Carolina Crimes

by Nora Gaskin Esthimer

  Did she really have to answer that? “To see if you’d tell me the truth,” she said. “To use it as an indication of how the rest of our conversation might go.”

  It was her turn to move on without warning. “So I ask again, do you have any of his personal property or old files of his in the office? Don’t forget, I can tell now when you’re lying.”

  He glared at her. She held the gaze, deciding that she wanted pizza for lunch. One of those new buffalo chicken ones the Hut had on the buffet. She glanced at her watch/fitness tracker. It was still an hour until they opened up the pizza trough.

  Mr. Xander reddened at the neck and about the ears. After a huff, he hollered at the partially closed door. “Grace!”

  For a finance guy, he was horrible at the game chicken. He flinched pretty fast. Maybe he didn’t give a shit. He had his money and nothing to hide.

  A tired-looking young woman with premature salt and pepper hair stuck her head in. “Yes, sir?”

  “Is the box that belonged to Mitch still in the storage room?”

  If it was, Jillie decided it most likely would not implicate Frazier McWilliam Xander in Mitchell’s death, or he’d have played a better game.

  Grace’s mouth twisted to one side as she thought. “I think so.”

  He looked back to Jillie. “I doubt there’s anything in there to help Candice. The cops looked at everything when he went missing. As his sister, she is, of course, welcome to it.” He looked back to Grace. “Give it to Miss Dolan, and show her out.”

  He started typing on his keyboard on the otherwise empty desk. There weren’t even finger prints. Too much shiny. She bet Gracie had to polish it every day before leaving the office.

  “Thank you,” Jillie chirped sweetly.

  He didn’t respond. She had been dismissed. Grace had already made her exit.

  “Nice talking to you. Frazier,” she added, just to be snarky, and followed Grace out.

  The Wife

  Jillie had read the interview with Leslie Lorraine Hart-Neil documented in the police report. What was with all the hyphenated names in this family?

  She’d never been close enough to marriage to consider what she would do with her own name. Dropping Dolan and adding a new name seemed like an adventure to Jillie. Adding one more would push the it’s-cool-to-have-something-different name thing into the realm of overkill.

  The officers who spoke to Leslie had noted she seemed cold. Quiet. Not as emotional as one should be if your spouse was missing. As if there was a template on that shit. They checked her background, her acquaintances, questioned her friends. Nothing indicated a lover, and they had looked. If no lover, then what motive would the woman have to kill her husband?

  The insurance Leslie received when he was finally declared dead wasn’t enough to give her an extravagant life. Five hundred grand. She had downsized, gone back to work herself, and managed to raise their daughter on her own, instead of remarrying.

  Jillie had called ahead so there was no surprise when Leslie Hart-Neil opened the door before Jillie reached the top step of the stoop.

  “Candice wants to dig up old bones. She was always convinced that someone killed Mitch.” Leslie held the door back to allow Jillie entrance. The place was neat, smelled like pink air freshener. Whatever sweet scent that shit was. Freesia, Rose? Jillie wondered. Leslie headed for the small kitchen.

  “Even told people that I had murdered her brother. So now you’re here. Coffee?” She held up a pot.

  “Sure.” It was the first word Jillie had managed.

  Leslie poured. Jillie noticed a family portrait, at least ten years old, of Mitchell, their daughter Chris Lynn Neil—sharp, clean name; she liked it—and Leslie, all in matching white sweaters at the beach on a lovely day.

  “If you’re here to help her dig that up again, you can take a big sip of that Hawaiian blend, and be on your way.” Leslie smiled as she said it, but there was a hint of attitude with it.

  “She’s convinced he didn’t commit suicide.”

  “At the time, I didn’t think it was possible either.” Leslie’s gaze darted to the portrait and back. “For Chris, if nothing else. Mitchell was a planner. He wanted everything perfect for that girl. We were on our way to saving for college, retiring early.” She shook her head.

  “But?”

  She let out a little chuckle. “The bubble. The market crashed. He was under so much stress.”

