by Nick Pirog
I always found it odd that Odell was there all by himself. That big store and no checker, no one stocking shelves.
The anvil fell.
They were having a meeting.
I turned to Mallory and asked, “Why didn’t you go to the meeting?” Neil might not have been aware that Chief Eccleston and the Mayor where in on the cover-up, but from the pictures, he would have been certain Greg Mallory was involved.
“What meeting?” he asked.
I could feel Wheeler’s gaze on my shoulder.
“The night of the Save-More murders.” I was guessing that Neil wanted to meet with the parties involved before he did anything rash. That would mean Tom, Odell, and Mallory.
“I was on a cruise,” Mallory replied. “My wife’s and my fortieth. I don’t know anything about a meeting, I swear.”
I believed him.
If he’d known, he would have been there, and he would be dead.
I wasn’t exactly sure how the meeting changed things. I wasn’t sure if the group was the target or if it was just Neil. Maybe Ramsey decided to clean house. Maybe he planned on killing everyone involved. Then again, the Mayor, Eccleston, and Mallory were all still alive. Surely, there were chances in the last four years to get rid of them. Ramsey must have decided it would have looked too suspicious and that someone would eventually put the pieces together.
I looked at Eccleston and asked, “Were you invited to the meeting?”
His face flushed.
He was.
I turned to the Mayor. “What about you? Where you invited to the meeting?”
She shook her head.
I didn’t know whether or not she was lying. I would need an hour in a locked room with her to know for sure.
“Anyhow,” I said, “Lowry shoots the six of them, killing five. Then he jumps in his car and makes a getaway. He pulls over on the side of the road.” I pointed to Team Blackwater and said, “I’m guessing that Lowry was meeting someone. That he was to get another big bag of cash for having completed the job. But Team Blackwater has strict instructions from Ramsey that Lowry needs to be terminated. It’s too big a risk to let him walk. So they kill him in his car and make it to look like a suicide.”
“You sonofabitch!” the Mayor yelled, running toward Ramsey, banging her manicured hands against his shoulder. “You murdered all those people!”
Dolf peeled Mayor Van Dixon off David Ramsey and stood between them. She screamed, “You’ve made us all accessories to murder!”
“Calm down, Paula, just calm down.” Ramsey put his hands up. “I did no such thing.” He turned toward me and said, “You spin a good yarn, Mr. Prescott, but I hate to disappoint you. Neither I nor anyone I employ had any part in any murder.”
It was the way he said it.
Wheeler glanced in my direction.
She must have felt it too.
“Neil Felding was getting fifty thousand dollars a month for the rest of his life,” Ramsey continued. “There’s no way he ever would have risked that by talking. Trust me, I knew the guy for twenty years. Money talked with him. There was no need to murder him.”
“Seems like you were paying out a lot of money,” Eccleston spat.
Ramsey snorted, then said, “You think you were worth more than twenty thousand a month, just to sit on your fat ass?”
“Twenty thousand a month?” Eccleston huffed. “Try half that. And I did plenty. I protected you.”
“Protected me?”
Eccleston glanced at me. I could almost see him straddling an invisible fence. Keep his mouth shut and hope for the best or speak his peace and accept the worst.
He chose the latter. “Mike Zernan.”
“Who?” asked Ramsey.
“Don’t act like you don’t know,” Eccleston scoffed. “He was the Save-More investigating officer. He wouldn’t leave the murders alone. Kept at it even a couple years after. Said it just didn’t feel right. Then he came to me one day and told me that he thought maybe Lunhill was somehow involved in the murders.”
I’d never been able to figure out what had tipped Mike off and I asked, “What made him think that?”
“Something about the murders had never set well with him. I think it was the way Lowry yelled at Odell. Mike thought it sounded rehearsed.”
I’d never seen the video, so I couldn’t speak to this.
