Chapter Twenty-Five

When we were back at the sheriff’s office, Darrell and I searched Ajax’s desk.

The contents were what you’d expect. Underneath the files of active cases in his drawer, he had copies of Penthouse and Hustler, many with dog-eared pages so he could find the photos he liked the most. He kept a flask-sized bottle of vodka, plus a carton of cigarettes, a tin of breath mints, and a strip of condoms. We found a pocket calendar, but most of the entries were blank, so we weren’t able to determine if he’d planned to meet someone while Ruby was gone for the weekend. There was also nothing in the calendar to tell us if he’d been seeing a woman other than his wife.

As we went through the desk, Jerry stopped by. The sheriff looked devastated by the murder of his nephew, and maybe that was why he raised no objections when Darrell said he wanted to deputize me to help on the case. Darrell pointed out that we were short-handed without Ajax and that I’d worked with him on the previous Ursulina murder. I expected an argument, but Jerry simply nodded his approval with barely a glance at me. We all knew it would be a short-term assignment anyway, given how far along I was.

After Jerry left, Darrell finally raised a topic that we’d avoided between us for months. Given that the Ursulina was back, we couldn’t dodge it any longer. “I know you wanted me to push back with Jerry about closing the Brink case,” he told me. “You didn’t agree with him blaming Jay.”

“I never said that.”

“No, but you don’t think Jay killed him,” Darrell said.

“You didn’t think so, either. But Jay confessed, so I get it.”

“It was better for Will,” Darrell admitted with a sigh. “Jay was dead, but Will still has to live in this town.”

“I know. You’re right.”

“Except here we are with another body.”

“Yes. Here we are.”

“You’re right, you know,” Darrell went on. “I never thought Jay murdered his father. I was pretty sure that the same person did all three. Brink, Kip, Racer. If Will’s right about Brink being in town years ago, that makes it even more plausible that we’re only looking at one killer. There must be a connection that we’ve missed.”

He shut the drawer of the desk and shook his head. “There’s nothing here. Let’s go through the personal papers I brought back from his house.”

We went into the office conference room, where Darrell had stashed the box that contained the contents of the rolltop desk from Ajax’s rec room. He pulled out stacks of papers and spread them neatly across the table. There was a lot to review. Tax returns. Bank statements. Receipts. Credit card bills. I took one side of the table, and Darrell took the other, and we began to sift through the piles in silence.

It felt odd, going through Ajax’s records, as if I were digging into the private details of his life without his permission. I’d seen him on Friday morning here in the office, and he still felt alive to me. He should have walked into the conference room, sat down with his cocky smile, and asked us what the hell we were doing. Instead, he was gone. I’d stared at his body, defiled in a truly horrific way. It seemed impossible. I couldn’t say I was going to miss him, but I didn’t understand why he was dead.

Or who could have killed him.

“Is there anything in the credit card bills?” Darrell asked.

“Ruby’s right about the jewelry store. Ajax spent almost a thousand dollars there last month. If it wasn’t for her, then who?”

Darrell whistled. “A thousand bucks? That’s a lot of money.”

I flipped through more of his statements. “He liked his toys, too. He made a lot of purchases from sports and auto-part shops.”

“Did he have any outstanding balance on the credit card?”

“No, he paid it off each month. In most months that ran to a few hundred bucks.”

Darrell grabbed for the stack of bank records. “Where was Ajax getting that kind of cash?”

He took the most recent account statements and passed the others to me. We paged through them, and I flipped through all the canceled checks that came with each statement.

“His checking and saving balances aren’t high,” Darrell said. “His salary wasn’t paying for most of the toys, that’s for sure.”

“Could Jerry have been helping him out?” I asked.

“Jerry doesn’t make that kind of money, either.”

“Hang on,” I said.

“What?”

“There are no checks made out to the credit card company.”

“What do you mean?” Darrell asked.

“He’s writing checks to places around town, but I don’t see anything made out to Visa. So how’s he paying off those balances?”

Darrell examined the papers spread across the conference table again. Then he frowned and reached for a new stack of bank statements. “He has another account.”

“What?”

“Look at these records. He has a separate checking account at a bank in the next county. Not joint, like the accounts here in town with Ruby. This one is just in his name.” Darrell went through the pages quickly. “The Visa checks came from that bank. Up until late last year, he was depositing five hundred dollars into that account every month.”

“Every month? From where? A second job?”

Darrell shook his head. “He couldn’t possibly have had another job without me knowing about it. There’s no info on where the money came from. He was simply cashing checks every month.”

“From who?”

“That’s the question.” Darrell ran through the bank statements again. “The last deposit was made in December of last year. After that, nothing. He’s been working down the balance since then, but he’s still got a few thousand dollars built up in the account. He must have been getting those payments for a while.”

“December? That’s when they stopped?”

“Right.”

“That’s the month Brink was killed,” I said.

*

Later, Darrell and I drove back to the house that Gordon Brink had rented.

I didn’t like the feeling of déjà vu or the ugly memories in this place. But in the time since I’d been here, the law firm had made a clean sweep. The retired mine president had decided to stay in Florida permanently, and the house had been repainted and refurnished from top to bottom. There was almost nothing left to remind me that Brink and his wife and son had ever lived here.

