Catherine Nelson - Zoe Grey 02 - The Trouble with Theft

by Catherine Nelson

  I guess this helped explain why Linda McKinnon was so cautious about whom she spoke to and let in the house, as well as what sort of “problems” they’d been having with House and Home.

  Something was tickling the edge of my brain. I reached for it, but I couldn’t quite get it. We sat quietly for several minutes, eating. How strange that both the Burbanks and the McKinnons had had something stolen from them—in both cases, an art object worth quite a bit. If there is no such thing as coincidence, what explanation could there be for this? I wondered if Eric Dunn had ever had anything stolen from his house. I remember seeing quite a few artsy things I thought might be worth a pretty penny.

  Then I remembered what Mr. Burbank had said. He thought Dillon had been working in the house. Mrs. McKinnon remembered Dillon from House and Home as the girl who did a crappy job cleaning the bathroom, no pun intended. Eric Dunn told me he didn’t have any house staff, but I suspected he used service people of some kind.

  “You clean for a lot of rich people, don’t you?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Some. Why?”

  I pulled the photo of Dillon out of my pocket and passed it to her.

  “She look familiar?”

  “Yes …” she said, and I could see the wheels turning. “Okay, let me think for a minute.”

  “Amy Wells.”

  I paused with a bite halfway to my mouth and cringed at the nasally tone I always hope never to hear again.

  Priscilla Casimir stopped beside our table, on the other side of the wrought iron gate enclosing the restaurant patio, and looked down at us. She was dressed in another suit, charcoal gray today, and wore giant sunglasses.

  Amy turned to me. “She do that to you?”

  “Isn’t it annoying?”

  “I’m not surprised,” Priscilla said. “Where there’s one, there’s the other. That’s how it always was.”

  “It’s weird how friends do that, huh?” I said.

  “If you wouldn’t mind, Priscilla,” Amy said, “we’re having lunch.”

  “I wondered when I’d run into you,” she said to Amy, “since I ran into Zoe. You were never far away.”

  “That sounds a lot like jealousy masked as disgust,” Amy said casually. “Maybe you should talk to someone about that.”

  “Always so crass, Amy.”

  “Actually, I believe that was sarcasm,” Amy said. “You’d think someone at one of those fancy schools would have been able to teach you the difference with all the money you were paying them.”

  Priscilla opened her mouth to respond, but I spoke first.

  “Enough, Priscilla! Now, buzz off. We’re busy.”

  “Is that any way to treat an old friend?” she asked.

  Amy and I both rolled our eyes.

  “We’re not friends,” I snapped. “Never were, never will be. Stop saying we were.”

  “Oh, Zoe,” Priscilla said sadly, shaking her head.

  “Hey, brainiac,” Amy said sharply. “You were the one who decided you two would be enemies. Don’t be mad if she embraced it.”

  “Fascinating how time dilutes the memories,” Priscilla said.

  “Think she learned to talk like that at those fancy schools?” Amy asked me.

  “Probably some sort of requirement, you know. ‘You can’t graduate until you sound like a pompous idiot every time you open your mouth.’”

  Priscilla made a show of looking at her expensive watch.

  “Well, I must be going,” she announced. “I have a meeting with the man I’m dating. I’m sure I’ll be seeing you both around.”

  We watched her walk away, her heels click, click, clicking across the sidewalk.

  “Hey, you’re dating Ellmann, right?” Amy asked without looking away from Priscilla.

  “Yeah,” I answered, also not looking away.

  “Don’t you call him your boyfriend?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you have dates, not meetings?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. But then, Ellmann’s real, you know, not some guy I made up just now.”

  She turned back to me. “See, that’s what I thought.”

  “Made up?”

  She nodded. “Yes! Because who—”

  “—would date her?” we finished together.

  We both burst out laughing, drawing looks from those at tables nearby and passing on the sidewalk. We hardly noticed. After several minutes, we were able to sit up. I reached for my water, and Amy sighed.