  “Bad investments?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Not so much for us, personally. Our investments dropped, but not catastrophically. But some clients were very upset. He was constantly on the phone. I heard him give the same reassurance speech over and over. And he delivered it to me more than once. Hold tight. It will pass. But not everyone held tight.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I remember a man who worked at one of the telecom companies. He’d try to play the odds. Bet on the falling prices or something. Short selling, maybe. Whatever it was, he lost everything. House, retirement, all of it.”

  “It’s got to suck for a financial advisor to watch his client go through.” Jill settled onto a barstool at the small island. It was cluttered with clean dishes and a stack of unopened bills.

  “That one wasn’t his client. He was Frazier’s. The man jumped off an overpass onto I-40.” Leslie hugged the coffee mug to her chest and shivered a bit. “But still, Mitchell felt the pressure. So when he disappeared, after a few months with no leads, not a word from him, I had to consider the fact that he’d given up.” Her eyes went still and dark.

  Jillie gave her a few heartbeats to feel that pain. “So you think he did?”

  “Looks that way now, doesn’t it? I mean up there by himself, no signs of struggle. All his belongings.”

  “The phone and car?”

  “He left them in the parking lot. Someone noticed after a few days and took it.” She tilted her head. “That’s the only thing that makes sense, isn’t it?”

  “When you lay out the facts like that, yes.”

  Her brows rose. “But you believe differently?”

  Jillie sighed. This one was boring. Cold cases usually were. All the heat of passion and anguish had been wrung out of the people involved. Leslie still wore her ring, still lived as a widow, but her pain had turned to a reality that was lived in, like an old, ripped sweater. You didn’t particularly like it, but it was warm and always on the top of the pile.

  “I believe my client is looking for an answer, I’m trying to find it,” Jillie said.

  “Good luck with that, Ms. Dolan.” Leslie took a drink.

  “Do you have any of Mitch’s old records tucked around here?”

  “I’ve moved twice since then. I kept things I thought were sentimental, but all the paperwork, it’s gone.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “After so long, I didn’t even need the old tax records.” She set her cup down.

  “So the marriage was okay? Happy family life? No affairs?” Jillie asked. The abruptness seemed to take Leslie off guard. She’d probably not heard such personal questions since the time of the disappearance.

  She shrugged. “Like I said. He was stressed. I was young. We fought. But nothing bad enough to break us up. We loved each other, and we loved being a family.” This time her gaze lingered on the portrait.

  “Did you both have a will?”

  Leslie rolled her eyes. “You did get that he was a financial planner, right? Of course we did.” She took another sip. “I was beneficiary to our portfolio. Which was at an all-time low at the time. He had a modest life insurance policy because he thought the money for premiums would better invested elsewhere. And it probably would have been, but…”

  “Crash.”

  “Exactly.” She looked the picture again. Jillie was starting to feel the woman had not really moved on. Maybe she was still pining. Or struggling.

  Jillie glanced at the stack of bills. Metro Bank on top.

  “Chris and I got by with what we had. Mi
tchell had taught me enough to live modestly, and save as much as possible. We had wanted to pay for Chris to go to UNC. No loans. So I downsized. Saved. I think he’d be pretty happy with that.”

  Jillie would be. Her student loans were fifteen years old, and she had no hope of paying them off before she was a set of bones in the woods. “I bet he would.”

  There wasn’t much here. Leslie hadn’t gotten rich off her husband’s death. She’d have been much higher on the horse if he’d lived and done a good job playing the market through the recovery. If she killed him, it was over passions long dead. And frankly, the woman seemed too soft to lure her husband into the woods, kill him, and leave him to rot. Something like that took some fire.

  The Clue

  Something didn’t sit right. Jillie banged on the keys of the old computer on her desk. Banged was accurate. No matter how much she tried to type more lightly it didn’t happen. Two keyboards a year, maybe three, added to the cost of doing business. Pencil leads didn’t stand a chance either. She broke them like mad taking notes. Heavy-handed, in more ways than one.

