Lost Legacy (A Zoe Chambers Mystery Book 2) (18 page)

“How well?”

Jackson no longer made any effort to appear relaxed. He clenched the can so tight the aluminum crinkled. “We were best friends.”

Pete pretended to read his notes. “You made a pledge to take care of Chambers’ wife and daughter if anything happened to him. Isn’t that right?”

“Who told you that?”

Pete leaned a shoulder against the pillar, confident he would win this game of chicken.

Jackson let out a slow breath. “Yeah. I said I’d watch out for them.”

“When?” What Pete really wanted to ask was if he’d made that pledge before Chambers’ death? Or after he’d allegedly
faked
his death? But asking that would have given credence to Zoe’s wild suspicions.

“I don’t know. It was just one of those things. We’d been drinking. Celebrating after Zoe was born, I think. He got emotional and made me promise I’d look after Kimberly and Zoe if anything ever were to happen to him.”

Jackson sighed. “It was one of those drunken buddy moments. I told him I would. But I never in a million years expected...”

Pete reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the copy of the letter from James Engle’s house. The one about Zoe’s dad’s accident. Pete pressed away from the porch railing to hand the folded paper to Jackson. “What do you make of this?”

Jackson set the Coke can next to the flower pot and took the letter. He unfolded it and squinted at the words on the page for a moment, and handed it back.

Pete didn’t take it. Instead, he folded his arms and resumed leaning on the railing.

A flash of annoyance crossed Jackson’s face. He let his hand and the paper drop to his lap. “This is the damned letter that has Zoe in knots.”

“So you’ve seen it before?”

“Yesterday morning. Zoe confronted her mother with it.”

“And you hadn’t seen the letter before then?”

“No.”

“How about your wife?”

“What about her?”

“Had she seen it before?”

The screen door swung open, and Kimberly breezed onto the porch carrying a glass pitcher Pete recognized from Saturday night poker games here at Zoe’s place. A smiling Harry followed with a bowl brimming with potato chips.

“Had who seen what before?” Kimberly asked. She set the pitcher on the table, carefully moving her husband’s Coke aside.

Sylvia, carrying glasses, trailed behind and gave Pete an apologetic grin in reply to his glare. He’d hoped for a little more time alone with Zoe’s stepfather. But Sylvia had a chance to redeem herself. Pete raised an eyebrow at her and shot a glance at Jackson’s Coke can. Sylvia’s minute nod let Pete know she understood.

Jackson waved the letter at his wife. Kimberly pinched it between her thumb and index finger and held it at arm’s length, straining to see. “Oh.” She crinkled her nose as if the page carried a stench.

“Well?” Pete asked.

“What?” Kimberly gave him a vapid look.

He waited. From the periphery of his vision, he noted Sylvia pour the rest of Jackson’s Coke into one of the glasses. Slicker than a sleight-of-hand artist, she swept the can out of view.

“Oh,” Kimberly said again. “Had I seen the letter before? No. Not until Zoe shoved it at me yesterday before church. I swear that girl does stuff like that just for the shock value.”

Shock value?
Zoe
? Did Kimberly even know her own daughter?

Harry, still holding the chips, offered the bowl to Kimberly with one hand and held out the other one, palm up in an invitation to swap snacks for the letter. Kimberly eagerly complied.

“Any idea why Engle wrote it?” Pete asked.

Kimberly shrugged, uninterested. “How should I know?”

“He addressed it to you, Mrs. Jackson.”

“But he clearly decided not to mail it,” Zoe’s stepfather said.

Harry frowned at the letter while Sylvia leaned closer and read it over his arm.

Pete glared at his pair of would-be assistants, but neither one noticed. He turned back to the Jacksons. “Do either of you have any idea what Engle meant when he wrote about Chambers not dying in the accident?”

Jackson took the bowl from his wife and examined the contents. “I can tell you what he
didn’t
mean. He did
not
mean that Gary’s still alive, no matter what Zoe says.” Jackson popped a chip in his mouth.

Kimberly planted her hands on her hips. “Obviously it’s the ramblings of an unstable man. Jim was dying, after all. He clearly wasn’t in his right mind.”

