Dead Man's Game

by Paul Carr

  He went to the bedside table, pulled open drawers, and found only porn mags. Back in the hall, he noticed a door at the end. Inside he found shelves for linens, but no linens, just a lot of junk Wilbur had crammed inside. As with the bedroom closet, he checked around the floor and walls. There were no loose boards and no openings in the wall. Closing the door, he sighed and turned back toward the kitchen, wondering where Hess might hide something he didn’t want to be found. A cheap reproduction hung on the wall, and he checked behind it but found only a nail for hanging.

  There had to be some hiding place. Hess dealt in drugs, an illegal activity, and would have had secrets to be guarded. Back in the bedroom closet, he went over it again and still found nothing. Inside the linen closet, he splashed the light on the ceiling. Something appeared unusual about it, and he found a chair, dragged it close, and stood on it. Comparing it with the hall ceiling, it was a few inches lower. About two foot square, the piece of painted board rested on molding around its edges. It lifted easily, and he was able to push it up between the joists and out of the way. The original ceiling had been cut out and replaced with the removable one. Reaching up into the cavity on the far side, he felt a metal box. When he pulled it down and opened it, he found stacks of cash and a phone.

  Chapter 7

  After a late breakfast the next morning, Dalton drove to the office, pondering what he should do about the phone in Hess’s linen closet. He had turned it on and found it password protected. Something was on it that Hess didn’t want discovered or he wouldn’t have locked it and hidden it with his cash. Dalton gave up and put it back. Because of the way he’d found it, he wouldn’t be able to use sheriff’s resources to unlock it. If he got someone else to do it, he wouldn’t be able to use any evidence on it against a murder suspect, at least not in any legal proceedings.

  Since it was Saturday, the office was mostly vacant when Dalton arrived. Colin Casey was already there with Crook in an interrogation room. After thanking their guest for coming in, Dalton flipped on the recorder and cited the date and time and those present. “Okay, Mr. Casey, the reason we asked you here is to clear up a discrepancy. During our initial conversation with you I mentioned the life insurance proceeds from Riley Gunn’s policy. You said you didn’t need the money because you earned more than that on tour and even more on record sales. Since we spoke with you, we’ve learned that you are deep in debt and the band’s record sales are not so rosy. What do you have to say about that?”

  Casey’s nerves seemed on edge. His hands shook, eyes darted. Maybe just a bad hangover. “Well, uh, I really don’t remember saying anything about my financial situation.”

  “This is what I wrote down: ‘I make a lot more than a million dollars when we’re on tour. And my share of record sales are even more than that.’”

  “Huh. Well, I guess if you wrote it down….”

  The detectives stared and waited for him to say more. Finally, Casey said. “I guess I was exaggerating.” He tried for a smile that didn’t quite pan out. “And I didn’t want you to think I killed Riley for his insurance.”

  “Can I see your phone?”

  The guitarist hesitated before answering. “Uh, yeah, I guess so.” He pulled it from his pocket and handed it over. Dalton scanned the call history, looking for Hess’s number. It appeared a couple of times over the past week, incoming and outgoing, along with Riley Gunn’s. He expected to see Gunn’s number, since they were band members. He handed the phone to Crook.

  “Did you hear that Wilbur Hess was murdered?”

  “Yeah, I did. That’s too bad.” He didn’t appear upset about it at all.

  “We think whoever killed Gunn, killed Hess, too.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Riley called him several times during the party, and then again not long before he died. Also, the murders are similar. Same caliber weapon, both shot in the head within minutes of each other…and both done by a person about your height.”

  “Are you accusing me of murdering them?” Casey leaned back and crossed his arms.

  Ignoring the question, Dalton said, “How did you expect to pay for the house you just bought?”

  Casey shrugged. “I thought the band was on the upswing. We were working on songs, and Riley had the brothers come in from Canada to talk about an album.”

  “Okay, then, what do you know about Eon Harbor?”

  “You mean the hotel in Thailand?”

