Melvin quit moving.
“Drop your rifle.”
“They tricked me,” Melvin complained.
“Mr. Entwhistle, you took a woman against her will. This is not a case where you can claim you were wronged. Now kick the shotgun away from you and lie facedown with your hands behind your back.”
Melvin dropped the gun out to his side and got to his knees, then lay down.
Jake moved forward and handcuffed Melvin Entwhistle, reading him his rights as he did.
“He’s really hot when he does that, isn’t he?” Annie said.
“How’d you get out of that?” Cam asked.
“Dad and I used to do ropes as a kid—part of sailing. There’s a knot that is totally tight unless you pull exactly the right spot. I just waited for my moment.”
“A win for your dad!” Cam said.
“Yeah. He comes through sometimes.”
Cam hugged Annie, and Rob called, “Can we come out, or should we stay in the trees?”
Unfortunately, the whiz of a bullet answered the question, and Jake had to dive for the ground. Cam thought it looked like he’d been hit.
“No!” Annie screamed.
“Stay hidden!” Jake yelled.
Cam could see he was rolling for the trees himself.
“What about me?” Melvin yelled.
“They’re your people. Are they going to shoot you?” Jake asked.
A sickening
sput
answered the question. Shutting Melvin up was apparently what they wanted, well at least one of the things. On the positive side though, the gunfire had brought the police running back through the woods.
Jake rounded the house in the trees, running toward them holding his ribs.
“You’re hurt!” Annie yelled.
“Yes and no. I have a vest on, so no penetration, but it stings like the dickens. You three get back away from this. Bullets came from that direction.” He pointed. “So you head the other way. It might get ugly. Hundred, two hundred yards back that way, then get under or inside something. Go!”
He pushed them off, and Cam and Rob had to physically pull Annie for a while before she would move.
“Annie, if he’s worried about you, he won’t be able to pay full attention. We have to get out of here.”
She finally agreed and they followed the line of the hill until it began sloping down again.
“There,” Rob pointed out a small building and the three of them aimed for it. It was up a little hill, but looked sturdy enough to hide in, even if somebody decided to shoot at it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t empty.
“Vera?”
Vera Windermere-Sullivan stopped, stone still, a deer in the headlights.
“What on earth are you doing? I thought you were going to direct the police?” Cam said.
“Nothing. Just a whim. After they got here, I came . . .”
But Cam could hear by her shaking voice she was lying. She was glad she hadn’t trusted Vera or the police might not have found them. Rob moved in front of her and finished raising the bucket from the well, as that was where they were—a covered well house. In the bucket was an accordion file folder just over an inch thick.
“Give me that! It’s mine!” Vera said.
“I think we’ll let the police check that,” Rob said, holding it out of Vera’s reach as she jumped for it.
“So you killed your father?” Annie asked.
“Don’t be absurd,” Vera sniped. “I’m sure Mike killed my father! He had all these papers about what Daddy had done . . . Maybe they argued. Maybe it was an accident.”
“Then what are you hiding?”
“Nothing. I knew if Mike gave the papers to Elle, this is where she would hide them.”
Cam didn’t trust what Vera was saying. It was too halting, like she was making part of it up. “So why retrieve them yourself? Why not let the police know, instead?”
“Can’t a woman be concerned with her father’s reputation? He’s dead. I’d like to leave him in peace.”
Vera wouldn’t come with them, but Annie had figured out where they were and headed them back toward the Sullivan cabin. Rob brought up the rear of the trio, looking back regularly and steering them into the cover of trees a few times just in case. Vera had run off in another direction as soon as they left and it was hard to say what or who she might be after.
“She doesn’t want them to have the books or they’ll take her money,” Annie said when they were walking. “It’s illegal money. She figures she lost her dad and husband. She doesn’t think it’s fair she loses the money, too.”
“Even if it solves the crime?” Cam asked.
“She might just figure done is done. It was over a dirty business deal, and her dad and Mike both got caught in something they shouldn’t have done, but since they are dead anyway, why forfeit the money?”
“I think there’s more to it than that,” Rob said. “She doesn’t want something becoming public.”
“Like what?”
Rob handed Cam a thin ledger. Cam opened it and could see immediately it was for accounting: money coming in, money going out. The recipients tended to be political. In fact it looked a little like the one they’d seen earlier, but the people listed were different. A few of the recipients here were known to be under investigation. And there was a political name absent from the “official version.” Chad Phillips had received a great deal from Chrysanthemum Holdings.
“Election fraud?” Cam said.
“Well, and besides that—somebody hiding information from their business partner.”
“Sounds like motive for murder,” Cam said.
“Yeah, but whose motive?” Rob asked.
A picture was starting to form in Cam’s mind that would answer that question.
• • •
• • •
T
he Sullivan cabin was strangely quiet, or perhaps not strangely, considering the firefight down at the other cabin. Cam, Rob, and Annie found a police car and locked themselves in, Annie in front so somebody could work the doors if necessary. They all felt being locked behind bulletproof glass was probably a good idea while the chaos collected itself. Annie managed to use the radio to call for an ambulance, as they knew Melvin had been shot, and who knew how many more might be hurt before it was over. Nobody said anything specific out loud because Jake was still down in the fray.
“Where do you suppose Dad and Elle got to?” Annie asked. “Their car is gone.”
“Maybe when they told the police the documents had been moved, the police sent them home to be out of the line of fire,” Cam suggested, but she agreed it was strange.