Eccleston continued, “So he started looking into all the victims’ backgrounds. Will Dennel ran a sports book, even had his little notebook on him when he was killed, and Mike thought maybe there was something to that. But that quickly sputtered out and he started looking into Felding. He thought it was suspicious that he’d had this skirmish with the CEO of Lunhill, then resigned just three weeks before he was killed. Then when he found out that Lunhill had ties to Blackwater, that’s when he really started to think that they might be involved.”
I’d cracked open many cases following the same formula—a gut feeling substantiated by coincidence and correlation.
I said, “And that’s why you made Mike see a psychologist and paid them to diagnose him with PTSD from his time in the military. Not to mention bouts of paranoid schizophrenia. Anything that would mandate he retire.”
Eccleston nodded. He was all in now.
I almost said, “That’s when Mike stopped investigating the murders and turned that energy into restoring his hot rod. But then when I came to his house asking questions, he found a way to pass his suspicions along to me. He’d been paranoid that perhaps the unfriendly folks from Blackwater had bugged his house, hence the cloak-and-dagger operation of creating a replica of Will Dennel’s Moleskine and its surreptitious message of ‘Lunhill.’” I kept this to myself.
“But I liked Mike,” Eccleston said. “We were fishing buddies. I leveled with him. I told him that if he retired and stopped looking into the Save-More murders, I would get him a full pension with benefits.”
“And he took it?” I asked.
“He did, but apparently he didn’t stop poking his head into the investigation, which is why Ramsey over there had him taken out, just like he took out Tom, Odell, Neil, and Victoria.”
Something about this statement pinged something in my brain, but I didn’t get a chance to ruminate on it before Ramsey belted, “I told you I had nothing to do with any murders.”
Eccleston jerked his chin toward the Blackwater guys, “Just because you pay men to do your dirty work doesn’t mean your hands aren’t dirty.” He took a couple steps toward the two mercenaries. “Which one of you assholes did it? Which one of you strangled my friend?”
I turned to Dolf. “It was you. You broke into his house, came up behind him, and put a garrote around his neck. You had him by fifty pounds, so it wouldn’t have been hard for you to strangle him. And you just happen to be left-handed, which is why the ligature marks were so much worse on the right side of Mike’s throat.”
Dolf moved his tongue around the inside of his bottom lip, took a breath, then asked, “This Mike Zernan, you said he was a military man?”
I nodded.
“If I’d been paid to kill this guy, this would have come up in my research and I never would have taken the job. I would never kill a man who put his life on the line for his country.”
The way he said it was so matter-of-fact I found it hard to believe he was lying.
I said, “But you had no problem killing Lowry Barnes.”
He shook his head and said, “Sorry to tell you, but the worst thing I’ve done contracting with Lunhill is taking some embarrassing photos of a couple politicians.”
“What about my barn?” I asked. “You burned down my fucking barn. You almost killed my two piglets.”
“Again, not us.”
Wheeler shouted, “But you bugged his car!”
“That we did. We were hired to follow you and see who you talked to, then report back to Mr. Ramsey.”
“I told you,” David Ramsey said. “Neither I nor anyone I employ had anything to do
with any murders.” He turned to Eccleston and said, “If you would have told me about this Mike Zernan guy, I would have paid him to be quiet. Or found a reason to sue him. Payoffs, bribes, lawsuits, this is what I’ve done for thirty-five years. And guess what? It’s worked. Why would I go and change that?”
He was making good points.
Actually, he was making great points.
Why change your MO when it has proved successful for more than three decades?
He looked at the Mayor, Mallory, then Eccleston, then said, “I’ve paid out twenty-three million dollars to you guys over the past twenty years, why wouldn’t I have paid another half a million to keep a guy quiet?”
Eccleston’s jaw went slack. “Did you say twenty-three million dollars?”
Ramsey nodded.
The Mayor and Mallory turned and glanced at each another. Then both turned and looked at Eccleston.
“How much were you getting?” Eccleston demanded of Greg Mallory.
“Ten thousand a month,” he said.
Eccleston turned to the Mayor and asked, “What about you?”
