Lesser Crimes

by Aitana Moore

  He would hide the money as well as he could, but he had no safe, so there was only one place where he could conceal things: under the floorboards. A room at the back had a desk and a computer. Lee moved around it, tapping her heel on the boards, and finally got a hollow sound close to the wall. On her knees, she pushed the carpet aside, looking for the edges of the loose board. She lifted it carefully.

  There was a hole, and inside it a duffel bag. Pulling the bag toward her, she unzipped it to reveal a great quantity of money in small bills: money that hadn't come from the bank, but from the street. It was untraceable money, ready to be thrown out into circulation again.

  It was drug money.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Lee stared at the money for a long while before she noticed the navy-blue passport with an elaborate coat of arms on the cover. It was stuck inside the paper band around a wad of bills, and it had been issued by the island of St. Kitts and Nevis.

  It was issued to Scott Hoffman.

  She knew about citizenship-by-investment in St. Kitts. Before she decided that the Caribbean was too risky, she had considered giving $200,000 to a development fund in those islands or others, like Antigua and Barbuda or Dominica, in exchange for a wholly legal passport.

  Transparency laws were being tightened every day in the age of terrorism, but Scott had died three years before, when he might still have gotten away with laundering money in St. Kitts. Meth was a profitable business, one that had given him quite a bit of cash in what must have been a short period of time. He had died at twenty-one: how young could he have been when he started cooking the drug?

  It was a shock to know that Scott — friendly, generous, trustworthy Scott — might have been a drug kingpin in the making, but Lee didn't believe for a moment that he had done it alone. To sell meth, he would have needed knowledge of the streets. He would have needed someone who could procure the chemical ingredients, far from the place where he lived. He would have needed contacts to move the drugs.

  Scott could never have done all that alone.

  There was a phone inside the duffel bag; she picked it up, turning it on. It had a photo of the Hoffmans on the home screen and was low on battery, but still worked. All messages had been erased. Why had Caleb kept Scott's phone?

  In any case, she had to get out of his house. She took a photo of the passport and put everything back in its place, except for the phone, since it might contain more clues to Scott’s death. As she walked out, locking the door behind her, she kept thinking there were more people involved in all this, apart from Scott and Caleb. It was far too big a job for two kids such as they had been three years ago.

  A loud ringing startled her as she got into her car. For a second, she thought it might be Scott's phone, but it was Caleb, calling her.

  "Why you going around asking questions about Scott, Lynn?"

  Noah would have looked puzzled or worried until Caleb got out of him that Lee had called him to Dolly's. It hadn’t taken long.

  "Why shouldn’t I ask about Scott?"

  "You weren't even here when it happened. I told you I took care of the Hoffmans. I went to see them. What damn stupid idea you got in your mind now?"

  She sounded calm as she asked, "How did he die, Caleb?"

  "You know."

  "That boy never took drugs."

  A silence preceded Caleb's reply. "No? Then how did he die?"

  "He was cooking meth."

  "The hell, Lynn? He had an overdose. We have the evidence."

  "Was it another open-and-shut case, Caleb?"

  She could hear Caleb's breathing; he was walking, probably trying to get out of earshot of others, and his voice was low when he warned, "Lynn, you stop getting involved in shit. Scott killed himself, I got proof. Don't you open your mouth about this to anyone, not anywhere — you hear?"

  "And I got a message for you from Billy. He said, don't keep the money. Burn it."

  The silence was much longer now. She had expected it to be.

  "I don't know what that means,” Caleb said.

  "I think you do."

  "Lynn! Goddamn it, you don't know what you're playing with!"

  Lee hung up, but her phone rang again almost immediately; it was Caleb. She turned it off.

  First things first: she needed to get out of that street. She drove toward the high school, where she could park behind the football field, and sat grasping the steering wheel.

  The wise course would be to go to Chief Fisher with the money, but he thought she was a murderess bent on discrediting his office. She couldn't even go to Noah, who would probably just ask Caleb to tell him the truth and might end up killed as well.