  “Boy, I hate her.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “It’s really too bad she finally grew into those hips.”

  “Absolutely heartbreaking.”

  She reached for her fork again, glancing at the photo of Dillon still lying on the table.

  “I got it!” she said, picking up the photo. “She applied for a part-time position a while back. I interviewed her.”

  “Really? When was that?”

  “Oh, geez, Zoe, I have no idea. I don’t have the turnover some companies do, but I have quite a bit. I’m almost always hiring, and I interview a lot of people.”

  “It could be important,” I said. “Is there any way you could find out? Do you keep applications or notes or something?” Knowing Amy, she did.

  “Sure, of course.” She glanced at her watch. “Missy’s in the office for a few hours today.” She picked up her phone. “Let me see if I can catch her.”

  Missy had been halfway out the door when she’d heard the phone ring. Amy relayed her request, and a moment later Missy came back on the line. She reported there were no interview notes for anyone named Danielle Dillon.

  “I didn’t think that name was familiar,” Amy said to me. “Uh, Missy, look for an application done in blue ink. And, I remember she listed Rocky as her highest level of education.”

  “Blue ink?” I heard Missy ask over the line.

  Amy has a memory for visual things like that.

  Amy’s interview notes and applications are filed by year and then subfiled by month. Missy had to go back sixteen months to February of last year. Finally, she found it.

  “Kelly Shultz. Thank you, Missy.” Amy hung up. “She used the name Kelly Shultz.”

  __________

  Before I left Amy’s house, I used her phone to check my messages. There were three: one from Ellmann, one from Frye, and one from a Detective Charlie Simmons. Ellmann called to check in, Frye called to warn me about Simmons, and Simmons called me about Vandreen.

  Jeremiah Vandreen, represented by his attorney Eric Dunn, was pressing charges against me for assault and a few other things. Simmons was investigating and requested I return his phone call immediately. Which was about all I needed just now. But I wasn’t surprised. Vandreen wasn’t the type to take something like that lying down.

  I debated for several minutes about returning Simmons’s call. I had no intention of running from what I’d done, but I really didn’t want to be arrested until after six a.m. tomorrow. Once the deadline on Danielle Dillon’s bond passed, I was perfectly willing to see my consequences through. If I found Dillon in time, maybe we could share a cell.

  I sighed. I really hate jail.

  I decided not to call Simmons. He may well come looking for me, but I thought I could elude him for the next eighteen hours. In the end, I might not find Dillon. But if I couldn’t, it wasn’t going to be because I wasted what little time I had left in jail.

  I said goodbye to Amy and swiped a cookie from the small stash she’d held onto.

  Andrea and Donald Hammond lived on the northwest side of town in the Poudre River subdivision off Overland Trail. The houses were like any you’d find in a neighborhood built within the last ten or fifteen years: small and similar. There were only a handful of models, and they were all painted various shades of white. Despite the size of the houses and the out-of-the-way location, the homes in this development were a bit on the high side, price-wise. When I found the Hammond house, I saw a Mustang convertible sitting in the driveway a
nd guessed it to be only a year or two old. I wondered what Mr. Hammond did for a living and if the Burbanks paid well.

  I rang the doorbell and waited. The sound set off an eruption of barking and then screaming. Apparently the Hammonds had dogs and children. Finally, a blonde woman opened the door, with a toddler wearing a pink tutu and pigtails on her hip.

  “Can I help you?”

  I handed her my card and gave her my spiel.

  “Do you recognize this woman?” I asked, handing her the photo.

  I saw recognition flash in her eyes as she saw the picture, but an instant later, a boy, about five years old, came sprinting to the door, screaming, dressed in nothing but a pair of Superman underwear with a towel tied around his neck. I thought it was an excellent superhero outfit. His mother told him to go put some pants on. When she turned back to me, retuning the photo, anything telling in her eyes was gone.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ve never seen her.”

