Claudia glanced at the screen.
“No, looks like somewhere near Bakersfield. But nobody has a local phone number these days.” A thought struck her, and she got to work excavating her computer from where it was doing vital work holding up a pile of dirty plates.
“Actually, I wonder . . .”
What she was wondering would have to wait to be revealed, because at that moment the truck pulled up with Elias and Brandon and a load of rented furniture. Helen took off like a rocket to meet them, with Lennox right on her heels, and the others followed, Julia to prevent Elias from throwing anything important, and Carmen and Iryna because they weren’t about to miss out on the next act. Only Claudia and Betty were left in the house, one focused on her computer screen while the other unpacked another batch of miniature tarts from her seemingly endless supply of plastic containers.
“That’s what I thought.” Claudia said.
“What?” Betty stopped looking for something on which to serve her baked goods that was more appropriate than a frisbee and came to look over her shoulder.
“Solar panel salesmen? IRS scams? What’s going on?” Betty asked, reading down the page Claudia had brought up.
“It’s spoofed,” Claudia explained. “You pay one of these services and they’ll disguise your call or text with a different number. They’re mostly used by telemarketers and scammers to trick people into answering. The spoofing services reuse the same numbers all the time. Some people go online to make notes about the calls they get, on sites like this.”
“So that’s it? There’s nothing you can do to find out who sent that text?”
“Nothing I can do,” Claudia said, as she made a copy of the page and attached it to an email, along with a screenshot of the text on her phone, then sent both to the printer. “But there’s something that can be done.”
She found Lennox arguing with Helen about the evidentiary value of the extra canning supplies in her car, while Brandon stood quietly by.
“Brandon,” she said, ignoring the others for now. “Did you get a text today? One that asked you to be somewhere tonight? From a number you didn’t recognize, but it said it was from someone you knew?”
Brandon’s eyes bugged out and for a moment she thought he might be about to accuse her of witchcraft.
“Yea—Yes, how did you know?”
She ignored the question and held out her hand.
“Can I see it? It’s important.”
Wordlessly, he took out his phone and unlocked it, even as his mother started to protest.
“No you hold onto it,” Claudia instructed as he went to hand the phone to her. “I just want to see.”
The number wasn’t the same as the one she had, but the message was similar.
“Hadley’s Point? That’s about twenty minutes north of here, right? Pretty remote spot to be going out to at that time of night.”
Brandon didn’t say anything, but he was blushing so vigorously that Claudia was worried he might pass out. In the interests of kindness, she didn’t read the message out loud or comment any further on its contents, though she did have some questions about the sort of people who would name their daughter Kaiylleigh. Instead, she made a note of the number and led the way back into the house, where she put it into the search box on the same website and came up with a similar list of complaints.
“So that’s what happened,” she said after she finished explaining the existence of phone number spoofing for the second time. “Someone used one of these services to make fake numbers, and sent both of us texts that were supposed to get us out in the area where Mr. Hahn was killed, so one or both of us could be framed for his murder.”
It was hard for Claudia to believe that she was talking so casually about a man’s death, but this was no time for emotional crises. Lori having died on her doorstep might have been a coincidence, but there was no mistaking the malice in the current situation. Unfortunately, if anyone was going to fail to see that, it was Chief Lennox.
“How do I know you didn’t send those yourself?” he said, grasping at the remaining straws that were holding up his beliefs.
“In what universe would I send myself and Brandon fake texts, to set us both up to have no alibi for a time when we both had perfectly good ones?” Claudia said. “Do you have something against evidence that would actually stand up in court? They don’t offer these services for free. Someone must have paid for it, and they probably left some sort of paper trail. Find out who they are and maybe you’ll get somewhere.”
The rest of the volunteers had crowded back into the house at this point, giving Claudia a significant audience for her rant.
Elias, at least, was entirely on her side.
“This is ridiculous,” he said, stepping into the doorway and completely blocking Iryna’s view. “You say this man was killed tonight? You’re sure of that?”
Lennox had to admit that he was.
“Well, then the boy didn’t do it, because he was with me. And I am not someone you sneak away from, you know? And Claudia didn’t do it because she was here. So stop bothering these people and take the information she is very nicely giving you and go find the real killer. That’s what you want to do, right?”
Lennox couldn’t argue with that, and facing the only man in the room who was larger than him, it seemed he didn’t want to. After making a minor show of reminding everyone who had the authority around here, he finally accepted the printouts that Claudia was offering him (in lieu of handing over her phone, which she kept in a death grip) and left in a huff. Derek paused for a second on their way out the door, and Claudia almost said something to him, but the words, whatever they were, stuck in her throat.
CHAPTER TWENTY
When the police were gone, the air of tension in the cottage relaxed noticeably. Thoughts of planning for the marketplace were forgotten, as they passed around Betty’s tarts and exchanged theories.
“He was probably her partner, laundering the money from the drug operation,” Iryna said. “He came to find it, and then the mafia killed him too.”
“That makes sense,” said Helen. “Where do you think she hid it?”
