“Do you have any names of other women he was seeing?”
“No.”
“Did you go over there this weekend?”
“No!” she insisted. “I didn’t go to his house. You’re trying to make it out like I killed him, and I would never do that. Never! You should ask Ruby about it. You saw what she did tonight. She’s crazy!”
“Other than Ruby, can you think of anyone else who might have killed him?”
She shook her head. “Nobody.”
“Did he talk about having problems with anyone? Did he say if anything was bothering him?”
“No. I mean, not really.”
I heard hesitation in her voice.
“It sounds like there was something,” I said.
“Well, he talked about the lawsuit a lot. He asked me lots of questions about it. He was always pushing me for information. He wanted to know what I’d heard, what I knew, what Ms. Svitak was saying about the case.”
“Why was he so interested?”
“I don’t know. I figured it was because Ruby was a witness.”
“Did he ever talk about money?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, did he ever mention getting monthly payments from the law firm?”
Her brow wrinkled. “Why would Ajax be getting money from the firm?”
“He never told you about it?”
“No.”
“Did he talk about getting money from anyone else?”
“No.”
“What about the lawsuit? Did you give him information like he wanted?”
Penny hesitated. “I don’t want to get fired.”
“Well, you say you loved Ajax. Don’t you want to find out what happened to him?”
It took her a long time to answer. “Okay, I probably told him more than I should. I wanted him to like me, and I didn’t really see the harm. Ruby was a witness for the mine, so it’s not like I was helping the plaintiffs. Besides, he wasn’t asking about the harassment or anything like that.”
“What did he want to know about?”
“He asked a lot about Gordon.”
“Gordon Brink? What about him?”
“He asked if the firm was hiding anything about him. Did Ms. Svitak know things that might come out at trial? Or did she have any idea who killed him? I thought that was weird, because everybody said Gordon was killed by his son. I asked Ajax why he wanted to know, and he told me his partner still had questions about the case. That you were pushing him to find out more.”
Darrell frowned. “He said I wanted the information?”
“Yes.”
I glanced at Darrell, who shook his head.
“What did you tell him?” I asked Penny.
“Well, I told him about a tape recording I’d heard. It seemed to upset him.”
“What was this tape?”
“Not long after Ms. Svitak arrived, she was going over archival records of our client relationship with the mine. I was there to take notes. She was listening to a cassette recording of a phone conversation between Gordon and the senior partner of the firm in Milwaukee.”
“What were they talking about?”
“Gordon said he’d tried to get Sandra Thoreau to quit the mine. He’d offered her a payout to leave, but she’d turned him down. After that, Ms. Svitak switched off the tape and told me to leave.”
“Did you ever hear more of the tape?”
“No. Later, Ms. Svitak told me to destroy my notes about it. That’s very unusual. I asked why, and she snapped at me and said not to ask any questions. My guess is, she didn’t want anything on paper that might accidentally show up in discovery. The firm doesn’t want the plaintiffs to hear what’s on that tape.”
“You told Ajax about it?”
“Yes, and he freaked out. I don’t know why.”
Darrell interjected. “Do you know when the call was taped?”
“Years ago.”
“How many years?”
Penny blinked as she tried to recall. “Seven, I think? I always label my notes with the date of the conversation, and I’ve got a good memory for that kind of thing. I’m pretty sure it was summer seven years ago.”
“Where was Gordon when he made the call?”
Penny shrugged. “Here.”
“Here in Black Wolf County?” Darrell asked.
“Yes. He said he’d met Sandra Thoreau that day, so he must have been here.”
Darrell eased back in his chair with a heavy sigh. Then he turned to me. “We need to pull the murder file again.”
“On Brink?” I asked.
He nodded. “Yes, but not just him. Summer seven years ago is when Kip and Racer were killed.”
We kept our files in the basement of the building. It was a dank, windowless room, not the best place to store documents, but we didn’t have a lot of extra space. Boxes of d-CON kept the mice from devouring our papers. The files were all in bankers boxes organized by date on a series of rusty metal shelves. The archives went back for decades, so if someone wanted to see their grandfather’s arrest record for skinny-dipping in the 1940s, it was probably still there.
Darrell didn’t say anything as we traversed the narrow aisles, with me squeezing sideways because of my belly, so I was the one who brought it up.
“What was Ajax doing?” I asked. “Trying to solve the murders?”
“Maybe. But that doesn’t explain the monthly payments.”
“At least now we know why Ajax was buying Penny gifts. He wanted information from her.”
Darrell nodded. “Ajax is caught up in all of this somehow. I have to assume that’s why he’s dead.”
We reached the area in the basement where the boxes were kept for the months of July and August seven years earlier. Everything Darrell had gathered in his investigation into the murders of Kip and Racer was crammed into three heavy boxes, typically filed on the top shelf. I wasn’t able to reach the boxes myself, or to lift them, not in my condition. But I didn’t need to.
The boxes were gone. The other records from that time frame had been squeezed together to make the gap less noticeable, but the murder files were gone.
“Somebody took them,” I said.
Darrell grabbed the log sheet that we used to record who removed materials and when. As he reviewed the top sheet, I could see Darrell’s own name from the last time he’d pulled the files, shortly after Gordon Brink’s murder. He’d noted the date and time in and the date and time out.
That was the last time the records had been touched, according to the log. No one had checked them out. But they’d vanished anyway.
“We need to check Brink’s file, too,” he said urgently.
Quickly, we made our way to the shelf that held the records from last December and then January of the current year. It took me only one glance to see that the box of materials we’d gathered on Gordon Brink’s death had disappeared, too.
“It was here,” I told Darrell. “I put it here myself.”
Darrell shook his head. “It had to be one of us. A cop took it. Nobody else has keys to get in here.”
“Ajax?”
“That’s my guess.”
“But why? He was part of the investigations. He already knew what we’d found.”
“I don’t know,” Darrell replied, “but we’re back to square one. Everything we know about the Ursulina murders, all our evidence, is gone.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The next morning, we met Sandra Thoreau at the mine. She arrived in the work site trailer from deep down in the terraced layers of the copper mine, wearing a hard hat and yellow reflective suit. She was dirty over every inch of exposed skin, the kind of dirt from which you probably never felt completely clean. She didn’t look happy to see us, and I was conscious of the fact that the mine was going to dock her for every minute she wasn’t on the clock.