Claire and Dom shared what they knew about Elbert Daniels—the treasure-hunting club, the silent partner, the brooch Mari had had. None of this was news to Zambuco.
“Only someone who knew about that treasure chest could have put Elbert in there,” Dom said.
“So it stands to reason that it was one of the other treasure hunters,” Claire added.
“Obviously, but what was the motive?” Zambuco asked.
“That’s what we can’t quite figure out. At first we thought it was greed. Something to have to do with the treasure, but none of them seems to have gotten rich back then. If they found the treasure and split it four ways anyway, why not share with Elbert too? Why kill just him? It doesn’t make sense.”
“What if the motive wasn’t money?” Claire asked.
Zambuco turned to her. “What are you thinking about? Jealousy? A lovers’ quarrel?”
“Most people share secrets with their spouses. He probably told his widow about the treasure. Maybe they didn’t have a good marriage, and she didn’t want to share his portion …” Claire let her voice drift off.
Zambuco’s eyes narrowed. “No one mentioned any kind of dirty secrets or problems at home.”
“But were you asking?” Claire paused for a few beats while Zambuco thought it over. “We weren’t specifically asking about that either. Maybe we should have been.”
“If you’re right, and the widow did it, then the two murders can’t possibly be connected. She moved away from the island shortly after Elbert went missing and died earlier this year.”
Dom’s eyebrow twitched. “She recently died?”
Could her death be connected or just coincidence?
Zambuco slurped his coffee. “It’s a good theory, but it doesn’t seem likely. Physically, it would be difficult for a woman to kill a man, stuff him in a treasure chest, and then bury it again. She would’ve had to have help.”
“Maybe Elbert’s wife was having a fling with one of the other treasure hunters and they were in on it together,” Claire suggested.
“Ahh, killing two birds with one stone, so to speak,” Dom said.
“Tweet!” Romeo tweeted his objection to the phrase loudly.
“Right, get rid of the husband, hook up with the wife, and get a double share of the bounty,” Zambuco said. “So we’re back to our original suspects, the members of the treasure-hunting club. I don’t recall hearing about any of them having a relationship with Elbert’s wife, but they might have kept it hidden.”
“But if that was the motive, then why kill Mari Wilkinson now?” Claire asked.
“Maybe she knew something. Had an incriminating picture of Liz Daniels and the killer.” Dom tapped his finger on his lips. “She did mention pictures when we were there, but we didn’t see anything with the treasure hunters being friendly with a woman.”
Claire glanced over at Zambuco. “Did you find any incriminating photos in there when you catalogued the crime scene?”
“No. None from that far back.”
“Maybe we should go and look.” Dom didn’t dare say that he already knew where all the old photos were. Even with this supposed newfound alliance with Zambuco, he didn’t want to let on that Robby had let them into the house.
“We could.” Zambuco hesitated. “But I’m not sure that would be a good use of time. Most likely her old pictures were more benign. I doubt she had something that showed an overt affair.”
Claire half stood, cocking her head sideways to look at the labels on the folders. She picked one and slid it in front of her then opened it up.
“Let’s attack this from another angle. What do we have on the search and rescue for Elbert? Killers will often insinuate themselves into the investigation. Was Elbert’s widow a part of it?” Claire asked. “If there are pictures, maybe I can read her body language in conjunction with the other searchers.”
Zambuco gestured toward a folder. “Of course. She was front and center. In fact, almost the entire town trekked all over the island trying to find him. Even Mari Wilkinson was out there!”
They leafed through the folder, which was a compilation of police reports, newspaper clippings, and old pictures.
“This tells us nothing,” Claire said. “I don’t see any secretive couples here.”
“Let’s not be too hasty,” Dom said. “You said most of the island was out on the search? Were the treasure hunters there? Maybe the killer was one of them, after all. We just said that killers like to insinuate themselves into the investigation.”
“Or stay away altogether. Maybe one of them was conspicuously absent,” Claire suggested.