“Except he wasn’t dying,” Pete said.

Jackson choked on the chip. “What?”

Finally. An unmasked reaction. Pete made a mental note. Tom Jackson did not know about James Engle’s feigned cancer.

“Hey. You two about done in here?” Devon, the clerk gatekeeper of the courthouse crypt, stood at the end of the aisle, scowling at Zoe and Baronick. “It’s quitting time. I want to lock up and get home.”

Zoe glanced at the thin folder lying in the bottom of the box in front of her. Done? She’d been done before she started.

Baronick shot one of his killer smiles at the clerk. “I need about fifteen more minutes, pal. Do you mind?”

Devon muttered something and disappeared.

Baronick stood and offered a hand to Zoe. She ignored it and climbed to her feet.

“Fifteen minutes?” She picked up the box. “What for? There’s nothing here worth copying or signing out.”

The detective took the box from her and slipped it back where they’d found it. “True. But this isn’t the only case I was asked to look into. You can go, though.”

“No way. Not until you tell me what you meant about knowing why my dad would disappear without a word to his family.”

Baronick crooked a finger at her, beckoning her to follow as he strode off to another section of the storage room. “You say you think he may have faked his death. That no one saw his body?”

Zoe jogged along behind him. “No one I believe.”

Baronick paused to orient himself. He looked around, grunted, and started off again. “Had your dad been involved in anything...shady?”

“No,” she snapped. “What are you getting at?”

“Have you ever considered that he went into witness protection?”

Zoe stopped. “What?”

Baronick located the row he’d been searching for and veered down a new aisle, squinting at the faded labels on the boxes. “If he’d seen something he shouldn’t have or testified against someone in a big case, someone who might have wanted payback, he may have gone into witness protection. The feds would have helped him fake his death. And he’d have just disappeared.”

“That’s nuts. He never testified against any mobsters.” At least Zoe didn’t think he had. “You’ve been watching too many old movies.”

The detective chuckled. “Very likely.” He stopped. “Ah. Here we are. Vernon and Denver Miller.” He reached up and pulled out another box, this one in worse shape than the first.

Baronick set the box on the floor and hunkered down next to it just as Zoe’s mind skittered back in time. Her memories of being eight years old were vague at best. Just about everything else had been obliterated by the agony of losing her dad. But what had gone on before that? Had he been involved in something? Seen something? Was there any merit to Baronick’s bizarre theory?

A soft whistle from Baronick brought Zoe back to the present. She leaned over his shoulder. “Did you find anything?”

He held a pair of folders, not much thicker than the one for Gary Chambers. “Pretty sparse police report. No surprise there.”

“Warren Froats was police chief way back then, too?”

“How’d you guess?” Baronick smirked. “And the coroner was the same, too. No autopsies.”

“Did these guys do
anything
to earn their pay?”

Baronick scowled into the box. He reached in and picked something up. His eyes widened. “Someone did.”

“Oh?”

He held up a lumpy small brownish envelope with smudged scrawls on the side.

Zoe leaned down for a closer look. “What is that?”

Baronick hastily tugged a glove onto one hand. With his thumb, Baronick popped open the flap. Then he carefully tipped the contents out into his gloved palm.

They both stared at the lump of lead.

“That, my dear,” Baronick said with a grin, “is the bullet that killed Denver Miller.”

Eighteen

Pete surrendered the front seat on the way home so he could stretch out across the back of Sylvia’s car and put his throbbing foot up. He really needed to solve these cases and get to the orthopedist.

“You know I absolutely adore Zoe,” Sylvia said, “but that mother of hers is a real piece of work.”

Pete grunted.

Harry continued to clutch the duplicate letter the way a kid might hang onto a stuffed animal. “Who?” he asked Sylvia.

“Zoe’s mother,” Sylvia replied, her tone softer. “Kimberly. She’s the one we were just talking to.”

Pete watched the back of his father’s head and imagined his puzzled expression.

“She’s the one who poured the potato chips into the bowl while I made lemonade,” Sylvia went on.

