SEALs of Honor: Taylor

by Dale Mayer

  She stared at him, her jaw open, eyebrows raised. “That is a lot of money.”

  He nodded. “Do you know where the winning ticket is?”

  She frowned. “I never saw a ticket. I gave the money to my boss. We all did, as far as I know. He went out and bought several tickets for the group, I assume.”

  “You didn’t ask for a photocopy of them or anything?”

  She frowned, concentrating. “I think he was supposed to email it or something.” She brought up her emails and sorted to show only those from her boss. “Give me a minute. I have literally hundreds of emails from him.”

  “Did you search further for mention of lottery tickets?”

  She did a couple more searches and then laughed. “He wrote down Retirement Plan on the subject line.”

  She opened the email and, sure enough, found a receipt and a copy of the tickets. She sent it to the printer, and, when she could hear the machine moving behind her, she walked back there to find both men crowding around the printer. Pulling the sheet of paper out, both men got excited at having an angle to work.

  “Well, it looks like it could be a motive after all,” Taylor said.

  “We don’t even know if it’s a winning ticket,” she said. “It could be a partial winning ticket. There were a lot of smaller prize payouts too.”

  The detective took the ticket and headed off to one side of the room, where he made some phone calls. Taylor looked at her and asked, “You want to print off another set of those? I can help track these down.”

  She walked back to her desk and sent another copy to the printer. He stayed where he was, waiting for it to come out. Then he took a photo of it and sent it to Mason. “We should get answers on this one pretty soon.”

  “But what if we don’t find the ticket?” she asked.

  Taylor pointed at the photocopy and said, “Surely nobody’s stupid enough to cash in the big lottery ticket, as long as you have a copy of this, and you’re alive and well.”

  She froze when he pointed out that harsh reality. “Let’s find out if any of these are really a winner and how much the payout is first,” she said. “I just don’t see that it’s worth killing for. There were five of us, for Christ’s sake, so it would still be an incredible amount of money for each one.”

  “Fifteen million each,” he said, “versus seventy-five million alone.”

  “What the hell would anybody do with seventy-five million?” she cried out, raising her hands in frustration. “That’s a stupid amount, excessive, and nobody needs that much.”

  “Half would go to taxes right off the bat.”

  She stopped. “Really?”

  He laughed and nodded. “Really. And then you have decisions to make with the rest of what you won.”

  “So out of fifteen, that’s still almost eight million,” she said. “So that means all of us could retire.”

  “Maybe that’s what happened to all your coworkers,” he said. “Maybe they retired rich.”

  “But could they have gotten the ticket and claim the prize money without me?” she asked. The thought not only hurt her feelings, but it pissed her off. That was a hell of a lot of money. How could anybody be so greedy to cut her out of it?

  “We’ll find out soon what the winning numbers were, either from Mason or the Butler,” he said. “But let’s see if we can find the original ticket.”

  “If my boss had just turned it in,” she said, “then there won’t be a real ticket. Or my missing coworkers turned it in?” she asked, thinking about them. “If they had the ticket, and they turned it in without me, or him, I can see that making him pretty angry too.”

  “I hadn’t considered that,” Taylor said approvingly. “That’s a hell of a reason for murder.”

  “But I would still be entitled to my portion, right? And it’s still in my email inbox.”

  “Did everybody get a copy of that email?”

  She brought up the email again and shook her head. “No, he just sent it to me. Of course, that doesn’t mean he didn’t also send one to everybody else individually—or sent blind copies—but I did ask him for a copy at the time.”

  “And he sent it to you, so I’m presuming he had honest intent on his part at the time, but, what happened after that, we don’t know,” Taylor said. “Because, if that money is still out there, ready to be claimed, the five of you are now four of you.”

  She swallowed hard. “That’s an ugly way to look at it.”

  “Maybe,” he said, “but that’s the truth.”

  The detective stepped over. “The prize money has not been claimed, though they got a phone call about it.”

  “What does that mean?” she asked.

  “It means somebody called to say they have the ticket and asked about the procedure for claiming the money.”

  “Of course they didn’t get the name of who was claiming it, did they?” Taylor asked.

  Butler shook his head. “No, although they would have to provide the ticket and identification if they tried to get the prize money. So far, they haven’t.”

  “When was the phone call?” Taylor asked.

  “Two days ago,” he said. “Potentially that phone call made it real to the point they decided to kill everyone.”

  “It still doesn’t explain why the old couple was taken out.”

  “Not yet, it doesn’t,” Taylor said quietly. ‘Unfortunately, when it comes to big money, it doesn’t take that much motivation to take someone out.”

  “It’s even more important now that we find those coworkers,” the detective said. “We are searching for them but no luck yet. Meanwhile, let’s search for the original lottery tickets.”

  “Want my help?” Taylor asked.

  Midge jumped to her feet. “Me too?”

  “You can help,” the detective said cautiously. “But you can’t touch anything.”

  Taylor just stared at him.

  Butler raised his hands, palms up. “Okay, okay. You know what I mean. When you find something, you call me.”

