Dying Echo: A Grim Reaper Mystery (Grim Reaper Series) (34 page)

Chapter Thirty-eight

Casey ran back toward the motel, every fiber in her being wanting to make a detour past Betsy’s house to scour the blueprints. No one had ever considered the blueprints, because no one knew they were there, except Betsy, and she just figured they were old portfolio type things for Cyrus. She’d gotten them after the investigation was over and had stuck them in the attic. Billy didn’t know. Robbie didn’t know. And, most importantly, the three men didn’t know.

But Casey knew. And she was going to be at Betsy’s door at the break of dawn, demanding to be shown the thing that could get her brother out of prison. She shook herself. No, the blueprints couldn’t get him out of prison—they wouldn’t say anything about the murder up in Colorado. But they were going to point her toward the people who killed Elizabeth Mann. She knew they would. Somehow.

With each footfall, Casey felt something within her rising up. Something foreign. Something new. Something almost like…hope.

No. It couldn’t be that.

Could it?

By the time she arrived at the motel it was almost two. She remembered in time to be quiet so she wouldn’t wake Eric, and shut her door quietly.

“Where have you been?” Death stood in the middle of the room, fists on hips.

“Like you couldn’t have found me.”

Death frowned. “I
couldn’t
find you.”

“What?”

“I was going to see what you were up to. Join you, hang out, help with clues, like always. But it was like…like you’d closed me off.”

“Seriously?”

“Casey…” Death was like a statue. “Do you want to live?”

Casey took a long, deep breath. Did she? Did she really feel like living another day would be a good thing? Something she should look forward to?

“I don’t know. I think…maybe.”

“Casey…what does this mean?”

“You tell me. You’re the supernatural being.”

“
I couldn’t find you
. How supernatural is that?”

“It’s not. It’s just weird.”

Death flickered, like a bad hologram in a science fiction movie.

“Oh, God,” Death said. “Are you deserting me?”

Casey stepped forward, reaching for Death.

And Death disappeared.

Chapter Thirty-nine

Casey woke Eric at six. He came to the door in a wrinkled T-shirt and shorts.

“Come on,” Casey said. “We’ve got things to do.”

He blinked. “Can I have a few minutes?”

“Make it quick.”

Nine and a half minutes later, during which Casey was completely alone except for the cars passing on the other side of the motel, they were walking very quickly downtown.

Eric smoothed down his still-wet hair. “Where are we going?”

Casey explained what she’d found out the night before. Eric listened, then said, “What do you think we’re going to find?”

“What could we find in designs for houseboats?”

“I think it’s obvious. Hidden compartments for smuggling. We’re right across the Gulf from Cuba, and that was the early nineties. All kinds of stuff went down then with smuggling. People coming over illegally, cops taking down boats full of drugs, causing tons of deaths on both sides, all sorts of violence and betrayal and theft. Nasty stuff.”

Casey remembered Robbie talking about smuggling when they’d first gotten to the hotel, although he was talking partly about human trafficking. “I guess it depends how big the boat is.”

“Or how big the inventory is. Could have been anything. Drugs. Cigars. Diamonds. Even cash. You could squeeze a lot of those things in small spaces.”

“But don’t they usually use speed boats to smuggle? Or bigger yacht-type things? Houseboats aren’t exactly fast, or even seaworthy, not out in the middle of the ocean.”

“Guess we’ll have to see what’s on the plans.”

They arrived at the Betsy and Scott’s house. A light was on in one of the upstairs rooms, so they wouldn’t be waking everyone. Casey rapped lightly on the door, and listened for footsteps. When they didn’t come, she tried again, a little louder.

The door opened, and Scott stood there, looking much like Eric had twenty minutes earlier, in shorts and a stretched-out T-shirt. “You’re up already?”

“So are you.”

He smiled. “True.”

“Can we come in? Is Betsy up?”

“Sorry, of course, come in. I’m not quite awake. I’ll go get Bets.” He shut the door behind them and padded up the stairs.

Betsy came rushing down, tying her housecoat. “What is it? It’s not Wayne, is it?”

“No, he’s fine. But he gave me an idea of what the men were looking for. Can we have another look at your boxes?”

“They’re still in the dining room.”

Casey went right to the memento box and popped the end off of the mailing tube. She breathed a sigh of relief when she saw the blueprints right where she’d left them.

“Those?” Betsy said. “They’re just some of Cyrus’ old stuff.”

Casey shoved the boxes aside and lay the blueprints flat on the table. Eric held down one half while she held the other.

“I guess it’s a houseboat,” Eric said. “But it kind of looks like a yacht.”

The first drawing showed the dimensions of the outside of the boat, as you would see it from the side if it were floating up above the water. It was a typical pontoon-style houseboat, just like Casey had imagined. In the lower right hand corner was a logo which said simply, “Private Boats, Inc.” Casey peeled that top sheet off and let it slide to the floor. The second drawing showed the same outside view, but from the front and back, while the third showed the opposite side. Each of them had the same logo imprinted on the bottom corner. Casey got rid of them, too, and finally saw the interior.

The top sheet was an overview of the entire layout. Kitchen, bar, lounge, bathroom, two bedrooms, and two bunk rooms. Lots of room, but then, if someone was really living on it, it would have to be somewhat sizable. All of the rest of the papers were individual sections of each room, as well as electrical, venting, and water pipe diagrams.

“Why is it important?” Betsy asked.

Casey didn’t know. There was nothing obvious. Nothing saying, “Hidden compartment for smuggling drugs.”

“Give me a minute,” Eric said. He flipped back and forth between several sheets, muttering to himself, for several minutes. “Hand me those other sheets, will you?”

Betsy grabbed the ones on the floor and put them on the table.

