Crazy Like a Fox (Lil & Boris #3) (Lil & Boris Mysteries) (13 page)

I felt a hand on my shoulder, comforting. When I looked up, Punk dropped his hand, quietly commented, “It might not be her, Lil. Lotta people went to that college.”

I nodded. A lot of people had. But how many knew me, my house, my routine, my cat? And how many graduated the same year as Doug Winston, known relation and friend of Craig McElroy?

My legs felt hollow when I stood up and went back to my desk. Harry Rucker had a law school classmate up in New York. I’d ask Harry to call the man, see what New York knew about Steven Clay. Ask him to get a subpoena on Doug Winston’s phone records.

I held it together until Aunt Marge came through the door. She rushed to me like she had when I was little, and had fallen off my bike or out of a tree. “My poor Lil,” she crooned, and swept me into her arms.

Behind me, as I tried not to cry into her shoulder, I heard Punk asking Lieutenant Breeden to put out an APB on Kim.

13.

W
e searched Kim’s room at her parents’ house. She had left her clothes. She had left her jewelry, such as it was. She had left everything, but there was no sign of her laptop. Her mother assured us she had one, and we found the manual for it in a drawer of her very cheap desk. No flash drives. No paper trail to anything. Kim didn’t have a credit card. Or a debit card. Naomi Lincoln explained, flustering, that Kim had chosen to go cash-only a few months ago. “She said she was tired of the fees.”

That gave me a time frame for a change in her life, her patterns. We’re creatures of habit and pattern, we humans. About as bad as cats. “What about a checkbook?”

Punk held it up. “Dresser,” he explained, and started flipping through it. “Cell phone, mostly.” He turned to Naomi, wide-eyed in the brown-carpeted hall. “She pays rent?”

“No,” whispered Naomi. “She shares the utilities.”

“Nice of her,” commented Punk kindly, and went on with the dresser. I was in the closet with Boris. “Naomi?” I called.

“Yes?”

“Where’s her overnight bag? The one she always takes to the Outer Banks?” I knew the bag well because Kim often left right from the office.

“I don’t know.”

There’s this about my job. It’s got its routines, its rhythms, and those are bizarrely soothing. I carefully shined my flashlight into every inch of the closet, following an imaginary grid. I retreated, frowning, and started poking under the bed. Shoes in their boxes. A plastic storage box full of summer clothes. Dust bunnies. I nearly cried from frustration. I couldn’t find any evidence to support Kim’s involvement, and I couldn’t find any against it. I’d have paid gold for either, just to get something.

“Please,” Naomi begged, “what is this about?”

I thought of Aunt Marge, who tried very hard to teach me tact, and did not fully succeed. “Kim may have given information about me to the kidnappers.”

Naomi whitened, and swayed. I caught her arm and steered her to a chair down the hall, in a weirdly shaped alcove by a bay window. “Oh God,” she moaned. “Oh God.”

“Lil!”

I left Naomi with her head between her knees. Punk held out a small box of a particular blue I knew well from Aunt Marge’s jewelry collection, with which I had played dress-up as a girl. “Tiffany’s,” I breathed in awe. “Holy crap. She can’t afford Tiffany’s.” I had to shake my head hard to hide that my lip was wobbling. I returned to Naomi, who quickly denied that she and Matt had bought the earrings not currently in the box.

I hunkered down by Naomi. I could hear Boris chirping to himself in Kim’s closet, the only sound in the house besides our breathing. “Naomi, I know this is hard, but it might be nothing. You know as well as I do cops chase down leads all the time and those leads go nowhere. Okay? Now, did Kim say where she was going?”

Naomi’s whole body shook. “Oh God. No.”

“Do you know where she is right now?”

“No.”

I patted Naomi helplessly.

Punk came into the hall. “Boris is stuck or something.”

I went into the closet, where Boris was indeed stuck, having gotten his head through the handle of a shopping bag full of what I’d thought were old three-ring binders. After I’d freed a near-panicking Boris, I saw they were photo albums. I snuggled Boris while Punk began a rapid scan of the photo albums’ contents, and started a closer search of that corner of the closet.

I found what Boris had been seeking. A package of his favorite gourmet tuna treats, almost empty, in the pocket of an old winter coat I’d knocked off a hanger.

“Lil,” said Punk. “Got something.”

