by L A Dobbs
Mick stared into his drink as he swirled it around, the ice cubes clinking against the side of the glass. "I don't know. Dupont went to Harvard. Two of the rapists were from Harvard. But we looked into that. He didn't know them."
"Not that we could find," Sam said. "Maybe we overlooked something. We were younger, less experienced, and emotional about defending Gracie."
Mick's face softened. "How is Gracie?"
Sam's heart twisted. His cousin Gracie had been a promising singer down in Boston twenty years ago when she'd been brutally raped by four college students. Even though two decades had gone by, the effects still showed. She was a hermit that barely left her house. Her music career had ended that night. The girl was afraid of her own shadow now, and Sam couldn't do anything to help her.
"I haven't seen her in a while." He made a mental note to visit her the next day. Maybe Lucy would cheer her up. His cousin was skittish around people but hadn't lost her trust in animals.
Sam finished the rest of his burger in silence. What did Dupont know about what he and Mick had done to avenge Gracie? Gracie's memory about that day was fuzzy. She vaguely remembered what had happened to her when they'd found her unconscious next to the Charles River. She couldn't even name her assailants, only to tell them it was four boys and one had a crimson scarf.
They'd never uncovered any evidence that Dupont was even remotely involved. Could they have missed something?
"I don't know. Dupont is sleazy and all, but I don't think he's a rapist," Mick said as if reading Sam's mind.
"You never really know what people are capable of. Most of us are keeping secrets." Sam's thoughts turned to Tyler and the extra twenty grand in his bank account. "How are things going with Tyler's investigation?"
Mick shook his head. "I've been keeping an eye on the grandson while I've been doing other business. He's acting a little skittish and jiggy. I think something's about to break."
"We discovered that Tyler had twenty thousand deposited in his account two weeks before he died."
Mick's brows shot up. "Twenty thousand?"
Sam nodded.
"You think he was into something?"
"I've no idea. But it's looking more and more like his death wasn't just a coincidence. Someone had a specific reason for wanting Tyler dead."
Chapter Eighteen
The next morning, Sam was up early. The hunting camp he'd inherited from his grandfather felt quiet and empty without his daughters. But they had their own lives down in Massachusetts, and he had to respect that. Since he had no intention of inviting anyone to live with him, he'd mostly gotten used to the emptiness, except for the few days after his daughters visited. Now that he had Lucy, he didn't need much else.
He fiddled around in the kitchen, feeding Lucy and sipping coffee while he stared at the taxidermy that hung on the log walls. The deer-head mount and colorful lake trout brought back childhood memories. They had all been caught by his grandfather, who had taught him to fish and hunt.
The camp had creeped his last wife out, but to Sam it felt comfortable and homey. He hadn't done much to it, and it was still decorated much the way it had been in his grandmother's time, though she'd died over a decade ago. She'd been an outdoorswoman herself and favored a more camp-like decor. There were precious few feminine touches except for her favorite china teacups, her old batter bowls, and her own grandmother's flow blue china.
Not too many women would want to live in a camp like this, at least not according to Sam's second wife, who had refused to move there when he'd inherited it upon his grandfather's death. She'd insisted they buy a big old Victorian closer to town. He'd gotten rid of that Victorian shortly after getting rid of the wife. He'd never wanted to live there anyway.
He loved the cabin because it was stuffed with memories of his parents and grandparents, but most of all he liked the seclusion. The property was situated on twenty acres and teeming with wildlife. Owls, woodpeckers, foxes, and even some bears whose claw marks could be seen at the stand of beech trees that sat a little further into the woods. His favorite, the deer, came to the edge of the pond across the street in the summer right at dusk.
The police radio he kept next to the birch-framed picture of his daughters on the bookshelf that divided the kitchen from the rest of the cabin squawked. The White Rock police department was too small to man the police station twenty-four, seven. They switched off with the state police and county sheriff at night and kept in communication by police band radio.
