Some Like It Hawk (31 page)

“Don’t discount the ballet,” I said. “They’re doing
Appalachian Spring
,
An American in Paris
, and
Stars and Stripes
. None of them are that quiet, and the last one’s to music by Sousa.”

“Really?” he said. “Then I’ll tell the crew to be back for that.”

When the politicians went onstage, Michael decided to flee.

“I’m taking the boys and the llamas home,” he said. “I’ll bring them back in plenty of time for the fireworks, but they won’t enjoy it unless they get a nap.”

“I doubt if the llamas would enjoy the fireworks under any circumstance,” I said. “You don’t think it will be too scary for the boys?”

“They’ve been hearing small fireworks go off all day and loving it,” Michael said. “Eric and Rob have already trained them to shout ‘boom!’ whenever a firework goes off. Or, for that matter, whenever they would like a firework to go off, which is pretty much all the time. Could take a while to settle them down.”

I kissed the boys and waved bye-bye to them, hoping that either they’d forget about “boom!” during their nap or that it would grow old while they were still in Eric’s charge.

I was relishing the ensuing peace and quiet—okay, I was napping myself in the folding recliner—when my cell phone rang. It was the chief.

“You still willing to babysit that PI on his trip to the courthouse?”

Chapter 37

“I thought I dodged that bullet,” I muttered. But I made sure Rose Noire knew I was going.

“It could be worse,” she said. “You could be going back through that horrible tunnel!”

When I got to the mayor’s tent, the chief looked harried and maybe a little cranky. Apparently my experience of the day as a relatively quiet and peaceful one was not shared by the Caerphilly police. And he was laying down the law to Denton.

“And if you find anything, I want to hear about it immediately,” he said. “Not a few days from now when you’ve had a chance to play with it yourself.”

“Absolutely,” Denton said. “Here she is now.”

“You’re in charge,” the chief said, turning to me.

“Yes, sir.”

He stormed out.

“What’s gone wrong?” I asked Denton.

“What hasn’t?” He was gathering things and stuffing them into Horace’s bag. “Let’s see—skinny dippers in the college fountain. Seventeen lost kids—only three of them still unclaimed. Semi full of eggs overturned on Stone Street. Third vanload of drunk and disorderly just left for the Clay County jail. Five ambulance runs—three heat prostration, one suspected heart attack, and a woman from Winchester whose baby your father delivered in the ER a few minutes after they got to the hospital. Oh, and your grandfather’s missing a snake. Keep your eyes open—something called an emerald tree boa.”

“That should be easy to spot,” I said. “It really is emerald green, and dry as it’s been all summer, there’s not a lot of green grass for it to hide in. If you’re ready, put your head on.”

Denton pulled on the gorilla head, grabbed Horace’s forensic bag, and led the way out of the tent.

I glanced over at the Flying Monkeys’ tent. Only Lieutenant Wilt and one other guard were there. I wondered, briefly, where the others were.

Aida Morris was at the top of the courthouse steps, pacing restlessly.

“Whole town’s gone crazy, and I’m guarding an empty building,” she said. “Hey, Horace, Meg.”

Denton grunted and trotted inside.

Was she not in on the secret, or was she being careful in case of eavesdroppers?

“At least you’ll have a good view of the fireworks if you’re still on duty then,” I said.

“What’s up with him?” she asked.

“Long story,” I said, shrugging. “Looking for a stray piece of evidence. I’m supposed to be the spare pair of hands if he needs me.”

“Good hunting then.”

I walked inside and she returned to her pacing.

Denton was waiting in the middle of the huge, two-story entrance hall.

“Can I take my head off now?”

“Okay by me,” I said. I was reassured when I realized that his voice was so muffled by the gorilla head that even people who knew Horace might not realize it wasn’t him inside, so odds were his presence had gone undetected by anyone who wished him ill.

We finished exploring the first floor relatively quickly. Denton seemed focused on finding papers, and there weren’t any to be found in the entrance hall, the courtrooms, or the emptily echoing judges’ chambers. Then we ascended to the second floor and the real search began.

