Windfall

by Byron TD Smith

  “He wasn’t in any condition to speak last night. It was just a heart attack or something, Henry. Nothing more.”

  A loud click from the old bedroom door announced Frieda reemerging. She’d changed into a T-shirt and jeans, and she carried her satchel in her arms.

  “It’s my fault.” Her voice cracked, holding back tears.

  Bernadette spoke first. “Oh, sweetie, it’s no one’s fault. It’s just the inevitable awful part of getting old.”

  “No,” Frieda said through swallows and breaths. “I saw Mr. Creepy come out of Mr. Benham’s apartment after I went downstairs yesterday. It was him.”

  Henry’s throat tightened. The others were stunned silent.

  “Fred,” he said in as calm a voice as he could muster. “You saw the man from the café, the man from the hallway, leaving Mr. Benham’s suite last night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Look, you aren’t responsible for this at all. We can tell the police what you saw and, if this guy did something to Mr. Benham, it’ll help catch him. There’s no way that you could have known something was wrong, right?”

  “Did you call the police?” Tess asked.

  Frieda looked at her, confused. “No.” She reached into her satchel and pulled out some folded papers. “But I found these.” Her words and breath still came through in little convulsions. She pressed the pages flat onto the table.

  Henry picked them up.

  “What are they?” Tess asked.

  He flipped through each. “A list of our names and our suite numbers. Some pages of a printout of an internet chat from some site called Net-Tectives, some old index card with our address on it and a list of I don’t know what, and . . .” The last piece required no explanation. It was a different paper than the first two and, unfolded further, it was clearly a copy of the Globe crossword from last Saturday.

  “Where’d you find these?” Henry said.

  Frieda looked at Shima as she spoke. “He dropped them on the lawn when he left.”

  “You saw him drop them?” Tess asked.

  “Yeah. I was going to tell you about the crossword because it proved you’re not crazy, but I didn’t get the chance.”

  “Jesus,” muttered Henry.

  “Did he see you go outside and pick this up? What if he’d come back?” Henry’s voice cracked with worry. “I shouldn’t have left you alone.”

  Frieda fidgeted with a metal brooch. It wasn’t the Pepsi logo. She was taking too long to answer.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “Bernadette.” Tears left trails over her round cheeks. “I don’t want to get in trouble. I just wanted Tess to believe you.”

  Henry scooped her into his arms and squeezed. “No one’s getting in trouble.”

  “And it wasn’t Sarah who took them.”

  Henry felt a visceral punch and winced. She picked up on more than he realized. She always had.

  He looked down at Frieda and saw that she was waiting.

  “And it wasn’t Sarah,” he said.

  Frieda wrapped her arms around Henry and hugged him back.

  He tried to soften his voice, “Fred, we should give the police a call. We can tell them what you saw. It might be helpful, alright?”

  Bernadette reached into the small pile on the table and took some of the papers. “I need to hang on to these,” she said, folding everything together.

  Henry frowned as the paper disappeared into her purse. “What do you need those for? The police are going to want them.”

  “We don’t know that this… man had anything to do with what happened. Ron will be awake this morning and he’ll set everything straight. Maybe something happened and maybe it didn’t. There’s no point in getting the authorities all wound up for nothing. They’ll just send people off on a wild goose chase because of a bunch of papers and use up tax dollars. They’re not important. As you said, it’s just a list.”

  “Then why hide it?”

  Bernadette spoke to Frieda. “If anyone asks you if there are more pages, don’t lie. You say, ‘yes’. And you say that I have this. But if no one asks, you don’t have to say a thing.”

  Henry scowled and fought unsuccessfully to find the right words.

  “Then we should go talk to Ron,” Tess said.

  “I’m sorry.” Bernadette stuffed the list into her pocket and, rising from the table, dismissed the group with a wave.

  She spoke to no one in particular as she opened the door. “I know Ron, and he wouldn’t want the police to have this.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Henry made a fanning motion with Constable Tipton’s card as he paced in the living room. On the other end of the phone, the officer had spoken with Frieda, and had listened patiently to Henry while he explained the papers, the confrontation at the coffee shop, and his crosswords.

  He hung up and knocked on the bedroom door.

  “Come in.”

  Frieda lay on the floor, leaning on her elbows in front of her laptop. Shima was stretched out over her arms, pinning her hands to the keyboard.

  “Someone’s going to go to the hospital to speak with Mr. Benham today,” Henry said. “If the police are there, we can give them the papers.”

  “Did you mention Bernadette taking stuff?”

  “No.”

  “How come?”

  The reason sounded weaker aloud. “I guess I thought it could be mentioned later. But if I said something now, I wouldn’t be able to take it back.”

  Fortunately, this appeared to make perfect sense, as she grunted her approval.

  “Tess wants us,” she said.

  “Sure. We can tell her when we’re going to the hospital.”

  “No.” Frieda slid one arm out from under the cat. “She’s been blowing up my phone for the last twenty minutes. Check yours.”

  He looked at the stream of texts.

  We need to talk.

  Are you done?

  You need to see this.

  Come up as soon as you’re done.

  OMFG Get off the phone.