“We don’t have any reason to believe Lori had anything to do with drugs,” Claudia said, trying to keep the conversation from getting completely out of control.
“Another thing then. Smuggling, or cheating the banks.” Iryna was not to be deterred. “She must have been doing something. Otherwise why would she be murdered? And now him?”
“People do get murdered when they haven’t done anything wrong,” Betty protested. “Mr. Hahn has been staying with us for the past two days, and nothing he’s done has made me think he had anything to do with a criminal conspiracy.”
“He did seem to be looking for something Lori might have had,” Claudia said, thinking out loud. She regretted it almost immediately.
“Something she had?” Julie asked. “Like what?”
“I don’t know,” Claudia said, trying very hard not to give away her guess. “But the police have been looking through everything of hers, and if there was something incriminating there, you’d think they would have found it by now.”
“I don’t like it.” Elias had been uncharacteristically quiet for most of the conversation, and Claudia was surprised he broke his silence for such an obvious observation. The rest of the party waited for him to elaborate, which, after some more thought, he did.
“The lady dies, okay, it’s sad, but it’s a big world and lots of crazy things happen. But now this? A man who knew her comes to town, and he’s dead too? And why? What could be here that would be worth killing two people for? We sell cheese and pickles and pork, not diamonds and drugs.”
“Not everyone gets killed for money,” Carmen said. Like Elias, she had mostly stayed out of the conversation, but now she entered it with a vengeance. “A woman moves to a new town and starts a business where nobody knows her. And she keeps it that way—in all the time she was here, did anyone have any sort of
conversation where you learned anything about her? Or ever see her spend any of this huge amount of money she’s making with all these drugs or whatever?”
A series of sideways looks and shrugs brought the group to a consensus of no on both questions.
“So, yeah, maybe she decided to move here to run a vast criminal enterprise that no one seems to have heard anything about. Or maybe she had other reasons.”
“You think she was running from somebody?” Julie asked.
“She might have been.” Carmen looked around like she was daring someone to contradict her. “Why else would she have gone to all that trouble? And cheating on her shop like that, it doesn’t make any sense. Even the extra money she was making, how much would that be?”
“Not much,” Claudia admitted. “I was wondering that myself. As scams go, it’s about as small-scale as you get. She would have been better off setting up on the Internet and saving herself the overhead.”
“See? That’s what I mean. It makes no sense for her to have been here. And it makes no sense that someone killed her. So maybe together, they make sense?” Carmen said.
Claudia looked around the room and marveled at the group she had somehow gathered around her. Five women and two men, all clustered around her table, helping themselves to the pot of mint tea that Betty had somehow conjured from the kitchen cupboards. (Claudia hadn’t been aware that she even owned a tea strainer.) Their attitudes covered the gamut from Deeply Apprehensive (Helen), through Concerned But Embarrassed (Brandon), Just Concerned (Julie, Betty), and all the way up to Much Too Enthusiastic (Elias and Iryna, despite Carmen’s best attempts).
If you had asked Claudia what she expected to come of her opening an artisanal marketplace in a seaside town, “assembles a mismatched team to investigate a murder” would not have been her first guess.
“But if she was killed by someone she was running away from, then what happened to the man who died tonight?” Julie asked. “Was he running from the same person?”
“Or he might have known who it was,” Claudia pointed out. “He was here yesterday, asking me questions. From the way he was talking, it sounded like he was going around to a lot of people. Maybe he found out something that someone didn’t want him to know?”
“And did you ever think that person might think you know the same thing?” Betty asked. “You’re staying with us again tonight.”
“I can’t. There’s way too much to do,” Claudia protested. “Besides, I can take care of myself.”
“Claudia, two people have been murdered and somebody just tried to frame you for one of them. Could you just humor me by making a good decision for once?”
Even with the suspicion that everyone else in the room was going to gang up, kidnap her, and force her to take the offer, Claudia might have still tried to decline. But then she had an idea. It might even have been a good one.
“Okay,” she said. “You’re right. Let’s just get finished up here and I’ll follow you over.”
By the time they got to the ranch, the police had been and gone, taking the dead man’s possessions with them and seriously upsetting the remaining guests. Betty took over the job of soothing them from her husband, who was well out of his depth. Claudia hung back and offered to help clean up the dinner dishes while she waited for an opportunity to make her suggestion.
She had armed herself with a dishcloth and was doing her best to keep up with Celene, Betty’s part-time employee who helped out in return for boarding her horse in their stable, when Olive appeared at the kitchen door.
“Mom told me to get the eggs for the French toast tomorrow. Are you gonna be here for breakfast?”
“Probably not,” Claudia said, adding a clean plate to the stack in the cupboard. “I have a lot to do, so I’ll be getting out early. But isn’t it a little late to be getting eggs now?”
“Oh, the chickens don’t mind if it’s me,” Olive said airily. “They don’t even notice.”
Claudia didn’t know enough about chicken psychology to dispute that, so she settled for expressing her regrets that she was going to miss the fruits of their labors.