  James. He had asked her to think of him as her partner. He had helped her every time she needed it, but he would tell her to stay away from more complications before her trial. He would tell her not to get involved in anything else, and he would be right.

  He would be right, too, to think that she was reckless and stubborn. Something had happened in that town: Scott had been murdered, perhaps by Caleb; and Caleb would bury the case if she didn't get proof. He might be capable of killing her, who knew, but she wasn't afraid.

  Once more she turned on Scott's phone and connected it to her cable so that it would charge. What would she find in it that could help her? His contacts had been erased, and she spent a while trying to recover them without managing. The phone had been cleaned of calls, messages, and even its internet history was blank. But there were apps that had been deleted from the home screen and were still in the phone.

  She found Google Maps: an address had been searched in early 2014. It was north of Hawkshaw and Greensboro, in Rockingham County. It seemed to be, from what she could tell by zooming in, a place in the middle of a forest or woods.

  The place where Scott had used to cook the meth. The lab.

  Turning on her own phone, Lee wrote the address in her own more modern GPS app. It started to talk to her as she drove. It was a friendly female voice, and Caleb wasn't calling her anymore, which probably meant he was moving toward something or someone. Perhaps he was moving the same way she was.

  Idiot. You're an idiot. You're doing it again. You provoked Caleb. You need to call James, you need to tell him. You can't go to this place alone.

  James would stop her. He would want to go to the police when ...

  The realization surprised her: when she couldn't do that to Caleb. Not before she was sure.

  She had to be beyond sure that he was the heartless killer of his friend. It was possible; anything was possible — just as it had been possible for Scott, a young man of promise, to make drugs for profit.

  Anything was possible. No one ever knew anyone else. But she needed proof that Caleb was guilty.

  He hadn't laundered the money or destroyed it. Why?

  Lee didn't trust the authorities not to commit an injustice, not to put away the wrong people for Scott's murder, not to come to a facile conclusion. She trusted them even less than she trusted Caleb, and she had to find out the truth for herself.

  These thoughts occupied her mind as she drove as fast as she was allowed on the highway toward the point indicated in the map. A series of huge billboards announced the pleasures of junk food before the voice said, "After 0.1 miles, turn left. You have arrived at your destination."

  To her left there were woods, a gate, then more woods for a good stretch. The gate must lead to the property where Scott had set up the lab. The whole country was full of meth labs in woods, trailer parks, farms and even apartments.

  Apparently, however, Scott, Caleb and their accomplices had splurged on a place away from Hawkshaw and surrounded by trees.

  Lee parked on an empty dirt path to the right, making sure that her car was hidden from view. There wasn't any traffic, and she ran unseen to the other side of the road, skirting the fence as she watched out for cameras. She had no idea how paranoid or how prepared they were at that property, but when she saw a gap in the wire fence, she crawled u
nder it.

  Her bag strap was long, and she hung it across her body and made her way amid the trees. The lab could be anywhere in the woods, and she might give herself away before she even found it.

  After a quarter of an hour, she heard water and saw from her vantage point that a brook ran through the place. It formed a small lake surrounded by willows before narrowing again. Scott's job had been to protect the environment and the quality of water, and he had in fact been polluting it in the worst possible way.

  Lee picked up a strong, unpleasant smell before she spotted a cement shed to her left. It was a simple construction with dirty white walls and a roof of corrugated metal. As she passed it, she glanced through the windows. It was completely empty — eerily so. Abandoned sheds always had something inside: tools, gallons, empty containers, construction materials or debris. Something.

  Nothing was inside the shed, except the strong smell of cat piss. Lee no longer had any doubt that Scott had been cooking meth in that place. Now she must find out if Caleb had been his accomplice, and who else had been working with them.

  She rounded the corner carefully and saw a small covered boat on wheels, and beyond it a wooden cabin. Lee stopped short as Caleb’s voice floated to her.

