He turned to face her, eyes narrowed.
“If he’s merely trying to write a satirical article about this situation, why wouldn’t he have hit Ayla and me up when he had the chance? He was after a scoop, why didn’t he take the tire off our car and chat us up? If nothing else, he’d have the fun of getting to write about how he had trolled us.” Jane squinted and looked him up and down. “He left as though he were scared. From the coffee shop, and from the side of the road.”
A thin sheen of sweat popped out on Brad’s forehead. “You didn’t make it very easy for me to help you, what with getting arrested.”
“We did not get arrested.” Jane sat on the edge of her seat, a fire of indignation in her breast.
“Tased. Sorry.”
Flora rocked back in her chair. “Maybe he’s just a bad journalist. He was in over his head. He got himself writing something he thought was hilarious, and then heard about the murder.”
The thin sheen of sweat on Brad’s face turned into droplets.
Rocky leaned forward, his brows arched with fatherly concern. “Brad, you don’t have to be scared in here. Even if you have made a real hash of this, we can help you.” He nodded his head slowly, encouraging Brad to believe in him. “What did you see?”
Brad’s jaw flexed. He fixed his eyes on the wall behind Flora and didn’t say anything.
Jane prayed.
Flora turned back to her phone.
Rocky kept his gaze calm, and concerned.
Brad’s breathing sped up. He opened his mouth and then shut it.
The wall clock ticked.
“Excuse me,” Miranda popped her head in, her loud, cheerful voice breaking the silence like a car horn. “I just got a call for a Brad Carter. That wouldn’t be you, would it?”
Brad jumped to his feet. He pushed past Rocky and Miranda. Rocky followed him out.
His footsteps echoed through the empty hall, and the bell on the front door jingled.
Miranda lifted an eyebrow. “So that wasn’t him?”
Jane closed her eyes.
“Yes,” Flora said. “That was him.”
“Oh.” Miranda drummed her fingers on the door jamb. “I guess I’ll just tell them he left.”
“Wait!” Jane stood up. “Let me take the call.”
“No way.” Flora clicked a button on her desk phone and picked up the receiver. “I’ll handle this.”
“Brad just stepped out. May I take a message?”
“Sure.”
Jane chewed her lip. Flora’s face was giving nothing away.
“How do you spell that? B-R-E-N-N-A? And Frances like the country or Francis-with-an-I?”
Jane leaned forward. Brenna Frances? Maggie’s paranoid sister?
“Okay, Brenna, if I see him again, I will let him know you called. What’s that? No, he doesn’t work for us. I’m sorry. How did you get that impression?” Long pause. “He did? Goodness, I’m sorry.” Short pause. “Okay. Let us know if we can help with anything else.” Flora hung up.
Rocky came back and slumped into his seat, arms folded, a frown firmly in place.
“How did Brenna trace him here? How did she find out his name?”
“He called her again, with more questions from the credit card company. She threw the phone number he called her from into the Tumblr search bar and found the account for Brad Carter.”
“But how did she manage to catch him while he was here?”
Flora pulled the vinyl blind from her window a crack and looked outside. “Maybe she’s been following him.”
“How could she get enough information from Tumblr to follow him?”
“It could have been dumb luck. That happens sometimes,” Rocky said.
“More often than we like to admit.”
“I’m going to go see her tomorrow.” Jane also peeked outside.
“Oh, are you?” Flora sounded slightly impressed. Like she hadn’t expected a spurt of go-get-um from Jane.
“And I’ll bring her here. And we will all find out what she knows, and how she knows it.” Jane got up and went to the door.
“Have her here by eleven, then,” Rocky said. “I need to take Miranda to the coffee shop for a little talk.”
“That sounds good to me. Get Brenna Frances here by eleven tomorrow morning. It will make up for the way Rocky let Brad get away.”
“Now wait a second. I can’t just grab him and drag him back in here, can I?” Rocky said.
“Apparently not.” There was a glimmer in Flora’s eye that made Jane think Rocky wouldn’t mind the teasing so very much.
Jane left, letting the thrill of the chase kill the little seedling of worry that maybe Brenna had other things to do tomorrow at eleven.
Eleven
By nine thirty the next morning, Jane still wasn’t sure how she was going to get Brenna to the SCoRI office.
She had taken care of her morning cleaning client, and then transformed herself from apron-clad maid to intern-detective with a quick wardrobe change. But she had experienced a significant system-failure in the imagination department.
Time was short, so she turned to Facebook. After a half an hour, she realized that had only made time shorter.
She closed her computer, traded her mall-quality menswear inspired clothes back for her jeans and apron and drove to the Frances’ house. She knew one way to solve a crime, and she was going to have to do it.
Brenna came to the door when Jane knocked. First she craned her neck to look up and down the street behind Jane, then she grabbed Jane by the elbow and pulled her inside. “What do you want?” She eyed the cleaning caddy.
“I want to help.” Jane set the caddy down. “I’ve got an hour, and you all have a crisis. Can I help in any way around the house?”
“No.” Brenna gritted her teeth. “As it is, I have to stop Mom from doing it. She could easily destroy whatever clues Maggie has left lying around.”