  “Yes. Do you remember what happened there with Riley?”

  “I just remember he wanted to leave in a hurry. He never said why. I was a little miffed, because we had to refund a lot of concert tickets.”

  Dalton checked his notes, and the dilemma of Hess’s phone came back to mind. He wondered what could be on it that might break the case.

  “You have anything else?” Crook asked.

  Shaking his head, Dalton said, “No, I think that covers it, for now.” They returned Casey’s phone and Crook took him to the front door. When he returned, Dalton said, “When we were at the Hess house, you mentioned something about a Key West PD flap over a deputy’s handling of evidence. Can you give me the details on that?”

  “I can tell you what I remember. Let’s go to my desk.” When they were seated, Crook said, “It was a convenience store robbery. The guy came in and demanded the cash in the register. He probably thought the place was empty, but a customer from the rear of the store saw what was happening. He tried to intervene and got shot. The robber got the money and left. The guy didn’t die, but they never identified the shooter. The store was located inside the Key West city limits, but the police department had too many cases going on and their CSIs were spread thin. The sheriff sent in our crew to help. One of the police CSI’s took a photo of a shell casing, but the casing went missing. Ringo stood by his people and accused our guys of losing it. He said they might’ve gotten a print from it. Nobody ever found the brass.”

  “What do you think happened to it?”

  Shrugging, Crook said, “All I know is our CSIs are pretty meticulous.”

  “Could the Key West guys have misplaced it?”

  “That’s my guess. The sheriff didn’t want to make waves, so she told us to stand down. Why are you asking about that?”

  “Ringo didn’t show me much in the way of evidence that they gathered. Maybe they gave it the broad brush, since Hess was a known dealer.”

  “Yeah, I can see them doing that.”

  “You have Ringo’s office number handy?” Dalton pulled out his phone.

  “Yeah, hold on. He might not be in today, since it’s Saturday.” Crook gave him a narrow-eyed glance before picking up a laminated sheet from the corner of his desk and reading off the number.

  Dalton punched it in. Ringo answered. “This is Dalton. We’re opening our own investigation of the Hess murder. This is a courtesy call to let you know we’ll be going into the crime scene in a couple of hours. Have someone bring the key so we won’t have to break open the door.”

  Ringo hesitated, then said, “I’m not approving that.”

  “That’s okay, we have the authority to investigate the murder. As a matter of fact, I’ll need a copy of everything in your murder file. Have it ready and I’ll stop by around five and get it.” Dalton hung up.

  Crook grinned. “Man, he’s gonna hate that.”

  “I’ll say.”

  Dalton called Tarver on his cell and told him what he needed. Tarver didn’t want to round up his crew on a Saturday, but he agreed and said the team would arrive by 1:00 p.m.

  After hanging up, he thought about something that had been nagging him. Crook had spoken with one band member that Dalton hadn’t seen yet. “You said Sheffield, the other band member, had a solid alibi, right?”

  “Yeah, pretty solid. He and his girlfriend were at his condo, and they backed up each other’s story about when they got home after the party. Both said they’d stayed there all night and they looked still in the bag.”

 
“We have a while before the CSI team shows up. Maybe we should go see Sheffield again.”

  Crook shrugged, as if he thought it might be a waste of time, but called and found the man at home. After a couple of minutes going back and forth with him, he hung up. “He said we’re spoiling his weekend, but he agreed for us to come over.”

  Fifteen minutes later they sat in the living room of Alan Sheffield’s condo. It overlooked the Gulf of Mexico. Sheffield, a tall man dressed in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, had tattoos up his arms and on his neck. He offered them a drink. Crook accepted a bottle of water. When Sheffield came back from the kitchen, he also brought a drink of his own. It looked like whiskey on the rocks. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said, gesturing with the glass. His words had a hint of a slur.

  “Sure, that’s fine,” Crook said.

  They sat on the sofa, and Sheffield said to Crook, “I thought we were done with this. We told you, Richelle and I were here together all night.”

