The Gift of Grift Read online

  “No, I do.” Katie’s doubtful look turned a little more toward thoughtful. “Where did you say she was staying?”

  “Hinckley.”

  Six to eleven was a big time window, and eight thirty was pretty near the middle of it. Getting back and forth from Hinckley in time wouldn’t be hard. Easier than Pammy’s route, definitely.

  Why couldn’t the police narrow down that time window? Surely the time of death wasn’t that difficult to determine by now.

  “Judy is afraid,” Katie said at last. “But I’m not sure she should be.”

  “You don’t think she killed Brian, but whoever it was won’t come after Judy next?”

  Katie met his eyes, her green eyes clear as day. “Not even Clark Dutch would kill over twenty dollars. We already know Pammy had a reason to dislike Brian. What if she wasn’t the only one whom he scammed all those years ago?”

  Ray fell silent. Once again, he wished Lori were here — but this time, so he could talk to Mitch.

  Or maybe he’d be seeing Chief Branson anyway.

  Ray dialed Chip’s home number, but the police chief didn’t answer. Katie toyed with the idea of talking to Doris at dispatch to find him, but before they could decide, there was a knock at the shop door.

  Ray hurried down the stairs as best he could — it had been a very long day. This knock had better be important.

  When he entered the shop, he saw the person at the door right away: Chief Branson.

  Ray unlocked the door. “Just the man I was trying to get ahold of,” he greeted Chip.

  “You were?”

  “Chip, we both know Pammy didn’t hurt Brian. Don’t you think he could have scammed other people all those years ago out of a lot more than twenty-five bucks.”

  “And an elopement,” Chip added.

  Which was supposed to be the main motive, of course.

  Ray narrowed his eyes. “Wait, why did you come here?”

  Chip frowned and bowed his head. Ray finally noticed the red and blue flashing lights behind the police chief.

  “What happened?”

  “We got an anonymous tip.”

  Ray fixed the younger man with his best severe, skeptical look. He might not have that newfangled, call-waiting identification or whatever it was called, but Ray knew these days nobody could call in something anonymously.

  “It was called in from the library. I already talked to Diana.”

  The librarian was pretty sharp and definitely would have remembered someone using the phone if she’d seen him. Or her.

  “What did the tip say?” Ray asked, refocusing on the priority.

  “It led us to the murder weapon.”

  Ray’s stomach crawled toward the floor. If Chip was here, if he had his police lights flashing on his undercover car, if Ray and Katie hadn’t called him . . . “What brings you by, Chip?” Ray finally asked.

  The police chief stared at his shoes for a second, breathing out a great sigh. “We found the murder weapon.”

  Ray barely dared to ask. “A buoy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  But something more hung in the air, hovering over them heavier than humidity before a hurricane. That wasn’t nearly enough to bring Chip down here like it was an emergency, or to block off Front Street or have — Ray paused to count — three police cruisers swarming around his shop.

  The other shoe hadn’t fallen yet.

  “Is that all you found?” Ray tried.

  Chip nodded, his shoulders rising and falling with another breath. After two long heartbeats, the chief opened his mouth to speak, sucking his teeth in the process. “They were under your front porch.”

  Ray absorbed that blow like a visceral hit. Did that mean suspicion was back on him again?

  Surely not. They all knew the buoys were stolen. Even if Ray hadn’t noticed them missing until after Brian’s murder, Chip had to believe him.

  Didn’t he?

  Wait a minute. Under his porch? Had someone just torn them down and tossed them underneath the porch to torment him? Local hoodlums out for what passed for a crime spree in Dusky Cove?

  But then Ray remembered the real crime spree in town: murder.

  And the latest victim had been killed with buoys. From his store.

  That they had just found back at his store.

  Ray forced air into his lungs. You couldn’t con an honest man, could you? Then could you send one to jail for something he didn’t do?

