Blind Vigil

by Matt Coyle

  “Now what can I do for you folks?” Jake Hunter.

  “Moira and I are here investigating the murder of Shay Sommers.”

  “You mean June’s daughter? The little towhead?” His voice pitched higher. He was shaken. I figured with the national attention the murder received, everyone in the Bellevue area who knew the Sommers family would have already heard about it.

  “Yes. I’m sorry to have to break it to you. I thought you would have already heard about it.”

  “No. We haven’t heard a thing. I haven’t thought about the Sommers family since June died in Portland two or three years ago. That’s a real shame. Shay was the sweetest little girl you’d ever want to meet. Murdered, you say?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Did you catch the person who did it?”

  Here’s where things could get tricky. I hadn’t said we were with the police, but I didn’t mind Jake Hunter thinking we were. Law-abiding citizens would be more willing to open up to the police working on behalf of the prosecution than they would be to investigators working for the defense, even though, technically, we weren’t. Americans believed in the principle of innocent until proven guilty, but the power of the badge conveyed guilt to most people who were busy living their own lives.

  “There is someone in custody,” I said.

  “What do you need from me? I always do what I can to support law enforcement. I’m truly sorry Shay Sommers is dead, but I haven’t seen her in twenty, twenty-five years.”

  “We’re not law enforcement.” Moira saved me a decision. “We’re private investigators.”

  A figure appeared in the living room with arms outstretched in front of it. Claire Hunter with a tray of strawberry lemonade.

  “Little Shay is dead?” Claire Hunter, a quaver in her voice.

  “Yes, ma’am. Did you know her?” I tried to sprint past the detective versus investigator issue.

  “You’re not the police?” No such luck. Jake Hunter, his head tilted to the side.

  Claire set the tray down with a clack on the table in front of us, then hovered in front of me.

  “No.” Moira.

  “I put your lemonade right in front of you, Mr. Cahill.” Claire, her voice still caught in the news of Shay Sommers’ murder. She moved over to where Jake was sitting and stood behind him.

  “Thanks.”

  “Then why did you say you were on the phone?” Hunter, directed at me.

  “I think I said I was a detective.”

  “But not a private detective.” Sharp. “When people hear the word detective all by itself, they think police.”

  “My mistake. I apologize.”

  “If you’re not police detectives, then why are you here?”

  “We’re investigating Shay’s death, and a man from Idaho named Keenan Powell keeps popping up.” I pulled out my wallet and flipped open the clear holder on the flip side of my driver’s license that held my private investigator’s license issued by the California Bureau of Security and Investigative Services. “We’re trying to gather any information we can about Shay Sommers and people she might have known, like Keenan Powell. He’s from this part of Idaho and his bio says he worked on a ranch when he was a teenager. You folks own the biggest ranch around here. Have you ever heard of him?”

  “Nope.” Jake Hunter. “And it’s time for you to leave. You should have been up front when you left a message on the phone. We like to deal direct with people here. I guess this kind of deception is commonplace out in California, but we don’t appreciate it here in Idaho.”

  “You’re right.” I nodded my head and wished, not for the first time, that I was more like Moira. “I should have been more direct. I’m just trying to make sure the police have the right man in jail. Moira came out here to help me because she’s my friend. She’s got nothing to do with my detective/investigator game of semantics.”

  “Are you investigating for the defense?” Jake Hunter.

  “Not officially.” I leaned in Hunter’s direction and spread my hands. “Here’s the whole truth. The police arrested a friend of mine for the murder. I don’t think he did it. Moira’s not sure, but she’s willing to track down any clues that lead to the truth, whatever it is. This Keenan Powell person could lead to the truth, one way or the other.” I took out my phone and unlocked the screen, bringing up the picture that I’d saved there of Keenan Powell’s Blank Slate Capital’s bio page with his photo. “Please look at this picture and tell me if you’ve ever seen this man.”

  I stuck my phone out in Jake Hunter’s direction. The ripping sound of movement on leather, then an arm reached over and grabbed my phone.

  “Nope. Never seen him.” The phone was placed back in my hand.

