Keeping Mum (A Garden Society Mystery) (14 page)

They had gone into Cam’s kitchen, Cam fetching each of them a beer. Rob sat with a notebook. Cam stood to pace while she thought.

“Melvin Entwhistle, for reputation smearing. Chad Phillips, as a political rival of Jared. He might have resented Jared getting both men’s support.”

“Vivian Macy has political reasons, too,” Rob said.

“I don’t think so. Did you know she was my mom’s college roommate?”

“She was? How did I not hear this before?”

“I didn’t know about it until the fund-raiser, and things have been a little crazy since then. Dad thinks a lot of her, and he said she’s running for the State House, not Senate, so she wasn’t intending to run against Jared. She just wanted the lay of the land.”

“What about Jared?” Rob asked.

“Jared? Why?”

“Maybe he’d just learned his number-one supporter was going to have some embarrassing skeletons come out dancing. Hey, wait. Let me see something.”

Rob logged on to Cam’s computer and went to his email.

“Remember the missing security tapes?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, the one that wasn’t missing . . . my informant sent me a copy—not official, of course, but so we could watch,” Rob said.

“Nice!”

Rob opened the file and they began watching the garden reception in double time. A short way in, they slowed it down to get a closer look. The man who’d annoyed Senator Schulz had gotten a major lecture from Derrick Windermere and then stormed off.

“Thanks to you and Annie,” Rob said, “we now know this guy, Mike Sullivan, is also Senator Schulz’s brother-in-law. He’s connected to both victims.”

“Do we think he has a motivation to kill Derrick?”

Rob scratched his head. “Well, there’s no shortage of in-law jokes. But why does Mike have an apartment with some guy staying at it when he should also have a house with Windermere’s daughter?”

“Maybe things are strained at home? Let’s see if there’s anyone else.”

They watched the rest of the tape and saw one more argument between Derrick Windermere and a man they didn’t know, a man who, strangely, at the end of the tape was the same man they saw borrow Joel Jaimeson’s phone. Cam didn’t know who he was, but his hat was nautical, which reminded her of another detail.

“The boat!”

Rob looked at her like she’d grown a second head.

“When I was thinking on my feet, wandering around Mike’s place, there was a picture of Mike, Elle, and what’s-his-face—the cop who’s their brother. It was in front of a boat.”

“And a boat . . . this time of year might be very private,” Rob said.

Cam grinned. “We can hope.”

Cam plugged in the cable between her phone and computer and transferred the picture over so they could enlarge it. It was too bad it hadn’t been taken with one of Annie’s good cameras—the enlarged picture was grainy, but Rob had some photo manipulation skills. Reporters occasionally had to work with what they had rather than what they wanted, so he knew how to select smaller pieces of the picture and sharpen them into focus.

The sailboat was white, as were ninety-nine percent of all sailboats, but it had royal blue piping in a double line up the sides, and the rim around the top was the same blue. Most telling, though, was the name written in a nice cursive on the side.
Coraline.

“Are you sure that shouldn’t be
Caroline
?” Rob asked when Cam said it.

“I don’t think so; look at the ‘a’s. But I’ve heard the name.”

“Probably not that common on boats,” Rob grinned.

“No. Especially when we have a pretty good idea who might own it. What we need to figure out is where they moor it.”

“This would be a lot faster if we brought Jake on board. He has access to more search routes than we do.”

“Try yours first. Then we will bring him in. I’d just rather not have this battle until we have something bigger to dangle as success.”

“He said he wanted our help,” Rob argued.

“Do you really think that includes going inside Sully’s apartment?”

Rob grinned again. “Probably not. Why do you follow her impulses?”

“Can you resist her ideas, hotshot?”

“I guess not.”

“Right. Add a twenty-year friendship on top of that.”

He shook his head, but Cam knew he understood the truth of it. Annie was a force of nature when she wanted to do something.

Rob fiddled on the computer for a while and started throwing out factual nuggets. Apparently, the Sullivan-Chamberlain family were boating enthusiasts with a few different boats, and nothing unofficial noted which one was kept where.

“If they have a couple of boats, shouldn’t we check them all?” Cam asked.

“We should check the ones registered to Mike and Elle.”

“Elle has a boat?”

“She does. Registered to her maiden name, with no connection at all to her husband.”

“Well, that’s curious,” Cam said. “I guess maybe she’s a ‘mine and ours’ girl. I know she’d pitch a fit if Senator Schulz had something
she
didn’t know about.”

“We don’t know he doesn’t know about it.”

“Oh, stop being all technical. I want to be mad at her.”

Rob ignored her. “From what I could tell, they lease slots in Newport News, Virginia Beach, and Baltimore.”

“Baltimore?”

“I really doubt that’s quite as sleepy, even this time of year, so we’ll put that last on our list.”

“Geez. Both of the others are more than four hours away.”

“Which is probably why Sully flew. Good thing tomorrow’s Friday, I guess. If we have weekend plans, I need to figure out how to cover Saturday’s football games. Then we’ll get a good night’s sleep and go.”

Cam looked at her watch. It was past midnight, so she wasn’t sure what he meant by “good night’s sleep,” but she agreed. It seemed like something they couldn’t pass up.

“And what about Jake?” she asked.

“He should come, too. If they do have Annie’s dad, we’ll need a real cop.”

• • •

• • •

T
hey could have just taken one car to Newport News, but when they looked at the distance and the possibility there would be some hustling to do, they decided two was wiser. It was a bit of a wonder that Cam and Annie each convinced their partners she should drive, but there was no way Cam was riding that far in Rob’s uncomfortable Jeep. She thought Jake had given in to Annie on a gas mileage argument.