  With that, Taylor and the detective started to search the first desk in the employees’ area. Rather than get caught up in the nightmare of evidence and tampering with it, Midge just stood back and watched. They went through Bart’s desk first. After finding nothing, they went through Terri’s desk, which revealed nothing.

  “Can you log into their profiles?” the detective asked Midge.

  She nodded. “Yes, we use a system in the event of computer glitches where we use each other’s logins to get in to complete the files.” She sat down, brought up the computer and signed on, using Terri’s login.

  “Go to the email and check for that same retirement planning subject line,” Butler said.

  “Nope, it’s not here,” she said, checking emails from her boss. “And again, I have hundreds of emails to sort through.”

  “Search for lottery tickets.”

  “Holiday fun?”

  After she had tried all their suggestions and still hadn’t gotten anywhere, the detective nodded and said, “Okay, we’ll get forensics to go through and give it a closer look.”

  Taylor turned to Midge and asked, “What are the chances they think you don’t know anything about it? Or that they don’t think you were part of it?”

  “We joked about it being all five of us. That we’d have to find ways to split the money nicely and take care of all the legalities. And that we couldn’t all quit our jobs at the same time,” she said, “because the department would be completely empty. Bart used to joke, saying he dreamed about calling in rich.”

  “Instead of calling in sick, is that it?” Taylor asked. “What do you want to bet he’s sick trying to figure out how he can get ahold of the money?”

  “Well, now there’s only four of you,” the detective said. “But we have to find out if anybody else was involved.”

  “Well, let’s go check the boss’s computer then,” she said.

  “Can you log in?”

  She stopped in
the hallway, then frowned. “I’m not sure.” As she went around to the computer, she froze, seeing the bloodstains on the office chair.

  “Take it easy,” Taylor said, then turned to look at the detective. “I presume forensics has been all through the place?”

  He nodded. “Absolutely. But let’s move the chair out of the way.”

  They removed the big office chair from her sight and gave her a different chair to sit in. Perched awkwardly on the edge, she brought up his computer and tried several different times to log in. Shaking her head, she said, “Nothing’s letting me in.”

  “Good,” the detective said. “You shouldn’t have access to everybody’s computers, for crying out loud.”

  “We should also have a computer system that doesn’t freeze up when two of us are working on the same database,” she snapped back. “We have deadlines and people yelling at us because we haven’t gotten back to them. Plus, with a dozen phone calls waiting, we’re on the go all the time. We do what we have to do to keep functioning.”

  The detective opened the drawers beside her. “Did Shorts ever keep his desk locked?”

  “No clue,” she said. “I can’t say that any of us got along all that well, especially with him. So, when our day was done, the last thing we wanted to do was check to see if he had locked his drawers.”

  “A lot of times,” the detective said, “people do exactly that. They want to snoop into other people’s things to see if they can use something. Like something they can write them up for or otherwise get them in trouble with.”

  “Wow. Well, I choose the ‘live within your own space and ignore what others are doing’ motto,” she said sarcastically. “Plenty is going on in my life. I don’t need to be snooping into his.”

  She caught Taylor’s odd look and realized that, to him, her world was very plain and basic. She showed up at work, did her job and left, and she didn’t have a ton of extra things going on. And he was right to a certain extent, but that didn’t mean she wanted to insert herself into other people’s business.

  “Hey, I prefer not to pry,” she said to change the view he may have had. “I didn’t mean that my world is so crazy that there’s no space for curiosity. But I also don’t believe in crossing boundaries.”

  “And checking your boss’s office is doing that?” the detective asked, writing down notes.

  “Of course it is,” she said. She had no clue what he could possibly be writing, but it was always unnerving to have somebody in authority write notes, as if about you. While she sat here, studying the detective, Taylor checked the rest of the drawers.

  “I’m not seeing any tickets,” he said as he lifted the last of the files and froze. “Well, would you look at that.”

  Underneath was a clear plastic file folder, and it was flipped upside down. It had stuck to the bottom of the last manila file folder, and, as Taylor had lifted the file folder, it had dropped back off. Lifting it up, he held it for the detective to see. “I say we now have ourselves a megasize motive.”

  The detective’s face lit up when he saw it.

  Midge said, “I want a receipt for that.”

  The detective looked at her and frowned, earning a glare from Midge. “Oh, no. That ticket doesn’t just disappear now.”

  “It’s going into evidence,” he said.

  “That’s nice,” she snapped. “I just want it to be noted that it’s mine.”

  “Oh, it’s noted already,” his voice went soft. “And that people have died for it already.”

  “So say you,” she said. “What I know is, I have a dead boss and somebody who tried to frame me for murder. That’s pretty personal. And, if that ticket is the reason my life has been turned upside down, it’s not leaving my sight until I know what the hell is going on.”

  “Or until you get to cash it in. Is that the idea?” the detective asked, his own tone hard. “Maybe all your protests of innocence were just a ruse until you could get your hands on this.”

  She snorted. “Not likely. I do have a copy in my email, which I hadn’t even thought of until you brought it up. What I have now is a detective I don’t know from Adam trying to take possession of a ticket that is potentially worth a lot of money.”