She glanced at me, then said, “Same. Ten grand a month.”
“Okay, okay.” He turned to Wheeler and said, “And how much was your old man getting?”
“Same.”
Eccleston looked upward, his eyes closed. After a moment he said, “By my math, we were getting collectively seven hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year for twenty years or so, which is roughly fourteen million dollars.” He turned to David Ramsey and asked, “How the hell did you come up with twenty-three million?”
Wheeler leaned into my side and said, “How did he come up with seven hundred and twenty thousand? I thought there were only five of them on the take.”
She was right. Eccleston, Odell, Tom Lanningham, Mayor Van Dixon, and Greg Mallory.
Each getting $10,000 a month was a $120,000 a year, times five, which was $600,000 collectively.
“There was a sixth person,” I said.
“Who?” she asked.
And then it hit me.
It was what had pinged my brain when Eccleston mentioned her name and not Will’s or Peggy’s.
For the first time yet, Ramsey appeared somewhat baffled. He said, “I paid you guys each ten thousand dollars a month for the first couple of years. But then after she came to see me, I upped it to twenty thousand a month.”
“After who came to see you?” asked Mayor Van Dixon.
But I already knew.
The sole survivor.
David Ramsey said, “Victoria Page.”
Thirty minutes later, Wheeler and I watched all the cars drive away.
I’d set up the meeting to prove murder, but all I’d done was prove a twenty-year-old conspiracy, which in all honestly, didn’t hold much weight with me. Sure, some cows died, some people got sick, data was manipulated, payoffs were made, and a corporation profited billions, but no one at the meeting was involved in the Save-More murders.
That’s why I promised the pictures and documents would never see the light of day. Of course, for a price.
Ramsey came prepared to deal, and after I signed several documents promising to destroy all copies of the pictures and documents Darcy Felding had given me, David Ramsey handed me a briefcase with $2 million in it.
My only stipulation was that I be one the one to deal with Victoria Page. All parties begrudgingly agreed.
“What are you going to do with the money?” Wheeler asked me. Though she hadn’t voiced it at the time, I could tell she was embittered, even resentful, that I’d taken the money.
I ignored her question.
I took a few steps toward the school bus across the street and yelled, “You can come out now.”
I hadn’t told Wheeler. I couldn’t risk her glancing in the school bus’s direction.
Blue hair popped up in one of the broken windows of the school bus and Wheeler asked, “Who is that?”
“My friend Bree. She’s Will Dennel’s little sister.”
“How long has she been in there?”
“I dropped her off earlier this morning.”
“How did you know they would stop right here?”
I hadn’t known for certain, but I figured David Ramsey would be in the lead car and he wouldn’t drive past the signs warning of contamination.
Luckily, I’d been right.
Bree exited the school bus from the back, jumping down into the thick brush, then clambered toward us.
“You get everything?” I asked.
She patted the radar gun looking device in her right hand, which was actually a parabolic microphone she often used to listen in on Walmart Guy and his girlfriend’s dates, and said, “Yep. Got it all.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“They’re beautiful,” Bree said, her face pushed up against the back window.
“They’re called quarter horses,” I said. “Race horses. This lady breeds them.”
We’d driven directly from Simon Beach to Page Ranch and it was closing in on 6:00 in the evening.
I glanced at Wheeler. She’d been out to the ranch just three days earlier to remove a nail from one of the horse’s hooves. She fidgeted in the passenger seat.
“Is that why she stole so much of the money?” Bree asked. “To help pay for her breeding program?”
Wheeler locked eyes with me.
Neither of us had disclosed our theory to Bree, but to her credit she had been listening to the entirety of the meeting at Simon Beach. Still, to put this together was nothing short of astonishing.
“She’s like a genius or something,” I said.
Bree laughed from the back.
I parked between the house and the stable.
“Stay put,” I said to Bree, knowing full well she would be over the fence petting the horses the moment we stepped inside the house.
“Sure thing, boss.” She added, “You sure you don’t need me to record this?”
