“It was an accident, Mrs. Strong.” Detective Shafer walks back to me. “The hydraulic trolley car lift collapsed. That’s the preliminary finding. They are going to examine it back at the lab to be sure.” I had already told him and Barney Williams the story twice about how I interviewed Brian earlier and came back to the garage after he didn’t answer his phone. I noticed something different between my two visits and decided to hold that back from the police until they gave me their version.
We are standing outside of the garage bay, having been there since they taped off the scene. Ken and I shiver together arm in arm as our summer clothes are not warm enough in the darkness. A cool breeze kicks up.
I’m not buying that this was an accident. “Don’t you think it’s strange, detective, that the owners of this body shop die within a week of each other?”
“You said it yourself, Mrs. Strong. Yelito was mad Dawson killed himself and left him with all this work to do. Maybe he was exhausted and got careless. He should have been using floor mounts to suspend the rear end as a back-up.”
“Or maybe it’s something else,” my daughter pipes up from behind me.
Shafer gives her a puzzled look.
“Detective Shafer, say hello to my daughter, Erin LeGrande.” Erin hands Ken and me each a heavy pullover sweater. I didn’t even ask her to bring them. Next, she hands us both a couple of large Dunkin’ Donut coffees. I love this girl.
He smirks. “The Erin LeGrande whose FOI request caused me to have to reopen the Dawson death?”
“Yes,” she says, “and how is that coming along, Detective Shafer?”
“It’s an open investigation,” he says dryly. “No comment.”
“Two deaths in less than a week, best friends under suspicious circumstances,” I say.
“Both deaths are unwitnessed. What are the odds of that?” Erin adds.
The detective seems unaccustomed to being questioned by civilians and is not a happy camper. I spot Barney Williams staying clear of us. I have questions for Barney and remind myself to catch him at the right time.
“Maybe I should just let you two amateurs run the show,” he says.
“Notice how he didn’t answer your question, Erin. Aren’t you glad, Detective Shafer, that I called the State Police barracks on a recorded line asking specifically for you, saying that this death is connected to the Dawson case you are working?”
I notice Ken start to drift away, but only to shake his coffee and not spill it on himself. He is still close enough to hear the conversation.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Shafer says as he stares at me. I may have poked the sharply dressed plainclothes law enforcer a little too hard.
“It means that as much as Erin and I would love to figure this out, you were the first person I called.” I give him an equally hard stare. “I didn’t call for an ambulance or that guy over there.” I point to the oversized officer wearing an undersized uniform. “If this turns out to be an accident, so be it, but I made sure that nobody trampled all over your crime scene.”
He gulps as he realizes I am right. “Who would want him dead?”
“Who would want them dead?” I remind him.
“Okay, who would want them dead?”
I point to the Mustang. “Follow the money. If both deaths are not what they appear, who would have the motive to kill them?” I ask.
Ken had wanted to jack the Mustang up and extricate Brian from underneath, but I knew my former student was dead as soon as I squatted down and looked at his face and saw a gray death mask. His hand was cold to the touch. I pushed my helpful husband away from the jack and I told him it may contain fingerprints or DNA. Brian hadn’t answered his phone or checked for text messages because he had already been killed.
Erin and I had talked this out well before Williams, and then Shafer rolled up on the scene. After I called the barracks, I took photos in the fading sunlight of the scene while my daughter calmed me down and told me what to do and say until she could drop the kids off at her in-laws before meeting me here. We were ahead of the cops and had to think like steely-eyed professionals, lest we be treated the way we were when we had started looking into Jake’s death.
“Is that a rhetorical question?” Shafer asked, bringing me out of my thoughts.
“Maybe,” Erin replied.
“That depends on what you already know, detective,” I add. “If neither death is as it appears, then who would want them dead? If you reopened the first case to keep us from stepping into something you are working on, then you already have a pretty good idea on motive.”
Erin stands shoulder to shoulder with me and asks, “If you reopened the Dawson death just to thwart our efforts, then you are just finding out tonight that the deaths may be connected. Which is it?”
We get our answer when Shafer says to the crime scene technicians, “We are taking the Mustang too.” He walks over to Williams in a huff, and they confer briefly before going off in different directions. It appears the boys in blue have a little catching up to do.
Chinese takeout is a treat in the Strong household. Having one of my children over to the house mid-week is special. Staring at my shell-shocked husband, I am wondering what I got myself and Erin into. I cannot enjoy the shrimp with garlic sauce over brown rice before me. That’s not to say that I am not devouring my late-night dinner.
“Whaddya thinking, Mom?” Erin asks me.
“It’s more important that we ask how your father is doing,” I reply.
Ken stares at us from the head of the table. “I felt like I walked on to a movie set, but it was all too terribly real.”
“What else?” I work my chopsticks around the plate. I know I am putting my man on the spot, and I don’t want to stare at him.
“Then I watched my wife and daughter acting like a couple of hard-boiled gumshoes.”
I see Erin suppress a grin. “Which ones, Daddy?”