  In its era, the dot-com bust made the news more often than a trashy celebrity with a drug problem. She needed to drill down locally, to see what was going on in the area. Context, and twenty-twenty hindsight, were her best tools for a cold case. And good old Google.

  She poured a couple fingers worth of bourbon into a dirty coffee mug next to her computer. It was the cheap stuff and she didn’t care. It went down a finger a swallow. She surfed through a bunch of articles about people killing themselves over the crash. The suicide Leslie had mentioned was there. Gregory Thomas Smith. Solid Midwestern, farm boy name. Seems Gregory had lost about three and half mill, wifey was leaving with the young’uns, and he had gotten the pink slip. Ouch. Jillie figured she might dive off a bridge over that. Being broke had its advantages.

  She found four suicides in a two-week period in the papers. At the end of one of those articles, something caught her attention. Statistics about self-extinction for a few surrounding counties. They were mostly rural, but plenty of the big rollers of the tech industry lived out in fancy neighborhoods built close to the lake.

  She spied a mention of a man missing from Pittsboro. The town just west of the lake. Different county. This man was the same age and general description as Henry Mitchell Neil. Jillie stared at the screen for a moment. The missing man’s name was Mitchell Neilson. No middle mentioned. That bugged her.

  She searched her records data base for Mitchell Neilson in Chatterson County. A couple came up. One had a DOB exactly two months off from Henry Mitchell Neil. She clicked through her database and tried to find a social security number or driver’s license for Mr. Neilson. The DL search garnered her a picture.

  “Well. I’ll be dammed.”

  After a few more fingers of whiskey and time to ponder, she began to send emails.

  The Sting

  The blood pressure monitor on Jillie’s fit band had finally dropped below the you-should-stop-now-before-you-die zone. She thought it fitting that she perched herself in the spot Henry Mitchell Neil/Mitchell Neilson had expired.

  She sucked down a half bottle of water then immediately regretted it. Needing to piss when in the midst of a sting was not cool. And, of course, thinking about the possible need to pee made it happen. Shit. Shit.

  She should go before the target arrived. She glanced up the hill above the crime scene. She hustled away from the rocky outcrop that had supported Mitchell’s body for years. The trees grew thick and the undergrowth was thin from lack of sunlight. Mostly ferns. No goddamned fern was big enough for her to pee behind. She was not going to get caught with her pants down.

  She walked farther into the woods, occasionally looking back to stay oriented, then found a pile of stacked trees that had all taken the fall at the same time, making a three-foot high timber wall between her and the site.

  She was standing, trying to get her sweaty pants back up over her thighs, when she heard the sound of someone making their way up the trail. She shimmied and pulled, knowing her underwear would not end up in the proper location, but as long as her ass was covered, that was going to have to do.

  She looked up to see a man. A hiker, boots, backpack, tan shorts, and a blue T-shirt. The backpack hanging loose on his back. She was still buttoning when he pulled out a gun.

  The man turned, not surprised to see Jillie. “So. Are you looking for a weapon up here for real, or did you set a trap?” His gaze was dancing around, searching. Considering his options. “I considered both.”

  According to the marriage records Jillie had found, one of the other spouses was Stacy Neilson, forty-one, from Pittsboro. Married to Mitchell Neilson for seven years. A man? Stacy was a man. And that meant that Mitchell’s big secret was worse than four wives. It was three wives and one hubby. Maybe more hubbies. What if they were all men?

  “I thought anyone who might be worried they’d left evidence behind would come up and make sure.” In the email sent at two a.m. she had implied she’d figured out where a weapon had been hidden.

  “But he committed suicide, Ms. Dolan.” The gun he pointed in her direction appeared to be a .380. “The autopsy says so.”

  “If you’re aware of the autopsy results, you knew Mitchell was leading a double life.” The implication was heavy. Because the autopsy records would only be released to Mitchell’s wife. Or husband? “The Raleigh authorities only knew about his wife.”

  He nodded and grinned. There was more noise behind Jillie. She turned to see. It was Leslie. Also in well-worn hiking boots, but her clothing was much more North Face than his Old Navy. She had a knife.

