“But you were . . . close?” Vi asked.
Rita laughed. “Let’s call it ‘friends with benefits,’ okay? It was never going to turn into anything serious, but we liked each other.”
“How did you meet?”
Despite an obvious effort not to look disapproving, Vi’s gaze strayed to Rita’s outfit.
Combined with the way she was knocking back Charlie’s Scotch, the redhead’s clothes made it hard to avoid putting a label on her. As far as Liss knew, Charlie’s business had been respectable. His lawyer certainly was. Rita, however, seemed to personify the shadier side of a private investigator’s lifestyle—at least that lifestyle as it was so often portrayed in movies, books, and on television.
A single tear rolled down Rita’s cheek, leaving a trail in her heavy makeup. “Charlie solved a little problem I was having with an ex-boyfriend. I was grateful.” She stumbled to her feet. “I gotta go.”
Before she could bolt, Liss blocked her path to the door. “Are you sure you don’t know of anyone who might have wanted to kill him?”
“I’d tell you if I did. Charlie was a good guy, a good friend. He didn’t go after mobsters, if that’s what you’re thinking, or take drug cases. It was mostly wives that hired him to get the goods on their cheating husbands. And insurance companies trying to expose frauds.”
“Do you know Charlie’s lawyer, Mark Everley?”
“I know who he is.” As if hearing his name inspired greater caution, she narrowed her eyes.
Liss caught the implication in her words and it puzzled her. Everley had struck her as middle-of-the-road prosperous, not high-end or high-profile, but not a shady shyster, either. Rita obviously had a different take on the man.
“Okay. I’ll bite. Who is he?”
“He’s an ambulance chaser. He almost lost his license once for getting too enthusiastic about it.” Rita edged closer to the door.
Liss hastily grabbed a notepad and pencil from their place by the phone and scribbled her phone number on it. “If you think of anything that might help us figure out who killed Charlie, will you call me? Please?”
“Yeah. Okay.” Rita took the slip of paper and fled.
From the doorway Liss watched her get into a beat-up, old pickup truck parked at the curb. It started on the third try and roared away in a cloud of exhaust.
“I don’t know about you,” Vi said from behind her, “but I’ve had enough excitement for one day. Let’s leave searching Charlie’s belongings until the morning. Things will go much more smoothly after we’ve had a good night’s sleep.” She was already toddling off down the narrow hallway that led to two small bedrooms, her voice growing fainter with every step.
Liss caught herself fighting a yawn. For once, she and her mother were in complete agreement.
* * *
They were up early the next morning, primed to find answers among the possessions Charlie MacCrimmon had left behind. Their first discovery was that he appeared to be a dinosaur when it came to record keeping. There was no sign of either a personal computer or a laptop. He had a printer, but it wasn’t connected to anything. It was a manual typewriter that took pride of place on the desk in the bedroom he’d used as an office. Old-fashioned file cabinets held his case records in neatly labeled manila folders.
“How on earth did he do searches without access to the Internet?” Liss wondered aloud.
“Maybe the old-fashioned way?” Vi suggested. “You know—tail the suspect and catch him in the act?” She pointed to an assortment of cameras and camera attachments stored in a closet.
“Rita did say he catered to women wanting the goods on their cheating husbands.”
Long-lost Uncle Charlie had gone down several notches in her estimation by the time a methodical search of the paper files confirmed that the bulk of his business had involved taking incriminating pictures of unattractive middle-aged men carrying on with women other than their wives. In far too many of the photos, which were of excellent quality and in perfect focus, both parties were partially or wholly undressed.
“Yuck.”
“Agreed.” Vi hastily closed yet another folder and put it back where she’d found it.
All the correspondence was to or from clients. Nowhere was there anything personal, let alone any hint of the reason Charlie had suddenly decided to travel to Maine.
After they’d thoroughly searched his office, they moved on to the other rooms. There were no more pictures of naked people. There were, in fact, no photographs at all. Charlie hadn’t displayed any personal mementoes. If he’d been keeping track of his family, he’d left behind no proof of it.
Charlie MacCrimmon had been secretive. Everley had called him a loner. Liss was beginning to think he’d also been paranoid, but if he’d thought someone was after him, he just might have been right.
They took a break at midday and went out for lunch. On the way back to the house, they visited the two mail drops Charlie had used, but nothing had been delivered to either one since the last time he’d checked them. According to the records at both places, he’d done so on the day before he left Florida for Maine.
The sun was low in the sky when, quite by accident, Liss stumbled upon Charlie’s secret stash of documents. She was pacing the bedroom she’d slept in, the one where her uncle’s clothes still hung in the closet, wondering where else there was to search, when a floorboard creaked beneath her foot. Curious, she put weight on the same spot again. She didn’t think she was imagining it when she felt a slight give in the surface.
“Mom!”
By the time Vi appeared in the doorway, Liss had pulled a large braided rug aside and was down on her hands and knees, peering at the flooring. At first, it seemed perfectly smooth, but then she spotted a slight unevenness between two boards.
