by Jan Dunlap
“He likes you, Shana. He’s trying to help. I think,” I added.
“Not Stan,” she ground out. “Chuck. He’s the son-of-a-bitch. He was making payments to Ben behind Jack’s back. That’s why Stan was down here birding. He was supposed to meet Jack and me after dinner tonight to tell us what he’d found. Jack hired him to make a very discreet audit of OK Industries because Ben didn’t seem to be hurting financially the way we thought he would after Jack cut him off.”
She crumpled the note in her hand. “I asked Jack to bring Stan in. He’s an old friend, and I trust him. Jack didn’t want to think it was Chuck making the payments. That son-of-a-bitch,” she repeated.
“You and Stan are old friends?” I asked, but Shana had already turned around in her seat to face Tom and Bernie.
“Jack and Ben grew up together,” she explained to them. “Their families were close. When Ben went into politics, Jack supported him financially on a regular basis, because the Grahams didn’t have any money, and because Jack believed in Ben’s judgment.” She rubbed her hand across her brow. “Until this spring. Then Ben started siding against Jack when it came to developing the eco-community here. It wasn’t like he sided with anyone else—he just kept his considerable political clout—as you mentioned, Bernie—out of the discussion altogether.” Shana shrugged. “So Jack stopped funding Ben.”
“And now Jack’s dead,” Tom finished.
“But Big Ben’s still getting money from OK, right, Bob?” Bernie pointed out. “Isn’t that what you said?”
I nodded.
“Then Big Ben has nothing to complain about,” she concluded. “He’s still got the money coming in.” She tapped the wadded note in Shana’s hand. “So who knows what this is about, but it sounds to me like your stepson has some explaining to do, Shana.”
I looked at the faces of my passengers. No one seemed able to comment on Bernie’s remark, so I turned off the overhead light and put the car in gear.
“It’s past my bedtime,” I said. “We can think some more about this tomorrow, but right now, my pillow is calling me.”
Unfortunately, so was someone else. I handed my ringing cell phone to Shana and told her to answer it for me.
She popped it open. “Hello.”
After listening for a moment, she glanced at me and said into the receiver, “This is Shana O’Keefe.”
Another moment passed with Shana listening. “He’s driving,” she told the caller.
Yet another moment went by with Shana on the phone. “I’ll let him know,” she said and ended the call. She laid the phone in the cup holder next to my seat. “That was your sister. She wants you to call her as soon as you stop driving.”
Great.
Lily.
Like I really wanted to hear her rip into me about my latest birding-gone-bad weekend. I could already imagine what she had to say.
“I’m getting MARRIED, Bobby, and you find another body! What are you THINKING?!”
I’m thinking I’m going to drive to Arizona. No, make that Alaska. Hell, I’d drive to China to avoid talking with Lily tonight. Maybe by then she’d forget what she wanted to say to me.
Not in this lifetime, if I knew my sister.
“She also said to tell you that you looked terrible in the footage on tonight’s newscast,” Shana added. “And she said you can forget about renting a tux for her wedding because you’re no longer invited. Somebody named Rick can be the best man.”
Chapter Fifteen
“That’s a relief,” I said into the silence that hung in the car after Shana passed along Lily’s message. “I hate wearing a tux.”
“Wait a minute,” Bernie said from behind me. “Is that the same Rick I met birding with you back in May? The policeman with the diamond stud in his ear?”
“Yup. That’s him.”
“Now, I’d love to see him in a tux. He could moonlight as a male model if you ask me. Heck, I’d be happy to see him without the tux, if you know what I mean.”
Tom groaned in the back seat.
“You’re not serious,” Shana said to me. “You wouldn’t miss your sister’s wedding.”
I blew out a breath of exasperation. “No, Shana, I’m not going to skip out on Lily’s wedding. Though God knows she might just drive half of her wedding party over the edge before the big day finally gets here. Luce is the maid of honor, and she’s hanging on by a thread.”
“Who’s Luce?”
It suddenly dawned on me I hadn’t mentioned Luce to Shana before this moment.
