As we went through the desk, Jerry stopped by. The sheriff looked devastated by the murder of his nephew, and maybe that was why he raised no objections when Darrell said he wanted to deputize me to help on the case. Darrell pointed out that we were short-handed without Ajax and that I’d worked with him on the previous Ursulina murder. I expected an argument, but Jerry simply nodded his approval with barely a glance at me. We all knew it would be a short-term assignment anyway, given how far along I was.
After Jerry left, Darrell finally raised a topic that we’d avoided between us for months. Given that the Ursulina was back, we couldn’t dodge it any longer. “I know you wanted me to push back with Jerry about closing the Brink case,” he told me. “You didn’t agree with him blaming Jay.”
“I never said that.”
“No, but you don’t think Jay killed him,” Darrell said.
“You didn’t think so, either. But Jay confessed, so I get it.”
“It was better for Will,” Darrell admitted with a sigh. “Jay was dead, but Will still has to live in this town.”
“I know. You’re right.”
“Except here we are with another body.”
“Yes. Here we are.”
“You’re right, you know,” Darrell went on. “I never thought Jay murdered his father. I was pretty sure that the same person did all three. Brink, Kip, Racer. If Will’s right about Brink being in town years ago, that makes it even more plausible that we’re only looking at one killer. There must be a connection that we’ve missed.”
He shut the drawer of the desk and shook his head. “There’s nothing here. Let’s go through the personal papers I brought back from his house.”
We went into the office conference room, where Darrell had stashed the box that contained the contents of the rolltop desk from Ajax’s rec room. He pulled out stacks of papers and spread them neatly across the table. There was a lot to review. Tax returns. Bank statements. Receipts. Credit card bills. I took one side of the table, and Darrell took the other, and we began to sift through the piles in silence.
It felt odd, going through Ajax’s records, as if I were digging into the private details of his life without his permission. I’d seen him on Friday morning here in the office, and he still felt alive to me. He should have walked into the conference room, sat down with his cocky smile, and asked us what the hell we were doing. Instead, he was gone. I’d stared at his body, defiled in a truly horrific way. It seemed impossible. I couldn’t say I was going to miss him, but I didn’t understand why he was dead.
Or who could have killed him.
“Is there anything in the credit card bills?” Darrell asked.
“Ruby’s right about the jewelry store. Ajax spent almost a thousand dollars there last month. If it wasn’t for her, then who?”
Darrell whistled. “A thousand bucks? That’s a lot of money.”
I flipped through more of his statements. “He liked his toys, too. He made a lot of purchases from sports and auto-part shops.”
“Did he have any outstanding balance on the credit card?”
“No, he paid it off each month. In most months that ran to a few hundred bucks.”
Darrell grabbed for the stack of bank records. “Where was Ajax getting that kind of cash?”
He took the most recent account statements and passed the others to me. We paged through them, and I flipped through all the canceled checks that came with each statement.
“His checking and saving balances aren’t high,” Darrell said. “His salary wasn’t paying for most of the toys, that’s for sure.”
“Could Jerry have been helping him out?” I asked.
“Jerry doesn’t make that kind of money, either.”
“Hang on,” I said.
“What?”
“There are no checks made out to the credit card company.”
“What do you mean?” Darrell asked.
“He’s writing checks to places around town, but I don’t see anything made out to Visa. So how’s he paying off those balances?”
Darrell examined the papers spread across the conference table again. Then he frowned and reached for a new stack of bank statements. “He has another account.”
“What?”
“Look at these records. He has a separate checking account at a bank in the next county. Not joint, like the accounts here in town with Ruby. This one is just in his name.” Darrell went through the pages quickly. “The Visa checks came from that bank. Up until late last year, he was depositing five hundred dollars into that account every month.”
“Every month? From where? A second job?”
Darrell shook his head. “He couldn’t possibly have had another job without me knowing about it. There’s no info on where the money came from. He was simply cashing checks every month.”
“From who?”
“That’s the question.” Darrell ran through the bank statements again. “The last deposit was made in December of last year. After that, nothing. He’s been working down the balance since then, but he’s still got a few thousand dollars built up in the account. He must have been getting those payments for a while.”
“December? That’s when they stopped?”
“Right.”
“That’s the month Brink was killed,” I said.
Later, Darrell and I drove back to the house that Gordon Brink had rented.
I didn’t like the feeling of déjà vu or the ugly memories in this place. But in the time since I’d been here, the law firm had made a clean sweep. The retired mine president had decided to stay in Florida permanently, and the house had been repainted and refurnished from top to bottom. There was almost nothing left to remind me that Brink and his wife and son had ever lived here.
The partner who’d taken over the lawsuit, JoAnne Svitak, was exactly as Norm had advertised her. She had an edge that could make you bleed. Her face looked molded into a wax shell of overly white makeup, and the only thing that moved was her eyes, which were blue and severe. Her hair was brown and flowed around her head like an ocean wave caught in an ice storm. She was probably in her midforties. We’d looked her up in a legal directory at the courthouse, and we’d learned that she was the only female partner at Gordon Brink’s Milwaukee law firm. I had no doubt that she’d followed a tough road to get there.
When we sat down, she made it clear that she didn’t have much time for us. Her clipped answers rushed the interview along.
“Do you know a sheriff’s deputy here in town named Arthur Jackson?” Darrell asked her.
“No, I don’t.”
“He went by the nickname Ajax.”
“I still don’t know him.”
“He was murdered over the weekend.”
The news of a homicide elicited no reaction at all. She simply tapped a pencil on the desk and waited silently for Darrell to continue.
“The nature of the murder was very similar to the murder of Gordon Brink, your predecessor,” he went on.
“How similar?”
“Almost identical. The same wounds. The same message left on the wall.”
“Didn’t your department conclude that Brink was murdered by his son?” she asked us.
“That was the sheriff’s conclusion, yes, but—”
“So what does this crime have to do with me or my firm?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Darrell said.
I leaned forward in my chair, which wasn’t an easy thing to do. “Ajax’s wife, Ruby, is a key witness for the mine in the litigation. It’s hard to believe you don’t know who Ajax is.”
Her eyes had the patient cruelty of a snake. “Anything and anyone related to the mine or this litigation is privileged.”