“What have you . . . ? Oh, that looks promising.” Vi retreated for a moment before returning to the room with her purse in hand. After a bit of rummaging, she came up with a sturdy metal nail file. “Here. Use this to pry that up.”
“I’m surprised TSA didn’t confiscate it.”
“They never pay any attention to little old ladies.”
“The more fools they.”
Liss fumbled with the makeshift tool, frustrated at first by her lack of success. She was about to give up when a lucky jab released a hidden catch and a square section of the flooring popped free.
“Shades of Nancy Drew,” she whispered. The hole was stuffed full of sturdy five-by-eight envelopes.
“Well? What are you waiting for? Haul them out of there.”
“Just a minute. I’m not risking my fingers until I’ve taken a good look inside. Hand me that flashlight.” She’d left it on Charlie’s dresser after using it to inspect the far reaches of his closet.
Vi held the beam steady while Liss examined the opening for booby traps. If Charlie had been worried enough to conceal this material under the floor of his bedroom, in what appeared to be a custom-made hiding place, she wouldn’t put it past him to have taken other precautions. It could be anything from an audible alarm to a mousetrap. Then, too, given that this was Florida and there was a crawl space underneath the house, she didn’t think she was being overcautious to worry about spiders and snakes.
She quickly ruled out the possibility of creepy crawlies. The hidey-hole was lined with what appeared to be the same material used in lockboxes and safes. Liss frowned, wondering why her uncle hadn’t also installed a fancy combination lock. Deciding it was a good thing for her that he hadn’t, she reached inside.
A few minutes later, when all the envelopes were spread out on the kitchen table, she and her mother began the task of examining their contents. It didn’t take long for Vi to find something of interest.
“This is Charlie’s honorable discharge from the army,” she announced.
“We knew he was in the military.”
“Yes, but this is dated more than four years after he was declared MIA.”
“Are you saying the mili
tary knew he was alive and didn’t notify his family? I don’t see how that could happen.”
“Maybe there was a good reason not to let anyone know.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s probably far-fetched.”
“That’s supposed to be my line,” Liss said with a laugh. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I’ve wondered ever since we first heard he wasn’t dead if he might have been a deserter. You hear about such things in wartime. And for him to turn up later as a private detective, with no indication of what he’d been doing all those years in between—well, it occurred to me that he might have gone AWOL and then hired out as a mercenary. Isn’t that what some men with military training do, the ones who desert or get dishonorable discharges?” She ducked her head, as if embarrassed to have fallen prey to such wild surmises. “I guess I thought he might have been living under another identity all that time. But this”—she tapped the discharge papers—“this puts a different light on things. Now I have to wonder if he was working undercover for the government.”
“As what? A spy?” The idea was intriguing, highly unlikely, and probably impossible to either confirm or disprove.
“Why not? If our government was determined to hide his activities, that would also explain why they allowed the family to have him declared dead, even though he wasn’t.”
“I don’t know, Mom. It sounds pretty preposterous.”
“They do things like that all the time in the witness protection program.” Vi sighed and reached for the next envelope. “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know, unless Charlie left some record of his activities behind in one of these.”
They found a copy of Charlie’s will, the deed to his house, and paperwork relating to his private investigator’s license, but nothing to do with spies or mercenaries. Nor was there anything to suggest why her uncle had traveled to Moosetookalook . . . until Liss unfolded a plain sheet of eight-by-ten white paper. The typed words “Merveilleuse International” leapt out at her.
“Holy cow,” she murmured as she read on. “I think I’ve just found the connection.”
She looked up to meet her mother’s inquisitive gaze, but did not at once satisfy her curiosity. First she stuck her hand back into the envelope, just in case there was something else inside, but if Charlie had proof of the claims he’d made in the typed memo, he hadn’t hidden it in there.
It seemed more likely he’d taken that evidence with him to Maine, and it made a terrible kind of sense that he might have been killed to prevent him from revealing what he knew. If that was the case, the person who’d murdered her uncle had also stolen Charlie’s research, thereby successfully covering his tracks.
“What did you find?” Impatient, Vi snatched the paper from her daughter’s hand and read it for herself. Behind her glasses, her eyes widened. “Oh, my!”
“We need to get back to Moosetookalook right away,” Liss whispered. “The final hearing on signing over water rights to Merveilleuse International is scheduled to take place on Monday.”
Chapter Eight
When Liss boarded a plane on Saturday morning for the first leg of her journey back to Maine, she was as tense as a cat face-to-face with a ferret. There had been only one seat available. She was trying hard not to think about how much trouble her mother could get into on her own in Garden Park.
That she’d have to change planes twice, with long layovers in between flights, was further cause for stress. It would be almost midnight before she reached Moosetookalook. The only good thing about her itinerary was that it would get her home in plenty of time to talk to the selectmen before the hearing. She hoped to be able to convince them not to sign away the town’s water rights.
And talk to them is about all I can do, she thought glumly.
There was no guarantee they would listen to her warning. She had no proof of anything, just a page of notes her uncle had made on the subject. His claim that Merveilleuse International intended to defraud the town was unsubstantiated. So, too, was his prediction that if the project went ahead as planned, it would cause lasting damage to the local aquifer. Charlie MacCrimmon had believed that selling water rights would lead to an environmental disaster, but if he’d had evidence, it appeared to have died with him.