  HENRY GET UP HERE

  Tess cleared her table of everything except her laptop and a sketchpad, several pages of which were covered in an increasingly maniacal scrawl of notes. She moved with urgency, her heart racing. Dishes clattered as she let them fall from her hands into the sink.

  She flipped once more through the webpages open on her screen to ensure they were in the desired sequence. She ran to the printer and pulled off a map of Washington and Oregon, marked up with colored lines.

  The knock on the door signaled that her time was up. A quick look through the peephole confirmed it was Henry and Frieda. The chain and deadbolt clattered as she let them in, and again as she locked the door behind them.

  “Are we your prisoners?” Henry asked.

  “You first. How’d it go with the police?”

  “They’re sending someone to the hospital. If we don’t see them there, we should drop the papers off at the station.”

  “Did they say anything about what happened?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “About last night. What did they say?”

  “Just that someone called it in anonymously. It didn’t look like anyone had broken in. And Bernadette insisted that Mr. Benham had an accident.”

  “Of course he did,” Tess said. She held up her empty palms, paused, raised an eyebrow, and closed her hands into fists. “Or did he?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She spun on her heel and strode to her laptop on the table. “I think the explanation is in the pages that Fred found. I think our Mr. Benham is hiding a secret.”

  “Sure,” conceded Henry. “Bernadette’s being sketchy enough. But the pages that she left us with are just a bunch of emails.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I think they are.”

  “They aren’t.”

  Henry blinked and bit his lip. “So, what are they?”

  Tes
s held her chin up and turned the screen of her laptop to face her two-person audience on the other side of the table.

  “It’s a private discussion in an online forum,” Tess said, “between two members of something called Net-Tectives.com.” She brought up the website. The background of the home page was dotted with fingerprints and shoe impressions.

  “People come here to solve crimes. Amateur detectives. According to this, Net-Tectives members have successfully participated in the solving of over one hundred cold case files. They’re intense about it.”

  She watched Henry and Frieda’s eyes lock on the screen as she scrolled down through a list of hundreds of cases and names, mostly women.

  Henry opened his mouth to ask a question, but Tess headed him off.

  “Hang on.” She flattened the pages of the conversation out on the table. “Our two users, treasurehunter1971 and juliancaesar, are discussing a case they’re working on.”

  “I didn’t read it closely,” Henry said. “I was more interested in what Bernadette took.”

  “Most of it is generic,” she said. “But read this bit here.”

  @treasurehunter1971 How is that possible?

  @juliancaesar That’s a secret. ;) Whats it worth?

  @treasurehunter1971 Who knows? Thousands maybe.

  @juliancaesar OMFG

  @treasurehunter1971 Send pics.

  @juliancaesar I’m not sending a pic online. Once something is on the internet, anyone can see it. Next thing you know FBI is kicking down my door.

  @treasurehunter1971 I need proof. If it is real, I’m willing to pay.

  @treasurehunter1971 Cash money.

  @juliancaesar ATTACHMENT – IMG_1022.jpg 1.3MB

  @juliancaesar does that work?

  @treasurehunter1971 You have my interest for sure. Let’s meet.

  @juliancaesar I’m in Vancouver.

  @treasurehunter1971 No sweat. I’m in Seattle.

  @juliancaesar Canada :(

  @treasurehunter1971 Oh.

  @juliancaesar U there?

  @treasurehunter1971 Checking a map. Far.

  @treasurehunter1971 How do I know you’re not scamming?

  @juliancaesar You’ll see the real deal in person.

  @treasurehunter1971 I can drive up Saturday.

  @juliancaesar PM me when you get to Van. We can figure out a time and I’ll let you know where. It’s easy to find.

  @treasurehunter1971 See you then.

  @juliancaesar Cheers.

  The discussion ended a third of the way down the last page. Tess was getting the reactions she hoped for. Both Frieda and Henry were rapt. Although, Henry looked doubtful.

  “The FBI? Seriously?” he asked.

  “Fair question. But if someone’s name is ‘Treasure Hunter’, you’d expect whatever they’re talking about to be valuable. And it sounds like someone was coming to get it on Saturday. I think one of these guys is Frieda’s Mr. Creepy.”

  “I know which,” Frieda said. “Mr. Creepy is the one from Seattle.”

  “Why do you say that?” Henry asked, still reading.

  “His car has Washington State license plates.”

  Both Tess and Henry turned to look at her. “You never mentioned a car before,” Tess said.

  Frieda’s eyes darted between the two adults. “I forgot until just now. When he left Mr. Benham’s he got into a K-car parked by the café. It had Washington plates.”

  “A K-car?” Henry asked, frowning as though scanning her story with X-ray vision.

  “I think it was a K-car,” Frieda said. “One of those boxy ones like kids draw. It was yellowish white. I wrote the license plate down in my notebook.”

  “Did you?” Henry was no longer surprised by any of this. Of course she wrote it down. Why not? That’s the most normal thing in the world.

  “Anything else?” Tess asked.

  Frieda bit her bottom lip and squinted in a grand display of deep thought. “No. That’s it.”

