dollars.”

  “That seems oddly specific.”

  “Jeff said that his healthcare insurance deductible is fourteen thousand dollars and that he has a separate deductible for prescriptions, which he thinks might come out to around seven hundred dollars.”

  My eyes grew wide. “My out-of-pocket deductible is six thousand dollars. I haven’t even stopped to think about the fact that my time in the hospital was going to cost me some of my hard-earned savings. I’m pretty sure I h
aven’t received a bill yet.”

  “Jeff hasn’t either. He doesn’t know who the cash was from, but he was thrilled to have his deductible covered.”

  “Okay, so someone has decided to pay our deductibles. Do you think it is the bomber?”

  Kyle frowned. “It seems unlikely, but I suppose it is possible, especially if the bomb was not meant to harm innocent bystanders. I suppose the cash could have been sent by a Good Samaritan.”

  “It seems as if a Good Samaritan would simply make a donation on our behalf directly to the hospital.”

  “That is probably true.”

  “So did anyone other than Jeff and I receive cash?”

  Kyle shook his head. “Not as of this point. Roy and I discussed it and decided that whoever sent the cash sent it based on need. Hank, Bookman, and I have a lot of money. Paying our hospital bill won’t cause hardship for any of us. You and Jeff, on the other hand, don’t currently enjoy the same level of financial comfort.”

  I supposed that made sense. The fact that someone sent me the cash I would need to cover the hospital bill I hadn’t even stopped to worry about was nice, but not knowing who sent it was a little creepy.

  “Okay, say this theory is true. How did the person who sent the cash know how much our hospital bills were going to be? As I’ve already said, I haven’t received a statement from the hospital yet. I doubt I will receive one until the end of the month.”

  “I’m not sure how the person who sent the cash got this information. Roy wasn’t certain either. It appears as if someone might have hacked into the hospital’s financial records and looked up your deductible.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. “Did Roy say anything else?”

  “He has Lloyd’s laptop. I guess the guys at the impound lot found it in the trunk of his car. The laptop is password protected, so Roy is going to drop it by my place this evening after he gets off. He figures that while the county’s tech guys will eventually get in, I’ll get in quicker.”