The Path of the Crooked (Hope Street Church Mysteries Book 1) (11 page)

“This is really hard,” she whispered, gazing out a bay window into the side yard. “I feel like I’m spying on them and we haven’t even gone through any of their things yet.” As they headed upstairs, Cooper tried to shake off the feeling that she was moving through a place that had been permanently marked by tragedy.

Focus,
she told herself firmly.
People are like machines. There are clues that something isn’t running right. I just need to keep my eyes open and look for the little details—the thing that’s out of place.

At the top of the stairs, the hall split into a T. Cooper turned to the left and entered a small bedroom with a set of twin beds. She then poked around a laundry room, guest bath, and a room that clearly belonged to Caleb, the Hugheses’ son. Cooper was taking in the bookshelves filled with trophies, CDs, and books when Nathan called out, “The office is down here!”

The Hugheses had a large master bedroom suite, complete with his and hers walk-in closets, a sitting room with a fireplace, and a bathroom featuring a deep claw-foot tub. A door next to a massive Victorian chest of drawers led into a small office. The only furniture within was a desk, a side table, a straight-back chair, two sets of filing cabinets, and a narrow bookshelf bearing business and legal books, a dictionary, and photographs of the Hughes family.

There was a single window in the office, flanked on one side by a framed print of van Gogh’s
Irises
and on the other by a framed letter and a dry-mounted newspaper article. Cooper read the title of the article and studied the photograph. It was a short piece in the
Richmond Times-Dispatch
announcing the promotion of three Capital City employees. Cooper immediately recognized Brooke Hughes, though her hair was noticeably shorter, as the new head of Fraud. To her right was a dark-skinned man with a thick mustache. Cooper assumed he was Jay Kumar, who had been named as Capital City’s new project manager.

The third proud employee was Reed Newcombe. He’d been promoted to head of IT. Reed had an angular face, a sparse goatee, and thinning hair. He was captured in time in the photograph shaking the hand of the man standing beside him. Listed as Vance Maynard, executive vice president of Capital City, the man in the center of the photo seemed close to Reed’s age but was more attractive than his employee and had a leaner, more athletic body. He was also markedly taller. Vance wore tinted glasses and a practiced smile.

“Good for you, Brooke—breakin’ into the boys’ club,” Cooper said in admiration.

“Boys’ club?” Nathan raised his eyebrows.

“I know a thing or two about being skilled at something most folks believe only men can do.” She gestured at Brooke’s image. “I bet plenty of Capital City folks still doubted whether Brooke could do what they considered to be a man’s job. It took me two years of going to the same offices before those folks realized I’d come to fix their machines.”

“I love a woman with a toolbox,” Nathan quipped, and when Cooper blushed, he pointed at the framed letter. “What’s that about?”

The letter had been written to Brooke by Vance Maynard, the executive vice president from the newspaper article. It was a formal announcement of Brooke’s promotion but went on to compliment Brooke on her devotion, hard work, and adherence to good ethics. It was a very personal and flattering missive.

“Mr. Maynard must be a cool guy to work for,” Cooper said before turning her attention to Brooke’s desk.

The desk held two paper trays, a coffee mug stuffed with pens, and several books. One was open, and a sticky note had been fastened near the top gutter of the left page. The garbage can was full of papers and a stack of documents filled the out-box, while only one sheet lay within the in-box. Cooper turned to the piece of office equipment perched on a table beneath the window.

“A Brother MFC-8860 laser flatbed all-in-one.” Cooper admired the machine. “Nice.”

An orange light was flashing on the machine, indicating that it was out of paper. Cooper’s mind immediately leapt into repair mode. Nothing was sitting in the printer tray and Cooper saw no signs of a jam. She then pulled the machine slightly away from the wall, hoping that the last print job had fallen behind the machine. “Aha!” she exclaimed as a sheet of paper, freed from where it was pinned against the wall, slid onto the floor.

“What’s that?” Nathan asked.

Cooper knelt down and grabbed the paper. Bringing it back into the light, she studied the letters and numbers printed on the top. “It’s a fax. There’s a phone number here, followed by a code that identifies a specific fax machine.” She held the paper out for Nathan to see. “I have a feeling the police never saw this. It’s covered in dust.”

