Cruelest Month (5 page)

6

Ray had uncorked a bottle of Beaujolais
and was scanning the opening chapter of Fox’s book when someone knocked loudly at the front door. Before he could get up, Hannah Jeffers, a local cardiologist he’d met during a case the last winter, pushed her way into the kitchen.

“How is it that you just arrive like that?” asked Ray, putting down the book.

“Does it bother you?”

“No, I’m just curious.”

Hannah tore off her coat and flung it toward the sofa. “There’s no one else I can do this to,” she said, getting a glass from the cupboard and helping herself to a Diet Coke from the fridge. “I don’t know a lot of people up here. And I can’t drop in on the other men I know because they’re all married or living with someone. Anyway, I like your company. We do interesting things. Most importantly, you don’t put any demands on me.” She said this without looking at him. “I need a buddy, and that seems to be okay with you. And …” She paused.

“What?” Ray pursued.

“I know I can always get a decent meal here. I hate to cook, and I don’t like most restaurant food.”

Ray laughed. “The menu isn’t too inspired tonight. Most of it will be out of the freezer.”

“Do you have enough for….”

“No problem.”

What can I do?” she asked.

“Wash and spin the salad. Grate the Parmesan. I’ll do the main course.”

“Which is?”

“Ricotta cheese gnocchi in browned butter. I hope you’re not dieting.”

“The nice thing about being super hyper is I burn it off.” Hannah began to work on a head of romaine. “By the way, weren’t you involved with someone when we first met? I remember a very pretty woman who visited you in the hospital.”

“Yes.” In fact, Ray had been thinking about Sarah earlier in the day.

“What happened to her?”

“Her job up here was going away; she had a terrific offer with a large law firm in Chicago.”

“Are you two still talking?”

“Occasional e-mails.”

“There’s a wistful tone to your voice.”

“The timing wasn’t right.”

Hannah put down her knife and cocked her head until he looked at her. “C’mon, Ray.”

“All right. She is a very pleasant person. I enjoyed spending time with her. Unfortunately, during our brief relationship, I was injured twice. I think she found that quite frightening, perhaps more than she could deal with—even though over the course of my whole career, I’ve only been injured once before. And, then, I was working all the time. That goes with running a small police agency with minimal staffing. And probably it’s a personality thing on my part.”

Ray turned back to the stove. “Early on I thought she’d come back for weekends, or I’d go down there—I’d like a bit of an inducement to get to the Lyric Opera more often. It never seemed to happen. And then she quickly fell into a relationship, someone in her apartment building. We were in different places.”

“Yes?”

“I seem to be working all the time,” Ray said, facing her. “I guess I’m a workaholic. At the end, she was questioning whether I had the capacity to make time for her. Not just
time
time, but the emotional time.”

“What do you think?”

Ray waved his spoon in the air. “I don’t know. I haven’t been in a serious relationship for years. I’m used to being alone. When I’m not working, I’m kayaking, skiing, reading. I fill every moment. Perhaps I’ve forgotten how to make time for someone else.” He shrugged.

“I’m sort of the same way,” Hannah said, picking up her knife and beginning to slice the lettuce leaves from their stem. “When I’m not working, I’m being my hyperactive self. I once told you that I came up here to reconnect with a guy I had a relationship with in medical school. I had a silly idea about finding some kind of normalcy, part of my therapy to get beyond the war experience. I must have missed the fact years ago that he was sort of wacko. That’s the problem with hormonal relationships.” She laughed. “Sometimes you miss the really important stuff about a person, at least for awhile.”

Ray nodded as he worked on browning butter without burning it, his focus on the contents of a stainless steel pan. Hannah, too, settled into wordless concentration of washing, drying, mixing, arranging.

“How’s the world of crime?” she asked after they settled at the table and began their meal.

“Nothing too awful seems to be happening right now, fortunately. It’s funny, but when I started up here there would be long stretches where things would be routine, especially during the fall and winter. But in the last year, it’s been one thing after another.” He considered. “I do have one case that’s concerning me.”

“What’s that?”

“An elderly man has gone missing.”

“From a nursing home?” Hannah asked.

“No, he lives independently. Most of these cases with old people don’t have a happy ending.”

“I can imagine—heart failure, stroke, hypothermia. Our bodies fall apart, our brains turn to mush. We become increasingly vulnerable. And if you wander away somewhere and don’t get immediate medical attention ….” She paused. “Maybe that’s not so bad, to die quietly. How many times have I watched, sometimes participated in, an attempt to resuscitate an elderly person. Our best efforts to keep someone going can be violent. She looked directly at Ray, holding his eyes in her gaze. “I’ve often thought it would be so much more humane to let them die quietly.” Hannah smiled. “But you usually have the hysterical family there wanting you to do everything for Grandpa.”