Dom perched his half-moon glasses on his nose and reviewed the newspaper clippings. After a few minutes, he let out a breath. “Charlie Kuhn isn’t here.”
“Yeah, I know. I already checked,” Zambuco said softly.
“Benjamin Hill and Quentin Crane are here,” Dom said. “But not Bill Wilkinson.”
“But he couldn’t have killed Mari Wilkinson, so there’s no connection if he was Elbert’s killer,” Claire pointed out.
“Maybe there is no connection.” Zambuco ran a hand through his thinning hair. “It’s unlikely someone from Elbert’s time would physically be able to kill Mari. And the two living suspects, Hill and Crane, are old men. Crane is in a nursing home, for God’s sake!”
“Don’t underestimate the power of old men,” Claire warned. “Mari was no spring chicken, and she was tiny and frail. She would have been easy enough to overpower.”
“Even easier if you had a younger pair of arms to do the killing for you,” Dom suggested.
“What are you thinking?” Zambuco asked.
“Allen Hill. He goes everywhere with Ben,” Dom said.
“Ben did protest the digging very loudly. He was our first suspect.” Dom turned to Claire, who nodded.
“Yeah, mine too,” Zambuco said.
“Do you think Allen would be willing to commit murder to protect his grandfather?” Dom asked.
“Do you remember how protective he was of Ben while we were there? And Ben obviously lied to us about the treasure being found. We know that Charlie Kuhn took the treasure, whatever it was, to a collector on the mainland,” Claire said.
“And if he lied about the treasure, maybe he lied about how he came into his money,” Dom suggested.
“Or maybe he was able to make his initial investments because of the treasure,” Claire said.
“And if Allen suspects this, he wouldn’t want anything to come to light that might cause him to lose the family money,” Dom said.
“Can we connect Allen to Mari’s murder in any way?” Zambuco asked.
Dom slid another folder in front of him, the one on the Mari Wilkinson case. He opened it and quickly perused the notes, looking for eyewitness accounts of who had been near Mari’s that day. “The neighbors only saw him with his grandfather, and that was a day or two before she was killed. Does he have an alibi for the night of the murder?”
“I did speak with them because they were seen there, and Allen and Ben are each other’s alibis,” Zambuco said.
Claire snorted. “He’s tall. He might have wielded the murder weapon.”
“Which we still don’t have,” Dom said. “Perhaps a search of the Hill mansion is in order.”
Zambuco shook his head. “We need more evidence than that in order to get a warrant to search the premises.”
They fell silent as Dom read over the rest of the evidence from Mari Wilkinson’s case. “No sign of forced entry. Mari knew her attacker.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. No one locks their doors around here,” Claire said.
“You’re right. The killer could have walked right in. All we know is that they knew about the brooch and took it.”
“Brooch?” Zambuco asked.
Dom glanced up over the rims of his half eyeglasses. “Yes. Don’t tell me you didn’t know. Mari had a brooch that Bill said came from the treasure chest.”
; “I knew the killer rifled through her jewelry, but I didn’t know why. So they were looking for this brooch? Is it valuable?” Zambuco asked.
“Mari said it came from the treasure chest.” Dom put the paper back in the pile, picked the whole pile up, and tapped the edge on the table so the papers were perfectly aligned before placing them back in the folder. “She didn’t seem to think it had value, but I guess the killer figured it was proof of what was in the chest. Maybe they thought it could tie them to Elbert’s murder somehow, or maybe it really was valuable and only the killer knew that.”
“Well, if that’s true, the killer can’t be Charlie Kuhn.” Claire’s voice was tinged with relief. “If we’re going on the assumption that Elbert’s killer is the same person who killed Mari, that rules Charlie out for both killings.”
“True, but if we go on the assumption that another, much younger person killed Mari so as to cover up for Elbert’s killer, then Charlie is still in the running … and I’m afraid that implicates Jane,” Dom said.
“But we know it wasn’t Jane, and that brooch … if it was valuable…” Zambuco’s face turned thoughtful. “We may have been coming at this from the wrong angle. And there is one thing you guys haven’t addressed.”