  Henry and Tess watched Frieda in silence until the young girl started pulling her cloak closer over her shoulders.

  “If there’s anything else,” Henry said, “let’s talk about it.”

  “No. For real, that’s it. We can call Sonja and I’ll tell her about the car. I just forgot.”

  “Sonja?” Tess looked at Henry.

  “Constable Tipton.”

  “Ah.” Tess turned their attention back to the laptop. “Well, I have more as well.” She walked them through how she signed up for free membership, to access and search all the various forums.

  “Can you search for members?” Frieda asked.

  “Smart girl. Yeah, we can.” Tess tapped her mouse. “The one guy ‘TreasureHunter1971’ has only been a member for a few weeks, his bio’s blank except for ‘Keller’. I guess that’s his name?”

  “Sounds like killer,” Frieda said.

  “I worked with a Keller,” Henry said. “She was nice.”

  Tess continued reading. “He has no public posts. I even googled ‘treasurehunter1971’, hoping that he might have used the same handle on some other sites. No such luck.”

  “So, now what?” Henry asked.

  Tess leaned way across the table and pushed the laptop closer to the others. One hand pointed at the screen as she changed pages again with the other.

  “Treasurehunter1971 has only ever posted in one forum.”

  A list of posts confirmed that in his brief twenty-seven-day career as a Net-Tective member he’d only ever posted in a single forum: Crimes/Cold Cases/WA - DB Cooper Hijacking Mystery November 24, 1971 Part 3.

  She leaned back, triumphant, as the page changed again.

  “What are we looking at?”

  “Just read.”

  Henry obeyed and reached for the mouse across the table.

  Tess watched as the expressions on their faces changed, from curious to puzzled, and again to disbelief.

  After several minutes, she rose. “Can I make you some tea?”

  Henry shook his head. Frieda nodded. Neither could peel themselves away from the screen. Henry was scrolling further.

  “Look at the next tab,” she suggested, leaving them to catch up.

  This was her coup de grâce. It contained images of maps, links to the FBI website, photos, and 884 posts. Parts 1 and 2 of the thread had thousands of posts each and she hadn’t even scratched the surface.

  Yet.

  As she set the mugs on the table, Tess broke the silence.

  “So?”

  Henry looked up.

  “Well, it’s captivating, isn’t it? In 1971, a man going by the name of DB Cooper boards a plane with a bomb and escapes with hundreds of thousands of dollars by parachuting out a stairwell under the tail, never to be seen or heard from again.”

  “Is this true?” Frieda asked.

  Words burst from Tess, unable to restrain herself any longer. “A hundred percent. He’s an American legend. The FBI searched for decades and finally stopped looking in 2016.”

  “And you think this is connected to what the guy from Seattle is looking for? Why he came here?” Henry asked.

  “It makes sense, right? I mean, we can say he’s looking for something. Secondly, this guy is from Seattle, and Cooper disappeared somewhere between Seattle and Portland.”

  “And,” she continued, “the guy’s name is ‘treasurehunter1971.’” She underlined the year in the air with her finger.

  “Which is when parachute dude stole the money,” Frieda said.

  Tess fixated on Henry. “Are you going to say it? Or are you waiting for me to say it?”

  His lips pursed, and he squinted at her, blinking.

  Oh, he’s thinking it.

  “How old . . .” she started.

  “. . . is Benham?” Henry nodded as he spoke.

  “What?” Frieda hopped up to her knees on her chair. “Mr. Benham is hijacker-money-man?”

  “I’ll bet,” Tess said.

  Henry held up a hand. “Wait, wa
it. Maybe the guy that Frieda saw only thinks Mr. Benham is Cooper.” Henry scrolled to a hand-drawn wanted poster from 1971. On the left, a man in a business suit looked back through narrow eyes. On the right, prominent dark glasses masked much of the face which bore the same widows peak of hair and sliver of a mouth.

  “Okay, if DB Cooper was thirtyish then, he would be in his late seventies or early eighties now. It’s the right age, but that means nothing on its own.”

  “Look. There’s more.” Tess took control of the laptop and started clicking. “I haven’t read everything yet.”

  She turned the screen back. “Voila.”

  It was a list of names and ranks on the Canadian National Air Force Archives site. The page banner explained that these were graduates from Summerside Airforce Base in Prince Edward Island. She highlighted one small name in the sea of letters: Pte. Ronald Benham (1960).

  “That’s got to be him.”

  Henry shook his head. “Maybe. But all you have is that he was in the military.”

  “The Air Force,” Frieda said, and she shuffled around the table to sit next to Tess. “Like a parachuter.”

  Henry looked back at them, unmoving.

  Frieda tried again. “Mr. Benham is DB Cooper.”

  “Are you proposing we take this to the police?” Henry wondered aloud.

  “Take what?” Tess asked. “The license number? Sure. The Cooper stuff? I say no. They’d call us nuts. There’s nothing that we have that they don’t have. Let them do their own digging.”

  Henry was coming round. She’d touched upon a nerve of curiosity.

  “And,” Tess added, turning the screw where she knew it would have its greatest impact, “Bernadette must know. There’s some explanation as to why she took that paper.”