Maxi sat at the bakery’s kitchen table as Kate pummeled a shiny ball of dough. Oliver was curled up snoozing at the florist’s feet. The sun was sinking fast over the Gulf.
“OK, just whose face are you seeing when you punch the daylights out of that poor, helpless blob of dough? Stewart Lord or the floozy real estate chica?”
“If it was true, if there really was a sinkhole, why would Lord be trying to buy downtown? I mean, what can you do with land once it has a sinkhole?”
“Nada, nothing. The whole area would become unusable. You couldn’t even park cars on it. It would be a money pit for real.”
“But Lord was trying to buy parcels.”
“At super low prices,” Maxi interjected.
Kate nodded, slamming a fist into the dough. “And he was telling owners their property was going to drop in value.”
“While he was telling his buddies about the sinkhole,” Maxi finished. “And who were his buddies? I can’t imagine anyone wanting to be friends with that jerk.”
“I asked Manny the same thing. Apparently, a lot of the people from the consortium were from his club—the Emerald Coast Golf and Country Club. From what Manny says, it’s gorgeous. On the mainland, right on the water. And it’s a hotbed of up-and-comers. Doctors, dentists, chiropractors. People who have a good bit of extra money to invest.”
“And our friend Lord just happens to have a place to invest it,” Maxi said.
“And a decent track record with property,” Kate said. She paused, turning the new information in her mind, like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. “OK, why do you make a fire?” she said suddenly.
“Ay, is this one of Javie’s riddles?”
“Close. An old joke in restaurant circles. Man runs a restaurant for years, and the place just keeps losing money. Right before he goes bankrupt, it burns down. And he puts in for the insurance. But he’s a lousy arsonist, and he gets caught. So the arson inspector asks him, ‘Why did you do it—why did you set the place on fire?’ And the guy says, ‘I had to make a fire ’cause I can’t make a flood.”
“I don’t get it.”
Kate grinned. “A little gallows humor from an industry where you work all hours and never know if you’re going to have a job next week. I think Lord was making a sinkhole—or the rumor of a sinkhole—because it was going to get him what he wanted.”
“Downtown Coral Cay!” Maxi exclaimed.
“Exactly.”
“He was using the sinkhole to sink the property values,” the florist breathed.
“All he had to do was start the rumor and make sure it caught fire. Not only would all the downtowners be trying to sell, but he’d get their land for cheap.”
“But he wanted to build,” Maxi said.
“After he’s collected the land, he commissions another report. This one reveals that the first report was wrong. The land is solid. And he owns all of it. Heck, he doesn’t even have to share it with his consortium buddies. I’m guessing they were just a convenient front—an excuse for him to spread the phony information.”
“If any of them suspected he was cutting them out of the Coral Cay deal, they could have killed him,” Maxi said.
Kate nodded. “And that crowd of doctors and dentists at his country club would have no problem getting their hands on the drug that killed him and Muriel Hopkins.”