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Welcome to the Punkhorns (Shepard & Kelly Book 1)

Page 17

by Benjamin Bradley


  Ann and Peter Peck walked down the stairs together and joined Casper in the living room. They each took one of the large blue plush chairs that bracketed the couch. Ann’s faced the open kitchen where a candle flickered on the counter covering up the morning meal smells. Peter’s faced the water but positioned himself toward Casper.

  Casper realized they likely sat in these very seats every night they were home. He imagined them arguing about which movie to watch next and trying to video chat with their children from their perspective seats, fighting off echoes that come from such close quarters. He wondered if they sat in these very seats, opened a bottle of wine, and planned the wildest conspiracy Brewster had ever seen. It seemed fitting. Two powerful people planning to save the town from their comfortable seats in paradise.

  “Thank you again for having me downstairs. It’s a lovely set-up. I’m very much enjoying the space,” Casper said to Ann. “As I said, I’m here because we’ve had some developments in the case and I need to confirm a few details if you don’t mind.”

  Peter spoke first. “We’re happy to help. We are thrilled about Melanie and the others. So good to hear they were safe and sound. Now, let’s hope the same can be said for the other two missing folks. Forgive me, I don’t know their names, they were from out of town. Jack and Hector?”

  “Jared Sorrentino and Hector Ramos, yes, sir,” Casper said. “Yes, overall, it’s good news. Melanie’s tale is a bit far-fetched though.”

  “You don’t believe her story?” Ann asked.

  “I’d—we’d—like to. Honest to God. It would make this a lot easier. It seems the police just don’t want to put all of their resources into another wild goose chase and come back with egg on their face.”

  “Well, honestly, it sounds too bizarre to be made up. What sort of person would make up such a story?” Peter asked.

  “Regardless, I’m here to confirm it. I can’t promise you complete confidentiality with the police, but as far as I’m concerned, I was hired by the mayor’s office and not the police. If you can assure me that Jared and Hector were not part of the plan, the picture becomes a lot clearer,” Casper affirmed.

  Peter looked confused and glanced at Ann, then back to Casper. “I’m not sure I know what you mean, Casper.”

  Casper tried to evaluate Peter’s performance but considered that maybe Ann had left him out the loop. After all, it was her handwriting on the note that Melanie had given the chief. Either way, he didn’t actually care who knew what or who did what. He just needed to be able to tell police that Jared and Hector were truly missing.

  “Melanie had a note. The note said—”

  Ann cut him off. “They are not a part of it. I’m confirming that for you, Casper.”

  Casper watched Peter’s eyes, and he looked dumbfounded. Still, Casper knew that politicians were great performers in their own right, and didn’t give it full credence.

  “Thank you, Ann,” Casper said. “As far as I am concerned, that’s all I need. They’ve shifted their focus back to BJ Baxter anyhow.”

  Peter grimaced and looked again at his wife. “Casper, if you don’t mind me referring to you by your first name, I’d advise against pursuing that further. Baxter isn’t your man.”

  Casper to decipher the looks exchanged between the two. “And why do you think that?”

  “BJ Baxter was at our home on Thursday night. We made him dinner and then drank some wine. He had a bit too much and so we, together, drove him and his car back to Ocean’s Edge,” the mayor said. “He couldn’t have kidnapped or attacked those men. Unless he did it from eight miles away in a drunken stupor.”

  “Why would you host Baxter at your home?” Casper asked.

  “We’ve been trying to get him to consider a last-minute counteroffer to our agreement. We have it on good authority from the Conservation Trust that we could get the land designated as a State Park. We’ve been trying to convince Baxter to split the property between a resort and a park,” Peter continued.

  “Any luck?”

  “It’s a work in progress,” Ann said with a smile.

  “What time did you return him to Ocean’s Edge?”

  “Sometime past 1 AM. Like I said, he wasn’t in any shape to commit a crime, besides being drunk and disorderly maybe,” Peter said.