Dom stiffened in his chair, somewhat taken aback. “Oh? What might that be?”
Zambuco pushed up from the table and paced the small room. “If Mari’s and Elbert’s murders are related, then the killer must either be incapacitated or not know where Elbert was buried. Everyone knew about the pharmacy groundbreaking well in advance. It was approved six months ago, so why didn’t he or she sneak over and dig up the trunk themselves before the groundbreaking? They could have avoided the discovery of Elbert’s body in the first place, and things would have gone on as they have for the past sixty years. Maybe Mari’s murder has nothing to do with covering up Elbert’s.”
“Twimpessed.” Romeo clung to the side of his cage, giving Zambuco an approving look.
Dom was kind of impressed, too. Maybe Zambuco was a better detective than he had given him credit for. Dom slid his eyes over to Claire. She looked just as embarrassed as he felt. Zambuco had a darn good point. They’d been so focused on finding a motive that tied into the treasure and desperately trying to prove Jane or her father had nothing to do with it that they’d overlooked the obvious.
“Well, Ben did protest very heavily, and, if our theory about Allen killing Mari to cover for Ben is true, maybe he didn’t know anything about Ben’s involvement with Elbert until after the body was dug up,” Claire said weakly.
Zambuco, who had paced over to the French doors and was looking out, spun on his heel to face them. “But Ben must have known his protests wouldn’t stop the digging. Why not just remove the chest before the dig started? Why draw attention to the fact that he didn’t want that area dug up? That would guarantee putting his name at the top of the suspect list, and Benjamin Hill doesn’t seem that stupid.”
Dom carefully brushed the crumbs from the table. What if they had assumed wrongly all along? What if they’d misconstrued the evidence? That would explain why most of it led them down the wrong trail. But given the absence of the brooch and the condition of Mari’s room, it did seem like her murder had something to do with the brooch …
“So you’re saying Mari’s murder may have been about the brooch, just not in the way we thought?” Dom said. “That certainly does shed some light on things that didn’t quite make sense to me.”
“What do you mean?” Claire asked.
“Do you remember Diane Randall, that nurse from Greenbriar Manor? On our first visit, I overheard her complain about needing money. We know she visited Mari Wilkinson, and Quentin had been telling her treasure-hunting stories. Maybe she somehow figured out Mari had that brooch and thought she could get away with stealing and selling it.”
Claire snapped her fingers. “That’s right! Alice saw the van driven by a woman matching her description at Mari’s house ... and whoever cleaned out Elbert’s storage locker matches that description, too.”
“Storage locker?” A look of confusion crossed Zambuco’s face, and Dom felt a perverse pleasure in knowing they had dug up another clue that Zambuco didn’t know about.
“Elbert had a storage locker. Velma and Hazel told us he kept the equipment from the treasure-hunting club there, but when we went to take a look, someone had emptied it out,” Dom said.
Zambuco looked at them incredulously. “But Elbert was dead. Who was paying for the locker?”
“Oh, Marcy just kept it for him. Old island policy that we take care of our own,” Claire said. “Sure, if she needed to rent it, she would have, but she never needed that locker all these years. Her daddy thought maybe someone would come for the stuff eventually.”
Zambuco shook his head. Mainlanders often didn’t understand the tight-knit ways of the islanders. “Okay, but what does this have to do with this Randall woman? How does the storage locker relate to the brooch?”
“I’m not sure. But we found pebbles that could be from Greenbriar in the empty storage locker. Maybe Quentin told her they had stuff stored in there, and she thought she could cash in on some treasure,” Dom said.
“And you know for sure it was this Randall woman that looked in the locker?” Zambuco asked.
Claire shook her head. “We aren’t sure who cleaned it out, but Marcy told us someone was there before us to look at it, and the woman matched Diane Randall’s description.”
“That’s just a guess. We need to know for sure if we’re going to pursue this,” Zambuco said.