“Are you completely sure?”
“Yes.” Brenna eyed the window in the door. “Were you followed?”
“I don’t know, but it didn’t seem like it.”
Brenna took a deep breath through her nose.
“If I can’t help you here with house stuff, I can help with the investigation.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yes. Definitely. But you need to come with me, down to the SCoRI office.”
Brenna scratched her chin. She took a step back and looked Jane up and down.
“You know where they are, I think. You followed Brad there last night. From my place to SCoRI.”
Brenna tilted her head.
“But how did you find him to start following him in the first place?”
Brenna shook her head. “I’d rather not say.”
“Come with me, I’ll treat for coffee and donuts. The Wilsons with their thirty years investigation experience will get to the bottom of the trouble. It won’t hurt anything, and it will help everything.”
Brenna stuck her hands in the pocket of her hoodie, her shoulders hunched like she wanted to hide. “What do they want from me?’
“The information you’ve been gathering. You have tons of it, and if they knew what it was, they could piece it together.”
“Okay.”
“Really?” Jane grinned. “You will?”
Brenna chewed her lip. “Yeah. Just let me gather it up.” She left Jane in the vestibule for what felt like forever. When she came back, she had two plastic file crates stacked full of papers and objects.
Jane recognized a water glass like the one she had been given to capture her own fingerprints.
“Let’s go.” Brenna’s hands shook, rattling the crates, whether from nerves or their weight, Jane wasn’t sure.
It was a risk, but Brenna didn’t seem like the kind of girl who would want to hop in a stranger’s car, so Jane waited for her to load up and then led their miniature caravan to Oregon City and the waiting detectives.
Brenna did not let Jane help carry her e
vidence into the office, but she did set it on Flora’s desk. She pulled one of the avocado colored velvet chairs away from the wall, but didn’t sit.
The cardboard boxes had been somewhat tamed, mostly stacked like a shaky wall behind Flora, but six or so still lined the back of the room. Jane pulled up the other chair and sat down. “Flora, this is Brenna Frances, the sister-in-law of the missing man, the girl who called last night about Brad, and a pretty bright character who has collected a lot of data on the situation. I know it’s not directly related to the fraud case…”
“There was never any fraud. I am so sick of hearing people talk about fraud. My sister and Kyle have been in love forever.” Brenna spit the words out. She gripped the back of the chair, her knuckles white.
“So what have you brought with you today?” Flora asked, her voice had an edge to it.
Jane bit her lip. She missed Rocky’s calming influence. She doubted that Flora could get Brenna to relax enough to share what she knew.
Brenna inhaled a sharp breath through clenched teeth.
“You called us last night for information about Brad Carter, but we don’t have any. In fact, Jane had just brought him to the office to get some from him.”
“I assumed he had come here to report.” Brenna’s voice cracked.
“That’s okay,” Flora said. “It was a logical inference. We think he was being honest about his angle. He claimed he was trying to break the case to make his name in journalism.”
“Jerk.” Brenna grimaced.
“But possibly an honest jerk. We also think he saw something along the way that scared him.”
“At my apartment he tried to warn me away from dealing with murder.”
“Did he?” Flora gave Jane her full attention.
“Yes. At first I thought he was threatening me. But I kind of think he was scared. He told me to stay away from the Fish family.”
Brenna scratched her head. “That can’t be right.”
“Why not?” Flora swung her laser eyed stare back to Brenna.
“Because Kyle is a victim, not a perp.” She reached into the crate on the left and scrabbled around in it until she found a velvet ring box. “See?” She handed the box to Flora.
Flora popped it open, slipped her glasses down on her nose, and drew her eyebrows together. “Explain.”
“That’s Maggie’s wedding band. It was in his tux jacket pocket, hanging in the living room of my house. Right before we left for the rehearsal, he checked to make sure the ring was still there. He wouldn’t have done that if he had been planning on ditching.” She clenched her fists. “He didn’t know anyone saw him do it.”
Jane tilted her head. “Sure. But it’s not evidence of anything, really.”
Flora popped out the lining that held the ring in the box. Carefully, with the tips of her fingers, she pulled out a yellow sticky note that had been folded in half. “Hmmm…” She unfolded it, looked at it for a moment, and then turned to Jane. “When, exactly, did the online harassment of Maggie Frances start?”
Brenna answered instead, “It started Wednesday, the day before the rehearsal dinner.”
“It ended in a missing groom and a murder in two days? That escalated really fast,” Jane said it more to herself than her company.
Brenna shot Jane the evil eye. “These guys weren’t messing around.”
“We can’t be sure that that was what led to the murder of Devon Grosse.” Flora’s businesslike voice shut off Brenna’s words. “But with the right evidence, we could be. Jane, in your report you said you found sticky notes with some numbers written on them in Devon’s apartment. Do you remember what I am talking about?”
“Of course!” Jane fumbled in her purse for her phone, glad the cracked in her screen was the only damage. She pulled up the pictures as fast as she could, and passed the phone to Flora.
Flora dragged her finger across the screen, enlarging the image. “They’re the same.”
Jane sat on the edge of her seat. “But what are they?”