  A few seconds later a woman came from the hallway wearing a see-through nightgown with very little underneath. “Somebody talking about me?” She had a drink in her hand and slurred her words.

  “Get some clothes on,” Sheffield snapped at her. “These are police detectives.”

  Her face twisted into a frown. “Well, I’m sorry I’m such an embarrassment.” Her tone sounded anything but sorry. She turned and staggered back the way she had come. Crook’s eyes followed her all the way.

  When she had gone, Sheffield said, “Sorry about that. I forgot to tell her you were coming by.”

  Richelle didn’t seem in any condition to alibi anybody at the present.

  “I have some other questions,” Dalton said.

  “Sure, shoot.” He swigged from his glass, drinking about half of it down.

  “Did you know about the insurance policy Riley Gunn took out for the band?”

  “Yeah, he told us all about it. I didn’t care about it myself. I figured if something happened to him we could still do okay as a band and I wouldn’t need that money.” His slur was more pronounced. He took another drink.

  Colin Casey had said Sheffield was always after Gunn about singing his own songs. “I heard you had an argument recently with Riley Gunn over a song you wanted to record.”

  “Yeah, I guess you could call it an argument. He told me no dice without hearing me out. I made a fuss, but cooled down a little later. Who told you that?”

  “It isn’t important. Maybe you cooled down, but didn’t forget it. Did you go back to his house after the party to settle the score?”

  “What?” His eyes widened. “I told you already, Richele and I came here and didn’t leave.” He took a big slug from his glass.

  Dalton stared for a couple of beats, then said, “Did she continue to drink after you two got here?”

  “No, she was fine. We went to bed and went to sleep.”

  After making some notes, Dalton said, “Okay, tell me about Eon Harbor.”

  Sheffield’s face twisted into a scowl, and he hesitated before saying, “Eon Harbor? What do you mean?”

  “What do you know about it?”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “You never heard of it? Do you remember what happened in Thailand?”

  The rocker took another drink. “Yeah, we came back early because Riley got sick.”

  “You remember where you stayed while you were there?”

  Sheffield paused, and then shrugged, maybe realizing he was about to be caught in a lie. “Yeah, it was a hotel, that’s all I remember.”

  Dalton nodded. “Okay, that’s all I have for now. You have any questions, Detective Crook?”

  Crook shook his head, and they got up and left.

  Back in the car Crook said, “You think he was telling the truth?”

  “No, he’s holding back on something. We need to get him and Richelle into the office when they’re sober and know they’re being recorded. We might find a crack in their story.”

  They headed on to Wilbur Hess’s house and pulled up to the curb. Tarver’s van waited in the driveway, and a police cruiser sat on the opposite side of the street. A policeman got out of the car and stepped over as Dalton and Crook got out.

  “Detective Ringo asked me to let you in the house.”

  “Good. I’ll need you to leave the key with me, or bring me a duplicate, in case we need to return later.”

  The cop gave him a questioning look. “I’ll have to ask Ringo about that.”

  “You do that. Please open the place up first.”

  The officer strode across the front yard, unlocked the door, and headed back to his car. Tarver and his crew went inside, followed by Dalton and Crook.

  “Okay,” Dalton said to the group, “the Key West PD has already scoured this place, but they didn’t find much. I want you to go about it as if they hadn’t been here. I want you to look for prints and any DNA, but we also need to search for places Hess might’ve hidden records or documents, anything that might tell us who he’s been dealing with. Look inside all the outlets and air vents, around all the baseboards and in the closets. Also check behind pictures on the wall.”

  Tarver gave him a condescending stare. “Anything else?”

  Dalton smiled. “No, that should do it.”

  An hour or so later one of the CSIs said, “I think I’ve got something.” Dalton, Crook, and Tarver stepped to the hallway where the investigator stood on a chair in the door of the linen closet. “This is a false ceiling, and it’s loose.”