  “Ma’am?” I held the phone up in Claire Hunter’s direction.

  “I’ve never seen him, either.” Quick, backing her husband.

  A gust of wind blew in from the hallway and a door slammed.

  “The wind’s coming up.” Loud male voice. Boots on hardwood floor. “Colder than a you know what out there.”

  A figure entered the living room with a triangle-shaped head. A cowboy hat. I would have known it was a male even if I hadn’t heard his voice. The cocksure walk even translated to a blind man. The figure strolled toward Moira. Cigarettes, leather, and horse smells roiled together to form a cloud of Cowboys’ brew.

  “Jimmy Hunter.” An arm down to Moira. “Nice to meet you.”

  “This is Moira MacFarlane and Rick Cahill.” Jake Hunter jumped in. “They came here from California impersonating police officers and they are about to leave.”

  “Whoa.” A laugh from Jimmy.

  “Sorry you folks had to come all the way out here misrepresenting yourselves and come up empty, but it’s time to go.” Jake Hunter.

  I saw Moira stand up out of the corner of my eye.

  “Big Jake has spoken.” Jimmy Hunter. “Time to go. I’ll walk you out.”

  Moira took a step and her outline turned toward me. “Rick.”

  I carefully found the lemonade glass and took a sip. The taste made me wish I would have been more straightforward. I stood up.

  “Thanks for allowing us into your home. Mrs. Hunter, that’s the best lemonade I’ve ever tasted.”

  “Thank you.” Reserved, like she wasn’t sure how much credence to give me.

  A grunt came from her husband’s direction.

  I should have listened to Moira and been honest from the jump. Starting with the phone message I left on Jake Hunter’s voicemail.

  Old habits die hard. So does stupidity.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  MOIRA AND JIMMY Hunter were waiting on the porch. An artic wind froze my cheeks.

  “You pissed off Lord Jake.” He chuckled. “Never a good idea. What kind of a con were you trying to run on him?”

  “We weren’t running a con.” Moira, full-auto delivery. “We’re private detectives investigating the murder of Shay Sommers and—”

  “Murder?” His voice broke high like his brother’s had. “That cute little girl? Son of a bitch. What happened?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out,” I said. “And we think this guy is somehow connected.” I pulled out my phone, unlocked it, and thrust it toward Hunter. The photo of Keenan Powell should have still been on the screen.

  A hand grabbed the phone.

  “How old is this picture?”

  “Maybe three or four years.” Moira. The one person between the two of us who’d recently seen Powell in person. “He doesn’t look too much older now.”

  “The name Powell rings a bell and his face looks kind of familiar, but the Powell I’m thinking of was a nephew of the foreman who used to run the ranch hands before we incorporated the old Lazy S ranch into Smokey Mountain. The kid worked on the ranch a couple weeks each summer. He was a teenager back then. I think he went by Bill or Billy.”

  The hair on the back of my neck spiked and it had nothing to do with the icy wind.


  I turned toward Moira. “Keenan Powell’s middle name is William.”

  “Mr. Hunter.” Moira. “Can we buy you a cup of coffee?”

  “Follow me.” Hunter hopped off the porch. “Coffee shop’s five miles north in Bellevue.”

  We drove for nine or ten minutes, then pulled into a parking lot next to a one-story structure with an overhang jutting out sideways from the roof area. We got out of the car into the cold and followed Jimmy Hunter under the awning into the building. Hunter had a confident strut that was so bowlegged that even my limited eyesight could discern the gap between his legs.

  The bitter aroma of coffee smacked me in the nose when we entered the building. I’m not a coffee drinker but the smell was homey and comforting and the room was warm.

  “Welcome to Coffee Corner,” a female voice greeted us before the door closed behind me.

  We settled at a small table in the corner of Coffee Corner. I ordered a hot chocolate, Moira a latte, Jimmy Hunter, coffee. Black, of course.

  “How many summers did this Billy work on the ranch?” I asked.

  “Well, let’s see.” Hunter’s cowboy-hatted head went back like he was thinking. “Maybe two or three. I think he stopped around the time we bought the Lazy S.”