  Ray wasn’t sure, but it had only been a couple years since Chip had tried to do just that to Lori. A few months since he’d done it to Mitch, someone the chief had known his whole life. Could he do the same to Ray?

  Not if he had anything to say about it. “I assume you’ll be checking the buoys for fingerprints.”

  “And I assume we’ll find yours.” Chip said it as if it pained him to point out that fact.

  “Probably. And probably the fingerprints of whoever took them from my porch — and whoever killed Brian.”

  “Hang on — took them from your porch?”

  “Yes, I reported them to Doris on Tuesday. I thought that was why you came by that afternoon.”

  Chip frowned. “She never mentioned this.”

  “Did you tell her you were looking for buoys?”

  Chip scanned his memory, his eyes moving back and forth. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen anything about this.”

  “I didn’t ask for an investigation, just to make a report in case I needed it in the future.”

  Chip folded his arms. “Feels awfully convenient. You don’t have any other information that might exonerate you, do you?” The last two words carried a note of hope.

  Ray hesitated a moment too long. “My sworn statement they were stolen? It’s got to be on file, right?”

  Doris couldn’t have kept her job all these years if she were incompetent, right?

  Before Chip could answer, the phone rang. And rang. If Katie wasn’t answering — “I need to check this.” Ray crossed the room to grab the other cordless handset. He answered to silence, then a click.

  “Hello, Ray, dear,” Katie said. “May I please speak to Chip?” Katie asked. Ray recognized the sharp politeness in her voice. He’d crossed her enough in the last six decades to know he needed to give her a wide berth and obey as fast as possible. He crossed the room and held out the phone to Chip.

  The chief raised an eyebrow but accepted the handset. “Hello?”

  Katie’s voice carried strong and clear across the distance between them. “Chip Branson, I know you’re not implying the man who’s been a second father to you would ever hurt someone who knew him his entire life.”

  “Well, ma’am, the evidence —”

  “Is circumstantial at best. If you were to take this case to trial, I can only imagine how embarrassing it would be to try to argue that an eighty-year-old man beat a man in his fifties to death with a heavy object made of solid wood.”

  Ray wasn’t quite that feeble — though admittedly, it would have been a feat — but his wife’s strength, even after all these years, lived up to the legend she’d created throughout the county. This wasn’t the first time she’d taken up for someone who needed help, and he once again wished he had insisted she go to law school all those years ago when she had toyed with the idea. He could only imagine what the county would look like with her as a prosecutor.

  Hurricane Katie was truly a force to be feared.

  He was vaguely aware he should also be afraid of how much his wife could hear from the shop — but an honest man had nothing to hide, right?

  They’d have to see what the police chief had to say about that.

  “Uh, well, ma’am,” Chip stammered at last. “That is, we don’t have any evidence to the contrary.”

  “Sounds as if it’s time you got to work finding some instead of flinging an accusation at someone who is either just the closest unlucky victim or clearly being framed.”

  “Framed?” Chip’s voice grew tight around the wo
rd.

  “Oh, yes, sir. Wouldn’t it be the obvious choice, if you’d gone to the trouble of stealing a weapon and murdering someone with it? Slip it back where you found it and let that nice shop owner take the fall. With the motivation of losing thirty whole dollars.”

  That definitely didn’t sound like Pammy, or anyone else Ray knew. Of course, maybe he just naively thought people would be as honest as he was. If Brian were killed as a crime of passion and opportunity, the right thing to do would be to come forward and trust the clemency of the court to take that into account.

  Katie wasn’t done with Chip yet. “Furthermore,” she said, sharpening that edge on her voice to a razor edge, “you know full well you should be investigating this anonymous tip further, when that clearly has a stronger tie to the crime or the criminal than the happenstance of where the weapon was stashed — not far from where the murder was committed.”

  “All right, all right, ma’am,” Chip managed. “I know when I’m beat.”

  Katie thanked him and hung up, and Chip handed the handset back. For just one second, he looked thoroughly whipped, tail between the legs and all. Just before he turned away, though, he caught Ray’s eye again. “I will be following up on the physical evidence, you know.”