The partner who’d taken over the lawsuit, JoAnne Svitak, was exactly as Norm had advertised her. She had an edge that could make you bleed. Her face looked molded into a wax shell of overly white makeup, and the only thing that moved was her eyes, which were blue and severe. Her hair was brown and flowed around her head like an ocean wave caught in an ice storm. She was probably in her midforties. We’d looked her up in a legal directory at the courthouse, and we’d learned that she was the only female partner at Gordon Brink’s Milwaukee law firm. I had no doubt that she’d followed a tough road to get there.

When we sat down, she made it clear that she didn’t have much time for us. Her clipped answers rushed the interview along.

“Do you know a sheriff’s deputy here in town named Arthur Jackson?” Darrell asked her.

“No, I don’t.”

“He went by the nickname Ajax.”

“I still don’t know him.”

“He was murdered over the weekend.”

The news of a homicide elicited no reaction at all. She simply tapped a pencil on the desk and waited silently for Darrell to continue.

“The nature of the murder was very similar to the murder of Gordon Brink, your predecessor,” he went on.

“How similar?”

“Almost identical. The same wounds. The same message left on the wall.”

“Didn’t your department conclude that Brink was murdered by his son?” she asked us.

“That was the sheriff’s conclusion, yes, but—”

“So what does this crime have to do with me or my firm?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Darrell said.

I leaned forward in my chair, which wasn’t an easy thing to do. “Ajax’s wife, Ruby, is a key witness for the mine in the litigation. It’s hard to believe you don’t know who Ajax is.”

Her eyes had the patient cruelty of a snake. “Anything and anyone related to the mine or this litigation is privileged.”

“Your opposing counsel, Norm Foltz, believes the mine covered up an incident of harassment involving Ruby,” Darrell went on. “It’s unlikely they could have done that without Ajax knowing about it.”

“Again, anything related to the mine or this litigation is privileged,” she said.

“Even if it involves murder?”

“Murder is your concern, not mine.”

“I would think you’d be nervous, given that someone killed the previous lawyer working on the case.”

“I’m not, but thank you for your concern.”

Darrell and I exchanged a glance. We were both thinking we should have brought along an ice pick to chip through her frozen exterior.

“Do you know if Gordon Brink had any kind of relationship with Ajax?” Darrell asked.

“I’m unaware of who this man is or was. Obviously, I have no idea whether Gordon knew him.”

“Ajax was receiving monthly payments of five hundred dollars from an unidentified source. Those payments stopped the same month that Mr. Brink was killed. Was your firm making payments to Ajax? Or was Mr. Brink?”

“I have no idea.”

“Can you find out?”

“I have no access to Mr. Brink’s personal finances, and anything related to payments made by the firm would be privileged.”

“How long did Mr. Brink represent the mine?” Darrell asked.

“Anything about our client relationship is privileged.”

“Even how long you’ve represented them?”

“That’s right.”

“We have reason to believe Mr. Brink visited Black Wolf County prior to his arrival last fall,” Darrell went on. “Is that true?”

“I can’t say.”

“Because you don’t know, or because you won’t tell us?”

“I can’t say.”

“Was he here in connection with your representation of the mine?”

“Anything about our client relationship is privileged. I believe I’ve made that very clear.”

Across the table, Darrell shook his head in frustration. “Well, you’ve been a big help, Ms. Svitak.”

“It’s not my job to help you, Deputy.”

“Even if it means solving the murder of your colleague?” Darrell asked.

“Gordon is dead. That’s not going to change. Right now, my only concern is serving the interests of my client. Are we done?”

“Yes, we are. For now.”

“Then please show yourselves out.”

Darrell stood up from the table. So did I, with more difficulty. We both shook hands with the lawyer. Her grip was cool and limp. By the time we left the room, she’d already gone back to the paperwork in front of her, as if the time she’d spent with us was a nuisance that she’d already forgotten.

On our way out of the house, I had to pee again. Darrell headed outside, and I tried to locate a bathroom. As I checked the doors, I collided with Penny Ramsey, who was coming out of a room that had been set up as a law library. I hadn’t seen Penny since Ajax and I interviewed her the previous December, so I hadn’t even realized that she was still in Black Wolf County.

Seeing me, her eyes widened. Quickly, she glanced both ways down the hallway to make sure we were alone, and then she took hold of me by the elbows. “Oh my God! Is it true about Ajax? He’s dead?”

“Yes, he is.”

“What happened?”

“We don’t know yet.”

Penny covered her mouth with a trembling hand and backed away from me. “I can’t believe it.”

“Do you know something about his death?”

“No. Nothing!”

“It looks to me like you know something.”

I saw her eyes welling with tears, and her fingers nervously caressed the necklace she was wearing. Without saying more, she ran down the hallway, and I saw her disappear into one of the other rooms. The door slammed shut behind her.

I’d only had a moment to look at her, but she’d upgraded her wardrobe, her hair, and her makeup since we met. The Amy Irving innocence I’d first seen at the motel had been replaced by a more polished style. If I’d had to guess, she’d found a boyfriend who was buying her gifts.

Like the expensive gold-and-emerald necklace she’d been fondling.

I was pretty sure I knew who’d bought it for her.