  It was fear in her eyes now. She was a terrible liar. Which, of course, is my favorite kind.

  “Mrs. Hammond, let me explain again who I am. I’m a bond enforcement agent. That means I find people out on bail who fail to appear in court. All I care about is finding those people and putting them back into the system. I’m not a cop. I can’t arrest people. And I’m not in the habit of tattle-tailing to the police.” I held up the photo. “So, tell me again, have you ever seen this woman?”

  She shook her head. “Nope. Sorry. I can’t help you.”

  “Look, I just want to find this woman. And I’m running out of time to do it. But everyone has secrets, things they don’t want their spouses to know, their bosses, the government. You look like you have a happy life here. But I have to find this woman. I know you’re lying to me, so unless you tell me the truth, I’m going to have to start digging into you. I always end up finding things people wish were left buried. And when it happens that way, I can’t always control how far the information spreads. It’s better just to talk to me now, where it can stay between you and me. And then I’ll leave.”

  “You’re threatening me?”

  I sighed. “No, I’m explaining a fact to you. I am seriously running out of time to find this woman, and everyone is lying to me. My patience is wearing thin. Please make a decision quickly. Tell me the truth or tell me one more time you haven’t seen this woman, and I’ll get started digging.”

  She quickly put the girl down and stepped out onto the porch with me, pulling the door closed.

  “Look, I’ve seen her, okay?” she whispered. “She was at the Burbanks’ house a few times. One day, there was an envelope with ten thousand dollars cash and a note inside on the seat of my car. The note said to leave the alarm off on a certain day and at a particular time. I didn’t want to lose my job; Mrs. Burbank is fanatical about the alarm being on. So for a couple days before, I complained about the system malfunctioning—which wasn’t unusual. Mrs. Burbank doesn’t know how to use the alarm and is always setting it off, bitching it isn’t working properly.

  “That morning, I set the alarm off and told Mrs. Burbank it had malfunctioned when I tried to disarm it. She had me call the security company, and they came to the house to work on it. They were there during the time the note specified and had the alarm off to work on it. She never suspected I had anything to do with it. It was that afternoon she discovered that stupid statue missing. I never knew for sure, but I always thought it was that woman who had left the note and the money.” She pointed at the photo.

  “And you haven’t seen her since?”

  “No.”

  “Who did you think she was when you saw her at the house? What did you think she was doing there?”

  “I thought Mrs. Burbank had called her. She had a notepad and a tape measure in her bag; I thought she was a decorator of some kind. But I asked Mrs. Burbank if she was redecorating, and she said no.”

  “Did you ever catch her name?”

  “No.”

  “What about the car she drove?”

  She shook her head. “Sorry.”

  “Thank you for your help.”

  “Hey, you’re really not going to tell anyone, are you?”

  “No. Between you and me, I don’t really like Mrs. Burbank much.”

  I was pretty sure her involvement in the statue theft would come out sooner or later, but if it did, it wouldn’t be by my hand.

  I got back in the truck and drove to the address I had for Todd Lindgren. The house, a regular mansion, was located off Trilby. The main house was three stories and absolutely huge. The four-car garage was detached, and there was a guesthouse above it. An enclosed walkway stretched between the guesthouse and the second story of the main house. There was a small private lake on the property, complete with a slide and rope swing. There was another small house, presumably a guesthouse, on the other side of the lake. I couldn’t help but wonder how a gardener could afford a place like this. I briefly considered that I was in the wrong line of work.

  I went to the door and knocked. A thirty-five-year-old man in plaid shorts and an Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirt smiled out at me.

  “Good afternoon!” he said, stepping out onto the porch.

  “Good afternoon. This is some place.”

  He grinned as he looked around. “I love it here. I’ve got places in Aspen and Key West, but this is my favorite. This is home.”

  “It looks like it might actually be three homes.”

