J.D. LEFT THE Glenview Country Club on a road that wound between fairways, crossed the iconic stone bridge over Country Brook, and turned south on Buena Vista Boulevard. She called Matt.
“I hope you didn’t go back to bed,” she said when he picked up the phone.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “I jogged on the beach, had lunch at the Longbeach Café, and am now at Mar Vista with Cracker, Jock, and a cold one.”
“The life of a beach bum. And here I am working for no pay.” She told him about her lunch with Ruth Bergstrom. “She’s not a happy person. She needs money and wants to have a lot of it. I can see that as a motive to steal Aunt Esther’s manuscript. If she expected money from Olivia and didn’t get it, I would say she had a motive.”
“But she said she drove a neighbor to the Orlando airport and didn’t get back until after Olivia was killed.”
“She could have been lying. I’d like to talk to the neighbor, but I was afraid to ask Ruth for a name. I didn’t want her to think I was zeroing in on her as a suspect. I thought I’d ask around, see if anybody might know of someone who planned to travel. If that person was a member of the book club, one of the members would know who left town. Was Jock able to find out anything about the hackers?”
Matt had told her about Sheriff Black’s problem with her computers and that he’d asked Jock to look into it. “Yes,” he said. “They were able to find the links back to the hacker. They don’t have a name, of course, but the hack was initiated from an Army intelligence unit in Afghanistan about two months ago.”
“Josh Hanna?” J.D. asked.
“Most likely. Whoever the hacker was, he was in the same unit Josh was and at the same time.”
“Had to be Josh.”
“Exactly. Now we’ve got to find him. He owns a white van, he’s probably the hacker, and he’s supposedly in Florida.”
“How would he have gotten Esther’s gun?” J.D. asked. “It’s pretty clear that her gun was the murder weapon.”
“We’ll have to work on that. I’m certainly not willing at this point to cross Kelly and Ruth off our list of possibilities. I’m also still interested in Sally Steerman. Who is she and how is she involved?”
“I checked the property appraiser’s records for Sumter, Lake, and Marion Counties yesterday while you were out on the dock with your boat. There’s no property in any of the three counties that make up The Villages listed as owned by Sally Steerman, or any other person named Steerman. Nothing in the phone listings, either. I even went into the Department of Motor Vehicles database, which I’m not supposed to do except for legitimate police business. No driver’s license listing for anybody named Steerman in the three counties, and no Sally Steerman in the entire state.”
“I’ll have to make another run at those idiots who came after me,” Matt sad. “Something will turn up.”
“When are you coming back here?”
“Not sure. I’m wondering if this might be a good time for you to introduce yourself to the sheriff.”
“Might be. We probably need to see if we can get him to keep Chunk Steerman in the clink for a bit longer. At least until you decide to get up here and talk to him.”
“I know you can’t use the LBKPD to put out a Be On The Lookout for Hanna’s van, but maybe you could talk the sheriff into helping with that.”
“Let me see how the meeting goes. If he’s not willing to help, I’ll talk to Chief Lester. Maybe he can come up with a reason to put out a BOLO even if it doesn’t have anything to do with one of his cases.”
“Can you meet with the sheriff this afternoon?”
“I’ll try,” she said.
J.D. called and identified herself as a detective with the LBKPD and asked for an appointment with the sheriff as soon as possible. She was told that the sheriff could see her that afternoon if she could get there by three thirty.