Kim’s bedroom light chose that moment to pop a bulb. Punk and I took the album to the window and flipped through. Near the middle we found some photographs of Kim around college age. We recognized Kim, Amanda Campbell, RJ, Jean McElroy, two men, one of whom was enough like Jean to be Craig. It was a camping trip, to judge by the tents.

We went into the hall, and I held out the photo album. “Naomi?” I asked softly. “Who’s that guy?”

Weeping, Naomi twisted away. “It should be on the back. I taught her to label photographs.”

I slid the photograph out. On the back were the names. The unidentified man was Doug Winston, with a little heart dotting the letter i.

My cell phone rang. It was Kurt Danes. “No sign of Winston at his house or anywhere in town, but I might know where to find him. Should I go look?”

I couldn’t take my eyes off that photograph. Doug’s arm was around Kim’s waist. She was leaning into him the way a woman does when she’s infatuated, and has been having sex with the man to boot. “Go get him. Thanks.”

I don’t pray much, but I prayed a little then. That Danes would find Winston, that Winston would have answers, that I owed Kim one hell of a big apology.

***^***

Wherever Kim had gone, she’d gone without anyone noticing. Her car these days was a tan sedan, a few years old, nothing to make it stand out, not even a vanity plate. I found records of the payments in her checkbook. Whatever had been going on with her, she hadn’t stopped paying her bills on time.

We ransacked her desk at work. I found a lot of chocolate, our shared weakness, and a few bottles of old nail polish in one drawer. The rest of the drawers held office supplies, forms, nothing personal at all. I paced restlessly, waiting for Breeden to call and tell me he could get a trace on her cell phone, or for Harry to call and tell me we could have her phone records in the next ten seconds. Instead, I got a telephone call from a New York City area code. I pounced.

“Sheriff Eller.”

The man’s accent wasn’t exactly New York, had hints in it of New England. “This is Steven Clay.”

I put him on speaker, gesturing for Punk to come near. Tom hovered in the background. He hadn’t stirred since he came in and found out we were hunting the woman he’d had a crush on for years. His open, good-natured face had shut down, gone queerly dead.

“You are the Steven Clay who handles the kidnap and ransom policy for Robert Eller’s family and for Eller Enterprises?”

“Yes. Now may I ask why someone from the district attorney’s office has told me to call you? The matter of the policy has been settled. We are satisfied with the documentation, reimbursement has been authorized, and I do not see any need for…”

Punk was shaking his head. “That ain’t him.”

Somewhere in my head, pieces of that puzzle were starting to click together.

“I am most certainly Steven Clay,” snapped the man on the telephone. “What is going on?”

“Sir,” I said as ingratiatingly as I could, “I am going to ask you a favor. Could you fax me your driver’s license, enlarged so we can see the photograph clearly?” I read off our fax number, and I heard him muttering under his breath. “And, sir, I’m going to ask a very strange question now.”

“Oh? That will make a nice change.”

His sarcasm went right to my hindbrain, but I didn’t have time to play stupid monkey games. “Sir, did you have your ID stolen back around Christmas sometime? Cell phone, too?”

Punk hissed in a breath. Tom cursed, very quietly and very, very profanely.

Steven Clay didn’t spot the bamboozle because Steven Clay‌—‌the one who’d come to Crazy, at least‌—‌had
been
the bamboozle.

It was nice, having something finally make sense.

Clay’s voice on the phone lost some of its New York, trended heavily to Massachusetts. “How did you know that?”

“Is it policy for your company to send K&R experts to the family?”

“Only if requested.”

I scribbled that hastily. I was going to have a whole new interesting set of questions for my relatives. “Did the Ellers request your assistance?”

“Look, lady,” he said, and now he’d lost all his Manhattan. “I advise on the policy, I counsel people on how to handle K&R so we don’t end up having to pay out too many policies, sometimes I sell a few policies. There’s not a lot of private sector jobs for someone from my background.”

I took a guess, though I can’t say why I had that particular suspicion. “Hostage rescue with the Bureau maybe?”

“Something like that,” he hedged. I got the picture, or rather, didn’t get it. Not the Bureau, then. But he’d likely dealt in negotiation and, most probably, extraction. I made a note to look up that company online. I’d bet dollars to doughnuts they had some fat contracts with companies that did a lot of business overseas. The kind of companies that make Eller Enterprises look like junior varsity.