“That’s okay,” Olive said. “I’ll come over and make it for you some other time. You’re busy solving the murders right now.”
Claudia froze in place, holding a half-dried coffee mug suspended over the dishtowel in her other hand.
“Who told you I was doing that? I mean, I’m not doing that. That’s the police’s job.”
“But they aren’t any good at it,” Olive said, picking up a dishtowel of her own and taking a water glass from the rack. “And you need to know, don’t you? They might come after you next.”
“Um, well, I guess that’s a possibility. That’s why your mom invited me to stay here tonight. But I don’t think you should worry about it too much.”
Claudia was acutely aware of Celene behind her. She was giving every appearance of someone who was paying no attention to the conversation, but Claudia noticed she had turned down the flow on the tap of the kitchen sink, so that the sound of it didn’t interfere with her ability to hear. Claudia didn’t blame her; she would have done the same. But she wasn’t about to give her anything interesting to share.
So, to Olive, she said, “Is your mom done in the living room yet? I need to ask her about some stuff before she goes to bed?”
“About the murders?” One thing you could say for Olive, she was persistent.
“One hundred percent not about any murders, here or anywhere else.” Which was essentially true. Using the ranch’s network monitoring software to give her insight into Neil Hahn’s recent browser history was not, strictly speaking, about murders, though that could change quickly if she found anything.
If Olive suspected the prevarication, she was kind enough to let it pass. And Celene, having finished her work, reluctantly gave up the hope of hearing any more, leaving Claudia alone to carry out her plan.
“No.” Betty’s response was firm, and not unexpected. Claudia had come prepared for this.
“But what harm can it do?” she argued. “No one will ever know. And what am I supposed to do, hide in your spare bedroom forever? I need to get a handle on this mystery, or I’m never going to get my life back. If it makes you feel better, you can tell the police tomorrow that you thought of it, and give them anything that’s relevant.”
Her friend hesitated. There was no question that what she thought Claudia should do was to go to bed with a borrowed book and a mug of her excellent homemade cocoa. But Betty had once backpacked across Vietnam with nothing but two changes of clothes and an iguana named Sid, and there was enough left of that woman that she was willing to take the occasional risk.
“Okay, fine. But if you find anything, leave it to me to decide who gets told, and how. I don’t want guests to think if they come here someone will be going through their underwear.”
Claudia gave her solemn word that no laundry, dirty or otherwise, would be aired, and Betty reluctantly led her to the computer, to do her worst.
The room that served as the Tylers’ office had started its life as a storage closet, done some time as the heart of a failed mushroom-growing operation, and reached its current status with the addition of a used school desk and a suite of computer equipment, purchased on Claudia’s recommendation.
She had also been the one called in after the unfortunate episode of the guest whose combined interests in downloading pirated movies and watching pornography with the sound turned up to eleven had given them a difficult week and made it clear that simply handing out the password was not a good long-term plan. She had gone with one of the simplest security systems on the market, which monitored every device connected to the network and blocked access to a regularly updated list of malicious and inappropriate websites. When she installed it, she had described it to Betty and Roy as a filter for their Internet, and now she was going to see what had gotten caught in it.
She was still able to sign in as an administrator, which was some
thing she was going to need to talk to Betty about, but for the moment it was convenient. Claudia had mostly chosen the software for the website blocking, but another feature it had was that it recorded every URL visited through the ranch’s network. There was no record of the contents of anything that might have been transmitted, but she was hoping it might give her something to go on.
Teddy, who had come along on the evacuation and been given her own dinner with the Tylers’ dogs, was curled up in the small amount of floor space that wasn’t taken up by the chair or the carefully-stored stacks of old copies of National Geographic. (The office doubled as storage for anything deemed sufficiently office-y, which also included several boxes of Christmas decorations and old vegetable seed packets.) The chair was one that had been retired from the dining room set after a guest had had the wine-fueled inspiration to reenact one of the velociraptor scenes from Jurassic Park, to damaging effect.
Having gotten herself settled as comfortably as possible, Claudia opened the program and reacquainted herself with the interface. There was nothing she particularly expected to find in Neil’s browsing history, but his behavior had convinced her he was up to something, and it was Claudia’s experience that the modern person, when confronted with a question, looked for answers on the Internet. She had barely known Neil, and what she had known she hadn’t particularly liked. But, like Lori, he had been someone who had come into her life and left it violently, and Claudia had had enough of that sort of thing.
The software didn’t identify the users by name, but it did assign unique identifiers to their devices, and since there were only three other rooms occupied at the ranch at the moment, plus the family, it didn’t take long for Claudia to narrow it down to the likeliest candidate. Of course, there was always the chance that he was the one who had been looking at horses for sale in San Diego county, or the person who seemed to be fixated on a string of news stories about fraud at a small pharmaceutical company, or even the guest who rotated between four different social networking sites with such vigorous regularity that Claudia suspected some sort of compulsion, but she thought she would go with the one who had searched her own name in several iterations.
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