Chapter 20

CHAPTER 20

T HE NEXT MORNING DEVINE PACKED his duffel. He had two pistols and extra mags and wondered if he could rent an RPG launcher around here somewhere for his pilgrimage to Ricketts.

As he was driving out of Seattle in the Toyota 4Runner and heading east, Emerson Campbell phoned him.

“We’re still digging up background on the Odoms and Perry Rollins. It’ll be emailed to you when complete.”

“What can you tell me now?”

“Dwayne Odom kicked around the Pacific Northwest after high school. Then, in his mid-twenties, he headed east for a fresh start. Sometime after that, he met Alice in her hometown in Ohio. They got married and later had their daughter. Years after that, they moved back to the Seattle area. And Danny Glass was also far older than his sister. She might have been an unplanned pregnancy.”

“I understand Glass was close to Alice?”

“Yes, and he protected Alice from her father. From what we found out the man apparently was not very nurturing. A real sadist, in fact.”

“But what happened when Glass joined the Army and could no longer protect her? Alice would have still been a minor living at home.”

“From what we could learn, it was rough for her, although her mother apparently did what she could to shield her daughter from him. And one of the people we talked to who knew the Glasses well said that when Alice finished high school, some family friends got her a job and helped her rent a little house with a roommate across town. She didn’t see her father much after that.”

“Glass said he saw Alice after she married Dwayne and he was back in town on leave. Betsy wasn’t born yet, so it was early on in the marriage. Dwayne was off trying to find work.”

“Well, he rarely held a job long, according to our investigation.”

“I talked to his friends out here and they said the same thing. The money to buy the house and car? Any leads on that?”

“We looked at the Odoms’ bank records for the time in question. They had no large deposits, cash or otherwise.”

“But that makes no sense. How did they buy the trailer home and a car?”

“The money for the home purchase and related expenses, and the car, was sent directly to the sellers from a source that we have not been able to track down.”

“Come on, how is that possible? There are laws and regs so as to prevent just that sort of money laundering. Or people gifting money above the annual limit without paying the requisite tax. Otherwise, people can transfer their wealth to their kids or other third parties without any monies going to the Treasury Department, thereby completely circumventing the estate tax. And a six-figure transfer is way, way over the official cutoff for a bank’s fraud department to raise the red flag.”

Campbell chuckled. “Almost forgot you have your MBA and worked on Wall Street. To answer your question, the laws, apparently, failed in this case. Now your turn. Report.”

Devine filled him in on everything he had learned since their last talk.

“This is so muddled, Devine,” noted Campbell. “We don’t really even know what killed the Odoms. And the girl says the police are lying.”

“And keep in mind that Nate Shore and Korey Rose back her up on that.”

“So the cops out in Ricketts are being paid off? Again, the obvious suspect is—”

“—Danny Glass. He had no way of getting custody of his niece while her parents were alive.”

“But why does he want custody? That’s the million-dollar question.”

“He strikes me as a control freak, but he couldn’t control his sister. She married Dwayne, apparently behind his back, and started her family and then moved away. So maybe he wants to take charge of his niece.”

“Does a guy murder two people over that, Devine? Even someone like Glass?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“And what would Perry Rollins know about any of this?”

“Same answer,” said Devine.

“So what do you expect to learn in Ricketts?”

“Chiefly, why the Odoms were there in the first place and who they met with. And what was in the duffel bag. If it wasn’t drugs that killed them, then it seems that the Odoms might have been poisoned somehow. I can’t think of anything else to account for what happened to them other than exposure to something like that.”

“But how could it have been administered and no one see anything?”

“I don’t think anyone was asked. It was put down right away as a drug overdose.”

“Even though the girl contradicts that?” asked Campbell.

“Something tells me that her word against the police won’t cut it. And like I said, there was no criminal investigation, as far as I know. So I doubt they even asked her anything or took her statement.”

“Watch yourself out there. Sounds like hostile territory.”

“Will do. Anything on your wayward former PA, Dawn Schuman?”

“Nothing. Any sign of the girl on the train out there?”

“No.”

“Good.”

Devine clicked off and kept driving. It was around six hours to the town of Ricketts, and he soon left all vestiges of urban life behind. He might as well have been on another planet, albeit one with beautiful views. He was actually relaxed.

That lasted until he entered the town of Ricketts, when a police cruiser pulled in behind him.