Liss’s best guess was that her uncle had made a case to back up his allegations and had taken the documentation with him to Moosetookalook. What had happened to it since was anybody’s guess. Had the police found his files? Sherri had told her there was no laptop among Charlie’s possessions. Now that she’d seen his office, that didn’t surprise her. She could only hope he’d left a paper trail.
On her flight from Miami, sitting in her aisle seat next to a senior citizen who was gently snoring, Liss contemplated what she knew and what she didn’t. There were way too many unanswered questions!
If Charlie’s intention had been to “save” his old hometown from an evil international conglomerate, why hadn’t he told anyone in Moosetookalook what he’d uncovered? As far as Liss knew, he’d gone into hiding as soon as he arrived. He’d actively avoided making contact with family members, but he must have planned to share what he found out with someone.
Several people her uncle had known as a teenager still lived in the area, but if he hadn’t trusted any of them with the secret of his survival after Vietnam, why would he choose one as a confidant at this stage of the game? The possibility that he’d reached out to an old friend became even less likely when Liss factored in Charlie’s murder. Once his body had been identified, wouldn’t someone with whom he’d recently been in touch have come forward in the interest of helping the police find his killer?
Fishing in her carry-on for a notepad and pen, Liss started a to-do list. Number one was Talk to Charlie’s friends.
It was a long shot, but the effort might still be worthwhile. Before this Florida trip, besides her parents and Dolores Mayfield, she hadn’t asked anyone about Charlie’s past. She’d meant to talk to Dolores’s husband. At the very least, Moose might be able to provide her with the names of other old cronies.
She tapped the end of the pen against her chin while she considered what else she could do. After a moment she scribbled, Find out if anyone from Merveilleuse International was in town around the time Charlie was killed.
She didn’t know much about the company beyond what Thea Campbell had told everyone at the town meeting. Jeremiah Forestall, the head honcho, had a summer place somewhere on the coast of Maine and ran his business out of a foreign country. Switzerland? She hadn’t been paying attention. It hadn’t seemed important then.
Did Forestall visit Moosetookalook to inspect the site himself, she wondered, or did he send minions to do the legwork? Engineers, and maybe geologists, would have surveyed the area. In order to sell Thea and the other selectmen on the idea, a representative must have met with them.
On the next lines she added, Get names and descriptions, and then, Share information with police.
That last item should probably have been first on her list. Detective Cussler wasn’t likely to appreciate her input, but that mustn’t stop her from giving it.
Liss doubted the police had been looking at anyone connected with Merveilleuse International as a potential killer. Why would they? Until she told Cussler what she’d found out in Florida, the detective would have had no basis for making a connection between Charlie’s presence in Moosetookalook and the sale of water rights by the town . . . unless the state police already had the paperwork Charlie had brought with him to Maine.
Liss’s frown deepened. The more she thought about it, the less likely that possibility seemed. If Detective Cussler knew why Charlie had been in town, she wouldn’t be so suspicious of his brother.
Ask if cops have Charlie’s evidence. Get them to share, she wrote.
A small snorting sound escaped her, causing a passing flight attendant to send her a questioning look. Fat chance Kelly Cussler would give Liss MacCrimmon the time of day! She toyed
with the idea of making an end run around the detective in charge of the case. She could appeal to her old friend and onetime suitor, Gordon Tandy, Cussler’s predecessor, for help. Maybe he could convince his colleague that Liss had a need to know details of the investigation, even if she was a civilian.
The man beside her awoke with a start, slamming his elbow into Liss’s side as he jerked out of a sound sleep. He blinked bleary eyes at her, but didn’t apologize. “Need to get out,” he mumbled.
Hastily tucking her pen and notepad into the seat pocket in front of her, Liss stood to give him room to stumble into the aisle and make his way along it toward the restroom. She stayed on her feet, taking advantage of the opportunity to stretch.
Although she didn’t expect to see anyone she knew, her gaze swept over nearby passengers. A white-haired grandmotherly type flashed her a tentative smile. The man seated behind her avoided eye contact by ducking his head. Liss vaguely remembered seeing him in the waiting area at the gate. She wasn’t sure why she’d noticed him. He was too ordinary-looking to stand out in a crowd.
When her seatmate returned, he demanded coffee from the flight attendant. Liss started to ask for some, but then thought better of it. She’d already had three cups, and the caffeine wasn’t doing a darned thing to keep her alert. Instead, after retrieving her pen and notebook and reading over what she’d written, she returned them to her bag, leaned back, and closed her eyes. With luck, she thought, a catnap would take her the rest of the way to the first layover.
Her eyes popped open again, only moments later. She’d meant to empty her mind for the duration of the flight. Instead, it teemed with possible scenarios. Had Charlie been hiding in Margaret’s apartment because he knew a hit man had been hired by Merveilleuse International to take him out? She told herself the very idea was ludicrous. How would they have found out that Charlie was onto them? That was almost as preposterous as her mother’s theory about spies and mercenaries.
A View to a Kilt Page 11