Part 8 (1/2)
Bob got up. ”All right, I think that's it for now,” he said. ”Roger, you'll say all this again for the record, right?”
Which made Jake wonder again, as the unhappy barkeeper nodded in reply: Roger was upset. But he wasn't stupid. So- ”Why, Roger? Why tell us all this now, and ...”
He understood. ”Incriminate myself? Not that it will.” He turned sneeringly to Chip, then faced her again. ”Please, that's the least of my problems.”
A bitter chuckle escaped him. ”I know Randy's alive, and what he's done. I'm the only one who has known, until now. So if anyone chases after him, he'll know who talked, won't he?”
His shoulders sagged. ”So put me in jail, please. Maybe in there I'll be safe. Knowing Randy, though, knowing what I know about him now,” he added bleakly, ”I'm betting not.” He put his face in his hands.
Chip gazed impa.s.sively at him. ”Okay, Roger,” he said. ”Okay, thanks.”
Chip walked out.
JAKE CAUGHT UP WITH HIM OUTSIDE. ”YOU'D BETTER COME on up to the house with me. There's no sense your sitting around alone in a motel.”
No sense telling him the real reason behind her invitation, either. Because maybe he was a nice guy, as he had been when he'd befriended Sam, years ago. But maybe not, and his performance just now had convinced her she'd better keep an eye on him.
Chip looked balky, but he followed her to the car and got in. ”What next?” he asked.
”Call my husband.” She gripped the wheel; no question about it, she needed Wade's calm confidence.
”It might take me a while to reach him where he is, though. Meanwhile, I'll have to”-What? She had no idea-”figure out what else to do, and do it,” she finished.
She backed the car out. ”What difference does it make how big the money package was?”
Chip glanced sideways at her. ”Because Roger Dodd's a liar. That sob story he's giving us is an act. On top of which, if you'd ever handled a million bucks-”
She had, actually. Back in the city her duties had included some interesting tasks for people who believed cash should travel incognito. But she'd never measured it with a ruler.
”Not that I've ever seen that much in one place,” Chip went on, ”but Carolyn was writing about a ransom demand once, so I actually had to find out how high a million dollars in hundred-dollar bills is. Roger's measurements were right.”
She did the math in her head, another holdover from her old money-manager days. Chip must have a bit of a head for numbers, too, she realized, to recall such a thing. ”Yup,” she confirmed. ”And that's not the kind of trivia he'd be likely to have just hanging around in his memory, is it? So he could be telling the truth about the money part.”
”Maybe. How did he get his hands on so much cash, though?” Chip wondered aloud. ”Because I don't care how rich you are, you can't just walk into your local bank branch and ...”
This part she knew for sure. ”He didn't. An estate like the Langs' has someone handling it, a personal banker. So a wealthy client doesn't have to stand in line with the riffraff.”
It was cold in the car. She turned the heat on even though they weren't going far.
”All Roger had to do was make a call, say what he wanted and how he wanted it, and go pick it up or have it messengered. The banker might've had thoughts about how wise it was, and counseled Roger about it.”
And good luck getting anywhere with that, she thought, rich and brilliant not being exactly synonymous, in her experience. ”Also, there are reporting rules about withdrawing so much cash.”
”To thwart drug dealers and terrorists, right?” Chip asked interestedly.
In the old days, he'd been interested in everything, too: surgical tools Sam's father had brought home, medical-text cross-sections of the human brain, baseball statistics.
Especially New York baseball statistics. She felt a burst of reminiscent affection for Chip.
”Uh-huh,” she replied. ”Bottom line, though, it's Roger's money. If the Lang trust's provision was that it be dissolved when the last family member died, and the proceeds delivered to a beneficiary, that's what happened.”
It wasn't rare for a large family trust to provide for its own end. There were a few paperwork hoops, not particularly onerous if no one involved was fighting about anything, and once they'd been jumped through, it would all be fairly routine.
Roger would have had no real problem getting the cash, if he was insistent enough.
”What made Carolyn Rathbone believe Randy Dodd might not be dead in the first place?” she asked.
She turned onto Key Street, past the old red-brick Peavey Library with the arched leaded-gla.s.s windows and the antique cannon mounted out front, then continued uphill between rows of small white clapboard houses built close to the sidewalk, their hydrangeas and trellised clematis vines brown and dormant for the winter. Identical gray wisps curled from their chimneys, scenting the cold air with wood smoke.
”Before he ever started sending you any e-mails, I mean,” she said. ”And even afterwards ...”
”Why believe it was really him?” Chip nodded agreement with this question. ”You're right, it could've been a crank. Online, anyone can say they're anyone, can't they? I mean, it's the whole principle of the chat room.”
They pa.s.sed the old Smith mansion, a three-story, mansard-roofed monstrosity with rotting trim, a sagging roofline, and more holes than stones in its foundation.
No smoke there-the chimney had collapsed into the yard long ago. Last year's shriveled Christmas wreath hung from a doornail.
”But the idea was originally Carolyn's,” Chip explained. ”She said until proven otherwise, a lot of money and a missing body meant murder, no matter how much it might look like something else on the surface.”
”I see.” Someone had slapped sheets of cheap white vinyl siding onto the rot-raddled expanse of the Smith mansion's facade, apparently in an effort to make the whole place look less like a tearerdowner.
The attempt hadn't worked. ”But how'd she even know-”
”-that much?” Chip turned from the window. ”She subscribed to an electronic clipping service. She got news stories about all kinds of crimes from all over the world, and I screened them for her.”
Which explained how a writer of true-crime bestsellers had cottoned on to events in a place so remote that it might as well have been on the moon, especially now in early winter. Overhead the clouds thickened again; a spatter of rain hit the winds.h.i.+eld and froze there in s.h.i.+ning globs.
”Once her last book was finally done, she started reading the clippings I'd picked out for her,” he went on. ”She chose the Dodd story, and I started doing research about it.”
”But-” she began. Surely the pair of them hadn't come all the way to Eastport just on a hunch?
”And what I found,” he continued, ”was one tiny detail that didn't make sense: a motor vehicle department record of a moving violation in South Carolina, issued to a driver by the name of Randy Dodd.”
She glanced at him. ”A speeding ticket? You can do that? I didn't know that you could just look up somebody's ...”
Driving record. ”You can't. But I can.” He sighed heavily. ”See, I've been a computer research geek for a long time.”
Back in the city, pretty much the only other thing the then teenaged Chip Hahn had done besides hang out with Sam was spend time on the early online bulletin boards. Still ...
”Trust me, if you know who to ask and they think you might be able to help them in return sometime, you can get just about anything from the people who run databases,” said Chip.
She thought about this. ”It could have been some other-”
”Somebody else with the same name?” He seized the objection happily. Then-”But not with the same driver's license number”-he demolished it.
”But that means-” She was still trying to wrap her mind around the idea that Chip could get this stuff at all.
”Yup. I think Randy had his act together,” Chip said. ”He must have done a lot of planning. But then he made a mistake.”
She looked questioningly at him.