  Ray raised one eyebrow, the subtlest challenge after what Katie had just put Chip through.

  “To rule you out. I hope. Doing my job.”

  “Of course.”

  Chip turned away, and Ray closed the door behind him. Once Chip was off the porch, Ray had a better view of the situation in his front yard. A photographer stood up, his head and shoulders popping up above the edge of the porch. Lights filtered up between the wood planks and several other officers milled around. One or two onlookers gawked around the edge of the perimeter.

  Good thing that guest of Lori’s didn’t arrive until tomorrow. Of course, that would be the perfect thing to welcome a tourist to town: police tape across the street.

  Ray heaved a sigh of his own and glanced at the phone in his hand. He was grateful Katie had swooped in, though he didn’t want to believe Chip could go and arrest him for something like that. Someone who’d half-raised him, over something so circumstantial?

  Clearly Chip needed someone like Katie on his team. Ray was forever grateful she was on his side.

  Well, when she was on his side. He was lucky that was most of the time.

  The policemen outside continued to mill around — probably the whole police force, out working on their biggest case right now. Ray turned away.

  Katie was waiting for him, eyes brilliant, when he reached her room. “Had me worried there for a minute,” she said. She glowed so bright she was practically luminous.

  She had her moments, even after the disease got her, but Ray had learned not to put too much stock in her “shooting-star” episodes. She would burn out, fast, and they’d be worse off than they were before.

  “That’s enough excitement for one day,” he said, moving the phone to its charger out of her reach. He cleared the plate and napkin off her table, trying to sneak even her . . . sidoki? book with it. Katie’s eyes flicked to his hands. Clearly she wasn’t fooled, but she let it pass without comment.

  “What do you think we should do now?” Katie asked. Ray turned away to set the book down. Obviously his wife already had a plan in mind.

  “I’ll think about that for a minute,” Ray said. He headed downstairs to rinse her plate and stick it in the dishwasher. He didn’t really have a plan. He only knew that he’d seen Judy and Gail by his porch tonight — but who knew how long the buoys had been down there? Who looked under porches?

  He hoped that short break would give Katie a minute to wind down.

  It did nothing of the sort. Katie was still sitting up straight in bed when he returned, hands clasped together, wrapped up in her bedsheet. “We need to find out who sent in the tip.”

  Ray pressed his lips together. She hadn’t called Doris already to start the unofficial investigation?

  He wasn’t going to win against Katie — he doubted if anyone could — but with her getting this worked up, he needed to take things down a notch. He turned off the overhead light and the television, leaving the bedside lamp as the only light.

  Katie fixed him with a glare. “I know what you’re trying to do, Raymond Watson, and it will not work.”

  “I’m trying to help you get settled for the night. It’s late, and you need your rest. You’re getting worked up.”

  Katie pursed her thin lips but acquiesced to lean back against the pillow. Ray pushed the button to lower the head of her hospital bed to a more reclined position. “I love you, dear,” he said. “All the days and all the nights and all the in-betweens.”

  She met his eyes again. “Where did the tip come from?”

  He tried not to purse his lips that she refused to follow the nighttime routine. “It was anonymous.”

  “Yes, but did he mention where it was phoned in from? I couldn’t hear that part.”

  Ray didn’t have time to gloat over one tiny factoid he had that she didn’t. It would calm her down faster to get the information out there. “The library.”

  “Which bed and breakfast is closest to the library?”

  “We’re not going to be able to figure it out from that. Nowhere in town is actually far from the library.”

  Katie acknowledged the point. “Did he say it was a man or a woman?”

  Ray tried to turn the conversation over in his mind, but he couldn’t remember. “I’m not sure. Does it matter?”

  “Of course it does. Obviously the tipster is the prime suspect. Who else would know where the buoys — the murder weapon — were?”

