Feeling the need to help, Gemma joined him at the sink. “Then you should go back to the beginning. Why did Olson fake his first death in the first place? He had to be involved in something and needed a quick exit. We’ve already established it’s difficult to fake your own death. Because hey, you need a body, someone to replace you at the morgue. Who was the poor homeless guy he killed in the explosion? Start way back in Salt Lake City.”
“That’s not as easy as it sounds. We’d need to dig the homeless guy up, exhume his body to find out who he was, and I doubt the police there would cooperate.”
“Most judges frown on giving a thumbs up to exhumations,” Zeb said. “You have to have overwhelming evidence that the guy in the ground is pertinent to an ongoing criminal investigation.”
Gemma let out a sigh. “Well, that’s a shame. Then we’re looking at this all wrong. Maybe this is no longer about smuggling coins or casino chips. Lando touched on that very thing last week. What if those two enterprises had run their course and the people involved decided to get into something else?”
“Like what?” Leia prompted.
Gemma lifted a shoulder. “I don’t know. What’s trendy out there? What’s readily available here in Coyote Wells that wouldn’t be anywhere else? Anything can be forged or faked. Anything.”
Lando turned from the counter to stare at his wife first, and then at each face in the room, going from one to the other. An idea hit. “Native American artifacts. There was a law enforcement alert that came out eighteen months or so ago that crossed my desk. It said to be on the lookout for people who were passing off cheap fakes as authentic original works, like arts and crafts, and jewelry.”
“I remember that,” Zeb said. “They were using cheap knockoffs made overseas as original works of art, silver inlaid earrings weren’t silver at all, animal carvings were made from ordinary rock instead of onyx or travertine.”
“Exactly. Necklaces made from shells had been mass produced in the Philippines. All the cheap stuff is much more profitable than the real thing. Could that be it? Could Olson have had a source where he dumped all his cheap goods from overseas onto a local dealer with Coyote Wells as his base of operation?”
“Wait a minute. What if Olson was sending the stuff to a person who had an online store? Someone in a much larger market like say, Los Angeles? What if the goods included knockoff Gucci, Rolex, handbags, and the like? It could be anything he received from overseas.”
Luke held up his phone. “A search online reveals selling knockoffs is a six-hundred-billion-dollar industry. That would be worth operating a smuggling operation in our little out-of-the-way, dot-on-the-map town we all call home.”
“Then why didn’t we find anything like that on his computer?” Lando wondered as he pushed off the counter. “Unless someone took the laptop with all the important stuff on it and left another computer behind to throw us off.”
“I still say Brandt Lewis was somehow involved,” Leia piped up. “And Tiffany Ringgold. I so want them to be responsible for Talia’s murder.” She glanced around the room at all the skeptical faces. “I can prove my theory, even if I have to spell it out for you guys.”
“How?” Lianne challenged. “If only we had a whiteboard.”
“I brought one with me. It’s in the car.”
Lianne laughed. “You’re kidding? I was joking.”
“I’m not. I use it to keep track of all the orders I need to place. Tuesdays are ordering day.”
“Only this time you brought it with you?” Gemma remarked.
“Hey, it’s what cops use to keep track of the suspects. Since I have only one suspect with a long list of reasons to murder his wife, I’ll write them down for all of you.”
“I’ll go get it out of the car,” Zeb volunteered as he trudged out of the kitchen. He came back carrying a thirty-inch by twenty-inch marker board and realized everyone had moved into the dining room. He propped the board up against the hutch and took a seat.
Leia got to her feet to jot down the points she wanted to make. By the time she finished, she had six. “First, there’s all the stuff I know firsthand from Talia about Brandt. He started talking about his wealth online. The first date, the day they met in person, was right here in Coyote Wells. He began talking marriage right away until he finally convinced her that he couldn’t live without her. All BS. Sometimes I think Talia just wanted the spectacular wedding. She probably spent thousands on it. I suspect she started having doubts even before the big day because she was very agitated during the ceremony.”
Gemma picked up her wineglass. “I remember you mentioning that.”
“Two weeks after that, Talia was already regretting the marriage. Something happened between those two and everything started going downhill.”
“But Talia’s unhappiness doesn’t prove her husband’s guilt,” Lando pointed out. “I know she was murdered. I’m sure you’re right about Brandt being a lousy husband, but I need solid evidence to get past his lawyers and get a warrant.”
Leia put down her marker. “What if I could get you proof?”
Zeb eyed his bride-to-be. “Don’t even think about playing detective. Three people have already been murdered. Whoever we’re dealing with is no stranger to killing to protect his self-interests.”
Leia looked wide-eyed and innocent. “Who me? I wouldn’t dream of interfering in police business. That’s up to you professionals.” But she’d already decided to rip a page out of Gemma’s book and see if she could find answers on her own. Fortunately, she knew just where to start.
19
Over breakfast the next morning, Gemma opened the county newspaper only to find an article that disparaged Coyote Wells for its crime wave and unsolved murders.