Puzzled, Nathan looked at the sheet and read:

FORGET ABOUT HAZEL

“Nathan, this sounds like a threat.” Cooper reclaimed the letter and placed it on the desk, warily, as though it still had the power to harm. “The name Hazel was also mentioned in the document stuck in Brooke’s work copier. We should show both papers to the police right away. Maybe they can find out who this Hazel person is.”

His brow creased in thought, Nathan began searching through the papers in the garbage. He dug out a sheet of paper from the bottom of the trash can and sat back on his heels, his eyes wide. The paper repeated the same text as the fax Cooper had found. Nathan turned the can upside down and shifted through assorted pieces of junk mail and clothing catalogues. The weight of the other mail had pressed downward so that the faxes had formed a compressed pile on the bottom. It was easy to imagine Brooke trying to hide the notes from sight, but Cooper and Nathan could see that someone had gone out of their way to get their point across to her.

Nathan laid out sheet after sheet on the surface of Brooke’s desk. “They all say the same thing.”

Cooper examined the copy in her hand more carefully. Next to what appeared to be a local number identifying the fax machine sending the message, there was a date. The fax had been sent the Friday Cooper had met Brooke Hughes at Capital City. Cooper compared her copy to those Nathan had taken from the trash. They were all dated the same Friday, which, according to Brooke’s wall calendar, was April 6.

“There must be twenty copies here,” Nathan said. “But who sent them?”

“Only one way to find out.” Cooper reached for the phone and pressed the speaker button. The blare of the dial tone in the silent room caused her heart to skip a beat. As she punched the numbers into the keypad, she couldn’t help but wonder if, in a matter of seconds, they’d hear the voice of Brooke’s killer.

After a single ring, a recorded voice alerted them that it was necessary to add an area code when dialing that number. “Looks like the number’s not as local as I thought.” Cooper took a deep breath and then redialed.

“JessMark’s Shipping of Chesterfield. This is Mark. How can I help you?”

“Ah, hi.” Cooper quickly gathered her thoughts. “I received a fax here at work and I don’t know who sent it. Do you keep records of your outgoing faxes?”

“For a month, yes. But we don’t keep cover letters. Just a receipt showing the fax was received and the time and date it was sent.” A pause. “In case someone says that it didn’t go through,” Mark added with a hint of ire.

“I’m sure you get questioned all the time,” Cooper sympathized. “See, my boss thinks that I’ve misplaced this fax she received on Friday, April sixth, at five forty-three p.m., but I wasn’t even in the office at that time. Is there any chance you can check the records and make sure it went through? I’ve never lost one before and to tell you the truth”—she lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper—“I think the temp who’s been working in the evenings is reading all the faxes and deciding which ones are important before my boss gets a chance to look at them.” Cooper cleared her throat nervously. “My butt’s on the line over this whole thing and I can’t afford to lose this job.”

“Well, we can’t let that happen,” Mark said kindly. “Let me put you on hold and I’ll ask my wife to check our report for the beginning of the month. She’s better at all the tech stuff than I am. What’s the number where you received the fax?”

Nathan and Cooper exchanged panicked looks. “Um . . .” Cooper lifted the phone from its cradle in order to see if the number had been written underneath while Nathan frantically read over the numbers listed on a bulletin board tacked to the wall next to the door. When he spotted the words
Home Fax
, he elbowed Cooper and she hastily repeated the digits to Mark.

Putting the phone back on speaker mode, Nathan and Cooper continued to search Brooke’s office as Etta James kept them company through the phone line.

“Mark has good taste,” Nathan said as he opened desk drawers. “Usually you hear elevator music when you’re on hold. This is refreshing.” Flipping through a stack of papers in the out-box, he looked up at Cooper. “What kind of music do you like?”

Cooper opened one of the file cabinets and began to read the printed labels on the file folders. Brooke had created folders for medical and tax records, bank statements, insurance documents, appliance warranties, and the like. Nothing in the file seemed connected to Capital City. “I like the Beatles,” she replied, sliding the top drawer shut. She thought about the songs she and Drew always chose on the jukebox at their favorite bar and added, “I also like Elvis, Simon and Garfunkel, U2, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Fleetwood Mac, and a bunch of country singers. You?”

