March's Luck (Larry Macklin Mysteries Book 5)

by A. E. Howe

  “Jane, have you seen Hank? Yes. Because I haven’t seen him in a while, and he’s not answering his phone.” She listened to Jane for a few moments, then said, “No! No, you don’t know that he’s back on drugs. I certainly don’t. Stop it!”

  I could hear Jane’s voice speaking loudly on the other end of the phone, even though I couldn’t make out the words. They were coming fast and loud. Marge’s eyes were moist and she wiped at them as she listened to the invective coming from the other end of the phone.

  “I don’t care what you think. He’s our brother. Do what you want. Everyone in this family always has,” Marge said and hung up. She clutched the phone tightly in her hand. “She hasn’t seen or heard from him,” she told me through tight lips.

  Marge then assured me that she’d talked to any of their employees that might have seen Hank. She was also sure that they would have mentioned if they had seen a stranger or a car that they didn’t recognize.

  “That doesn’t leave us with too many options,” I said. “If he didn’t take his truck, and no one picked him up, then he had to have walked.”

  Marge shook her head and stared out a window.

  I thought about the property. From the house to the spot by the railroad tracks was a hike, but not that far. I decided that I wanted to go down there and look around. When I looked at Marge, I didn’t feel like I could just leave her there. I had to remind myself that a sympathetic suspect can be as guilty as an unsympathetic one. Many investigations have gone down the rabbit hole by focusing on someone who didn’t seem to be properly grieving or worried, while the real perpetrator was crying crocodile tears and egging on the police to try harder. Bad people can be very manipulative. At this point I had to keep an open mind about everyone, including Marge.

  “I’m going to go check a couple things out. Why don’t you come with me?” I suggested.

  “Thank you.”

  The sun was low in the sky as I drove down to the woods by the railroad tracks.

  “I should have thought about him coming down here,” Marge said with a twinge of… what? Irritation? Frustration? “He spent a lot of time down here when he was a kid. Always talking about that damn gold. Once he got that into his head, he just couldn’t let it go. We all got sick and tired of hearing about it, but the more Daddy forbid him to hunt for it, the more determined Hank got.”

  I parked the car and we got out. It was a beautiful evening, cool and breezy. There wasn’t any evidence of anyone else around, though the whole area had been walked over so many times in the last week that it would have been hard to tell. We walked back toward the ruins of the house.

  “Watch out, there’s an old well out here someplace,” Marge said.

  “Yeah, I know where that is,” I said, then gave her a highly edited explanation of how I knew that, without any details about who we found in the well.

  “We should have fenced this area off years ago. The old house was in pretty good shape when we were kids. When Hank was in high school, he and his friends used to hang out in it, drinking and smoking. Probably doing other things,” Marge said as we poked around.

  “You didn’t ever believe in the legend of the gold?” I asked her.

  “Ha! Only for a little longer than I believed in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Ridiculous.” She looked over toward the tracks. “You can just see the old railroad platform. Back in the day, the trains would stop and take on cotton and tobacco. A lot of the bigger farms had railroad loading docks back before everything started going by truck.”

  “When did you all start growing hay?”

  “When shade tobacco became unprofitable. Granddad decided that he’d rather sell hay than start growing tomatoes or corn. Both are too much of a gamble. You’re always trying to get in the first or the last crop to make the big money, and you have to invest in a lot of fertilizer, pesticides, irrigation. Hay’s more predictable. You just have to be able to gauge the rain. Granddad was smart. He said that with weather prediction getting better all the time—this was back in the late sixties—it’d be safer then ever to grow hay.”

  “Your dad was good with that?”

  “Daddy did whatever Granddad said. Period. It’s what broke Mom down.”

  We’d walked back to where the backhoe had dug the holes.

  “What a mess. We’ll have to clean this up,” Marge said. She seemed very comfortable with the idea of taking over the farm. I wondered if that was how it would work out. And I wondered how Jane and Hank would feel about that.

