Black Diamond Death (21 page)

We reached the filing office and Bridget put her second key in and turned it.

“Uh oh,” she said.

“What uh oh?”

“My key doesn’t work. Now what?”

“Let me take a look,” I said.

The troll was smart to change the locks, but she used a very cheap and very standard doorknob and jimmying it open wasn’t rocket science. One flick from a standard paperclip in the right direction and we were in.

“Voila.”

“Not bad,” she said. “I’m impressed.”

I handed her the flashlight.

“Now it’s your turn,” I said.

The files were kept according to year and agent name. Bridget found Charlotte’s in less than a minute.

“Let me make some copies and then we can go.”

“That will take too long,” I said. “We can’t risk it.”

“There’s no other option though.”

I held my hand out and she handed over the files.

“I don’t feel good about this. What if they find out?”

She stood there for a moment like we were still deliberating the subject. I grabbed her jacket and tugged on it.

“Let’s go.”

We climbed the first few stairs and I heard a noise on the main level. It sounded like someone had dropped their keys. This was followed by a jingle and then the front door opened. I turned to Bridget whose jaw propped open like she was about to get a root canal. I placed my finger over my lips and motioned for her to ease back down the stairs. She nodded. The main-level door slammed with a loud thud and a male voice sounded off in the distance.

“Like I said, I know these people personally. They lost everything when their business closed last year. One more month on the market without a good offer and they’ll accept anything thrown their way. I’m sure I can convince them to short sale.”

“It’s Jack,” Bridget whispered. “What are we going to do?”

“Keep quiet,” I said.

“Sure, sure,” he said. “I understand. Let me just grab the file and I will tell you what your counter should be.”

The light to the basement flickered and then came on and the sound of hefty footprints made their way down to the lower level. We crouched behind some empty boxes in the hallway, but they weren’t big enough to conceal both of us.

Jack reached the bottom of the stairs and halted.

“Oh, wait a minute,” he said. “You know what? I left the file in my office earlier today. Let me find it and I’ll call you back.”

He turned around and a minute later the light went off and we relaxed in the darkness.

I looked at Bridget.

“Not a sound,” I whispered.

“But what if he comes down here again? What if he sees us? What are we going to do? We need to get out of here.”

I put a firm grip on her arm.

“Get it together,” I said. “It’s going to be fine.”

She moved and I worried she was about to take flight.

I applied more pressure.

“Ouch, that hurts.”

“Good,” I said. “Concentrate on that for a minute.”

Several minutes elapsed before I heard his voice again.

“I think $840,000 is a fair offer. I’ll write everything up and get this over to you tomorrow.”

The front door opened and closed and a key bolted the lock. We stayed put for the next five minutes until his car pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road and then we got the hell out of there.

“It’s late and I could use another pair of eyes on these reports. Why don’t you stay the night at my place?” I said.

“Why did you do that back there?”

“Grab your arm?”

She nodded.

“I wanted to shift your focus.”

“It hurt, you know.”

“But it worked,” I said. “I’m sorry I had to do that, but you didn’t leave me much choice. I could tell it was more than you could handle.”

“Tommy must be worried. I’ve never went this long without calling.”

“I take it you haven’t told him what’s going on.”

“I didn’t want to get anyone else involved.”

“You wanted to protect him, I understand. Why not talk to the police?”

“I don’t even want to be here—in this town, I mean. I tried to leave, and I told Tommy I wanted to move, but he didn’t understand and then we got into a fight and now everything’s a mess.”

“Can I ask you a personal question?” I said.

“I guess so.”

“What attracted you to him in the first place? You two seem a lot different from each other.”

“I get that a lot,” she said. “I’ve known Tommy since we were kids. It’s kind of like that saying about how opposites attract. His life hasn’t been the easiest, and I think he’s still trying to figure it all out, but he knows me better than anyone. When all of this happened I thought I should run, but then I realized my life is here, with him.”