This morning, the radio was announcing a dispute over on Mooseridge Road. Sam answered the call then rinsed his coffee cup in the sink, whistled for Lucy, and headed out in the Tahoe.
The dispute was between longtime residents Ives Collier and Peter Demming. Peter complained that one of Ives's milking cows had trampled his fence. It took Sam twenty minutes and a couple of Bavarian cream donuts to get the two to shake hands and come to a friendly agreement over the fence. Peter even got a gallon of fresh milk out of the deal.
One the way back to the station, Sam decided to detour and visit his cousin Gracie. His conversation with Mick the night before had been a guilty reminder that he hadn't seen her in a while.
Gracie lived in an old Colonial with her parents. The house dated to the 1870s and had a large barn that still smelled of horses. Gracie loved the barn. It was her escape. She sat in there and played music. Even though she didn't have an audience anymore, she still loved playing.
Today, she wasn't playing music, though she was in the barn. She sat in an old chair in the corner, watching a small TV. Her face lit with a smile when she saw Sam, and for a moment he got a glimpse of the happy-go-lucky person she'd been before the attack.
Sam had the urge to hug her, but he knew Gracie couldn't stand to be touched anymore. Once, she'd been very affectionate, but the rapists had stolen that from her.
Her eyes fell on Lucy, and her smile widened. "I heard you got a K-9."
Lucy trotted over, and Gracie crouched down to pet her. She was cautious at first. Lucy leaned into her, nudging her gently, her tail swishing happily as if she sensed Gracie needed encouragement. Gracie hugged the dog, and Sam saw a look of joy on his cousin's face, something he'd rarely seen in the past twenty years.
"How's the police business?" Gracie stood, reached into the college-sized fridge, and pulled out a soda. She held it toward him. "Soda?"
"No, thanks." Sam preferred coffee. "Police business is the same as usual. Busy, though, since we're down one guy."
Gracie nodded and watched Lucy as she made her way around the perimeter of the barn, sniffing every nook and cranny. She must've been having a field day, because Sam himself could smell the sweet scent of hay and old leather even though horses hadn't been kept in the barn for a hundred years. But the floors were worn from years of housing horses, and he could still see the chew marks on the low stall doors. Gracie motioned him toward the gable end of the barn, where there was a big window that overlooked the field.
They sat in the chairs and chatted. Gracie's attention span was short, her eyes always on the move, nervously darting toward the door and the dog. Her eyes lit on the TV behind him and widened. Her body stiffened. Sam turned around. Dupont's commercial was playing on TV.
"Mayor Dupont." He turned back to Gracie. "Do you know him?"
Gracie shook her head, her eyes still glued to the TV. "He's a bad man."
"Did you know him when you were down in Boston? He went to Harvard," Sam said.
At the mention of Harvard, Gracie's eyes jerked toward Sam, and his heart pinched. Of course the name of the college that the rapists had gone to would stir bad memories in her. He felt like a jerk for mentioning it.
Her brows mashed together. "I don't know. It's all such a blur from back then. I mean, I know him from White Rock, but I get a funny feeling when I see him." Her eyes flicked from the television to Sam. "Someone like him shouldn't be mayor."
"I couldn't agree more."
Sam watched his cousin c
autiously. He wanted to delve deeper, ask more about Dupont and if she remembered him being around the boys that raped her. But thinking about that time was still painful for her, and she still couldn't even remember if she'd known the boys. Her testimony at the time was that she'd only seen them vaguely in the bar.
As if sensing Gracie's agitation, Lucy trotted over and stuck her head under Gracie's hand. Patting the dog seemed to calm her. Sam didn't want to make her upset again.
Was it possible Dupont had somehow been involved back then? He hadn't been with the boys that had done that to Gracie--Sam was sure of it. But why would he keep taunting him about it, and why would he wait until now?