And then I wondered: why hadn’t I?
“She’s my girlfriend.”
“She’s his girfriend,” said both Tom and Bernie at the same time the words came out of my mouth.
“Okaaay,” Shana drew out. “It’s obviously unanimous. Luce is your girlfriend.”
“They met on a birding weekend,” Bernie informed her. “I was there, in fact. I could tell something was going on right away. And that was years ago now. I keep telling Bob he ought to marry her pretty quick because she’s not going to wait around forever.”
“Bernie?” I caught her eyes in my rear-view mirror. “Do you mind?”
“Not at all, Bob,” she replied. “Luce is such a sweet gal,” she told Shana.
“Bernie!”
“I’m done!”
Silence filled the car again.
“There’s got to be a reason for that note,” Tom finally said, his voice breaking into the low hum of my tires on the county road.
I shook my head. “Whatever it is, I’m clueless. I only knew Jack from birding and I never met Big Ben until this afternoon. It’s got to be another Bob White. Someone they both knew.”
“Jack would never plot to kill someone,” Shana repeated, exhaustion edging her voice. “That is so nonnegotiable.”
Yet she had a note crumpled in her hand that suggested to Ben Graham that he kill Bob White. As I drove the last few miles back to the hotel, I spun around and around in my head everything I’d heard about the eco-communities Jack was working on. Had there been any big controversies, any confrontations, beyond the usual complaints of local residents when a new developer arrived in town and threatened to shake up the status quo? Was there another Bob White running around in Fillmore County, making so much noise he was courting a killer?
If there was, I sure didn’t know him. Which should have allayed any fears I had about the mysterious note from Big Ben’s pocket, but for some reason, I still felt vaguely uneasy about that little piece of paper in Shana’s hand. It meant something to someone, all right, and I had a feeling we really needed to know what if we were going to make any sense of Jack’s murder.
I pulled into the hotel parking lot and noted there were more cars than last night. Two cars had trailers behind them on which sat ATVs, their thick wheels muddied with dirt and leaves. I wondered where they’d been riding today, remembering the vehicles that Tom and I had watched flying through the air near Kami’s land.
Near Kami’s land.
I parked the car and turned to Tom in the back seat. But just as I was going to ask him to wait for me in the lobby, Bernie pointed out her window.
“I didn’t know Mac rode an ATV,” she said.
I followed the direction of her finger and saw Mac Ackerman on the other side of the parking lot, spotlighted beneath a lamppost. He had his hands in the engine of an ATV that was on a trailer attached to his car. The toolbox beside him must have been metal, since it looked shiny in the lamplight.
“When we went birding this morning, he must have left that trailer here in the lot, because I sure don’t remember him towing one to the youth camp.” Bernie climbed out of my SUV and shut the door behind her. “I don’t know any birder who rides an ATV,” she added.
Now that she mentioned it, I didn’t either. That’s not to say there might not be birders who enjoy driving All-Terrain Vehicles, just that I didn’t know any.
“Well, we know one now,” I told Bernie.
�
��You know, I don’t think he’s much of a birder,” she confided in a hushed voice. “He wasn’t exactly raring to go this morning, if you know what I mean. I noticed he drank three cups of coffee before we left the hotel this morning. Guess he’d had a rough night.” She took another look at Mac tending his ATV. “I bet Renee put him up to coming birding with her. She’s crazy about it. Or maybe she was just crazy about Jack.”
She threw a glance towards Shana, but Shana and Tom were already inside the lobby doors.
“I saw the mooneyes Renee was making at Jack yesterday evening when we all had an ice cream at the A&W before you got here, Bob. I know Jack was a handsome man, but Renee just seemed to be noticing him a little too much, if you get my drift.”
“They went to school together, Bernie,” I told her. “Renee mentioned it to me before dinner tonight. She even said she’d had a crush on him, along with all the other girls in her class.”