  Casper stood from the couch. “Well, thank you. This should be helpful to the investigation. I’ll be discrete with what I share.”

  Peter stood to meet him. “The chief is aware that we can speak to Baxter’s whereabouts during the night in question. He’s assured us anonymity. We don’t think the townsfolk would take too kindly to rumors that we are dining with Brewster’s biggest enemy. The other information, well, I trust you will respect our stake in the community.” He glared at Ann.

  “My lips are sealed,” Casper assured them.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Saturday, August 11th

  Delaney pulled up next to Grumpy’s Café and scanned the crowded outdoor seating area for Casper. A handful of families, most with young children, scarfed down omelets and toast on picnic tables. Others held ice cream cones that dripped over their hands and dotted the ground with a feast for the ants below. Her parents would have scoffed at the thought of a young Delaney having ice cream for breakfast. After a moment, she saw Casper weave through a crowd on the side of the building and wave over to her, smiling. Hoagie bounded next to him, pulling on his leash and racing towards Delaney’s car.

  That big, dumb smile Casper managed to flash with such an eager and honest sentiment had been Delaney’s saving grace in this case. She wondered if it was time to mention that to him, or if it was better to be appropriate and remain focused on the case at hand. Decisions had never been Delaney’s strong suit. Casper tossed the bottom of an ice cream cone into the trash and Delaney’s face contorted with shock.

  “Ice cream for breakfast? Plus, you threw away the best part!” she scolded him. Hoagie leapt into the backseat and put his front paws on the center console as he leaned down to lick Delaney’s cheek.

  He laughed. “Most important meal of the day. And no way, the butt is all sticky. The first bite of cone is the best part, duh!”

  Delaney started the car on and reversed out of the spot. “You’ve got it all backward, Casper Kelly. Anyway, what’d you find out from your mysterious source?”

  “It’s all true. Melanie’s story. Jared and Hector aren’t part of it,” Casper said, and then put three of his fingers in the air. “Scout’s honor.”

  “And I’m supposed to just accept that in your few days in Brewster you’ve managed to develop a confidential informant that we should trust unequivocally?” Delaney asked with a raised brow.

  “Pretty much. It’s that or chase your tail a bit while these two could be in harm’s way,” Casper added.

  “Tell me honestly now. Is Hoagie your source?”

  “No, but he heard all of this from a dog down the street, so I think we’re good to go.”

  “Can’t trust dogs these days, always looking to snitch.”

  “I think you mean sniff.”

  Delaney stuck out her tongue at him. “So, really? You’re not going to tell me how you’re suddenly so certain that an actual crime is afoot?”

  “I don’t think you’d believe me if I did. Can you trust me on this one?”

  Delaney nodded. Somehow, that was enough to convince her to accept it. Delaney Shepard, who shivered at the very thought of trusting somebody entirely, had been left with little option besides giving Casper the benefit of the doubt.

  As they drove down Run Hill Road and towards the Punkhorns, Delaney noticed more cars than usual parked along the side of the narrow road. She’d expected folks preparing for the Brew Run, but the gatherings usually didn’t get going until closer to the 4 PM start time. After they veered onto the gravel stretch near the parking lot, they both groaned at what they saw. A group of volunteers had gathered in the lot and were being organized by none other than Tate Archibald and Keri
Perotta.

  Tate shot their passing cruiser a look, and Delaney slowed to meet his stare. She was struggling to decide how to handle her friendship with Tate and Keri, and had yet to come to a conclusion. Regardless, it was essential to her that they knew what they did was wrong and she wasn’t just going to hash it out over a beer down at the Woodshed. No, they had wasted important time and resources. Her time and resources. She envisioned the complaint that she had drafted for Chief Slimmer. Violation of US Code 371–Conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud United States.

  Delaney decided to roll past without a word. Casper sensed her discomfort and broke the silence. “Hoagie was asking about you yesterday, you know.”

  Delaney shook her head. “Oh yeah?” She looked back to see Hoagie licking the rear window.

