Death By Sunken Treasure (A Hayden Kent Mystery Book 2) (4 page)

Six

It took some doing, but the clerk agreed to give me a copy of the other will and the receipt for its filing. Mallory and I had to haggle the public records aspect, but we won.

In all my years of practice as a paralegal, this had never happened before. The copy was worth every dollar I spent and the three I borrowed from Mallory for the copying charge.

The two of us walked toward our cars together. I pressed the automatic starter button for my vehicle. It chirped twice and started the air conditioner. While I walked, I flipped through the pages.

“Are you going to share what’s going on?” Mallory asked.

The second will I clutched in my hand was the draft my firm had emailed to Mike on Thursday evening with handwritten provisions someone had added. Provisions not in the will Mike signed in our office on Friday. I ran my fingers through my hair. What the hell?

“Yeah. The will he signed with us on Friday left everything to his son. No one else included. This will gives cash to Dana and Lisa, his girlfriend and the mother of his son. Lisa becomes trustee of the child’s trust. My finger pointed to the words written above Dana’s name indicating that her bequest was a consolation prize. “What do you suppose this means?” I cut a glance to Mallory. She shrugged and looked unimpressed.

“What happened when he came into your office? Did he seem like he was having second thoughts?”

My mind roamed back to that day. The sun cutting through the windows illuminating his hand as he signed. “No. But he was different. Resigned. I got the feeling he wasn’t happy with his choices, but he believed he was doing the right thing for his son. It was all about his son.”

“So far this isn’t too much different. There’s just some cash for his mother, and a snarky note.” She moved to peer over my shoulder. “Anything else?’

“The operation of salvage permit for the treasure site goes to Devon Rutherford.” That got her attention.

“Who?” Mallory asked.

“Mike’s former partner. He was a couple of years ahead of us in school. Look.” I pointed to some cross-outs. “Jake’s name was written in and then deleted.”

Mallory took the copy from my hand. The two of us leaned against her Prius while we studied the will. “Is the financial split from the treasure the same in your will? Devon and Jake.” She glanced in my direction. “Jake Patterson. Isn’t he Devon’s stepfather?”

I nodded. “Yes to the relationship. No to the split. It all went to Mike’s son in our will. Now Devon and Jake share a quarter for five years, then the son takes all. Way different.” I took the copy back.

“Check this out. The three of them owned the bar on the corner of Avenue A and U.S. 1, The Petard. Mike told Grant he bought Devon and Jake out. Said he took them off the liquor license. This will says Devon and Jake still own the bar and Mike’s son gets a share of the profits for five years, but no ownership.”

“The reverse of the treasure permit. So if this will was signed under duress…” Mallory drew out her words. “You could have a motive for murder. Kill him before he revokes it.”

Mental images of the dive site whirled through my head. Accident or murder? Between Friday and when I dove the site, the sea would have covered any evidence of a struggle. My mouth said, “My thoughts exactly,” but my brain yelled at me not to draw any hasty conclusions.

I handed the clerk’s Receipt for Deposit of Will to Mallory. “You recognize the name on the depositor line?”

She took the document in a manicured hand. “Sure, and so should you. It’s Buddy.”

“He’s…”

“Retired,” she finished for me. “But not anymore. He reopened. He’s renting space on Lower Matecumbe Key, the building with the Keys mosaic. Rolly’s office.”

I digested the news and wondered what brought him back to law work.

This second will changed everything. Even my plans to take the rest of the day off. I slid into my now cooled car. The display on my dashboard read almost four o’clock. I could get back to the office in thirty minutes. I activated the car’s phone button and called Grant. This bit of technology never ceased to amaze me. I’d driven a Chevy Tahoe for years until it wrecked last summer when someone drove me off the road. I’d escaped with a few bumps and bruises. The truck didn’t do so well.

Traffic backed up a bit on the approach to the Long Key Bridge. I braked at the same time Grant came on the line. I blurted out my story. “It’s a first for me,” I babbled. A deep silence greeted my statements. At first, I thought the call had disconnected. But his low whistle through the speaker confirmed the connection.

“What’s different between the two wills?”

“A lot of stuff, especially the beneficiaries.” Traffic eased a bit and I inched my car forward, hoping the delay didn’t indicate an accident ahead. The two-lane road lacked a shoulder to get around. “I’m heading back to the office. Should I stop at Buddy’s? Ask when and how he got this?”

“Where are you?”

Traffic crawled. In the time I’d been on the phone the car had moved maybe ten feet. Red taillights showed as far as I could see. “Stuck in traffic before the Long Key Bridge.”