They fell into silence for several moments. “I spent time with his daughter this afternoon,” Ray said. “She told me that her father’s a real character. He’s recently written and published a book on his years as a driver for Al Capone. He says he helped Capone bury his treasure up here.”

“For real?”

Ray left the table, retrieved the book off a nearby counter, and passed it to her before settling back into his chair.

“As you can see, the book is for real, and the author would have his readers believe that it’s all fact, not fiction. According to his daughter, however, Fox has a rich fantasy life.”

“How about the Capone connection?”

Ray chuckled, “Another urban legend that has been around for decades. I used to hear about Capone as a kid from the old-timers. It’s one of those stories you can tell and continue to embellish because no one can disprove anything you’re saying. Big Al supposedly had two or three hideouts up here. For example, there’s a house in Frankfort that reportedly has a tunnel that runs toward the beach. Story is that Al’s boys would come up in speedboats on moonless nights and drop off loads of hooch. But speedboats all the way from Chicago in the ’20s? And why would you bother to dig a tunnel where there are hundreds of miles of deserted beaches and dozens of remote road ends. The storytellers were mixing legends and yarns. Along the Detroit River, smugglers were running booze into this country with speedboats, an easy trip across a narrow band of water. And, yes, there were lots of tunnels and boathouses along the river. Most of the booze that got up here probably came in trucks or cars from Detroit.”

“How about the police?”

“This was a very rural county. People stayed out of other people’s business. I would bet there was little effort to enforce the Volstead Act locally. My grandmother told stories of her father brewing beer and the sheriff dropping by in his Model T to share a few bottles.”

“So what about the buried treasure? Any truth to that?”

“I’ve just skimmed the first few chapters. According to Fox, Capone amassed a huge amount of money, most of which he converted to gold coins. This was going to be his special retirement fund. Not trusting Bank of America, he and the boys buried barrels of gold all along the Lake Michigan coast with the plan that they would retrieve it as needed. Alas, the wages of crime caught up to them.” Ray flipped the book over to show Hannah the back. “The best thing is, if you look on the author’s note, Fox says the book is an invaluable guide to finding the Capone treasure.”

“So what happens now, a summer of digging up beaches?”

“Probably. Many of them are in the National Shoreline. It will give the rangers something else to worry about besides the nude sunbathers.”

Hannah stood up with her plate and reached for Ray’s. “I’ve got my boat on the car….”

Ray yawned. “It’s too late, and I’m too tired. How about a short hike? Then I want to crash.”

“You’re on,” she said. “Let’s do the dishes.”

7

Sue had backed into Vincent Fox’s gravel drive
and was standing at the open tailgate of her Jeep organizing her gear when Ray arrived.

“That was fast,” she said over the noise of Simone, yapping her greeting from the front seat.

Ray opened the door and accepted the kisses of the dog’s enthusiastic welcome. “I was already rolling when your call came.”

“I’m getting ready to cast a couple of tire prints. But I didn’t want to start on the house until you saw it. You can tell me what things looked like yesterday. And before we go in, I want to check the exterior for footprints, especially the area around the back door. That appears to have been the point of access.”

“So you’re telling me to hang back and not mess anything up?”

“Boy, are you fast,” Sue said, dryly.

Ray set Simone back in the car and closed the door. “You’re a bit touchy this morning,” he said.

“I’m a little ticked at myself. I should have been here yesterday and looked the place over. But it was late in the day, the search warrant wasn’t ready yet, and…”

“I didn’t expect you to be here yesterday, Sue. Didn’t I say that in my e-mail?”

“Yes, okay, but I would have normally come over and checked the place out. Shot some photos, looked for anything that might have shed some light on this man’s disappearance. I would have secured the place to come back to do a more thorough search, if it seemed necessary. But it was close to six o’clock when I got back from Sandville. And if I had started, I would have spent most of the evening here. I’m trying to figure out how to get a life. We’ve been working crazy hours for months.”

Ray waited for Sue to look at him, but she continued to fuss with her gear. “It’s okay, Sue,” he finally said. “Yesterday this wasn’t a crime scene. You did the right thing. When I requested that you look the place over, all I was thinking was that you might spot something that would give us a hint at why Fox went missing. You’re so good at that.” Ray paused for a long moment. “And you deserve a life, I recognize that.”