He rolls his eyes at her. “I mean it. There is a dead guy on the ground, and you two were talking to the detective like you would to one of your kids.”
“I would never talk to my kids like that,” she protests.
“It seems surreal to me too, honey,” I say. “Things got crazy for me in a big way. What was I thinking?”
He swirls the last of his eggroll into a puddle of duck sauce. “I felt like an innocent bystander to the whole thing and there was nothing I could do for you guys.”
“You stood by me and trusted me, even though I was way over my head. That’s what you did, Kenneth Strong.”
“Okay, why don’t you explain it to me then?” he says. “There were a lot of things not spoken between you two and the detective.”
“I didn’t think Jake’s death was as first claimed. Then I found out his business partner, Brian, was dealing with some unsavory characters and stood to gain from a million-dollar life insurance policy. Seeing Brian at the funeral and then talking to him today, though, I didn’t think he had anything to do with Jake’s death.”
“Not directly,” Erin pipes in.
“Yes, not directly. When I saw Brian dead on the floor of their garage. I realized that Jake’s death was murder and Brian’s death was made to look like an accident. That’s why I insisted that the detective looking at the one had to look at the other. I was forcing him to make the connection.”
“They didn’t treat Jake’s cabin like a crime scene,” Erin adds, “and Mom would not let that happen again.”
“What was all that talk about? A rhetorical question?” Ken asks. “That went right over my head.”
“Erin and I are troubled. When they stiff-armed us after we made our records request, we questioned whether they had something they were working on and wanted to keep us at arm’s length, or maybe they just didn’t want to get embarrassed by questions we would raise,” I tell him.
“And?”
Erin finishes my thoughts a little more bluntly. “And we find out tonight they had nothing and weren’t doing jack-squat.”
“We are forcing their hand to do something about both deaths now,” I add.
“Are you going to leave it up to them now that you have their attention?” Ken asks.
I look at Erin. She looks at her father, then back at me. “That’s a great question, Mommy. Are we going to leave it to Foghorn Leghorn and our good friend Detective Shafer?”
“I don’t know.”
“You said something about unsavory characters.” Ken knows how to push his bride’s buttons, too.
“Candace Dawson is the bookkeeper for Jake and Brian. She said they had a regular customer who bought wrecked Mustangs and paid for everything in cash. Everything. She went so far as to find out from the truck dealerships where they bought their brand-new trucks that they paid cash for the down payment and were paying the monthlies with a casino debit card.”
“You going to tell me who the unsavory characters are?”
There it was. Dare I say their names out loud to my husband? “Simon and Jason Stillman. They didn’t grow up here. They came when they were in high school.” I hold my breath.
Ken stiffens. “I know those two smartasses. Acting like bigshots. Think they can push people around acting all tough as they drive their shiny trucks around town.”
Both Erin and I look at each other. “And?” we ask at the same time.
“And none of the contractors can figure out what they are up to. They hire out-of-state contractors to come in work for them. Just like you say, they pay cash. Best we can tell, they act like preppers.”
“Preppies, like they went to prep school?” Erin asks.
“No, preppers, like those people who think that world is going to collapse any minute and they have to prepare for it. Survivalists.”
“Do you know where they live?” I ask.
“Why? Are you thinking of paying them a social call, Gwendolyn?”
I don’t get addressed as Gwendolyn very often by my husband. Usually, he has good reason. But sometimes I push his buttons, and I just pushed one. “No, I am curious. What makes you say that?”
“All that living ‘off the grid’ stuff their contractors order and pay cash for at the contractor’s registers. Generators, water filtration parts. Solar grids and converters. Hot house stuff.” He pauses. “Guns and ammo, too. You’d think they plan to hold out in the hills against the zombies. Those guys are either crazy or really dangerous.”
“Or both.” Erin says. I have a feeling it’s going to be a late night for her tapping away on the computer.
“Then why are they restoring Mustangs?” I ask. “You’d think they’d be working on old off-road vehicles with mechanical ignitions and starters.”
Both my husband and daughter look at me strangely.
“So, when the atmospheric electromagnetic pulse bomb knocks out all the computers, they can still drive around.”
Their looks don’t change.
“You think all I read on my Kindle are steamy romance novels?” I ask.
“Do you think the cops know about these guys?” Erin asks. I see her mind churning on this. She might ask for a favor from her part-time employer.
Ken shrugs. “Nothing illegal, I can tell. They act like they got a ton of money, and they flash it around.”
I know my daughter, and she is getting antsy to get home and research the Stillman twins. I take the cue. “Well, it’s late, and somebody has to get up in the morning and teach.”
“Let me know what you decide,” she says.
“I’ll walk you out, honey. I won’t be long, Ken. I’m exhausted.”
Once outside, she says, “I’ll let you know what I find on them.” She hugs me tightly. Our investigation is less than a week old, and it has gotten a lot scarier.
“One other thing I didn’t mention to Shafer or your father,” I say. I glance back at the house to be sure my beloved is out of earshot. “I noticed the gas tank that Brian wanted to return was nowhere to be found.”