Brenna held out her hand for the paper, impatiently flicking her fingers.
Flora narrowed her eyes, but handed the phone over. Not the paper.
“IP address.” She passed the phone back.
“Okay.” Jane sat back, deflated. What she knew about the internet and IP addresses could dance on the head of a pin with any number of angels. She wasn’t completely ignorant on all things computer, but this wasn’t her area at all.
Brenna also slumped into her seat. “Exactly. About as useful as a drug dealer’s cell phone number.”
“Not likely,” Flora said. “Not if Kyle thought it was important enough to double check that it hadn’t been lost, the day before his wedding.”
“Or if a geek like Devon thought it was important enough to write down on paper. I mean, the guy didn’t have any paper in his home office. None. So why write this down?” She liked the idea that was brewing. “Ayla was quickly dismissive of the note to her, which was also written down, which was about a donor. What if this was the IP address of that donor? It would certainly narrow things down.”
“But he had hundreds of donors.” Brenna shoved her hands in her hoodie pocket again. Her whole body seeming to disappear into the oversized sweatshirt.
“Sure, and that’s a lot of people, but there are thousands of people harassing Maggie.”
Flora turned to her computer and started typing. “It’s local.”
“You know how to look that stuff up?” Brenna sounded surprised.
Flora rolled her eyes. “I’d be a sorry detective if I didn’t.”
“So we have a local IP address that was important enough to hide with the wedding ring, and a note about donors. We should narrow the donor list down to locals, and then see if we can link it up to one of the people making threats.”
“It’s even simpler than that,” Flora said. “It’s the IP Address for Cascadia Surety.”
“Excuse me?” Jane’s heart leapt to her throat.
“Our client.” Flora sat back and folded her hands on her desk. “It looks like you are right. Fraud case and the murder seem to be connected.”
Brenna jumped from her seat and dug into her box again. “Then you might want this.” She held a bunch of papers with a shaking hand.”
Flora accepted them, and looked over them in silence.
“I found those in Kyle’s car. In his jockey box.”
Jane drummed her fingers on her knee, not wanting to interrupt Flora’s concentration, but dying to know what the papers were.
Flora passed them to her, with a smile. “What do you think, Jane?”
Jane turned the stapled pages over, one at a time.
Scribbled notes.
Coffee stains.
Computer print outs.
Phone numbers.
Dollar signs.
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and looked them over again, concentrating.
They were estimates for wedding stuff. Including insurance.
She focused on that page. Three companies, three quotes. Cascadia was circled, but their cost for insurance was not the cheapest, their total covered was not the highest, and they were also not the highest coverage for the cheapest price.
“So why did the two of them choose Cascadia?”
“Maggie doesn’t know. I’ve asked her and asked her.”
“Jane, I want you to get together with Ayla and compare the list of donors to the employee list at Cascadia. Brenna, I want you to go through your evidence and pull out anything that has even the remotest link to insurance.” She stood up. “Things keep popping up with my other case, but I should be done with it soon.” She waved her hand at the boxes. “Rocky called this morning. He is sorry to have missed you both, but it couldn’t be helped.”
Jane stood up, the papers gripped in her fist. Brenna followed suit. She stacked her boxes and hefted them onto her hip.
“I will call you just as soon as Rocky and I have reported to our oth
er client. Expect it sometime this evening.”
“Yes.” Jane bit off the ‘sir’ she had been about to say. “I will.”
Flora looked from Jane to the door.
Jane took the hint and led Brenna out.
Twelve
Ayla didn’t answer Jane’s calls at all that afternoon, so Jane had to do the best she could with the info available online.
She was pleased to see that Cascadia Surety had names and work-based emails listed for their employees, but she was even more pleased that Brenna had overestimated the number of donors for the gaming device. There were merely dozens instead of hundreds. Unfortunately, she couldn’t see the identities of every funder. Just the couple of dozen who had commented, and of those, only the ones who commented with what at least appeared to be a real identity.
And none of those were employees of Cascadia Surety.
Jane shut her laptop harder than was wise.
The trick about the messages on the funding site was that the interesting ones were the anonymous ones. The insinuations, the threats, basically anything that mentioned MotherofBridezilla/Maggie and her game had been written by people with names like MENZRITES and killtrollz. Jane considered cross referencing the user names with user names on the forum, but she dismissed it as the pointless time waste it was sure to be. Especially because the note found with the IP address talked about donors, and it didn’t at all look like KILLJOYNOW or BOOMSTICK had ever been donors.
She reconsidered. Who would be the angriest about the perceived injustice of the game test article? A donor. Someone who had ponied up money.
But would they have been angry enough to kill?
She read the comments again. All eight hundred of them. She was looking for the one commenter who wrote like they were personally invested in the game, and for whom the negative publicity had done actual damage.
But all of the comments sounded like that. Everyone was acting like their own grandmother had been personally assaulted. It made Jane’s stomach sick.
No sense of proportion. Not in eight hundred comments.
She didn’t read them a third time. Another thought had occurred to her.
Spoiled Rotten Murder: A Plain Jane Mystery (The Plain Jane Mysteries Book 5) Page 8