Harry nodded. “Right. I remember now. Lovely woman.”

Pete sighed. “How well did you know Kimberly before Chambers’ accident?”

Sylvia adjusted her rearview mirror so she could see Pete. He watched her eyes reflected in it. “Not well. She’s six or seven years younger than I am, so we didn’t run in the same circle. Plus she grew up on a little farm a mile or so south of the Kroll place. I don’t remember her hanging out around Dillard.”

“What about Chambers?”

“Gary was always a really nice guy. He and Tommy Jackson were only a couple of years behind me in high school. Both were jocks. Both went off to college on football scholarships. There was a lot of talk that Gary might have gone pro, except he blew out his knee.”

“That’s when he married Kimberly?”

Sylvia’s eyes narrowed in concentration. “Seems to me she was going to college when she met him. Maybe community college? I can’t remember. Anyway, once she and Gary got married, they moved into an apartment in Philipsburg. Couple years later they built that house on the hill behind the Vance Plaza.”

“You mean the Robertson’s place?” Pete thought of the stone and cedar house that looked more like a ski lodge than a private residence perched on a hillside overlooking the valley between Philipsburg and Dillard.

“Back then it was the Chambers’ place,” Sylvia said as Pete spotted a twinkle in her eye.

“That house had to cost a pretty penny to build. Even back then.”

“As I recall, Gary did okay for himself.” She emphasized the
okay
, as if what she really meant was
only
okay. “Owned a little appliance store in Philipsburg. But Kimberly had a reputation for being a social climber.”

“No,” Pete said sarcastically.

Sylvia chuckled. “Hard to believe, huh? Gary was gaga over his beautiful wife and gave her everything he could. She set her heart on a showplace house. He built it for her.”

“With what?”

Sylvia shrugged. “I have no idea.”

Pete made a mental note to look quietly into Gary Chambers’ life insurance. “By the way, where’d you put it?”

In the mirror, her eyes twinkled mischievously. “In my handbag.”

Sylvia’s purse sat on the backseat next to Pete. It had gained some notoriety in the past as a lethal weapon, so he hesitated touching it.

She must have spotted his trepidation. “Go ahead. It should be right on top.”

He gingerly opened the bag. As Sylvia had said, a Ziploc containing Jackson’s Coke can sat on top of the other contents. “Where’d you get the plastic bag?”

“I always carry them with me. You never know.”

Pete chuckled and removed the evidence. “If you ever want to come back to work for me as an officer, just give me the word.”

“I learned a thing or two after all those years as your secretary.”

“I’d say so.”

“What does this mean?” Harry asked, thrusting the letter he’d been studying into Sylvia’s face.

Pete lurched forward to grab his old man’s arm before Sylvia drove them into a ditch. But she beat Pete to it and calmly moved Harry’s hand out of her line of vision.

Pete flopped back in his seat. “What is it, Pop?”

Harry jerked around. “Pete. I didn’t know you were back there.”

Pete closed his eyes in exasperation, sighed, and opened them again. “The letter, Pop. What does
what
mean?”

Harry looked at the letter in his hand as if he’d never seen it before. Then he gave his head a quick shake. “Oh.” He held the paper up to show Pete, pointing at one sentence.

“
Gary was just trying to do what’s right
,” Harry read. “What does that mean?”

Pete took the letter from his father and read it again. Zoe had been so focused on the next line, Pete had overlooked the rest of the note. “That,” he said to his dad, “is a very good question.”

Zoe slammed through her back door, sending both cats scurrying. She wanted to talk to her mom and Tom. Now. But their rental car was gone. She spotted a terse note on her table.
Gone out to dinner.
Great. When had they left? How long before they’d return?

She remembered next to nothing about her drive home from Brunswick, her mind stuck on what Baronick had said. Witness protection? Could her dad be out there somewhere, using a different name? With a new family? Would he simply abandon her and her mother to save his own skin?

No. Of course not. But to save theirs? Yes. That much Zoe could believe. He could and would sacrifice his life with them if it kept them safe.

But safe from what?

A knock at her door jarred her. She swung the door open to find Patsy Greene standing on the porch.