  “It’s over now. People are following clues, and they’ll find this place.”

  A man replied in a low voice that she couldn't make out. Lee crept closer, hiding behind the trees. The cabin looked a bit ramshackle, like the house a man might use for hunting or fishing. The open door had a thick wooden bar on it, probably to keep it shut when the owner was outside, so that animals didn't wander in.

  Caleb was now within view, standing in his uniform with both hands on his waist as he faced whoever was behind the corner.

  "I ain’t gonna say anything about you, you bastard. I can't, can I?"

  "And I'm supposed to believe that, with Billy gone?"

  The voice reached Lee, loud and clear before the muzzle of a rifle appeared, followed by a tall, burly form she knew well.

  Caleb reached for his gun. "Put that away!"

  A shot rang out instead, and Lee muffled a scream as Caleb was thrown backwards onto the ground.

  "I'm sorry, buddy. I just can’t risk it," Ross said, standing over him.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  "Well, well, well, things keep getting interesting," Paxton said over the phone.

  James had just come out of the shower and stood rubbing his hair with a small towel as he put the attorney on speaker.

  "We've found the cabin Jada Phillips told you about," Paxton continued. "At least, we're pretty sure that's it. 'Woody's' gave it away. It's a defunct business in Rockingham County, and used to advertise on those old water towers. There's only one tower like that left, and only one road with the billboards she described. From there, our PI looked at properties along the stretch and found three. One was quite interesting. It's owned by a Caribbean firm in St. Kitts."

  "A Caribbean firm? The plot thickens."

  "It thickens even more than that. From 2016 on, property taxes for it were paid in cash, but once someone was stupid enough to write her name on a receipt. You'll never guess who."

  "Just tell me."

  "Madeleine Olson."

  "Madeleine ...?" James dropped the towel and picked up the phone. "Do you mean Maddy, Lee's sister-in-law?"

  "I'm guessing so. Isn't her husband's name Olson?"

  The cold, sick feeling that struck James was familiar. "And the St. Kitts business is in whose name?"

  "Still trying to find out. That might take a bit longer; they're notoriously tight-lipped over there, but there will be documents for the corporation somewhere. I'm guessing it will belong to the Olsons, or why would she be paying taxes on it?"

  For a moment, James stood thinking. "Why would they stop paying through the corporation? If they were trying to hide something, that would be stupid."

  "We'll find out when we know who's behind the company. But Joe Keane was friends with Maddy Olson and her husband, and he was using their cabin for his romantic encounters — except that he was sufficiently scared of them to drive out of there like a bat out of hell."

  "And get his head bashed in right after," James said, walking into the closet to grab a pair of jeans and a sweater.

  "Drugs," Paxton observed dryly. "That would explain his grand claims of soon being able to take Jada Phillips away, and also his family staying afloat through the crisis, although he had no job.”

  "Lee's there,” James said.

  "Pardon?"

  "Lee's in their house, and they must be counting on keeping their connection to Joe a secret so that she takes the rap for his murder. If they realize that I've spoken to Jada Phillips ... I have to go to Hawkshaw."

  "Wait a moment, James — isn't it better to let the police handle it?"

  "I need to get Lee out of that house as soon as possible."

  "Well,” Paxton said with a sigh, “I guess it's best if you do that. But be discreet."

  "I'm sure she'll answer the phone and I'll just tell her to meet me somewhere. Can you please forward the address of this cabin to me?"

  "Now, honey, you can't go there!"

  "Might not have to, but please do it."

  James had spoken with a confidence that he was starting not to feel. He dialed Lee's number, and it went to voicemail. He redialed, and again he got voicemail and left a message for her to call him back immediately.

  She might have turned off her phone for some reason, or not be next to it. But phones in the US also went to voicemail when the person you were trying to call was out of range.