“Go home,” Grant said. “Scan me a copy of the will you picked up and the depository receipt. I’ll see you tomorrow.” When the cars ahead of me inched farther up the road, I held my place. As soon as the road toward me seemed clear, I zipped the nose of my Subaru out into the oncoming lane and pulled a fast one-eighty. U-turns might not be legal, but in the Keys, the rules were different.

I got to my street in fifteen minutes. As I turned the wheel into the driveway, I pulled my cell phone from the console and typed a quick text to Mallory. I might still catch her if she went back to her office before heading home from the clerk’s office. We hadn’t run together for a while. It was time. I gathered my stuff and pulled out my house key.

I kicked off my heels as I punched my code into the alarm and headed for my home office. My phone chirped a quick dot dash as I turned on my computer and scanner. I punched the message button and grinned. I had a little road-pounding and brain-picking in mind. Mal matriculated in the criminal legal world. I dealt with the living and the dead. Our sources were different.

The scanner spat out the last page of the will. I picked up my copies, put them in a folder, and carried them out to my hall table. I’d put it in the car tonight so I didn’t forget the will in the morning. Tiger Cat wound around my ankles, alternately purring and mewing. He wanted his supper, and he sang for it. I walked to the cupboard, opened a small can of cat food, and dumped the contents into a handmade cat bowl.

“Here you go, youngin’. Just an appetizer. You’ll get the main course when I come home.” He abandoned me at once. Tail straight up in the air, he high-stepped to his dish.

I shook my head. “Ingrate.” My hands worked the clasp at the top of my trousers. By the time I made it to the bedroom, I was half-naked and ready to get into my running clothes.

My running clothes drawer looked like a carnival of color. I hated monochrome clothes, opting for tropical colors in running clothes and in my personal life. I yanked an orange sports bra, yellow running shorts, and a raspberry singlet over my body. Even my socks were multicolored, although only I knew that. They were no-shows inside my deep coral running shoes. I set the alarm, closed and locked the door behind me, and set out at a gentle lope for Mallory’s house a half mile away.

I jogged into her driveway in less than ten minutes. Ducking under the bougainvillea growing on a trellis over her front door, I knocked twice and turned the handle. My enthusiastic push nearly knocked her over.

“Steady, Hayd. Jeez. I’ve been waiting at least five minutes.”

A quick glance assured me she wasn’t angry but amused. I threw a hand to my chest and beat out three mea culpas. A huge grin split her face.

“Knew you’d get religion one of these days, Skinny.” She laughed, pulled the neon blue bracelet that held her key over her wrist, and headed out the door. I punched the two numbers to set her alarm, pushed in the thumb lock, and followed on her heels. One of these days I’d convince her to move her alarm control pad from next to her door and get deadbolts, but today wasn’t the time to fight that battle. Again.

A cool breeze played through the palms. We enjoyed the companionship broken by the soft sound of our sneakers hitting the pavement. Eager for Mallory’s opinion, I shared what information I could about Mike’s trip to our office without violating the attorney/client privilege. “You hear anything about his death? From any of your…sources?” I finished lamely.

She ignored the question and cut me a squinty-eyed look, sped ahead, and called back, “Which do you think is the final will?”

It took a quick spurt of speed, but I caught up. “I don’t know. Guess I won’t until I hear what Buddy says.” My lack of breathlessness after the brief sprint pleased me, so I continued, “Mike signed our will on Friday. He said he was going to dive his site. He seemed off. I couldn’t put my finger on it.”

We jogged in place waiting for the Sombrero Road traffic light to turn green. I remembered Mike sitting at the conference table. He asked all the right questions. Knew what he wanted. No question about his competency. But something hadn’t struck me right.

“I saw him last month,” Mallory said. The light changed and we continued our jog to the far end of the shopping center. We would turn around when we reached the Copper Monkey Bar. “At the doctor’s. When I wrote my co-pay check, I saw him waiting in the hall outside one of the treatment rooms.” She gave me a measuring glance as if weighing her words.

“Dr. Green told him this was the last time he would write Percocet and OxyContin prescriptions. Told him to make an appointment with a pain specialist.”

Mallory’s words made my heart pound faster than the pace of the run warranted. I yanked out my dry towel again and mopped my face as I ran. Mallory matched my steps pace for pace as we pounded for home up U.S. 1. Her troubled glances made me wonder if she followed my thoughts too. Drugs. I’d read about ghost pain after an amputation. How much worse would his pain be from burns? To have a chemical fire consume your body, then to suffer the regrowth of nerve endings, long dormant, now awakening.