  “Ah.” Jillie nodded. “You both knew. A conspiracy to commit murder.”

  “I found out.” Leslie motioned Jillie back into the open. Leslie made her way to Mitchell’s resting place. Looked over the edge. For an instant, she looked sad. But her eyes found Stacy and hardened. “I really thought this was the perfect spot.”

  Stacy shrugged. “Always knew discovery was a possibility.”

  “There is no evidence, is there?” Leslie asked.

  “Only that the man had been living several lives,” Jillie said, “and no matter how good an investor he was, no way he was keeping multiple partners happy when the markets crashed.”

  “I knew for a long time that Mitchell had others in his life. Stacy wasn’t his only male friend. And so many women. Mitchell had a sick addiction to sex.” Leslie touched Stacy’s arm. “I reached out. Stacy had no clue. He thought he could build a life with Mitchell. I tried to break it to him gently.”

  “Wasn’t that sweet of you?”

  She shrugged. “We were just going to bust him. Make him give up the charade, and the others.” Her voice still had that soothing motherly tone, as if she were talking about a misbehaving child. “Then Stacy pointed out that Mitchell’s addiction was going to be the end of my family. My daughter’s future.”

  “He used her. He used me,” Stacy said, angrily. “He was a manipulating little—”

  “You mean blackmail,” Jillie said.

  “Semantics. We convinced him to set up some accounts so we were both financially set to come out of the crash well-positioned.”

  Jillie eased closer to the rock formation to be better located. “So if you were milking that cow, why butcher it?”

  Leslie Hart-Neil flinched. “He was going to…”

  “Ah. Mitchell was smarter than you, huh? He got tired of the blackmail so you lured him up here and took him out. Which was it, the knife or the gun?”

  “He committed suicide, once he knew we knew.” But Stacy’s nervous eyes and shaking hand gave his lie away.

  “Sure he did. Way up here. All by himself. Dressed for a business meeting.”

  “We just wanted money. We didn’t want him dead.”

  “And so you decided it was a good idea to open a joint account?” Jillie said.

  They both took a step back.

  “A joint ac
count. To manage the investments, with a document he signed the day he disappeared?”

  “You found that?” Stacy frowned. “Pretty resourceful for a cheap private investigator. Don’t you need some kind of credentials to check on banking records?”

  Cheap? Jillie prided herself on being one of the higher priced gumshoes around, with an immaculate reputation. “We’ve come a long way since Sam Spade. A statement sitting open on Leslie’s counter made the search for accounts that much easier.”

  “That puts us in a far different situation here.” Stacy puffed out his chest, stood taller. He was steeling himself.

  Leslie was no longer the timid, mousy woman from the kitchen, woefully staring at the family photo. Her eyes were now tiger-like. Her knees slightly bent. She was as ready to pounce as Stacy. “I need to know if you told the police or Candice about us.”

  “Of course I did. I’m not stupid.” But she had been drinking. She couldn’t remember if she’d told Candice her plans or not. But Candice would be pleased to know she was right about her sister-in-law. And she’d get the money after all. Jillie wondered how the news her brother also had male lovers was going to go over.

  Stacy raised the .380, pointed it directly at Jillie’s heart.

  Holy gunfight, Batman. She’d not come armed. The plan had been to see who showed up and get the confession. She held her hands up and searched her mind for something she could say to put the man off the subject of that trigger long enough for the cavalry.

  Bam! Bam! Two slugs walloped her chest. Jillie toppled back, crashing onto her tailbone. The back of her head bounced off the hard-packed surface. Dang ferns. Blackness shrouded her vision, and only little bursts of light broke through. The proverbial stars.

  The bullets hurt worse than she’d expected, and a functioning breath took longer than she would have liked. She wondered what the heart monitor on the stupid sports tracker said at the moment? Zero? Two hundred ninety-eight?

  Stacy and Leslie had shown up with a plan. But the one thing Jillie had on her side was that the two of them were amateurs.