  “You sound like you plan on running the farm,” I said.

  “Who else? Jane? Don’t make me laugh. Hank? He has to work on his own problems. I don’t think he has the time or the inclination to take on the business.” She sounded very sure of herself. “Daddy was killed over there?”

  We’d walked to the very edge of the woods. She was pointing about twenty degrees too far south.

  “It was closer to over there,” I said, indicating the spot where we found the body. Was this a ploy, pretending to not know exactly where her father’s body had been found? Looking at the spot, I could clearly see where the hay had been trampled by all of the crime scene techs and deputies. It seemed like she should have seen that too. Or maybe I was just over-thinking it.

  “I don’t think Hank’s here,” Marge said softly.

  An idea occurred to me. “Try calling him.”

  She looked at me for a moment as if she was going to ask why, but then she took out her phone and hit the speed dial button. “Voicemail,” she said.

  “Let’s head back to the car.”

  When we got to the spot where the trailer and backhoe had been parked, I asked her to call again.

  “Oh,” she said, realizing what I was doing. She hit the speed dial again.

  “Do you hear something?” I asked, thinking that I did. I moved closer to the house and the old well.

  “Voicemail.”

  “Call again.”

  Nothing down the well. I walked quickly toward the railroad tracks. Could I hear something now? Marge was right behind me and called again without being asked. We were about fifty feet from the railroad tracks and I could just hear parts of a song that I couldn’t quite make out.

  Marge dialed again. I was standing beside the half collapsed rail platform. The roof was almost completely gone, but the platform had been made out of huge twelve-inch posts and three-inch by twelve-inch planks and was mostly intact. Now I could hear it clearly. Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” was coming from a hole where one of the planks had broken.

  I got up on the platform and walked over to the broken plank. I laid down and tried to reach for the phone. I put the idea of rattlesnakes far from my mind as I stretched my arm into the hole. But it was no use. My arm was still ten inches too short.

  “Stop,” I told Marge, who was still dialing her brother’s number. “I can’t reach it.” I looked around. We only had a little bit of daylight left, and I didn’t see any other signs that Hank had been here. “I think we need to call in help.”

  Marge nodded, staring at her phone as if it could provide answers.

  I called Shantel.

  “You know it’s past six?” she groused.

  “I know,” I said, trying to sound contrite. “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it was important.”

  “You are really messing with me,” Shantel said, sounding only mildly annoyed. “I’ll be there in half an hour. Marcus has already gone home so I’ll grab whoever is on shift.”

  Next I called dispatch and asked them to send me any deputies they could spare. They said it might be as much as an hour. The hours between five and seven were always busy for patrol as people had accidents on the way home or, once home, discovered that their house had been broken into.

  While Marge and I waited, I texted Cara. She was still at the vet clinic, helping to prep for Saturday’s Springtime in the Square festival. The Adams County Humane Society would be having an adoption booth and Dr.
Barnhill and his staff had all volunteered to help out. Cara told me that they were putting together little flower accessories to dress up the collars and harnesses of the adoptable pets. If it weren’t for how often she had to deal with the unpleasantness of sick and dying pets, I would have been a bit envious of her job.

  Dill finally called me back. “No one’s seen Hank since the day before yesterday. I talked with his sponsor. He said he’d check out a few places and give you a call if he finds anything.”

  “Thanks, Dill.”

  Ten minutes after I hung up with him, Shantel pulled up in the crime scene van. She had a long-handled trash picker with her that we were able to use to reach Hank’s cell phone.

  After Shantel pulled a couple of prints off of the phone, we checked the recent calls and text messages. An unidentified number called Hank’s phone around the time that Marge had last seen him. I called Darlene and brought her up to speed before asking her to check out the number. It was probably from a burner, but you had to try.

  Half an hour later we were joined by a couple of patrol deputies. By now the sun was down and we were looking for evidence by flashlight.