They finally got on the road just before two. They couldn’t leave earlier because Jake had to scramble a bit to come up with something to do that was legitimate work. He figured he could pretend it was the murder he was looking at, rather than the kidnapping, for about two hours of his shift.

• • •

• • •

N
ewport News was on a peninsula, so there were a dozen marinas, but Rob, using a smartphone mapping device, found the one they were looking for while Cam drove, rain pelting the car. When he showed her how private the marina was, she understood why the Sullivan family had chosen it.

It was dark when they reached Newport News, and the rain hadn’t let up. They were eager to get on with their investigation, but felt it might be wiser to get hotel rooms and have dinner, then get an early start the next morning. Cam could see the charm of Newport News, though with everyone’s nerves so frayed, the evening wasn’t the great time it might have been under other circumstances.

• • •

• • •

I
n the morning, they found the smaller sub-peninsula, though Cam doubted that was the technical term. It was surrounded by park preserves and a handful of marinas that looked a lot more private than those on the other side of the peninsula. Most of the other marinas looked either high-end or else very public. The cluster in the park looked like it would draw privacy seekers.

Finding the boat was another matter. There was a man in a little shop at the entry to the marina who came out to watch them pass, flagging the cars to stop. He clearly kept an eye on things. They parked across the street at a small lot to discuss their options.

“Wonder if he’s always there,” Cam said.

“I don’t know. This doesn’t look like a high-end place necessarily, but you’d think the risk at night of somebody doing something sneaky would be worse, so I bet he is,” Rob said.

“He doesn’t look above bribery,” Annie said.

“You think we should bribe him?” Cam asked.

“No. I think if Sully wanted him away for an hour, he would make himself scarce. He could figure what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. Especially as Sully keeps a boat here.”

“I thought it was Elle who kept her boat here,” Cam said.

“Does it matter? Legitimate person gives someone some cash to take a break. Did he look above that?”

Cam had to admit he didn’t. “So what do we do?”

“You two,” Jake said, pointing at Cam and Rob, “go in and ask if he’s got any rentals. Keep him occupied for a long time, and Annie and I will walk back there. Then you two come out and get in separate cars and drive a little ways down the road, find parking spots, and head back on foot to meet us, but stay in the trees.”

“You’ve been taking your Annie lessons, haven’t you?” Cam said.

“I’m a trained cop,” Jake argued.

“Who just came up with a brilliantly sneaky, non-cop plan,” Rob said. “Busted.”

Annie grinned proudly.

“So we’re in,” Rob said. “Annie, gimme your keys.”

Her grin disappeared but she cooperated. Cam took Rob’s hand and they headed for the shack while Annie and Jake waited until they’d rounded the front of the little building.

The inside of the shack didn’t have much to it, thankfully, including an absence of windows overlooking the direction they’d parked. Cam let Rob do the talking, since she was a bad liar. She could spin the heck out of something, but to do that, there had to be a seed of truth. While Rob didn’t lie a lot, either, he was a reporter who’d had some experience in telling stories to get the cooperation of a source, though admittedly it wasn’t much practice, given that sports reporting rarely called for deep-cover investigation.

“Hey there. We’re here for the weekend and wanted to rent a boat. We wondered if anyone around here . . .” Rob said.

“Mister, this is a private marina. There isn’t anyone here who does that unless you find it through an advertisement, and then the owner lets me know.”

“So you don’t have a listing of anyone willing?”

“I don’t have the time to act like a rental clerk. People just check in with me to pick up keys if they do it.”

“And you don’t have any keys?” Cam asked.

She knew how it would sound. It would give him the idea they were joy riders wanting to make a deal.

“No! This isn’t really the season for it.”

Cam leaned in and tried to give him a flirty smile. “Don’t you have any names we could call or something? Just to see?”

“Miss, the ocean is choppy, storms all the time. I assure you, you don’t want to go out there right now.”

Rob rubbed Cam’s back as if she were actually getting upset. “Listen, man. My girl really had her heart set on a boat ride.”

“Well, you’ll have to go around the peninsula and see if the public places have anything. Because I don’t.”

Cam crossed her arms and pouted, but Rob put his arm around her and led her back out.

“Nicely played,” he whispered as they crossed the lot to the two cars.

Cam led Rob up the road and found a parking lot for hiking trails through the preserve. They were supposed to have gotten a sticker, but she wondered how widely patrolled it was this time of year. Whatever the case, they didn’t have time to deal with that. She just hoped they wouldn’t get caught. They hurried back up the road on foot and then used the cover of trees to pass the man’s little shack so they could track down Annie and Jake.

The lot looked fairly deserted. Cam figured November was indeed a bad season for sailing. Or maybe it was just that it was the weekend before Thanksgiving.

“Do you see them?” Cam asked.

“Not yet. I’m not sure if we should be obvious so they call us over or if they’ll figure out a way to flag us.”

“Well,
we
are closer to this guy’s line of vision, aren’t we?”

Rob frowned and looked around. “Depends how far out they are. That shack had a seaside window, so if they aren’t right near shore, he can see their part of the dock. In fact maybe we should have distracted him longer.”

“It’s done now. I guess we walk the shoreline in his blind spot.”

“Good thinking.” Rob draped his arm over her and they walked.

Cam thought it would have actually been sort of a romantic place, had they wound up here under different circumstances. It didn’t take long before they saw Annie frantically waving her arms. Jake was down the dock talking on his cell phone.

“Uh-oh,” Cam said before she grabbed Rob’s hand and hurried toward Annie.

• • •