“None of this is an accurate portrayal of what’s happening in the investigation,” Gemma raged. “This isn’t just knocking the town, it’s knocking us—you and me—the mayor and the police chief, specifically. The story calls me a know-it-all psychic. Who wrote this crap anyway?” She then answered her own question when she noticed the byline. “Who is this Tina Ashcomb? Wouldn’t be any relation to Harry, would it?”
“His daughter.”
“I knew he held a grudge about me winning the mayor’s race. This hit piece proves it. I ought to march in there and threaten to sue.”
“What for? We do have three unsolved murders, four if you count the one in the trunk.”
“That one shouldn’t count. Tuttle doesn’t know for sure how she died.”
Eating his Frosted Flakes without reacting to Gemma’s rant, Lando mumbled, “That’s just being nitpicky. She was stuffed in a trunk. I doubt she wanted to end up that way.”
Deflated, Gemma plopped down in front of her plate of toast and jam. No longer hungry, she pushed it away and picked up her coffee cup instead. She let out a heavy sigh. “Sometimes I really don’t like people very much.”
“No need to get upset with Tina. She’s just doing her job, selling newspapers.”
“By character assassination? I don’t think so. Did this Tina person call you for an interview to get your side? Because I know she didn’t call me. No, I’m too busy fending off a long list of developers who want to turn Coyote Wells into their own personal playground.”
“Keep in mind that not all development is a bad thing. The town could use a new high school. The one we have is falling down.”
Gemma brightened, turning her focus away from “Tina The Reporter” to consider her other options as mayor. She wanted to prove that she could do this job, prove that the depiction of her in the article was just plain wrong. Or maybe it was to disprove Tina wrong. Either way, she needed to step up. “That could be my next project, once I get the bridge fund squared away.”
Lando patted her hand. “You’re doing fine. This is only your second week. Take a breath. Stop letting people like Tina get to you. Just be yourself.”
“This is hard, Lando, harder than anything I’ve ever done. Shouldn’t I have known
the school was falling down?”
“Why don’t you take the rest of the week and peel off the layers here in town? Discover what the people want. You were thrust into this job completely unprepared. Get to know your constituents. Talk to them, one on one. Sit down, eat lunch with them, have a cup of coffee. When you were running the chocolate shop, you got to know each person when they came through the door to buy candy. Right? Don’t separate yourself from them now. They’re just hardworking people, like you and me, who expect their mayor to be a decent human being and not stab them in the back. They expect fairness, Gemma. That’s all anyone truly wants.”
That advice stayed with her after Lando left the house. She finished her toast and tidied up the kitchen. With the carnelian stone in her pocket, she went into the solarium and took out Marissa’s jewelry kit, sorting through the tools she’d need to attach the carnelian stone to her necklace. She’d already figured out how to set the other gemstones in a metal casing. But this little red one posed a challenge since it was much smaller in size. Hoping to take extra care, she sat down to fashion the same kind of ornate, protective wrap she’d used for the others. Using a thin sterling silver wire, she twisted the metal around the stone until it shielded the edges from wear and tear.
While she worked, the stone radiated outward from its core, giving off a lifeforce of energy and heat, even her confidence seemed to soar. When she attached the finished carnelian stone to the chain and connected it with the others, she could feel the shift of power. She closed her fist around the stones. The surge felt like drinking a hot cup of cocoa on a cold winter’s day. The euphoric warmth spread throughout her body.
If this little red stone added truth and knowledge, it also brought with it a punch of courage. Inspiration hit. She should use its strength now, bring her A-game to the party, before it faded or she lost the feeling.
She put away the jewelry kit and took out her laptop. She decided to start with a genealogy website and look for relatives of Peter Olson. It took patience to weed through the names and dates. If she’d had more information to go on, it might’ve been an easier task. But all she could do was use the little data she did know about Olson to her advantage.
Truck driver Peter Olson had ceased to exist after his rig crashed in Salt Lake City. She needed to locate where he’d come from before that. After several false leads, she discovered a Peter Olson had started out life in Russell Springs, Kansas, a dot of a farming community off highway K-25. Somewhere along the way, he’d started making side money running a game on the elderly, stealing their government checks. By the time he was nineteen, he was looking at a five-year stretch in the Kansas pen for theft and fraud. She made a few calls, checked her facts, found out the titanium rod in his leg came courtesy of a broken femur that was too crushed to heal by itself due to a gang fight while in jail. After his release, he drifted to Colorado for a time, met a woman, and landed a job as a trucker.
She kept digging, making progress, kept turning over each rock, each little line of information until one detail stood out. Since she couldn’t discount it, she made more phone calls, vetting the data as best she could. After going through the family ancestry again, she was ninety percent certain she’d found Peter Olson’s relatives. If it turned out she was right, this was huge.
Refusing to stop there, she switched gears and changed websites. Researching disappearances, she hunted for females who’d been reported missing within the last week. None locally popped up. She widened her search, extending it to the state of California and found nothing that matched. She moved eastward clicking on other search engines, tapping into missing person Facebook posts.
Some nagging gut intuition from within made her go international. There was only one woman who fit the general description of the female found at the foothills. Claudia Bergamot. She was the daughter of Claude, a French financier, who was rumored to be worth two hundred million dollars, all made from trading in counterfeit labels.