He was pushing buttons on a machine. I could hear the little beeps behind his breathing. “Look,” he said tensely, “I like my job, okay? Better hours, much better pay, I can even afford a pool in the back yard. If this is going to come back on me, I want to know.”

“You didn’t answer the question,” I replied. “Did you get your ID and cell phone stolen around the holidays?”

“Just wait, okay?” he murmured, and I heard the movement of air, the click of a door closing. “Okay, yeah, I lost my wallet and my cell phone at the gym. A few people did. Locker room got robbed. It happens. You know how long it took me to get all that straightened out? I had to get a new license, everything. It was right after Christmas, too.”

The fax machine whirred. Tom rose with the slowness of an old man, went over, and retrieved the paper. He shook his head. Punk looked at it, winced, and mumbled, “Not the same guy.”

I perched on Kim’s desk, staring into the coffee cup that held the office petty cash fund. “Mr. Clay, when I figure it all out, I will let you know, but for right now, I think it’s safe to say this isn’t coming back on you. But I’m going to need to talk to you again. We’ve got a situation here.”

His tone veered immediately to the professional. “Situation? Define that, please.”

“What was your old cell phone number?”

He read it off. It was the one given by the Crazy version of Steven Clay. “But the company cancelled it,” he added.

“How long did that take?”

Into his sudden silence, I provided gently, “Because sometimes they don’t take your word for it the phone is stolen, and you have to provide police reports, and even then they may wait till the end of the pay period and then you can end up having to contest the charges and…‌Well, it was still around the holidays, right?”

Steven Clay hardened from confusion to menace. “I will call them and find out. I will let you know, Sheriff.”

We ended the call. Punk whistled. I went to Boris, lounging on his cat condo, and pressed my forehead into his soft fur for a moment. Against all odds, my day was going to get worse. I had to go talk to the Ellers.

***^***

Cousin Jack waylaid me before I made it to the cruiser, no mean feat since I parked it about two steps from the door to the office. His Lexus threw up a little gravel from its tires as he stopped, his face flushed and alight. “Lil!” he cried, and flung himself out of the car. “I was just thinking, could your cousin have set this all up?”

I wasn’t sure Robert Eller Junior could set up a card table, but I didn’t say it out loud. My tact shows up at the strangest times. “What?”

“I was thinking. His division of Eller Enterprises lost some money, maybe he set up the ransom to cover his losses.”

I looked at my Littlepage cousin fondly, and wearily. I really did not need any more complications. “Wouldn’t that look a little odd to the accountants? And just how much money did his division lose? And what division is that?”

“It’s part of their technology division,” said Jack, patting Boris once, quickly, before Boris could react. Boris responded to the insult by marching to the Lexus and anointing its tires behind Jack’s back. “My sources say he lost six-seven million on a recall.”

I noted that mentally. “So he sets up a kidnap and ransom, takes the money to bolster his books?”

My cousin nodded enthusiastically.

I wanted to dismiss it, but I did have two questions that made me hesitate. One was, of course, that the kidnappers’ second call had gone to the direct house line. The other was that eight million had presumably been transferred out of Eller Enterprises accounts. But to where? Right back into an Eller account, with the two million in cash as payment for the henchmen?

“Thank you, Jack,” I said solemnly. “I was heading up to the Ellers anyway, I’ll see what I find out.”

He beamed. He hustled away. My head started to hurt from the tension in my neck. I think I mentioned that conspiracies tend to collapse if you involve too many people, or make it too complicated. Cousin Robert being involved would definitely do that.

On the other hand, I couldn’t quite shake two gnats out of my brain. The first was the presence of a Tiffany’s jewelry box in Kim’s room. The other was knowing that my cousin Robert spent time in New York.

***^***

When Uncle Eller met me on the veranda, I ignored him, and walked right into the house, Boris jauntily riding my shoulder.

I stopped in the hall.

Whoa
.

The Littlepage mansion, with which I have a little familiarity, is full of dark, rich antiques and splendor. It’s also, undeniably, a home. Certain chairs are worn and shabby from use. The second-best china has a few tiny cracks in the glaze, a chip or two around the rims of teacups. The place smells of furniture polish and cooking, since the big kitchens provide meals for the dozen or so full-time estate employees as well as the Littlepage family. Which is to say, Cousin Jack.