“Easy enough to do,” Dom said. “We’ll just show a picture of Diane Randall to Marcy.”
“How can we get a picture of her?” Claire asked.
“She’s an employee of Greenbriar Manor. They have pictures for their records and employee badges.” Dom turned to Zambuco. “And I’m sure Detective Zambuco here with his police credentials can get them to text a picture to his cell phone, which we can then show Marcy.”
Zambuco already had his phone out, fumbling on the display screen with his thick thumbs.
“I can’t believe we didn’t think of this before. But it makes perfect sense. Elbert’s killer isn’t running amuck hiding evidence, and he didn’t kill Mari. Her death had nothing to do with Elbert’s, which is why no one dug up the treasure chest to keep it from being unearthed in the pharmacy groundbreaking. His killer is probably long dead. We’ve been barking up the wrong tree all along,” Claire said.
“Twee!” Romeo tweeted.
“This could be our chance to get you that suspect your boss wants and clear Jane.” Dom pushed up from the table and collected the dirty dishes.
Zambuco hung up the phone then stared at the display. “Robby’s having them send a picture, and he’s doing a background check on her to see if she has any priors.”
Ping!
“That’s it! That’s the picture.” Zambuco held the phone up, showing a picture of Diane Randall.
“That’s her. The woman from Greenbriar,” Claire confirmed.
“Well, what are we waiting for?” Zambuco started toward the door. “Let’s go find out if she’s our killer.”
18
Claire didn't waste time going to the storage unit office; the odds were Marcy wouldn't be there. “Let’s go straight to the house. Hopefully she is home.”
Zambuco pulled around back, and Claire was relieved to see Marcy’s Prius in the driveway.
Claire hopped out of the car and sprinted to the house, pounding on the door. “Marcy, open up! We need your help.”
A few seconds later, they heard the clank of the safety chain, the door cracked, and Marcy peered out at them. “Claire? What are you doing here?”
She opened the door the rest of the way, her eyes widening when she saw Zambuco and Dom. “What’s this about? Has there been some trouble?”
“No, not really. We’re looking into Mari’s murder, and we think you might be able to help us,” Claire sai
d.
“Help you?” Marcy looked pleased at the thought. “Well, I’ll do whatever I can.”
“Remember when you told us a young woman came to look in Elbert’s locker?” Dom asked.
“Yes, but I didn’t get her name.”
“That’s okay.” Zambuco held up the phone. “Is this her?”
Marcy took the phone then nodded. “Yes. Yes, I’m sure that is her.” Her eyes flicked from Dom to Claire to Zambuco. “Oh my gosh, is she the killer?”
“Well, we don’t know that for sure, but she has come up in the investigation, and we think she might be the person who broke in and stole everything out of Elbert’s locker,” Dom said.
Marcy frowned. “Broke in? Nobody broke in.”
“But you said the locker was full two weeks ago, and when we looked in it, it was empty,” Dom said.
Marcy nodded. “That’s true. But nobody broke in. Remember, the lock was still intact, and it was the original lock. We had a hard time opening it. If someone broke in, the lock would have been cut.”
“So whoever removed the items from the locker had a key?” Claire’s stomach swooped. Was the theory about Diane wrong? How would she get a key to Elbert’s locker? And if it wasn’t her, then who emptied it?
Ding!
Zambuco grabbed his phone back from Marcy. “It’s Robby. Dammit! Diane has no priors.”
Claire’s stomach fell even further. “This can’t possibly be her first time doing something like this. It’s too complicated. Could we have been wrong? Maybe she’s just never been caug—”
Ding!
“It’s Robby again.” Zambuco scrolled his index finger on the display, and a smile slowly bloomed on his face. “I’ve been trying to teach the boy, and finally he’s learning to take initiative, and it’s paying off.”
“What do you mean?” Dom looked at the phone over Zambuco’s shoulder.
“Robby dug further into Diane Randall’s background. It turns out Diane Randall is Elbert Daniels’s granddaughter.”
A Treacherous Treasure Page 11