Gemma shut down her laptop and called to the dogs. She couldn’t wait to tell Lando what she’d found.
“Look, I hope you won’t be mad, but I decided to do a bit of sleuthing on a genealogy website about Peter Olson.”
“Now see, stuff like that doesn’t make me mad. It’s when you go off on your own and put your personal self in danger.”
“I’m trying to make up for not telling you that I planned to go off to look for Fenwitha.”
“We did promise to tell each other things like that.”
“I know. That’s why I’m trying to make it up to you now.”
“Okay. I’m all ears. What did you learn looking up Olson?”
“I discovered that he had a daughter when he supposedly died in that fiery truck crash.”
Lando’s eyes widened with interest. “You should’ve led with that. How old was the girl?”
“Two when he faked his own death and became Woodson. Olson had gone through a nasty breakup with a woman named Starla Saylor, who listed her occupation on the girl’s birth certificate as an exotic dancer. The mother got sole custody of the little girl. Judges don’t like to separate kids from their birth mothers no matter what the mother does for a living. Olson must’ve been furious. He had to come up with a plan to fix all his custody issues so he could disappear with the girl. Which is why I think he killed himself off using that poor homeless guy. Becoming someone else allowed him to take the child with him and start over. I suspect that if you do a DNA test on those remains from the trunk, you’ll find out that the woman in that trunk was Olson’s daughter, Chloe Olson, later changed to Woodson. And get this, Chloe was diagnosed with leukemia at the age of fifteen. Which might explain why Tuttle couldn’t find a cause of death. Chloe may have died from her disease. I suspect that because I found an old posting on Facebook from 2005 that was a virtual plea for help with her medical expenses. The page had not been taken down.”
“But none of this explains why Olson didn’t give his daughter a proper burial.”
“It might if Olson didn’t want the authorities nosing around, afraid someone might make the connection to his past. Olson, now Woodson, did live with a lot of secrets for half his life.”
“More than. I suppose it’s easy enough to check. I could run a background on this Starla Olson.”
Gemma shook her head. “She’s listed as Starla Saylor on Chloe’s birth certificate, not sure if that’s her maiden name or a stage name. It seems Olson and Saylor were never married. I could never find a marriage license for them.”
“You got all this because you found a gemstone in a fairy circle?”
Gemma let out a laugh. “No. And it was a stone circle with a legendary fairy named Fenwitha. I did all this because I took the initiative. It took most of my morning searching online. The data didn’t just fall out of the sky. I got creative. But I have more to tell you, a lot more. I just found the connection from Jane Doe to the other murders.”
Lando cocked a brow. “I like this Fenwitha already if she gives you this kind of incentive.”
“That might be a first. Anyway, when you ran the background on that cabin, are you sure it wasn’t registered to a Claudia and not a Claude? They are similar names.”
“I’m certain.”
“Then Claude Bergamot is probably footing the bill for this entire operation. He’s not from Canada, never was. He’s living outside Paris. And his daughter, Claudia, works for the company. She left Paris a week ago on a ‘business trip’ to San Francisco.”
“How do you know all that?”
“When I discovered online that Claudia had been reported missing by her family—it was all over the San Francisco news outlets, print, radio, TV stations. Our own county newspaper must’ve missed it. I called the Bergamot company in Paris and asked to speak to Claudia. An administrative assistant confirmed that she never checked out of her Bay Area hotel, never used her return ticket back home, and hasn’t been heard from since Saturday night. Claudia Bergamot is your Jane Doe. And if so, she’s
the link to the other murders. Now we’re dealing with a serial killer who’s trying to cover his tracks.”
“A serial killer who lured this woman up here to Coyote Wells. I wonder if he killed her down there and disposed of the body here. He’s desperate. He doesn’t want anyone to connect these victims to his counterfeiting. Why would he kill for that, though?”
“My guess is, it has to be something a lot more sinister than fake coins and chips.”
After a morning spent playing detective, Gemma used the afternoon to catch up on emails and return phone calls. Hours later, she was bored out of her mind.
Her attention wandered from the town’s business back to murder. She did her best to try and visualize the victims, beginning with Talia’s autopsy, which proved that her murder had occurred before Olson’s. It had to be a significant part of the puzzle. But where did it fit?
Olson’s death was easier to explain. The man was into so much illegal stuff that he probably got on someone’s last nerve and had to be finished off.
But then there was Claudia Bergamot. Why was the rich girl found dead so far away from San Francisco? Who had she upset in the grand scheme of things, enough to end up dead?
Too many questions, Gemma decided and tried to switch gears to a more rational mindset. She had a bachelorette party to plan. She picked up the phone to ask her mother-in-law for help and realized it was in the middle of the lunch rush. Probably not the best time to go over the guest list.
Frustrated, she propped up her feet on the desk and dreamed of being back at the chocolate shop.
20
Leia began to plot her next move even before she could leave work. Getting into Talia’s house wouldn’t be easy, but in her mind, it had to be done. She had to get something on Brandt, find conclusive proof that would nail him as Talia’s murderer. The only way she knew to make that happen was to get inside that house.
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