  “We aren’t going to get anywhere like this,” I told Marge. “We’ve swept the area within a couple of hundred yards of the cell phone, but if we do any more in the dark, we’re as liable to damage evidence as find it.”

  She thought about this for a moment before answering. “I understand. I’ll start calling everyone we know. I don’t think I can worry about what people think anymore.” Marge was beaten down by this point.

  I sealed the area as best I could with crime scene tape after everyone else had left. I assured Marge that we’d be back at the crack of dawn and widen the search as much as we needed to. She thanked me and told me she’d let me know if any friends or relatives had had contact with him.

  I headed home to get a shower, feed Ivy and grab a bite to eat, but I had no intention of calling it a night. There were two people I was determined to get in contact with before going to bed—Eddie and Marcy.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I sent off texts to Eddie and Marcy as I ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a glass of milk for dinner. I shared a bit of the milk with Ivy and told her I’d try to be a more attentive housemate in the future.

  Eddie was the first to respond: I’m busy

  Me: Not an acceptable answer. Meet at the usual place in an hour.

  Eddie: K

  I still hadn’t received a response from Marcy by the time I met Eddie at the cemetery and told him to get in my car.

  “We could just talk here,” he whined.

  “This isn’t going to be one of our usual five-minute conversations in return for twenty dollars,” I informed him. “Things are going down fast and I need every bit of information you have. Maybe even some information you don’t know that you have. Understand?” With two bodies and a missing person, I was in no mood to play games.

  “I hear you,” he said morosely.

  “I’m not sure you do. To be clear, I want a rundown on this whole stupid gold-hunting expedition.”

  Eddie’s head snapped toward me. He was obviously surprised that I’d finally connected him to the gold, but he hid it well. “Where are we going?”

  “To the office.”

  “No, hey, you can’t. You know that I can’t be seen talking to you. The trial is still a ways off. They’ll kill me if they think I’m giving you any information.”

  Eddie was talking about the upcoming trial of his father, grandfather and half a dozen other minions of their little drug empire. Eddie had helped provide some of the information that eventually led to their arrests a couple of months ago. And he wasn’t kidding about being killed if they found out that he’d be giving evidence against them in the upcoming trials.

  “Don’t worry.” I pulled out my handcuffs and tossed them over to him. “Put those on. Behind your back. I’m bringing you in as a material witness in the murders of Hank Parrish Senior and his son, Joe Parrish.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Eddie asked in a very small voice.

  “No, I’m not kidding. Look, this will actually make you look better if it gets back to your clan. Better for you if it looks like we occasionally harass you.” I was telling him the truth, but I also wanted to shake him up. He’d become very lackadaisical about his position as CI. I needed him off balance and ready to spill his guts.

  Still unsure, Eddie started the awkward procedure of putting a pair of handcuffs on behind his back in a moving vehicle. He’d managed to do it by the time I got the car parked at the office.

  “Don’t say a word about our CI relationship or about the case against your family. Remember, there is CCTV everywhere so assume that everything you say and do is being recorded.”

  “Yeah, okay.” He sounded nervous and I could actually feel him shaking as I took his upper arm and led him into the building.

  At night the office was pretty quiet. The front door was locked to the public, so there wasn’t even a desk sergeant on duty. I took Eddie back to an interrogation room and uncuffed his hands.

  Sitting across from each other, I looked into his face. Fear radiated from his eyes. I felt a little bad about this, but I knew him and I needed him to take this seriously. I didn’t want to spend any more time dicking around.

  “Hank Junior is missing,” I told him bluntly, watching his reaction. His mouth fell open and his eyes opened wide. I knew him well enough to know that he was no actor.

  “Damn!” he said.

  “What do you know about his disappearance?”

  “Nothin’. Like, what could I know?”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Like, years…” he started then stopped. “Okay, I saw him about a week ago. Just for a minute.”