And for the first two hours, it was uneventful to the point of boredom. We methodically ransacked the few offices used by the FPF onsite staff. We learned that Colleen Brown had collected McCoy and Roseville pottery. Lieutenant Wilt of the security staff had decorated his borrowed office with taxidermied heads, presumably of things he’d shot himself, since his walls also contained a number of framed photos of him holding up newly slaughtered animals. Leonard Fisher appeared fond of motivational slogans and posters, and owned a copy of nearly every business-related self-help book published in the last decade.

But most of the offices were empty. If we’d been Horace and his colleagues, we’d still have gone over them carefully—for a murderer looking to change from bloodstained clothes to clean ones, what better than a vacant office? But for our purposes, vacant was useless.

From time to time, when we were on the town square side of the building, we could hear snatches of the entertainment on the bandstand. The ballet gave way to a swing band, and eventually I could hear the opening strains of the patriotic music from Michael’s students’ pageant. About the time the Revolution began, we left the second floor for a quick scan of the third, which I gathered was unoccupied. I assumed my tour of duty in the courthouse was nearly done. I was almost sorry. The air-conditioning wasn’t down at the arctic level where the lender had been maintaining it, but the building was still cooler than the outside. And it was restful. No tourists asking questions. No fretting over whether all the acts would show up—and finish—on time. No pangs of anxiety every time an outsider went near the entrance to the crawl space. Just trailing after Denton, who seemed to find no need for small talk as we rummaged through the drawers, shelves, closets, and in-baskets of the enemy.

Then, peering into the first room we came to on the third floor, I spotted something suspicious.

Chapter 38

“This is odd,” I said, stepping in and gazing around. “This was the mayor’s office. Our old mayor—by the time Randall was elected, we’d vacated the courthouse. Actually, this is where Mayor Pruitt’s administrative assistant sat. The mayor himself sat in there.”

I pointed to the door leading to the inner office. Denton went over and tried the handle.

“Locked. So what’s odd?”

“Why would someone be using this office, instead of one down near everyone else?”

“Are you sure anyone is?” He was looking around with quick, darting eye movements.

“Computer’s on. The screen’s gone dark,” I added, following his gaze. “But the power button’s lit and the fan is whirring.”

He cocked his head, listened, then nodded.

“You’re right,” he said. “Could be nothing. A lot of people just leave their computers on all the time. I think the idea is that shutting it down and turning it on again causes more wear and tear than just letting it run. No idea if that’s true. Maybe someone just left it running and never came back.”

“Not turning it off at the end of the day, okay,” I said. “But someone’s been using it since the mayor and his secretary left. It’s been over a year. We had power outages this winter. Look, there’s trash in the trash can.”

“Could be they use it whenever distinguished visitors from headquarters need a temporary space.”

“Could be, although they’d probably put the distinguished visitors in the main office, not here at the secretary’s desk.” I sat down, pulled on my gloves, and touched the space bar. The screen sprang into life. “You check the trash can. I’ll poke around in the computer.”

“You’re not afraid you’ll mess up any evidence it contains?”

“I won’t save or delete or close anything,” I replied. “Considering it’s been running here unguarded for who knows how long, I don’t think my doing a little careful snooping is going to compromise anything that hasn’t already been compromised.”

“Snoop away, then, and on your head be it.” He walked over and began peering into the trash can while pulling his gloves from his pocket.

I started by looking to see what programs were open. Firefox, Microsoft Word, and Adobe Photoshop.

Firefox was showing the Caerphilly County Web site’s page about the week’s activities in the town square.

Interesting, but I had no idea what it meant. Except that it was more evidence that the computer had been used recently. The page it was showing hadn’t existed a few weeks ago.

“Now this is interesting,” Denton said.

I glanced over and saw that he had a handful of what looked like standard sheets of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch paper that had been torn in half. He moved over to a clear space on the office floor and began arranging them.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Matching the tops to the bottoms,” he said. “Although I’m starting to think that’s not so useful. They’re all copies of the same document.”