  “He was asking if you knew of any doggy friends that he could play with here on the Cape. Hoagie seems to like it here quite a bit.”

  Delaney laughed. “Here as in Brewster?”

  “You know it.”

  “Hoagie Kelly, Brewster local. It has a ring to it.”

  “He’s a heck of a dog,” Casper said with a grin.

  Delaney weighed the options but gave in to her instincts. “Well, I’d love to spend some more time with him after the case.”

  “I’d like that, too,” Casper added. “I mean, uh, he would.”

  Sally Zimanski was as pleasant and civil as she had been the first time, and so her interview was brief, yet unhelpful. She had made some minor progress on her packing, but beyond that, Delaney felt like she was in a time warp. Her former friends Tate and Keri were now actual criminals who had ignored the very laws she took an oath to protect every day. They were no longer just witnesses. Delaney had decided she couldn’t trust a word they said; so why waste her breath and interview them at all. She felt spiteful that they’d pulled a fast one on her and Casper. They had higher hopes for Tommy Renard.

  Renard answered his door in cutoff jeans and spattered t-shirt that was more paint stains than t-shirt at present. “Can I help you two?” he snapped.

  “We’d like to ask some follow-up questions from our interview the other day. Can we come in?” Delaney asked with her best fake smile.

  “No, you may not. We can speak like this. Now, what do you need me to answer?” he snarled.

  Casper stepped closer to the screen door and took the lead. “Have you seen either of the missing men?”

  “Missing men? I thought they were all part of some magic trick.”

  “These men weren’t involved. Jared Sorrentino and Hector Ramos,” Casper said while he held up the MISSING poster that held both of their photos. “They parked in the lot down off Punkhorn road and were in the trails at night not far from here.”

  Renard let out a slimy laugh that made Delaney want to take a long, hot shower. “Serves ‘em right then, going in there at night.”

  Delaney snapped, “Sir, this isn’t something to laugh about. Do you or do you not have information about those men?”

  Renard spit through the screen door and particles flew through the tiny holes and onto both Delaney and Casper. “You can get off my land now. Tell Chief Slime-r to leave me out of this.”

  Casper froze, waiting on Delaney to move first, but she stayed still. “Sir, we’d like to—”

  “I don’t give a damn what you’d like to do. This is just like the last time, fancy policemen come in here and accuse me of something I didn’t do. Tarnish my good name around town. So, I’d like you to get the hell off my property before I go and dig out my shotgun.”

  “Are you threatening a police officer, sir? That’s a criminal offense,” Delaney added. Hoagie let out a bark from the car.

  Renard’s hands were out of sight, but he grinned. “I know better than to do such a thing. I was talking to your nosey sidekick over there. That ain’t illegal, is it?”

  Without a word, Delaney stepped back from the door and retreated to her car. She glanced back at Renard and then turned the car on and floored it out of the driveway. Once they were moving, she said “Asshole” under her breath and Casper grinned.

  “Lovely people you’ve got here in Brewster, Delaney,” Casper said. “I see what’s kept you here so long.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Saturday, August 11th

  Casper and Delaney stared at a mess of papers, folders, and photos spread across the metal table in the smallest interrogation room of the Brewster Police Station. Delaney had dumped the box containing everything the department had gathered on the missing people and relevant interviews. Now, it was up to them to find the needle in a haystack. Although, in looking for a needle, there’s always a risk you could get poked.

  Javier Ruiz had offered to take Hoagie for a walk around the block to give the two of them some time to focus. Delaney didn’t expect him back anytime soon. Unfortunately, they didn’t have a corkboard upon which they could pin up photos and connect co-conspirators with strands of red and yellow yarn. BPD was as low-budget as it got, so the hard way was how they solved the handful of semi-serious crimes that fell into their hands each year. Although, as the chief had noted numerous times to Delaney, they’d never seen anything like what had happened in the Punkhorns.