  Ray nodded, then tugged the sheet out of her worrying fingers to tuck it in. “This case is getting to be too much excitement, Junebug.”

  “Don’t you want to be exonerated?”

  “Do you think I’m a serious suspect?” Ray hoped the skeptical slant to his mouth was enough to reassure her that he wasn’t.

  Even though he wasn’t sure about that at all.

  Ray finally got Katie settled once he had promised to call Judy in the morning to try to determine whether she could be the tipster, but he spent half the night mulling over where the tip might have come from. Judy had been in town tonight; he could vouch for that. Chip had said the library staff didn’t see who had used the phone, which seemed odd. Was there still a pay phone or a public phone there, or would the tipster have had to ask the librarian to use her telephone?

  And why would the murderer and/or tipster want to harm Ray? Just to deflect suspicion from themselves? Or had Ray done something to harm them as well, and this was a revenge double play?

  Aside from Clark Dutch, Ray couldn’t think of anyone in town who might hate him that much. Sure, he’d hurt or offended people over the years — you didn’t live long without doing that — but enough to try to send him to jail for murder? At his age, any sentence would be a life sentence — no, a death penalty.

  By the time he dragged himself downstairs to open the shop after a cold, sad breakfast, Ray felt no more rested than he had when he finally got Katie to stop arguing back last night.

  One simply did not win an argument with Katie. He could only hope to get her to agree to stop arguing for a while, and that was exactly what he’d done last night.

  Ray took a moment to call Judy’s number, but she didn’t answer. If she were smart, she would have left town. But if she were really smart, she would have left days ago.

  He had only had the shop open for a few minutes when his phone rang — Kim Yates calling to tell him about an emergency DCBOA meeting.

  Ray hauled himself off his stool. At least it was winter, so he likely wouldn’t be missing out on business. He called upstairs to let Katie know where he was headed before grabbing an extra flannel and locking the door behind him.

  The dozen other business owners flocking to the community center looked about as grim as the weather on that gray day.
Even Clark Dutch seemed subdued as he settled into a metal folding chair.

  Heidi called the meeting to order and jumped straight into business. “Ray, I understand you’ve been in contact with Judy? The girl con artist?”

  He didn’t bother asking how she knew. Small-town gossip was faster and more lethal than a viper. “Yes.”

  “Is she still in town?”

  “She’s staying in Hinckley.”

  A dark look telegraphed around the room from one business owner to another, and Ray instantly knew he’d said too much. There weren’t many places to stay in Hinckley. While Judy wasn’t anyone’s favorite person, could they really be upset enough to go after her?

  “We think it’s high time she made things right,” Clark declared. “She stole from us. Unless she can make proper restitution, we’re going to insist that she be turned over to the authorities.”

  Ray gaped at Clark, who felt compelled to add, “We’re going to insist that you turn her over.”

  “Look, she stole from me, too, but the poor kid has been through a lot this week. She loved Brian —”

  Clark snorted through that giant schnoz of his.

  “ — and she has nowhere else to go.” Although he still hoped she’d finally skipped town.

  “That doesn’t justify stealing from us,” Kim pointed out, her voice gentle.

  “What are we going to do? Shake her down?” Ray peered around the room at the other Dusky Covites, trying to really gauge their intent. “Would that make us any better than she is?”

  “She started it,” Clark huffed.

  Ray didn’t even dignify that one with a response. Anyone with children could see how little water that argument held.

  “What are our legal options?” Heidi tried. At least she was keeping it somewhat professional.

  “We should be able to press charges,” Clark insisted. “We need the police reports for an insurance claim.”

  “Are you making an insurance claim?” Ray asked.

  Clark’s gaze slid away from Ray’s. Answer enough.

  “Is anyone planning on making an insurance claim?” Ray tried to pitch his voice to make it sound like an invitation rather than a rebuke. If anyone wanted to — or worse, needed to — file a claim, he didn’t want to prevent them. He just wanted an accurate read on the situation.