“Why don’t you call him tonight and let him know where you are and talk to him for a little while,” I said. “You can stay the night at my house and tomorrow I will drive you home.”

She nodded.

“Besides,” I said. “It’s time you told him the truth.”

I got Bridget squared away in my guest room and scooped up Lord Berkeley in one hand and the files in the other and went down the hall to my room. From the stack I had to sort through I could tell the past year had been a fruitful one for Charlotte and Vicki. I pondered waiting until morning when Bridget could help me, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep while the files rested on my nightstand.

Lord Berkeley scanned the bed a couple times before he assumed a position where his body rested against my thigh and his head propped up on top of it. Sometimes when I worked on my laptop at night he rested his head on the corner of it which made it almost impossible for me to type. I never moved him though.

Step one in my sort process was to separate out the transactions according to agent. I arranged them into three piles that consisted of Charlotte’s deals, Vicki’s deals, and the deals they shared together. In the past year, Charlotte closed over 45 transactions. No wonder other agencies fought over her. Of those, five were shared with Vicki. Vicki herself had a modest year, with 24 transactions. I looked over Charlotte’s files, but nothing stood out to me that was unusual. The same could be said for the shared deals she worked on with Vicki.

I laid both sets of files next to me and leaned back and rested my head on the back of my headboard. The moon shone through my window, and I imagined it must be past midnight. I squeezed my eyes shut and thought about how nice it would be to drift off to sleep, but I had one more pile of files to sift through, and I wasn’t a quitter. I wrapped my black satin robe around me and went to the kitchen. Bridget sat on a stool at the bar and stared into the bottom of a cup of coffee.

“Can’t sleep?” I said.

“Something like that.”

“Coffee won’t help,” I said. “I’m making some tea. Want some?”

She shook her head.

“Nah, I’m fine. I don’t feel like sleeping anyway.”

“Me neither. I took a look at some of the files.”

“Find anything?”

“So far nothing out of the ordinary,” I said.

I poured some water into the kettle on my stove and turned on the burner.

“Did you know you could put some water in a cup and nuke it?”

I nodded.

We sat in silence until the kettle hummed. I had used it so much over the years that there were dime-sized wear marks on every side, and the spout put up a good fight every time I flipped the handle to get the tea out, just like it was doing now.

Bridget stared at me in disbelief.

“Man, that seems like a lot of work to me.”

“I thought so too at first,” I said. “It was a gift from my sister.”

“I’ve got a couple of sisters myself. She probably checks to see you still use it when she comes over here.”

“Actually, she passed away a few years ago.”

Did I just say that, out loud?

“Oh shoot, I’m sorry. Sometimes I stick my foot in my mouth. Were you two close?”

“She was my only sibling,” I said.

“Did she get sick or something?”

I shook my head.

“Nothing like that,” I said.

“Did she have an accident?”

The girl asked a lot of questions.

“I hope I haven’t offended you by asking,” Bridget said.

She hopped off my stool and poured herself another cup of coffee and then made a face.

“Cold?” I said.

She nodded and put it in the microwave and then took it out and sat back on the stool.

The microwave still had :14 on it. I turned away and tried to concentrate on Bridget, but I couldn’t. And I knew I wouldn’t be able to continue our conversation and not think about it. I pressed the cancel button and the time displayed itself again. Perfect.

“I don’t talk about my sister very often,” I said.

“Sometimes I feel that way about things too but then my stomach starts to feel all heavy and stuff like I’m inside an old car at a junkyard and I’m about to be crushed and then I can’t breathe and I feel like if I don’t let it out, I’ll blow up or something.”

I sat down on the stool across from her.

“When I talk about it, I usually do burst,” I said. “That’s why I don’t.”

“It’s that painful?”

I cupped my hands around the mug.

“My sister was murdered,” I said.

Bridget choked down her coffee and the mug slipped from her fingers and fell through the air and shattered along the tile floor. Fragments scattered in all directions. She jumped off the stool and knelt down.