“The dimensions,” Eric said. “They don’t add up between the outside and the inside.”

“What else?” Casey was used to looking at set blueprints from back in her theater days, but that part of her brain had rusted, and these drawings just looked like a bunch of lines and angles with no real meaning.

Eric scanned the sheets again. “I need more time.”

“Can I help?” Scott was standing in the doorway. He’d taken a shower, and was wearing khakis and another blue button-down. Things you’d expect a high school teacher to wear.

“Please.” Eric stepped aside. “You’re physics, right? Maybe your kind of brain could figure this out better. We think these are plans for some kind of smuggling boat. Cyrus drew them.”

Scott leaned over the drawings, saying things like, “Um-hmm.” And “Oh, sure.” And even, “Huh.” “Okay,” he finally said in a normal speaking voice. “Look here.” He ran his finger along the outer shell of the layout overview. “There’s a buffer all around the sides of the boat. Space in-between the inner walls and the shell.”

Casey followed his finger. “They were hiding things between them?”

“Ingenious, really. That way no police could find things just by going through the boat. The cupboards, storage spaces, closets—they’d all be filled with legal belongings. There would have to be an opening somewhere…I don’t see it yet.”

He took his time looking over the schematics, going back and forth between sheets. “There. This paneling. It would look like solid wood paneling, but see here? He’s drawn in sliding sections. He would have had it constructed so no one would even think it was anything but a normal seam. You can see them all over—in the closets, behind the kitchen cabinets, even the breaker box. Behind each storage space is a hidden compartment. Fairly small.”

“But plenty of space for drugs or gems or cash.”

“Absolutely.”

Casey and Eric looked at each other.

“What does this mean?” Betsy asked.

“It means your uncle really was a criminal,” Casey said. “Or was at least working for some. And that opens up all sorts of possibilities as to who would want him dead.”

Chapter Forty

“So where exactly are we going?” Eric pulled onto the road heading southeast.

“Cyrus’ old workplace.” Casey wished she could have access to all of the files Death had scanned, but it seemed those were out of her reach now that she’d apparently become more okay with the idea of living. She was sure there would be information about Cyrus’ old workplace that she could use.

“I thought they went out of business, and that’s why Cyrus lost his job.”

“No, Wayne said he was laid off, but I don’t think it was because they closed down. Maybe they just couldn’t afford his services anymore. His expertise made him expensive.”

“So why wouldn’t he just lower his rates?”

“I don’t know. Made him feel taken advantage of?”

“This from a guy who wouldn’t accept charity? You’d think he’d be glad to have a job at all.”

“These were the nineties, remember. Not today, when folks will take anything they can get. But maybe it was something else. Supposedly, like people have told us, he just wanted to be his own boss and had trouble working for someone else. He wouldn’t be the first person fired for not playing well with others.”

Signs for Galveston Bay began decorating the side of the road, and Eric followed them across the flat, marshy land toward the coast. The GPS on Eric’s iPad took them south of the bay, as far as a marina, before saying they were at their destination.

“This is it?”

Casey understood Eric’s confusion. The Gulf sparkled under the sun, and extended as far as she could see, into the horizon. Beautiful. Amazing. But the marina itself, tucked into a marshy inlet, was not the hub of busyness they had expected. A floating dock bobbed on the water alongside several old fishing boats and a pontoon. One old houseboat was moored to a different, permanent dock, and looked like it had seen better days. Many of them. Casey didn’t see anyone out and about, except on the other side of the inlet, too far in the distance to recognize faces, or even genders.

A low but large building with two over-sized garage doors, made for accommodating boats, sat far enough off the water it wouldn’t get hit by incoming tides. Weeds had grown up around it, and all three of the visible windows were broken, with tell-tale holes in the panes where someone had thrown a rock or a heavy seashell. A sign hung crookedly on a post, one of its chains broken and trailing as the sign swung with the breeze. The sign said, “Harbor Houseboats,” although the paint was so faded it was hard to tell. No vehicles sat in the parking lot, which would have been a surprise at that point if there had been any. Casey ignored the sinking feeling in her stomach and got out of the car.

“Where are you going?” Eric came after her.

She picked her way across the weedy bank up onto the parking lot and peered through one of the busted windows. “I guess they’re out of business
now
. Let’s see if we can get in.”

The side door was easy to open, since the building had apparently been broken into long before they’d gotten there. Casey stepped into the muggy space, which had been the front office. An old metal desk sat in the middle of the room, along with an office chair that had been home to more than a receptionist in the past few years. The walls held faded photos of houseboats in spotted wooden frames, and a curling, yellowed calendar from 2007 hung to the left of the desk.

Eric worked at the top desk drawer to get it open. “Old envelopes, all empty, some letterhead, bunch of paperclips…” He went through the rest of the drawers, but found nothing more interesting than outdated phone books and a broken model of a houseboat.

Behind the desk was a doorway, and Casey stepped through it into a large workspace. She ducked as something flew down from the rafters, wings beating a hasty retreat.

“What was that?” Eric came in behind her.

“Bird of some kind. There’s nests all around.” Other things, too, by the look of it. Including people, although all that was left was the trash they left behind. Beer cans, food wrappers, probably syringes and who knew what else. Casey didn’t want to get any closer to find out.

The large room was fronted by the first of the two huge rolling doors. Hoists were attached to the ceiling, and workbenches, littered with refuse, lined the walls. The shell of a houseboat lay lopsided on the cement floor, as if someone had taken one of its legs out from under it. It was the flat style, so the windows to the house were at eye level. Casey walked around it, looking in the windows, hoping she wouldn’t find anything disgusting inside. There were newspapers and a couple of old blankets and cardboard boxes, but nothing that looked too hopeful. Or gross.