Bernie huffed and turned toward the lobby doors. “Well, that may be. But you can’t hang on to old crushes forever. Life goes on, Bob, and you’ve got to go along with it. Take it from me, an old lady: life’s way too short to hang on to the past. What’s that saying I saw on a coffee mug? Oh, yeah—today’s a gift, that’s why it’s called the ‘present.’ Pretty good advice, I’d say.” She patted me on the arm. “Good night, good-looking.”
And with that bit of wisdom, Bernie left me standing in the lobby. A moment later, Mac Ackerman came in, nodded at me, and started down the same hall Bernie had taken.
“About Mac,” Tom said behind me.
I turned to face him and he waved me over to one of the sofas in the lobby. He’d gotten two bottles of water from somewhere and left them on the end table. I uncapped mine and took a swig. “What about Mac?”
“This afternoon, while you and Shana were gone birding, I saw Mac leave with his ATV. I asked Renee about it, and she said just what Bernie was saying: she’s the birder in the family. Mac came along to keep her company, and she promised him he could have ATV time in the afternoon. Apparently that place where we saw all the riders this afternoon is a popular spot in Fillmore for ATV enthusiasts.”
“Near Kami’s land,” I confirmed.
“Yeah. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“If you mean that there’s a connection between Kami’s land and her fence being damaged and the ATV riders and Jack’s murder, then yeah. That’s what I’m thinking.”
“You think Jack saw someone tearing out Kami’s fence?” Tom asked.
“Maybe,” I admitted. “But I can’t figure out how that explains how Jack ended up at the youth camp with a couple bullets in his chest. Let’s say some ATV guy wanted to make it look like that land was too dangerous for an eco-community, so that it would be left undeveloped and a great spot for riding. He tears down the fence to let out Nigel. He catches Jack watching and kills him so he won’t get blamed for the fence. But that’s miles away from the youth camp.”
“The killer takes Jack there to stash the body where no one will find him?”
“Except that we do. First thing in the morning, too.”
“Okay,” Tom said. “So the killer didn’t know there was going to be a birding group coming by. His mistake.”
“Or, he wanted someone to find the body, and he knew there was a birding group coming by.”
“Why would a killer want the murder discovered? Never mind,” Tom immediately added, his hands up in surrender. “Let’s not go there. For argument’s sake, though, say that the killer did know we’d be birding today. That implies that either the killer is one of the birders on the weekend or that it was someone else who knew our schedule.” Tom rolled his water bottle between his hands. “So who else knew we were going to be at the youth camp this morning?”
“I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss our motley crew of birders,” I told him. “For all we know, Bernie’s an amnesiac killer. Of course, she would have had to commandeer a bicycle to get from here to the camp to kill Jack, because she doesn’t drive anymore, and then she would have had to pedal like mad to get back here before coffee, but stranger things have happened.”
“Yeah, right,” Tom said. “Like I said, somebody else had to know our schedule if leaving Jack at the camp was deliberate.”
I took another slug of water and thought about it. Who knew that our group of birders would be at the camp this morning?
Let me list the names.
Kami. Jack was at her place last night; I assumed that meant that she knew his weekend plans. But why would she want to kill Jack? Karla had told us that Jack and Kami were working together on the eco-community and that there was no romantic relationship there, so a deadly lovers’ quarrel didn’t hold up.
Unless Karla was lying to protect Kami. She’d said they were good friends.
Big Ben, on the other hand, had eagerly announced that said relationship did exist, and he’d apparently been quite ready to toss Kami’s name into the investigation. Why was that? Did Big Ben have something to gain by slandering Jack’s good name? True, Jack had stopped funding Big Ben, so maybe the mayor was making a little post-mortem payback out of spite. Not what I’d call a friendly gesture, despite Shana’s claim that Jack and Ben were old pals. Yet Ben hadn’t been left in the financial lurch after all, according to Stan. Thanks to Chuck’s sleight-of-hand, Ben had continued to feed at the OK trough. Whatever was behind Ben’s comments about Jack and Kami, it wasn’t money.
And whether or not Big Ben even knew Jack was in town was another unanswered question. I made a mental note to ask Shana if Jack had contacted Ben about being in Fillmore for the weekend.