“What document?” I asked.

“Looks like the signature page of a contract.”

I knocked over a chair in my haste to take a look at his find.

“Appears to be a copy of the loan document between Caerphilly and First Progressive Financial,” he said.

“Yes, but why haven’t all the county board members signed it?” I pointed out.

We put aside the identical top halves for the moment and compared the bottom halves. All of them had been signed by Mason Shiffley, Randall’s uncle, who had been and still was county board chairman. And all of them had been signed by Quintus Washington, the vice chair. But while Mason’s signature was unchanged from document to document, Quintus’s signature varied wildly. On one copy it was way too large. On another, too small. On several it slanted left or right, or fell a little below or above the signing line. But even in all these tries, it was the placement of the signature that varied. The loops and lines themselves remained curiously static. They all even had the same little broken bit on the capital W where the ink flow had stuttered slightly.

“Someone’s working on forging these signatures,” I said. “Or is it counterfeiting?”

“No idea,” Denton said. “But yeah, he’s digitized their signatures, and he’s working on adding them to a copy of the contract.”

“He’s got Mason’s signature the way he wants it,” I said. “And he was interrupted while working on Quintus’s.”

Denton nodded.

I raced back to the computer and began doing one of the few computer tasks in which I was expert.

“What are you doing?” Denton asked.

“Running a search,” I said. “If you forget where you filed a document, but can remember something about it, you can find it again. The mayor was supposed to have vacated his office about a week after the recall election. I’m searching for any documents created since then. And look—I’m finding some.”

The search screen was gradually filling up with the names of documents. Most of them were either Microsoft Word files or graphic files. When the search feature finished, I arranged its findings in date order.

“So this computer has been used on—call it six occasions in the last year,” Denton said. “Two of them were single day uses, and the others stretched from two to four days. The most recent being a three-day session that started on June thirtieth and ended on July second, the day of the murder.” He had pulled out a notebook and was scribbling. I pulled out my trusty notebook-that-tells-me-when-to-breathe and followed his example.

“And look what he was doing on July second,” I said, pointing to a group of files with that date. “He or she; I’m sure forgery is an equal-opportunity crime.”

Denton studied the file names I was pointing to for a few moments, then shook his head.

“Apart from the fact that they’re all graphics files, I’m not sure I get it.”

“Look at the file names. Atkinson.jpg. Hallett.jpg. MShiffley.jpg. Vshiffley.jpg. Washington.jpg. It’s the members of the county board.”

“Didn’t they already sign that contract years ago?”

“They signed
a
contract,” I said. “And there are plenty of copies of it floating around, so I can’t imagine anyone would need to forge signatures on that. But what if someone came up with a bogus version of the contract? With terms far less favorable to Caerphilly?”

“There would still be the originals,” he said. “There’s a pretty obvious difference between a signed original and—well, one of these.” He held up one of the sheets from the wastebasket.

“But what if the originals were missing?” I said. “And all you had were our photocopies and that—once the forger finished adding all the signatures?”

“Are they missing?”

“No idea,” I said. “I don’t even know how many of them were signed. But I know that there would be at least one copy with FPF and one with us. And I’m betting FPF’s copy will inexplicably turn out to be missing or replaced.”

“Where would the county’s copy be?”

“In the county archives,” I said.

“You mean in the basement?” he asked. “With Mr. Throckmorton?”

I nodded.

“Holy—okay, I think you solved the question of why my former client was suddenly so eager to get into the basement. But wait—why would they be doing this forgery here? They’ve got plenty of computers back at FPF’s headquarters, and probably graphic artists who could do this kind of graphic manipulation very easily. Why risk doing it here?”

I thought for a moment.

“Because the crook is here,” I said. “Not that there couldn’t be any number of crooks back at FPF headquarters, but I get the impression they operate on a grand scale, in clever ways that usually pass muster with the IRS and the court system. This is someone stationed here in Caerphilly.”

“That makes sense,” he said. “Someone desperate who is getting increasing pressure from his management to resolve an increasingly embarrassing situation playing out on his watch.”