  “Was the Lazy S the Sommers’ ranch?” I asked.

  “Yep. Sure was.”

  Was the ranch the connection between Shay and Keenan Powell? But Shay would have only been two or three years old, and Hunter said Powell stopped working at Smokey Mountain Ranch before Shay’s mother sold the ranch and Colt Benson ran off with the money.

  “How old do you think Powell was his last summer on the ranch?” Moira. She’d taken the bit.

  “Sixteen, seventeen. It was a long time ago and I probably talked to the kid maybe ten times. Quiet. Seemed like he worked hard. I might have run cattle with him once his last summer on the ranch. Competent. But I could be confusing him with any of the other twenty or thirty kids who worked on the ranch part-time in the summer over the years.”

  Sixteen or seventeen years old could have been Keenan Powell’s junior or senior year in high school. After that he would have been onto the community college in Twin Falls.

  “What’s Billy Powell’s uncle’s name? Is he still your foreman?” Maybe he was still in the area and could give us more information on Keenan Powell.

  “Oh, hell no.” A chuckle. “He’s long gone. Probably been dead twenty, twenty-five years.”

  The back of my neck prickled.

  “What was his name?”

  “Colt Benson.”

  Moira’s head snapped toward me. I couldn’t make out her expression, but I didn’t have to. Colt Benson. Shay Sommers’ father.

  “The man who was Shay’s father?” Moira, wanting to be sure.

  A shadow popped up next to me. The girl from behind the counter with our hot beverages. Table-side service. That beats someone mispronouncing your name and shouting it across the coffee shop.

  “Well,” Hunter picked back up after a sip of coffee and a loud “ah.” “Ole Colt claimed to me and Jake once that he wasn’t really the father, but was standing in as him because the real one wouldn’t step up and left town.”

  “Did you believe him?” I asked?

  “Maybe half of it.” Another chuckle.

  “What do you mean?” Moira

  “Colt was not a stand-in or stand-up kind of guy.” Hunter’s hand went up to his head. When it came down, his head had a normal rounded outline. He’d taken his hat off and set it on a chair at the next table over. “He was just the opposite of one. Maybe that makes him a sit-down kind of guy. Anyway, whether he was or wasn’t Shay’s actual father, he took on the responsibility so he could stay close to June Sommers, Shay’s mom.”

  “Why would he do that?” I asked, but I was pretty sure I already knew the answer.

  “In my opinion, he started formulating the plan the first day he saw June when he, Jake, and I met with her to discuss her interest in selling the Lazy S. She was a city girl who didn’t know the first thing about ranching. Her parents died in a small engine plane crash and left her the Lazy S.”

  “Wait a second,” I jumped in. “I thought June Sommers was from Bellevue. All due respect, even blind I can tell this isn’t a city.”

  “She grew up in Portland, Oregon. Her parents moved out here and bought the ranch after June went to college.” Another sip of coffee and another “ah.”

  “They didn’t know anything about ranching either, but they dabbled in livestock. Cattle for a few years, then pigs, then back to cattle. Nice folks, but still greenhorns by the time they died.”

  “So June Sommers showed up, and you and your brother offered to buy the ranch from her.” I took my first sip of the hot chocolate. Hot and chocolate. Perfect for an Idaho winter’s day.

  “Yeah. Jake saw the opportunity to expand and pick up another six hundred fifty acres of grazing land. At first, June wanted to keep the ranch in the family because her parents loved it so much. Didn’t take her very long to figure out she was in way over her head. By then, she was dating Colt, and he quit Smokey Mountain to work at the Lazy S as June’s foreman. Now, they only had fifty, sixty head of cattle at the time and didn’t really need a foreman. June already had three or four ranch hands—one of them, Eddie Sands from McCall, was kind of the de facto foreman. But Courteous Colt convinced her that she needed someone to lord over the hands. Waste of money.”

  “How long did he work at your ranch?” I asked.

  “Nine or ten years.”

  “Did Billy Powell go work for his uncle after he took over the Lazy S?” I asked

  “Hell, no. Colt couldn’t afford to pay the kid what we did.”