“I’m so sorry; I’ve broken your mug. Tell me where you got it, and I will get another one for you.”

I scanned the floor and went to the other side of the room and grabbed the broom.

“Don’t be. I sprung it on you, and I shouldn’t have,” I said. “Sometimes I don’t know the best way to bring it up.”

“It was my fault. I kept going on and on and now look at what’s happened.”

I scooped the broken pieces into the dustpan and dumped them in the trash. Bridget had a look on her face like she just ran over a fluffy white bunny on the road.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

“Your sister probably gave that to you too, and now I’ve gone and broken it.”

“I picked it up at the outlets for a buck, it’s no big deal.”

I went to my room and grabbed Vicki’s files and returned to the kitchen.

“Since neither of us wants to sleep,” I said, “what do you say we take a look at this last set of files. I could use your help.”

She nodded.

I divvied them out and we went to work. Seven transactions later I noticed a pattern.

“Is it common practice for your clients to use the same appraiser?” I said.

“It depends. If they don’t request a specific appraiser, there’s a list of people we recommend. Why?”

“So far every one of these properties lists Walker Appraisal, LLC.”

“That’s Travis Walker. Vicki uses him a lot.”

“What about Charlotte, did she go through him?” I said.

“Maybe once or twice in the past year I think. Do you want me to look?”

“Not just yet. Let me get through the rest of these first.”

I looked through all of them and found seven more that listed Walker as the appraiser. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but fourteen sales with the same appraiser in a town with dozens of appraisers to choose from attracted my attention. I handed them over to Bridget and asked her to look them over. 55 minutes and two more cups of coffee later, she closed the last of the files and turned toward me.

“Do you have a computer?”

I retrieved my laptop from my room and handed it to her. She turned it on and typed in the address for the MLS.

“I hope I can still log on with Charlotte’s username and password.”

She typed it in and pressed the enter key. After a few seconds the home page came up with a message that read
Welcome Charlotte
across the top.

“What are we looking for?” I said.

“I can’t say for sure, but I find it curious that all of these properties were remodels, and I wanted to take a look at their history and see…”

A page came up and Bridget glared at it for a minute and then clicked on the tab that displayed the history.

“There! Right there,” she said. “That’s what I thought.”

“What have you found?” I said.

“I had a hunch the properties had all been flipped recently, and I think I’m right.” She turned the screen toward me. “Look at this. All three of these listings were bank foreclosed homes that sold to the same client and then went back up on the market a few months later. And I bet if we looked at the others ones, they would all be the same.”

“Flipping is legal though, right?” I said.

“Most of the time, but not always. It depends.” She pulled one of the files out and opened it and handed it to me. “It’s like it doesn’t make sense yet, but it does.”

Bridget pointed to the picture in the file.

“A few days before Charlotte died they got into an argument over
this
listing.

“Who did?” I said.

“Vicki and Charlotte.”

“Charlotte said she needed to make it right. I didn’t think about it at the time. She didn’t yell or anything so I figured a simple mistake was made that she needed to fix.”

“Do you remember her exact words?”

“When I walked in they stopped talking about it, but I noticed the listing in her hand and,” she tapped the photo of the house with her finger, “this is the one they argued about.”

“Did you ask her about it?” I said.

“She said not to worry, so I didn’t. But what if there’s a connection between her death and this listing?”

Over the next hour we poured over the files Travis Walker was involved with and it turned out they were all bank foreclosed homes or short sales which the purchaser bought on the cheap, made some changes, and then relisted with Vicki. I felt like I had found several pieces to a puzzle and just needed to put them all together.

Bridget opened her mouth wide and yawned.

“You better get some sleep,” I said.

“What makes you say that?”

I pointed to the clock on the microwave which displayed a time of 3:34 am.

“Let’s both turn in for what’s left of the night. We can try and make sense of all this in the morning,” I said.