  Just then Taylor’s phone rang. He refused to move between the two of them, the ticket still in his hand.

  *

  “Mason, did you hear?” Taylor stared at the ticket in disbelief. He’d never known anyone who’d won a decent-size lottery prize. This one was unbelievable. “It’s a seventy-five-million-dollar lottery.”

  “Bingo,” Mason said. “That’s a hell of a lot of motive.”

  Taylor looked at the detective, with Mason still on the phone. “So, this ticket in my hand could be the sole winning ticket for the whole seventy-five-million-dollar payout.”

  Butler got a call too, flipped through his notepad and wrote something down. Hanging up, he read off the winning numbers, while Midge compared that to the email copy of the lottery tickets now in her hands, so Taylor could check the original tickets in his hands.

  Midge gasped in shock to find a match.

  Taylor looked at her and smiled. “Right. Okay, Mason, we have possession of the original winning ticket now, and I’m taking a picture of it,” he said and sent it to Mason. Then he said, “Midge has asked for a receipt from the detective as well.”

  “Smart of her,” Mason said. “That’s the only proof she’ll have that he actually picked it up from her custody.”

  Taylor thought about it and nodded. “The request sounded odd, given the circumstances.” His gaze was on Midge. She just glared at him. “Do you think she’s involved?” Mason asked.

  “No. I think she’s upset enough about all the other inexplicable things going on here that she didn’t want to have the ticket disappear too.”

  “I like her all the more,” Mason said. “She needs to stand up for herself. If that ticket goes missing, all kinds of hell breaks loose.”

  “Right. Well, now you know,” Taylor said. “And I’m wondering what the legal aspect is as to whether or not it even needs to go into police evidence.”

  “I don’t know,” Mason said. “Let me talk to Alex.” And he hung up.

  As he put his phone away, Taylor said to Butler and to Midge, “Mason will check with a friend of ours as to the legal aspects surrounding this ticket.”

  “I obviously must take it into evidence,” the detective said. “I acknowledge Midge has a partial right to it. Other than that, it’s not an easy case.”

  She looked at the detective. “That’s quite true. But I would be much happier to bring it down to the station myself.”

  He hesitated.

  “Why are you hesitating?” she asked, her tone sharp. “Unless you have something to do with this?”

  “I don’t like what you’re suggesting,” the detective said.

  “And I don’t like what you’re suggesting.” She stood up and snatched the original tickets from Taylor’s hand and said, “I will take it down.”

  “You’re not taking it from this office,” the detective said.

  Taylor placed a hand on her shoulder and held up a hand in front of the detective. “Hey, hang on here a minute. Midge has a claim to it. We know that. What we must do is find all the other people who also have claims to it.”

  “And,” Midge snapped, “we have to make sure this detective is in no way connected or has the opportunity to cash this in.”

  “Now that we have photocopies of your claim,” Taylor said, “and you’ll surrender this for a proper receipt, he can’t cash it in.”

  “Good,” she said. “And where the hell are the rest of the people involved in this?”

  “Maybe you should tell us,” the detective said, his voice ugly. “I don’t like what you’re implying at all.”

  “I don’t like what you’ve been implying all along either,” she snapped, “so don’t get all hissy with me. You were just accusing me, so maybe now I’m accusing you. How do
you like it?”

  Taylor chuckled. “I don’t know where you got your backbone all of a sudden,” he said, “and you’re sure not too particular about picking your battles, but this one apparently matters.”

  “A lot of people are dead,” she said quietly. “And that means we have to be even more vigilant.”

  Just then several people entered the main office. “Taylor, you in here?”

  Midge watched the detective’s face. He stiffened, and his gaze went to the ticket in her hand. She narrowed her eyes and shook her head. “You don’t get to touch this ticket. Do you understand me?”

  Colton barged in, along with several other men who stood at all the exits. “So it’s true? A winning lottery ticket is at the bottom of this thing?”

  “A partial winning lottery ticket apparently,” Midge said tiredly. “It was an office pool. According to Taylor, the payout is seventy-five million. There were five of us, as long as somebody didn’t sell off more shares.”

  “Oh, now that’s an interesting thought too,” Colton said. “What if somebody sold more to someone outside the office group? Or someone got angry that they wanted in and couldn’t be?”

  “All those scenarios and more are what I’m wondering about,” Midge said, “but unfortunately the detective here hasn’t tracked down any of my three missing coworkers. Since my boss and his nephew are both dead, I’m wondering if Gary was allowed to buy into the pool, only to be killed by a person who thought they should have gotten more. Then they killed my boss as well. And, of course, with less survivors, the odds just look that much better.”

  “But they’ll look even better still,” Colton said, “if there are less than four.”

  She nodded. “That’s exactly my problem. As long as this ticket is an issue,” she said, “so is my life. And I don’t want that hanging over my head.”

  Colton turned to the detective. “Have you gotten anywhere tracking down her coworkers?”

  The detective just glared at him. “This is an official investigation. I get that somehow she seems to have turned this into some circus, and you’re all playing along, but that’s not how it works. I want you all to come down to the station. Especially her, and I want that damn ticket.”