  Why should anything be amiss at that exact moment? He was just being absurd, but he was dressed, his shoes were on and he ran down to his car, putting Lee on automatic redial as he placed the phone on the holder and drove toward Hawkshaw.

  Another more insistent voice in his head asked him why would her phone be off, or why would she be out of range? It was a voice that turned his blood as cold as a river slowly freezing. He kept getting Lee’s voicemail, and he thought of another time when he couldn’t find her, in Mexico. She had been in mortal danger then, and he couldn’t help but believe that something was wrong.

  She would have called him back by now, if she weren’t out of range. But where could “out of range” be in North Carolina?

  The days were longer now, and although it was four-thirty in the afternoon, the sun wouldn't go down for a while. As he drove toward Billy's house, James went over what Lee had told him about Maddy and Ross.

  Maddy Olson was preoccupied with money, with becoming secure, buying a house, having children.

  Ross Olson was one of the smartest people Lee knew. Now that Billy was gone, Ross would certainly start his own company and leave Hawkshaw. Ross, Lee had said, took night courses in business administration.

  Ross would know that he could open a shell company in the Caribbean to act as a front for his drug business. He could probably figure out how to launder money through it. But what would Joe Keane's role have been in all this? The traveling salesman could have procured things they needed in different places, to avoid suspicion. He would know where to find the right chemicals, produced right in the state. In any case, his role had ended early, when he had shown himself to be untrustworthy by taking a woman to a cabin where they cooked meth.

  Joe Keane, the big mouth, had been bludgeoned to death for that slip. What would Ross do to Lee, when he discovered that her lover had been talking to Jada Phillips and could place Joe at his cabin on the night of his murder?

  James parked two streets away from the house and walked toward it under the cover of trees. There was only one car in the driveway, and it wasn't Lee’s. It was a new Toyota: a better car than the Olsons ought to have been able to afford.

  Maddy appeared in the living room with a mug of coffee in her hand. She took the remote control and turned on the TV. Apparently, she was alone and didn’t seem to be under any stress.

  "Go throu
gh, go through," he told the phone as he walked back to his car and hit redial.

  The dreaded voicemail again …

  As he sat behind the steering wheel, wondering where to go, James told himself that Lee couldn't be at the cabin in Rockingham — unless Ross Olson had taken her there and hidden her car.

  Although Hawkshaw was small, James drove so quickly that his tires screeched as he parked before the police station. It would be absurd to repeat the same situation they had just gone through in the desert; he needed backup this time. He needed people with guns.

  "I'd like to speak to Officer Brooks, please," he told the receptionist.

  "Officer Brooks took a half day off," the woman told him. "A private matter. Anyone else?"

  "Is the chief in?"

  "Who may I say—?"

  James could see the chief from where he was, and he didn't wait. Chief Fisher, as the plaque on his table said, was reading Wrestling News with a frown of concentration. He looked up as the receptionist called out, without bothering to move from her place, "Visitor for you, Chief!"

  "I'm sorry for barging in," James said. "But I need your help."

  "You're Lynn Miller's Englishman,” the chief stated after staring at him over his glasses.

  "Something like that.”

  The stone on a large ring gleamed as Chief Fisher placed his hand on the table, over the newspaper he had folded. "What help do you need?"

  "You may know I'm involved in Lynette Miller's defense. It's a long story, but we found a house where Joe Keane took Jada Phillips on the night of the murder. It turns out that Ross Olson is connected to that house. And Lee is missing."

  "Whoa, whoa, whoa." The chief leaned back in his creaky wooden chair. "Can you slow down there a second?"

  Instead, James looked around the station. "Lee is missing, Officer Brooks is missing, and we have to get to that house."

  "Well, if you have something in the nature of a lead, we'll look into it, but—"

  "I'm asking for your help, but if you don't come, I'm going alone."

  There was no time to waste. James turned, walking at a swift pace toward the exit. More urgent creaking told him that the chief had gotten out of his chair and followed him. "Hang on there, sir. Sir? You can't just—"