“I like real musicians. I don’t care what the genre is, but I admire people who write and play their own music and aren’t just a pretty face backed by computers.” He gestured at the fax machine.

“You still there?” Mark’s voice suddenly cut off Etta’s crooning.

“I sure am. Just enjoying your hold music,” Cooper answered.

Mark laughed. “That’s my wife Jessica’s doing. I was all for ordering Muzak and she said we’d lose customers by the fistful. Guess she was right
again.
Anyway, I have the reports and am sorry to say that I have bad news.”

“Oh?”

“Not only did the fax go through to your number, but it would have been mighty hard to miss when it arrived.”

Cooper frowned. “I’m not following you.”

“According to our report, that fax was twenty-five pages long.” He hesitated. “I think you might have to talk things out with the temp.”

“I guess so,” Cooper said. Then, her head snapped up and she asked, “Does anyone else work there besides you and your wife? I mean, do you think you’d remember who sent this fax? Maybe that would help me figure out what it was about.”

“It’s just the two of us on the weekdays, and we close at six. I haven’t sent a fax that long in ages, so it must’ve been Jess. I’ll put her on.”

“I feel terrible lying to the guy,” Cooper whispered to Nathan. “He’s gone out of his way to be helpful.”

“I know, but we have to find out every detail.” Nathan picked up the calendar from Brooke’s desk and glanced at it briefly.

“Hello?” A perky voice picked up the receiver. “I have a long line of customers, so I need to be quick. I only remember that a man wearing mirrored sunglasses and a baseball hat sent that fax. The only reason I can even call him to mind was that he acted strange. Yep. Odd
and
rude. He just gave me the papers, ordered me not to look at them, and then turned his back while I sent them. When I handed him the original copies and the receipt, he shoved them in our shredder and walked out without another word! No ‘Thank you’ or ‘Bye.’ Nothin’!”

“So there wasn’t anything unusual about him like his height or weight or”—Cooper looked down at Nathan’s shoes—“big feet or ears or really yellow teeth or something like that?”

“No, ’fraid not. Only thing I noticed was that he had a bunch of curly yellow fur stuck to his jacket sleeve, like he’d pet a dog with that hand and the dog hair had gotten all over his coat. I doubt it was human hair, unless someone was
really
stressed and was shedding like crazy. Working here, I could see how that could happen!” She laughed. “I’m sorry I can’t be of more help, but if you leave me your number, I’ll let you know if anything comes back to me.”

Cooper gave Jessica her phone number, thanked her for her time, and asked her to extend her gratitude to Mark as well.

“The shipping store’s in Chesterfield, right?” Nathan said after Cooper hung up. “That’s about thirty minutes south of here. Some guy with a dog in Chesterfield.” He stood still and thought for a moment and then shrugged helplessly. “I can’t come up with anything. Let’s finish up in here. It’s getting late.”

Cooper’s stomach grumbled as she checked her watch. It was dinnertime, all right. As Nathan shifted through the other file cabinet, she took a closer look at the text on Brooke’s desk that had been marked with the Post-it note. The title of the book was
Offshore Accounts: Tax-Free, Private, and Profitable.
Cooper scanned the marked page, which focused on Swiss bank accounts, but couldn’t understand the passage. She had no business background and the terms seemed utterly foreign to her.

She pointed the page out to Nathan, but neither of them could determine how the marked section was relevant to their search, so Nathan began to sift through the file cabinet as Cooper focused her attention on the photographs of the Hughes family.

There were a half dozen altogether, taken at various birthday celebrations, in front of the Christmas tree, at Easter egg hunts, and during graduation ceremonies. In all the pictures, the three family members looked happy and relaxed in one another’s company. There was lovely Brooke, with her kind eyes and warm smile, and Wesley, who had an endearingly crooked grin and a pair of sweet dimples that Caleb had clearly inherited.

“That’s Caleb, their son. Did you see him at the funeral?” Nathan asked. “I don’t think I saw you there.”

“I kept a little apart but it was impossible not to notice Caleb. It was gut-wrenching to watch him as Wesley was taken away by the cops.” Cooper glanced out the nearby window. “I wonder if he’s ever going to want to return to this house.”