  “You clearly had a low opinion of Colt Benson. Why did he work at your ranch for so long?” Moira asked.

  “He was a friend of my brother’s from college.” A sniffed laugh. “And as you can tell from your talk with Jake, he runs the show. Colt grew up in Bozeman and he did know his way around a horse, but his best asset was his mouth.” Hunter shifted in his chair to face Moira. “He could charm the rattle off a rattlesnake.”

  “And that charm worked on your brother?” Moira shifted slightly forward in her chair.

  “Mostly. It was wearing off by the time Colt jumped ship. But it started a couple years before that after Colt convinced Jake to invest in some stock market gimmick that turned to shit. Pardon my language.” A nod in Moira’s direction. “Jake lost about twenty grand. A lot of money to him back then. Hell, a lot of money to me right now.”

  The skin on the back of my neck prickled for the second time in the last hour. The stock market. Keenan Powell, CFO and general counsel at Blank Slate Capital, which managed a hedge fund. Had he picked up where his uncle left off?

  “Your brother took stock advice from his ranch foreman?” I asked.

  “A ranch foreman with a degree in finance who worked on Wall Street right out of college, but supposedly wanted to return to the more simple life of his childhood.”

  Colt Benson, uncle to Keenan Powell, had worked on Wall Street. The tumblers were clicking into place, but the last number wouldn’t fit. It couldn’t.

  “You don’t believe Colt Benson left Wall Street on his own terms?”

  “The guy was too slick to me from the jump.” Hunter now shifted toward me, hunched over the table. “What everyone else thought was charm, I read as smarm. So, when I found out Big Jake was investing with him, I did a little research on Colt’s Wall Street past. I didn’t find any kind of smoking gun that the guy was crooked or that he was fired from Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. But no one had anything nice to say about him. Nothing derogatory, but none of the four people I was able to talk to on the phone endorsed him. What they didn’t say said a whole lot more than what they did.”

  “You know that Benson stole the proceeds from the sale of the ranch and disappeared, right?” Moira.

  “Yep. We let June and Shay stay on the Lazy S
rent free for as long as they wanted, but June found a job down in Twin Falls within a year. The whole Colt thing left a bad taste in her mouth, and she wanted to get out of here as soon as she could.”

  Twin Falls. Where Keenan Powell went to community college for a year. I wondered if his year overlapped when Shay and her mother lived there.

  “Did your brother ever hear from Benson after he disappeared?” Moira.

  “No. He was on the lam. According to June, any large withdrawals from their joint account required both of their signatures and he forged hers.” Another nasal laugh. “Actually, June found out he went to the bank’s branch in Boise to make the withdrawal. Had a woman with a fake ID who forged June’s signature. The police in Twin Falls and Boise lost interest pretty quickly and June hired a private investigator, like you folks. I don’t know what became of that. She moved down to Twin Falls around that time and I only saw her once or twice after that.”

  “Do you know the name of the investigator she hired?” I asked. Maybe the P.I. found out something useful about Colt Benson and, more importantly, Keenan Powell.

  “I don’t, but Jake does. He started using a private investigator to run background checks on prospective employees after the Colt Benson mess.” The laugh. “He figured if he didn’t know what kind of a person a friend of his really was, he’d better start checking up on strangers he wanted to hire. I’ll call him and find out the guy’s name.”

  Screech of a chair pushed back along the floor and Jimmy Hunter’s body stood up.

  “If you’ll excuse me, ma’am.” Hunter’s form turned toward Moira. “Big Jake may not be in the best of moods, so I’ll call him outside.”

  Boots on wooden floor, then out the door.

  “Well.” I slid toward Moira. “We don’t know why Shay and Powell were meeting, but at least we know they weren’t having an affair.”

  “Maybe. It’s still a possibility. But all this Idaho intrigue doesn’t mean that Turk didn’t kill Shay. He clearly thought Shay was having an affair. That’s all that matters.” Moira cut me off before I could even get to the pass. “The police arrested him for a reason. They must think whatever forensic evidence they have is a slam dunk.”