Sue faced Ray and crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m not putting this on you, Ray. It just happens when we are in the midst of an investigation. And, well, we are both like bulldogs. We keep going until we solve the crime. But I still need a life. I haven’t made it to yoga in months. I seldom spend any time with friends. I know it’s been the same for you.” She turned back to the Jeep and lifted out a bag of Traxtone, a powdered casting material. Then she said quietly, “I photographed the tire prints already and hope the castings will provide a better impression of the sides. I’m not sure there’s enough on the treads to give us any real evidence. If this is the perp’s ride, he’s driving on a couple of real bald eagles.”

Ray watched as Sue knelt and measured some warm water from a thermos and poured it into a plastic bag. Then she added the Traxtone. As the water came in contact with the cement, colored pellets appeared. She kneaded the material until the color disappeared, then carefully poured the mixture into each of the two tire prints. Ray stood by quietly. He knew that Sue liked to focus on her work without the interference of a conversation.

Suddenly she stood up and once again faced Ray with her arms crossed. “And I started seeing someone,” she said. “It would be nice to have weekends off, most of the time, and sort of a normal life.”

“Anything else?” Ray asked, matching her serious expression.

“Simone. I think we should have joint custody. I would like to be able to go away for a few days and not board her. She really likes you. I think it would be good for you, for her, and for me.”

“It almost sounds like we’re negotiating the terms for divorce.”

“It does,” she responded, half laughing. “ And we’ve never had the joys of a marriage, let alone the pain of separation.” Sue’s tone changed. “I really like you. If you weren’t my boss and a bit too old, I could go for you. You’re a prize, Ray Elkins, a truly nice man who’s one hell of a cook. Even though you don’t seem to do shirts or windows, you’d be okay. So how about joint custody?”

“I can probably manage that.”

“Now let me show you the house.” Sue was back to business. “We’ll start at the front. Whoever broke in last night didn’t bother with the front door. They probably scoped out the place enough to see that it was fairly substantial. The back door, however, is little more than an interior door. Something they could easily kick in.”

Ray followed Sue through the open front door and stood motionless for a few moments, allowing his eyes to become accustomed to the dark interior. “Unbelievable,” he said.

“Bit of a change from yesterday?” asked Sue.

“Someone really tore the place up.” Indeed, the house had been thoroughly ransacked—furniture upended, drawers dumped, books pulled off shelves, cupboards emptied.

“What were they looking for?” asked Sue.

“Did you read my notes from yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see the line on Vincent Fox’s book?”

“Yes,” said Sue. “You noted the book’s title, something about Al Capone.”

“I scanned it last night. According to his daughter, it’s all fiction, but Fox presents his story as fact. Here’s the condensed version: Fox writes that he was once Al Capone’s driver and that Capone hid millions of dollars in gold coins up here during the 1920s and ’30s. He hints at the locations, but says with the passage of time things look different and, also, his memory is starting to fade so….”

“You think the trashing of his place….”

“Yes, and maybe even his disappearance, is connected to the book.” Ray carefully studied the interior. “It’s gone.”

“What’s that?”

“His computer, a desktop model. It was there, to the right of the printer.”

“So if we go with the theory that this break-in is connected to his book….”

“Exactly,” responded Ray. “Someone was looking for more information on the buried treasure. Maps, diaries, whatever. If what his daughter says is true about the story being total fiction, it must have been a frustrating search because there isn’t anything here. He wrote the book on the computer, so a quick glance at the directory would probably show file names related to the book. Maybe the perp was hoping there would be other material stored on the drive, so taking it would make sense.”

“New ring tone?” said Sue.

Ray nodded as he reached for his phone. He listened, looking at Sue. After thanking the caller, he switched off the phone.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“That was central. They just had a call from one of the security people at the casino. One of their employees noticed the piece on Vincent Fox on the early news and remembered seeing him at the casino over the last few days. When he got to work he checked a recently archived video. He’s got Fox and several people that he was with on tape. And, get this, Fox had a big win on Friday. Six thousand bucks on the slots!

“So, maybe, after all, it was just someone after the money he won?”

“How does that explain the computer?”

“A useful and somewhat easy item to turn into cash?”

Ray gave the small room another thorough look. “I’m not seeing anything else. Why don’t you finish up here, Sue? I’ll run up to the casino. Let’s plan on meeting in the late afternoon. Anything else?”

“The new ringtone,” said Sue. “I taught you how to download them and now you seem addicted.”

“A cheaper obsession than playing the slots,” he responded.