“I am a painter,” he replied, “but I’ve done a lot of this type of work. When you work on old houses, you pretty much become a jack of all trades. Most of the really skilled carpenters I know are all working jobs right now; you don’t ever want to use one who doesn’t know what he’s doing. And that dry rot really can’t wait.”
“Don’t worry,” Jase assured her. “We know what we’re doing.”
“Do you think we need to put off trying to get into the wall safe?” she asked. “It’s not as high a priority.”
“Not a good plan,” Jase replied, “in case the money is what the burglar is after. The sooner we figure out whether it exists—and if it does, put the rumor out that you’ve removed it from the house—the better I’ll sleep at night.”
“Did something happen last night?” Tom asked.
“Break-in,” Jordan replied. “Someone ransacked the library.”
“That’s solves the alphabetizing issue,” Jase told Tom.
Jordan slanted them a look.
“We were concerned,” Tom allowed, grinning.
“Keep it up,” she warned.
“Did the burglar get anything?”
“No.” She thought more about the framing project. “I’m a bit uneasy about how you all are always volunteering to help on the house. I don’t know how I’ll ever pay you back.”
“Don’t sweat it,” Tom said with a shrug. “Around here, everyone pitches in when needed. And the time will come when you can return the favor. Until then,” he added with a grin, “the entertainment value for us is real high. You have no idea how much we appreciate that.”
“If you’re feeling indebted, I need another bartender tonight,” Jase added.
“Sure.” Since their cups were empty, she went back to pulling espresso shots.
“I asked a couple of workers last night at the pub about the hotel job Holt was working on.” Tom settled back in his chair.
“You’re referring to those guys I saw you seated with?”
“Yeah. They said Holt definitely was losing money. According to the rumors on the street, Clive Walters was complaining that Holt’s work was substandard and asking him to redo a lot of it.”
Jase shifted, frowning. “That doesn’t sound like Holt.”
“Yeah, there’s no way Holt would have done a sloppy job,” Tom agreed. “In all the years I’ve known him, the only complaint I ever heard was that he took too long, because he was such a perfectionist. I never had a qualm recommending him for a job that I didn’t have the time to take on. So something’s rotten about that story. Crazy Clive is up to no good.”
Darcy popped her head into the kitchen.
“Hey,” Jase said.
“Hey, yourself.” She turned to Jordan. “Did you know there’s a giant hole in the side of your house?”
“Dry rot,” Tom offered.
“Ouch.” Darcy winced. “My sympathies. All right if I have the lab tech dust the desk and front door for prints before any more sawdust settles on everything?” she asked Jordan.
“Go for it.” Sawdust? She hadn’t even thought about sawdust. And she didn’t want to think about it, either. “Either of you need caffeine?”
“Do you even have to ask?” Darcy headed back down the hallway and out of sight.
Jordan spooned beans into the grinder and hit the button. At this rate, she’d need to stop by the deli this afternoon and buy more of their special blend. Running out of coffee beans was never an option.
Darcy reappeared, apparently having put the tech to work. After taking an espresso back down the hall to him, she sat down at the table with Tom.
“Did you talk to Crazy Clive yet and ask him about his alibi?” Jordan asked her.
“ ‘Crazy Clive’?” Darcy raised an eyebrow.
Jordan flushed. “Tom’s nickname, not mine. Though I have to admit—in a momentarily unprofessional lapse of judgment, that is—the name fits. The man really needs to chill.” She leaned against the counter next to Jase. “We were just talking about him,” she explained to Darcy, then told her about the rumors regarding the hotel job.
“I’ve got a meeting set up with him this afternoon,” Darcy said. “So Holt was losing money, huh? And Walters was claiming he was doing substandard work? Not, mind you, that it’s all that unusual for Clive Walters to be at cross-purposes with his employees. But I wonder what was really going on there.” Her gaze shifted to Jase. “Did you check through your receipts for the night Holt was murdered?”
“Yeah. Holt didn’t charge any drinks that night, so I doubt he was at the pub. I asked Bill, and he couldn’t remember seeing him, either. I also looked at the receipts for the previous two nights—nada, which is highly unusual for Holt. I can count on one hand the number of nights this year he hasn’t shown up for a beer and to hit on a woman. Have your men been able to piece together where he was that night?”
Darcy shook her head. “So far, all we know is that he stopped by a dive shop downtown to pick up full oxygen tanks around six in the evening. The owner said he asked Holt where he was planning to dive, and Holt clammed up and wouldn’t say. So then he tried to chat up Holt about the local shipwrecks that folks like to explore, and he got what he called a cold, ‘mind your own business’–type reaction.”
“Holt wouldn’t tell his workers at the hotel, either,” Jordan said. “So Holt didn’t want anyone to know where he was diving. Which leads to the question, how did the murderer know where he’d be?”
“The murderer was the dive buddy?” Tom suggested.
“Darcy and I wondered that the first day when we found his body,” Jordan admitted, thinking once again about the man she’d seen. But she was becoming more convinced she’d seen a ghost, not a human. She turned to Darcy. “Is there any evidence he had a dive buddy?”
“Not according to the dive shop owner. He even lectured Holt on the subject, but Holt didn’t seem interested in hearing about how unsafe it was to dive alone. The shop owner chalked it up to stupid first-timer mistakes and Holt’s willingness to break the rules.”
“Uh-uh.” Jordan shook her head. “I think it had more to do with Holt not wanting anyone to know what he was up to.”
“Well, someone knew where he was that night,” Darcy grumbled. “He didn’t shoot himself in the head, or we would have found stippling around the wound. And it’s not like he could have hidden the gun after he killed himself.”
“So still no murder weapon?” Tom asked.
“No, dammit.”
“What about his truck?” Jordan asked. “Have you found it yet?” They all looked at her as if her “powers” had expanded to include prescience. “What? It wasn’t parked in his driveway yesterday, so it was kind of obvious that he must have left it parked somewhere else the night of his murder.”
“We found it parked on a side street not far from the Hudson Point marina. A homeowner reported it after it had sat in front of his house for a few days and no one moved it. We’ve gone over it, but nothing unusual is showing up. No forensics other than what you’d expect.”
“No business ledger or files of any kind?” Jordan asked hopefully.
“Nope.”
“Damn.”
“So whatever boat Holt used to get out to Dungeness Spit was moored at the marina,” Jase concluded. “And since you didn’t find it anchored nearby, the boat probably belongs to whoever killed Holt.”
“Possibly. I’ve got my men looking over the boats as we speak, but we can’t board without a search warrant. So unless they find something suspicious in plain sight, we’ll have to figure out who killed Holt first, then execute search warrants on his house and any other vehicles or boats registered in his name.”