  Delaney dug through the pile, trying to sort files by topics and themes. She soon gave up, exasperated. “It’s all jumbled. Maybe dumping it out wasn’t the best approach after all,” she laughed.

  Casper took a deep breath and stood to look down upon the haphazard stack that he hoped contained the break they so desperately needed. It wasn’t lost on him that every moment counted in a missing persons case, and the chief had assured them that Hector and Javier’s families were devastated and hungry for an update. Any update.

  “Remember your original take? Your Sherlock Holmes quote? Then you wisely added that the simplest answer is likely true. So, what is possible and simple? Let’s start with possible,” Delaney said.

  Casper hummed as he thought. “It’s possible that they ran away together. It’s possible that they got hurt in the forest and we can’t find them. It’s possible that somebody hurt them.”

  “Okay, okay. What’s simplest?” Delaney added.

  “Simplest? I think somebody hurt them. Running away together and leaving behind their car is questionable. A search would have turned up something indicating they were hurt, maybe.”

  “I don’t know. The Punkhorns are a maze that almost nobody has a map to. I wouldn’t count that out,” Delaney commented. “I think it’s one of those two. Foul play or injury.”

  Casper agreed. “So, Sherlock Shepard, how do you want to attack that hypothesis?”

  “Well, let’s divide this mess into three stacks. First, let’s consolidate anything that might indicate that they got lost or injured. That’ll be maps, testimonies of other folks who have been hurt in there, and anything else about the forest. Next pile, anything that indicates foul play. Background on the two men and their potential enemies. Information on the neighbors and people seen in the area at the time of their disappearance. Stuff like that,” Delaney said.

  “And the third?” Casper asked.

  “The third is the stuff that doesn’t fit in either group. We can throw that back into the box and clean out some of this clutter. Sound good?”

  Casper nodded and the two of them got to work. Casper glanced in each manila folder before placing it in its pile. The officers had compiled such an exhaustive set of documents that the two stacks stood nearly a foot high, even with more than half of the files back in the box and off the table.

  They stood back and looked at their organized mountains of background information. “Which do you want?” Casper asked.

  “I’ll take the injury angle. I know the trails better than you,” Delaney decided. “You good with the darker of our theories? Don’t want to spook you too badly.”

  Casper chuckled. “I’ve got it handled. Where’s the coffee?”

  Delaney nodded towards the small break room between the
interrogation room and the maintenance closet. “It’s a Keurig, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Casper waited for his cup to fill and read through the first file. It was background on Jared Sorrentino from a college roommate who said that Jared had sold weed for a semester to earn extra cash to ease his student loans. Casper read on but discarded the report when he saw that it was on one occasion that Jared had sold a small bag of weed to a group of girls he knew. He appeared to be far from a drug kingpin.

  Delaney read through a list of animal sightings from the perimeter of the Punkhorns. Multiple neighboring streets had complained of a crying and howling sound in the middle of the night. A zoologist from Hyannis weighed in after listening to a recording and insisted it was a pack of coyotes defending their territory. A similar complaint was debunked as a fox’s mating call. Delaney chuckled. These people chose to live so close to nature, yet remained ignorant to it. Still, coyotes and other animals could play a role in this case somehow.

  Sally had mentioned them attacking her dog. Could they have mistaken a human for prey?

  Casper sipped from a blue and yellow mug as he flicked through a report about a public intoxication complaint against Tommy Renard. The arresting officer had written: “Violent towards police. Angry about accusations from a previous case, but no formal charges will be filed. Tossed in a cell to sober up.”

  He handed the report to Delaney, who read it over. “Huh, didn’t know about that one. But then again, Eric Austin wasn’t with BPD for too long.”

  “The mention of “previous case” caught my eye. Remember what Renard shouted at us? He talked about being accused of something he didn’t do. Think that’s the drunk complaint, or something entirely different?”

  Delaney rifled through Casper’s stack until she found a yellow case file. “This one is for Renard. He’s listed as a suspect in his wife’s disappearance.”

 

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