“Or to the station, but yeah—out of the way. Jake probably let everyone know Annie got out,” Rob said. Cam gave him a faux evil eye, as his idea had more merit than hers.
“Does that mean we could go home, too?” Cam asked.
“In what? We came with Vera,” Annie said. “Who knows where she went after we left the well?”
“Right.” Cam didn’t like feeling helpless. “And Vera doesn’t seem likely to be our friend after this.”
Rob looked pensive, so Cam put her hand on his leg. “What?” she asked.
“It’s just . . . she was so strange up there. And think about what Vivian said—that she was holding something over Melvin’s head that could ruin him.”
“The hidden files show support for Chad Phillips,” Cam said. “The open ones show support for Jared Koontz. We know Derrick Windermere was supporting Koontz. So Melvin must have been the one diverting money. You’re right. It looks like Vera might have been forcing it because she knew about the laundering!”
“But would she kill her dad for that?” Annie asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe it was an accident,” Cam said. “I mean, who thinks a flowerpot is a murder weapon?”
“But Mike’s death was more intentional,” Annie said.
“He caught on to her. I bet she felt trapped,” Cam said.
It was more than an hour later before the police officers began returning to the cars. Annie jumped out and asked the first one she saw to radio Jake, as he was probably searching the woods. The officer obliged, and even from the car, Cam could hear Jake’s relief, “Oh thank heavens! I couldn’t find them and I was worried.”
• • •
• • •
T
he next feared delay was the police setting out into the woods to find Vera Windermere-Sullivan, but Jake loaded Annie, Cam, and Rob into a different police car with their evidence and headed back to town, confirming that Annie’s dad and Elle had been sent back to town ages ago. Among them all, there was enough evidence that they wanted it right away, and the fewer civilians left on the mountain, the better.
Cam was shocked when, on the way back into town, Jake asked her to summarize what she thought had happened.
“This Chrysanthemum Holdings company seems to be a front for channeling drug money into elections,” Cam said, passing on what they’d figured out about Vera blackmailing Melvin for a change of recipient. “Maybe she thought if Chad was a senator, her dad would let her divorce Mike and marry Chad. Maybe her dad found out and wasn’t going to let her get away with it, so he ended up pelted with a flowerpot. Then when the thugs came looking for the paperwork, Vera figured out Mike had uncovered it, and she worried about whom Mike would give the evidence to. She wanted to protect her boyfriend, so Mike got pummeled, too, which is to say, killed. She thought she was safe then until Melvin realized we were snooping—he might have even told her to back off. But she took a chance in finding out what we knew and it was a fluke that Elle had the information—she knew just where it would be. She came up here and found it where Elle hid it and moved it.”
“You’re missing a key detail,” Jake said smugly.
“What?”
“I’ve been talking to Lenny as we searched for you guys up on the mountain. Mike was DEA. He was undercover for this drug thing, trying to get to the big guns. He didn’t know the elections piece . . . or didn’t tell anyone if he did. This file, though, looks like he cracked it. Where the drug money was coming from and which politicians and scam groups were getting it.”
“Holy crap! So that’s how he put this all together?”
“Looks like it. Lenny was in on it, too. In fact that’s why the FBI was never brought in on the kidnapping. None of the rest of us knew, but Mike had led Len to believe they were also doing something related to the search with the senator and Len had to keep cover,” Jake said. “The mob thought they had a dirty cop and his thug brother working for them, but actually, they were working together on a big drug bust.”
“Does Elle know?” Annie asked.
“You’d have to ask her.”
• • •
• • •
N
ick had successfully tricked Petunia into a day out of their condominium and Cam, her dad, and Annie had settled in to paint the stenciled design around the ceiling of the baby’s bedroom. Not that Petunia would have minded the stenciling, but they all knew it would go more smoothly without her constant commentary.
“Ducks, huh?” Annie said. “So they aren’t finding out if it’s a boy or a girl?”
“Petunia doesn’t want her baby railroaded,” Cam said.
“Good girl.” Annie then turned to Cam’s dad. “Hey, how’s Vivian doing? Did they ever figure out the angle for framing her?” Annie asked.
Cam’s dad shrugged and looked around like he was about to reveal a secret.
“Melvin as much as admitted to her in the hospital that she was the easy scapegoat—she had a history with both victims.”
“Is he getting in trouble?”
“A lot of trouble, but he’s trying to bargain by cooperating about both Vera and Chad now. They’re both being held, but Melvin could assure their conviction. There will be jail time, but not as much as kidnapping and embezzlement normally would earn.”
Cam thought her dad was so cautious in what he said because Vivian was a little embarrassed to be the beneficiary of this scandal. Her party had asked her to run for the senate seat after all.
“And are you two . . .” Annie continued.
“Still seeing each other? Yes. She says I look good on her arm,” he said.
Annie laughed. “That you do! You let us know when we can start calling you Mr. Senator.”
Cam looked at her dad, expecting protest, but he just grinned. This might just be getting serious.
Annie elbowed her and Cam deflected. “What about
your
dad?”
“I’m thinking there is some promise here,” Annie admitted. “If he can give Elle a pass for all these crazy shenanigans, he’s got to cut me some slack.”
“Yeah, who knew? Elle . . . nuts, huh?”
Annie nodded, and Cam thought she looked rather impressed. Annie always preferred a rule-breaker, given a choice.