  He laughed. “Yes, I suppose so. But the space never goes to waste. I have regular company, I entertain here frequently, and I have an open-door policy.”

  “Would you happen to be Todd Lindgren?”

  “Oh, goodness no!” He laughed. “No, Todd is my gardener. He lives above the garage.”

  “Todd is your gardener? He also works for Mr. and Mrs. Burbank. You don’t mind sharing?”

  “Heavens, no! No reason not to. He also works for Frank and Carol down the street here and another family out near the interstate, I believe. No, there just isn’t enough work to keep a man occupied full time around here. I assume the same must be true of the other properties, too. Todd does excellent work, but it can usually be done in a single day.”

  “And you let him live above your garage?”

  He laughed again. “Like I said, I have an open-door policy. Todd needed a place to stay, and I had been thinking of taking on a renter who would trade in labor. I pitched it to Todd, and he agreed. It’s been an excellent arrangement—mutually beneficial.”

  “How long has he lived here?”

  “Oh, a couple years.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “About the same.”

  “By a couple, do you mean ten?” I asked.

  “Who did you say you were again?”

  I handed him a card and told him.

  “I know Todd Lindgren was arrested ten years ago,” I said. “A man named Lyle Young was arrested with him. You’re Lyle Young.”

  I had no idea if that was true, but I had a gut feeling and decided to gamble. Plus, I was really tired of people lying to me.

  “And if I am?”

  “Then you just lied to me. That just pretty much puts you on my shit list. I need to speak with Todd. Is he home?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to be on your shit list. Yes, I’m Lyle Young. Yes, I’ve known Todd for ten years—longer, actually. We grew up together. Yes, we were once arrested together. And yes, Todd is home. He’s actually in the kitchen.” Young inclined his head toward the open door behind him. “Would you like to come in?”

  “Thank you.”

  I followed him inside and through the enormous house. Everywhere I looked, there was room after room after room. There was also lots of art: paintings, figurines, pottery. We hiked through the house to the kitchen, where Young and Lindgren had apparently been having lunch. A man I assumed to be Lindgren was sitting at the table, a plate in front of him. The chair beside him was empty, a plate waiting
in front of it. Young returned to his chair as he introduced me. They offered me a chair, and I sat with them.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt lunch,” I said. “I just have a couple quick questions.”

  “She’s sharp,” Young warned. He had attempted to bring it off as playful, but it didn’t quite come out that way; it was much more serious. A lot like a warning.

  I pulled the photo from my pocket and passed it to Lindgren.

  “Recognize her?”

  Young was a skilled liar. He saw the photo but showed no sign of recognition and casually took a bite. Lindgren, on the other hand, was not so skilled. After he looked at the photo, he started to look up at Young before he caught himself and shook his head.

  “No,” he said, handing the photo back. “I’m sorry.”

  “Does the name Danielle Dillon mean anything?”

  I watched them both. Recognition flashed in Lindgren’s face as he quickly grabbed his water glass and took a gulp. Young, still casual, swallowed and smiled, lightly shaking his head.

  “Doesn’t sound familiar,” he said. “Todd?”

  “No,” Lindgren said. “Not to me, either. Who is she?”

  “What about the name Kelly Shultz?”

  Again I saw flashes of recognition in them both, though again Young masked his almost perfectly.

  Lindgren shifted uncomfortably in his chair while Young continued to lounge, sipping his drink.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Lindgren said. “Why would it?”

  In my experience, a person who puts a question back on you like this is trying to hide the fact he’s lying. A person who really doesn’t know what you’re talking about simply says so. A person who does but is pretending he doesn’t demands to know why you think he does.

  I wanted to press them both, but I thought would be it a bad move. I didn’t understand things well enough, especially how they related to these two men, to be effective. It would have been too easy for them to run me around. Instead, I decided to take another crack at them when I had something else to go on.

  “I’m sorry I interrupted your lunch,” I said again, standing.