Dupont knew something, and judging by Gracie's reaction, Sam thought there might be more to his involvement. If anyone could find out, it was Mick, and Mick had a vested interest in discovering whatever Dupont had on Sam, because whatever he had on Sam was also going to be bad news for Mick.
Sam's phone pinged with a text, and he took it out of his pocket. It was Reese.
Come on back to the station. I have interesting news.
Chapter Nineteen
Twenty minutes later, Sam and Lucy were standing in front of the receptionist desk in the foyer of the police station. Jo and Reese were behind the desk, looking down at Reese's computer.
"I did a little digging around, looking into the Donnellys' finances like Jo asked me," Reese said.
"Good thinking." Sam hadn't asked Jo to do that, but it was something that needed to be done.
"Well, you never know what you might find. It's standard procedure, right?" Jo asked.
"Did you get a subpoena already?" Sam asked. If she had, she must've done it before Sam had threatened Thorne. Because Sam was sure Thorne would've gone to Dupont, and Dupont would've used his connections with the judge to stop any subpoenas if he was involved.
Reese plastered an innocent look on her face. "Of course. Well, I mean, one is coming, so I just expedited things."
Sam frowned. Reese was a whiz with computers, and she'd made a lot of contacts at the police academy who had a variety of useful skills. Sometimes cutting corners was necessary to get the job done quicker, but sometimes it bit you in the ass later on. Apparently it was too late now--they'd already found something, and judging by the looks on their faces, Sam knew it was something good.
Reese pushed a white donut bag out of the way and swung the computer around to face Sam. There were two windows up on her screen. She stood up and leaned over, her dark hair falling in front of her face as she pointed at one of the windows. "This is Mike Donnelly's bank account. The one his wife knows about."
It looked like the online dashboard of a regular bank account, just like Sam's. There wasn't much money in it. There was a checking account and a savings account, but neither of them showed a large balance, and the checking account looked to have normal deposits and withdrawals.
His eyes drifted to the other window, where Reese was tapping a cherry-red-polished nail. "This is his other bank account. The one his family doesn't know about."
"What do you mean they don't know about it? How do you know that?"
"It was opened two months ago and only has cash deposits. And here is the documentation." Reese pulled up another window that showed the paperwork with only Mike's signature.
"Makes sense Mike would have to open it on his own. Margie was probably too sick to go down to the bank and open an account," Sam said.
"Sure. But why would Mike be opening one now? With his wife so sick, you'd think he'd have other concerns," Jo said. "And where is this cash coming from? With Margie's obvious bills, where would he be getting the extra money to deposit?"
Sam looked at the screen again. It wasn't a lot of money. A thousand here. Five hundred there. According to the list of transactions, he would make a few deposits then withdraw most of it. "What do you think he's doing with the withdrawals?"
Reese tapped on the first window again. "It doesn't appear in this bank account, so he's not depositing it."
"Which means he's not using it to pay any of the medical bills or household bills," Jo said.
"Well then, what is he doing with it?" Sam asked.
"That, I can't help you with," Reese said then looked out the door. "Oh, shoot."
The door opened, and a nervous-looking young man walked in.
"Can I help you?" Sam asked.
Reese had jumped up from her desk and grabbed a piece of paper from the printer. She shoved it into Sam's hand. It was a resume. "I forgot to tell you. This is Walker Johnson. His interview for the open position is scheduled right now."
Chapter Twenty
Kevin had been out all day, taking one annoying call after another. First it was Mrs. Achison, who had a cat stuck in a tree. He was still picking splinters out of his palm from using her rickety old ladder that looked as if it dated to about 1910. The cat had been cute, though, a fluffy gray kitten with big round green eyes. And Mrs. Achison had been appreciative, but getting cats out of trees wasn't exactly the reason he'd gotten into police work.
He'd also sorted out a dispute involving Julian Martin, whose sheep had gotten loose and eaten Gloria Williams’ daisies. They were prized daisies that she was cultivating for some sort of contest. He managed to smooth it over by getting Julian, a confirmed bachelor, to take Gloria, a widow, to dinner.