More questions than answers crowded my head. If his doctor cut him off, had he turned to other, less legitimate sources? Was he the victim of a dealer who sold him bad drugs? I didn’t understand much about heavy-duty narcotics or their long-term effects. I figured if Doc Green wanted to cut him off, then he had his reasons. My stomach churned at the realization that I had to add this aspect to my death query questionnaire.

We jogged past Hall’s Diving Center and over the Vaca Cut Bridge before I decided getting answers was problematic. I lacked the background to frame the questions.

“Hayd,” Mallory began, “maybe I shouldn’t have told you. You’re going to look deeper into his death than your job requires, aren’t you?”

“Why do you think that?”

She gave me her patented eye roll. “Hayden Kent, you couldn’t leave this up to the police, not with a friend at stake. You need to be involved. I know you too well.”

It wasn’t the first time she’d referred to my tendency to want to control situations. My cheeks heated, knowing she was right.

“After today, there are too many questions. And I have information the police don’t. Or at least information they didn’t share.”

“Just don’t forget that they are investigating.” She paused for a beat. “Use their information. Let them help you.” She shot me a quick glance. “They don’t have to know.”

“Experience talking?” I wasn’t ready to talk about my visit with Deputy Diego. There wasn’t much to say.

Mallory’s chuckle had a Machiavellian edge to it.

Our sneakers made rhythmic padding noises. “What do you know about drugs?” Mallory stopped so short I thought she would fall over.

“What?” Her voice ended in a high-pitched squeal.

I brought myself to a halt. Hands on hips I stared straight into her eyes. “Not personally, goofy. Based on your job. Any of your crims talk about how drugs affect them?”

Cars whizzed past us on U.S. 1, intent on getting someplace fast now that they had two-laned the road in each direction. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted a pickup turning into the driveway where Mallory stood. She opened her mouth to answer and I grabbed her arm, yanking her to safety next to me. The driver of the car flipped us the bird.

“What’s his problem?” Mallory sputtered.

A distinctive license plate adorned the back of the pickup. “Masshole,” I muttered, using the local term for drivers from Massachusetts. “He had a sudden need for fast food.” I cocked my head at the burger joint behind us.

She pulled her legs up behind her one after the other in a classic runner’s stretch. The lines around her mouth were tight. Whether from the adrenaline rush of the near miss or in response to my question, I couldn’t say. Her hand shot out for my shoulder to steady herself. “Thanks. Someday I’ll get used to nearly getting run down on the sidewalk.”

The stretch indicated Mal was finished running for the night. We would walk the last half mile to her house or mine.

Her face softened. “You startled the hell out of me. I guess, when you get right down to it, I know more about street drugs than the prescription stuff.”

I thought about that a beat before I asked the question that chewed a hole in my thoughts.

“Are they different? I mean, I read about drug busts all the time where the drugs confiscated are narcotics. They’re pharmaceutical grade.”

“There are a million different answers to that question. The only honest one is, it depends.”

“Let’s head to my house,” I said. “Tiger Cat is probably climbing the curtains by now looking for his supper.”

As predicted, when we came in sight of my house, Tiger sat in the kitchen window. When he spotted us, he stood on his hind legs and began patting the glass. This cat had major attitude. I unlocked the door, and he launched himself at me. Laughing, I scooped him up and buried my face in his soft fur. Loud purrs rewarded my actions.

“I’m sure of one thing about addiction,” I said as I put Tiger down and he headed for the bowl Mallory filled. “An addict fears losing the high, and losing whatever makes them high. They panic if they get low.” I pointed toward Tiger. “Just like him. The thought of an empty dish set him up for an uncontrollable craving once someone nearby could satisfy his needs. Since I fed him before I left, he can’t be hungry.”

As if proving my point, Tiger pulled his head away from his dish and proceeded to scratch his paw backwards against the wooden floor. His immediate need met, he symbolically buried the rest of his food for later.

Mallory toed off her sneakers and wriggled her toes in her socks. “You think Mike suffered from addiction on top of everything else?”

“I don’t know. Dana worried about him taking an active role in the bar he, Jake Patterson, and Devon Rutherford owned. I think the only reason she wasn’t more vocal about it was that Jake was as much a second father to Mike as he was to Devon.” I pulled down plates and yanked open the refrigerator door, seeking something to reheat for dinner. Two cartons of leftover Chinese food caught my eye. “How’s chicken and scallions and veggie fried rice sound?”

“Better than the cold pizza at my house.” Mallory reached over my shoulder and grabbed the cartons. “Did you know these things unfold to make plates?” she asked as she scraped the food into pottery serving bowls and put them in the microwave. She removed the metal handle, unfolded one of the boxes, and laid it sort of flat on the table.