“I’m sure,” I said.
Both Wheeler and I had our phones in our pockets set to record. And I highly doubted Victoria would pat us down.
I told Bree to keep her cell phone on her just in case.
“I’m just gonna be in the car,” she said.
“Your hand is already petting an invisible horse.”
She put her hand down, then opened the door, and sprinted in the direction of the horses, blue hair bouncing.
“I like her,” Wheeler said.
“Yeah, me too.”
A moment later, I knocked on the front door. No one answered, and Wheeler and I headed toward the stable.
Wheeler took the lead, walking through the open door. Victoria Page was inside the second stall. She was brushing the coat of a large brown horse. The horse eyed us, his head swishing lightly back and forth.
“Oh, hi there,” Victoria said, pushing her hat up an inch with her free hand.
Wheeler went up to the horse and rubbed her hand on his nose. “What’s this guy’s name?” she asked.
“Retro,” Victoria said with a smile. “He’s my old man.”
“And how’s Macy?”
I guessed Macy was the horse whom Wheeler attended to three days earlier.
“She still won’t put all her weight on that back foot, but she’s doing a whole lot better.”
“No redness or swelling?”
“I checked on it a few hours ago and it looked pretty good.” She turned to me and said, “Is that why you guys are here?”
Wheeler and I glanced at one another.
I said, “Actually, it’s about something else.”
She nodded, gave Retro a few last brushes on his side, then exited the stall.
“Why don’t we go inside and have a drink?” she offered.
We followed her from the stable toward the main house. At one point she stopped and asked, “Do you guys see a blue haired girl out on the fence?”
Bree was straddling a black post, petting one of the horses. I
said, “Yeah, she’s with us.”
“Oh good. Just wanted to make sure I wasn’t seeing things.”
I forced a laugh.
Wheeler didn’t.
We made our way into the living room and Victoria excused herself to fix us some drinks. Several minutes later, she entered the room with a tray. She set two martinis on the coffee table near where Wheeler and I were sitting, then gingerly lowered herself onto the couch opposite us with her own glass in hand.
“That hip giving you some trouble?” I asked.
“No more than usual,” she said, then took a sip of her drink. She set it down, then said, “You still looking into those murders?”
I nodded.
“I figured that would be the only reason you two would be here together.”
“We have a couple more questions.”
She looked at Wheeler and said, “I’ve told you before how brave your dad was those last few minutes of his life. You should be proud.”
Wheeler moved her hand to mine and gripped it. At first I thought she was doing it to keep herself from crying, but she wasn’t. She was doing it to keep herself from leaping across the room and burying her fist in Victoria’s face.
“That night,” I said, “you went to the Save-More to get butter for some cookies you were baking.”
“That’s right, macadamia nut and white chocolate chip.” She gave a slight grin at the mention of her famous cookies.
“But that’s not really why you were there.”
Her grin vanished. “Yes, it was. I ran out of butter.”
“No, you were there for the meeting.”
“What meeting?”
“The meeting that Neil Felding called.”
She set the martini glass down. “Neil Felding? Why would I be meeting with Neil Felding?”
“Because he was about to blow the whistle on a twenty-year cover-up?”
“A cover-up? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We just had a long chat with Chief Eccleston, Greg Mallory, Mayor Van Dixon, and David Ramsey.” I glanced toward Wheeler. “We know everything.”
Victoria’s face fell.
I said, “Mayor Van Dixon told us how, as town comptroller, you stumbled on a secondary account that the Mayor was keeping. You knew it was something illegal, but instead of turning her in, you told her that you would be quiet about it if you got the same payoff. The Mayor contacted David Ramsey and made it happen. You then convinced the Mayor to let you control the payoffs, that you would launder them through the town budget and into a series of different bank accounts and trusts. Eventually, you convinced Dr. Lanningham, Greg Mallory, Odell, and Chief Eccleston to also let you control their payoffs, and pretty soon all that Lunhill money was coming directly to you.”