When he got back to the station, Sam was interviewing for Tyler's replacement. Kevin didn't know how he felt about that. He'd been offered the full-time job but had refused it, and now he was starting to wonder if he'd made the right decision.
As long as he was part time, he'd always be different from the others. But wasn't that good? If Sam and Jo were up to something shady, maybe he was better off to disassociate himself from their activities as much as he could.
"You save the cat?" Jo was tapping her pencil on her desk blotter, her feet up on the edge of the desk, leaning back, relaxed.
"Yep. Cute kitten." Kevin nodded toward Sam's office. "Another applicant?"
"Yep."
"What do you think?"
Jo shrugged. "Takes me a while to get warmed up to people."
That was no exaggeration. Kevin had been working with Jo for over a year now, and she was just barely starting to thaw out. He suspected she had some skeletons in her closet, but she wasn't the type to go blabbing about them. She was one of those people that kept things to themselves.
"Anything new on the Donnelly case?" Kevin asked. He'd already worked thirty hours this week and was feeling tired from it. He hoped that there was nothing new. He didn't want more work. But his contact had asked him to work closely with Sam and Jo so as to keep informed on this case.
"Seems the guy had a secret bank account," Jo said.
"Secret bank account? Why would someone have one of those?" Kevin asked.
"Apparently he's got a secret," Jo said. "Maybe a secret that got him killed."
"So what was he doing with the money?" Kevin asked.
"That's the thing. We don't know. We can see cash deposits, and then he makes withdrawals, but we don't know what he does with them. They don't go into his regular bank account."
Kevin frowned. One of the things his contact had asked him to do before was find out where Tyler was going after he made withdrawals. It had turned out Tyler was only going to the medical center, which ended up being something related to his sister's illness. But in order to find that out, Kevin had used a method suggested by his contact. Something that he'd seen on a television show, of all places.
"How does he withdraw the money from the bank?"
Jo frowned down at the paper on her desk. "Looks like he uses the ATM on the corner of Main and Berkeley."
"Hold on." Kevin sat at his computer and typed on the keyboard. Most ATM machines had a camera that took video of transactions. He pulled up the document he had stored that showed which ATMs in town had that capability. If he was lucky, the one on the corner of Main and Berkeley had one. He was lucky.
&
nbsp; "Check this out." Kevin swiveled the screen toward Jo, and she got up from her desk and came over. "This shows the ATM machines with video capability. I don't know how often they record over the videos, and it only turns on to record the transaction and shuts off pretty quickly, but I was thinking if Mike had someone with him when he made these withdrawals, then it might be on video."
Jo leaned over to get a better look at the screen. "Can we get the video from that machine? Because if there was someone with Mike, that means they knew about this money, and that means that we need to talk to them."
Sam leaned back in his chair as he smiled at the nervous applicant, Walker Johnson, sitting across from him. He went through the motions of the interview, asking where he had worked, what kind of work he liked to do best, what his biggest case was. But the whole time, Sam's mind was on his cousin Gracie's reaction to Dupont and the fact that Mike had a bank account with suspicious activity.
He wouldn't have been so suspicious of the bank account if it hadn't just been opened two months before. Lots of people had bank accounts separate from their spouse, but with Margie being so ill, it didn't sit right with Sam. Why open a bank account like that when she was going to be gone soon, anyway? The only reason he would be doing it now was he was doing something he didn't want Margie--or his kids--to know about.
Was it possible he was taking money from Thorne somehow? But why? Maybe he had promised the land to Thorne but didn't want to actually go through with the deal until Margie was gone. It would make sense that he wouldn't want to upset her in her condition. And maybe someone was giving him money in advance to seal the deal and give Mike something to pay off those medical bills. But if that were the case, how come the money never made it into the account from which they paid those bills, and why were the amounts so small?