Billy, Jack’s assistant, would also have to be on a list of people who knew Jack’s plans, but since Billy had also been murdered, I figured that was a dead end for consideration.
Literally.
Which left me with our motley crew again.
One of whom was Mac Ackerman, the ATV enthusiast who must have had a rough night because he needed three cups of coffee to get going this morning.
I shared my list with Tom.
“You forgot one,” he pointed out to me. “Chuck O’Keefe. He’s a birder, too, don’t forget. I bet he knew his dad’s plan for the weekend.” He paused and stared at the water bottle in his hand. “And he sure doesn’t like Shana, Bob. That’s obvious. I also wonder how much of a rift there was between Jack and his son. I mean, Chuck was paying off Big Ben on the sly specifically because he knew his father would disapprove.”
Tom’s eyes met mine. “Murder is ugly enough without it staying in the family, if you know what I mean.”
I nodded, mentally reminding myself that Tom probably didn’t even know about the jealousy that Chuck harbored against his dad because of Shana. I tried to circle back to our original hunch. “But what does Chuck, or Big Ben, have to do with Kami’s fence going down and ATV riders?”
“Beats me,” Tom said. “I’m a birder, not a detective.”
Twenty minutes later, I sat on the end of my bed in my hotel room and dialed Sheriff Paulsen’s direct line. She answered on the second ring.
“It’s Bob White, Sheriff,” I said. “I know it’s late, but I wanted to pass along some information I learned this evening. Jack O’Keefe recently severed a financial relationship he had with Big Ben over a disagreement in county development policy. I don’t know if it’s any use to you, but I wanted to let you know.”
The sheriff thanked me and said she’d look into it. “Are you heading home then?” she asked. “You sure don’t have to stick around. I know where to find you if I need to talk with you.”
“Can Shana leave?” The question popped out of my mouth without even thinking about it.
“Yes,” Sheriff Paulsen said. “Although we’re keeping the deceased’s body here for an autopsy. I can’t release it just yet.”
I tried to decide what to do, but all I could come up with was to get some sleep. “I’ll probably stick around to give Shana some moral support,” I finally
replied. “She doesn’t have any family here.”
“You mean, besides her stepson,” she said and ended the call.
Yeah. Shana’s stepson. Chuck O’Keefe. A real gem of a guy. Prince of the OK kingdom. For some reason, though, I wasn’t expecting him to show up on a white horse in the morning to rescue his fair, albeit hugely pregnant, stepmother. In fact, seeing how furious Shana had been when I told her that Stan had caught Chuck’s financial sleight-of-hand, I fully expected that the next time the two of them faced down, it was going to be less of a royal reunion and more like the shootout at the OK corral.
And I sure didn’t want to be the one caught in the crossfire.
Chapter Sixteen
I couldn’t fall asleep. Physically, I was tired enough, but mentally, I was jumping through an endless chain of hoops. Why was Jack O’Keefe lying in a morgue tonight when he should have been in bed with his very pregnant wife? Shana seemed convinced that his death was the result of his work with the eco-communities, but murder for philosophical inclinations sounded pretty farfetched to me. On the other hand, money was always a good bet for a motive for murder, and Big Ben—childhood friend or not—sounded like a prime candidate for that one. Even though he was still on the dole from Chuck, maybe he figured his financial pipeline would run more abundantly without the elder O’Keefe in the company picture.
And then there was Chuck. As we say in the counseling profession, he was a mess.
Actually, we don’t say that. Usually, we say someone has “issues.” In Chuck’s case, we’d say he had a “truckload” of issues.
Like maybe a whole fleet of them.
None of which I had any interest in helping him resolve.
So sue me. I was on summer break. Besides, I counseled teenage kids, not kids that were thirty-something.
I got out of bed, pulled on my jeans, and walked down the hall to the lobby to see if there was anything edible in the sole vending machine that stood next to the emergency exit door. I dropped some quarters into the slot and punched the buttons for a bag of pretzels.