  “Damn it, Eddie! He was one of the guys you saw Marcy with, wasn’t he? Why didn’t you tell me that from the beginning? Never mind… Any idea what they were talking about?”

  “I couldn’t hear them, but…” His voice dropped so low I could barely hear him. “I guess it had to do with… you know.”

  “With what?” I did know, but I wanted him to say the word.

  “The…” He looked up at the camera and turned his back to it as best he could, leaning forward and continuing in a low voice, “gold.”

  “What gold?” I asked loudly.

  He sat back. “Come on, man,” he whined.

  “What gold do you think they were talking about?”

  Again Eddie leaned forward and hissed, “There is gold. Maybe a share for you too. Let up. We don’t want everyone in on the treasure.” He jerked his head backward toward the camera.

  “Mr. Thompson, I won’t mince words. There. Is. No. Gold.”

  “Arrrrgggh. Yes. There. Is!” He suddenly realized he’d said this at a normal volume and leaned in to whisper. “I’ve seen it!”

  I was getting totally fed up with this whole gold hunt. “Okay. Slowly, tell me what you’ve seen.”

  “I saw a Nazi gold coin, okay. Happy?”

  “Who showed you this coin?”

  “Marcy. She showed it to me about a week after we got here. Hey, can you, like, destroy the footage from that camera?” he asked, pointing up at the wall.

  “You’re sure that it was gold?” I ignored his question about the video footage.

  “Yeah, and it had an eagle and a swastika on it. That was one side. On the other was a guy.”

  I took out my phone, pulled up Safari and Googled: Nazi gold coin. After a two-minute search, I turned the phone around and let Eddie read it. The gist was that the Nazis never minted any gold coins. Some coins might have been gold-plated after the fact, but there were no Nazi gold coins.

  “Well… That’s what the coin looked like,” Eddie mumbled.

  “And you didn’t take five minutes to Google it?” Of course, the answer was simple—he had wanted to believe in buried Nazi loot. Had Marcy been taken in too, or was she playin
g Eddie for the fool? I was sure that it was the former. She seemed to have drunk all the Kool-Aid about the treasure.

  “Okay. We’ve established that there is no gold. But you believed in the legend. You think Marcy does too?”

  “For sure. She was, like, we’ve got to find this and we’re all going to be rich.”

  “Why did she tell you about the treasure?”

  “She wanted me to check with my relatives to see if they had any information. Phillip Thompson was my granddad’s brother. Marcy thought that someone in the family might have heard something. ’Sides, she said it was right that a Thompson be in on finding it since a Thompson was killed getting it off the train.”

  “Stealing it off the train,” I corrected.

  “The government stole it in the first place,” he said petulantly. I didn’t bother getting into the differences between a state and an individual, or the fact that just because you steal something from a thief, it doesn’t make it yours. Or the fact that the theft never even happened…

  I knew Marcy. She’d brought Eddie in on the deal because she wanted a flunky to do the grunt work. I looked at Eddie and thought Marcy’s judgment must be getting pretty poor if she had sized Eddie up as a good prospect for a toady. Toady maybe, but a hard-working toady? Not so much. Then a thought occurred to me.

  “You’ve got a thing for her, don’t you?” I asked and his head jerked up. The look in his eyes told me everything I needed to know. Poor Eddie, I thought.

  “Uh, no,” he said unconvincingly. I let it go. Love counselor was not part of my job description. I wondered if Marcy knew about his interest in cross-dressing.

  “Why is she so convinced the gold exists? Besides the gold coin?” Marcy had always been on the lookout for easy money, but she also had a pretty keen eye for a scam. Never try to scam a scammer.

  “That book used to belong to her grandfather. She said there’s a code or something that we can use with the book to find out where the gold is.”

  “Who told her about the code?”

  “I don’t know. I think the same person who gave her the coin,” Eddie said, which made sense. Someone was pushing the gold hunt agenda, but who and why?