  “See what’s behind it,” Tarver said.

  “Yeah, there’s something here, feels like a box.” He got down with the box in his hands, set it on the chair, and opened it. “I think we found his stash.” Pulling out stacks of cash and thumbing through the bills, he said, “Must be twenty or thirty thousand here. And there’s a phone.”

  Tarver picked up the phone and turned it on. When it booted up, he said, “It’s locked. We need a password to open it. Go back through the house and see if you find anything that looks like a password, but count the money first.”

  Crook watched as the CSI counted the cash, then recorded the amount on a piece of paper, signed it, and put it inside the box.

  They searched for another hour before giving up. As they packed up their equipment and headed out, Tarver said to Dalton, “We’ll get one of our techies to look at the phone.”

  When they exited the house, the policeman with the key got out of the car and met Dalton with a duplicate. He turned without saying anything and left.

  Dalton took Crook to his car and headed over to the KWPD. The desk sergeant called Ringo and he came out and took him back to his desk. “So, did you find anything?”

  “We got some prints and blood samples that’ll probably turn out to be the same ones your guys got. But we also found where Hess kept his cash and there was a phone. It was locked, and our techs are going to work on it. Might be nothing, but we’ll find out.”

  “Where’d you find the cash?”

  “In the attic space above the linen closet. Hess had fixed the ceiling so he could take it out and hide his stash up there.”

  Ringo sighed. “Huh, we missed that. I’ll be sure to tell the CSIs about it. They need to be more thorough. You going to share what you find on the phone?”

  “You bet, soon as we can get it open.”

  “Okay, I’ve got the copies ready for you.” He picked up a file folder and handed it over. “I hope you’ll do the same with what you find.”

  Dalton told him he would and headed out the door. At the office, he glanced over the file and spotted something he didn’t expect.

  Chapter 8

  One of the pages in the murder file Ringo had given Dalton was an arrest report dated ten days prior. Hess and Riley had fought outside Hess’s home around midnight and a neighbor called 911. When officers arrived, both men gave them lip and got arrested for disturbing the peace. The charges were dropped the next morning.

  A
bout a week later, both were dead.

  Dalton wondered why they were fighting and called Gunn’s attorney Hilda Wright. When she answered he asked if she knew about the altercation.

  “Yes, I heard.”

  “You know why they were fighting?”

  “No, Riley never said. Even if I knew, I couldn’t tell you. Client confidentiality.”

  “Your client is dead.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I can be sued by his family if I disclose something that brings them embarrassment.”

  He wondered if she really didn’t know, or was just stonewalling. “This could be important. You sure you don’t know what it was about?”

  “Sorry, I don’t.” She hung up.

  He did a computer search on Riley Gunn, wondering if the incident had made the news. Lots of links popped up, but he didn’t see anything pertaining to a fight. Many of the items referred to social media accounts. Dalton opened one of them and found it to be a page for the band. It provided some history, including when they had formed and their early works. Not much had been posted in the last year, and those prior were posts advertising albums and concerts. Some were videos. Since Dalton had never heard any of their music, he opened one from a concert in Germany several years before. Riley strutted across the stage as he belted out a rock song, his voice a mixture of gravel and blues, his long hair flipping with the beat. Dalton understood the source of his stardom: his presence had total command of the stage. The camera rarely panned to Casey, Earl, or Sheffield, even though the guitars and drums seemed as good as those in any top band. In the rare moment when the lens found them, each seemed to be in a world alone, maybe accustomed to living in the background. Watching the video gave him a heightened awareness for what would happen to the group without Riley: each of musicians might develop a niche elsewhere, but Redgunn was finished.

  Another link was Gunn’s personal page. It, too, had little activity in the past year. Some posts asked about his future concert plans. Others commented on one of his songs, how it touched them in various ways. He responded with a minimum of words when he responded at all. Going back a couple of years, Dalton spotted a post by a woman named Tara Sand. It read, I miss you. Gunn didn’t reply to that one.