Still rattled from the break-in and an hour later than she’d planned to be home, Cassie entered her house from the garage with a bucket of fried chicken, containers of coleslaw, and a bag of biscuits from KFC. Her mother, Isabel, looked up from where she was reading the Bozeman Daily Chronicle at the dining-room table. When she saw the large plastic bag of fast food she cringed.
“Don’t say it,” Cassie said. “I’m not in the mood.”
Isabel had long gray-white hair parted in the middle and she wore flowing caftans and sandals. She hadn’t applied makeup in forty years. The style she’d adopted so long ago had come back into fashion, especially in the new Bozeman.
Isabel lowered the paper. “Not only is the food you brought home processed, those chickens lived the cruelest lives possible at their factory farms. They’re trapped inside cages and force-fed until they’re taken away to get slaughtered. Many arrive at the slaughterhouse with broken bones from being picked up by their legs by workers and jammed into containers. Their little throats are cut by machines and they’re dipped into scalding water while they’re still conscious.”
“So you’ve told me, Isabel.”
“I think I’ll make myself a salad.”
“Please do.”
“I thought you were cooking tonight.”
“I’m late because someone broke into the office.”
That took a second to register. “What? Why?”
“I don’t know the answer to either question,” Cassie said. “Did you notice anyone suspicious hanging around the building when you left tonight?”
Isabel creased her brow and thought it over. “No.” Then: “Maybe it was that new intern.”
Cassie rolled her eyes. Her mother and the new hire had clashed almost immediately. It was amazing how quickly her mother could irritate people. But she was good on the phone as a receptionist and Cassie didn’t know what she would have done without her to be with Ben when Cassie was working late or out of town. Plus, Isabel was her mother. They were stuck together.
“I doubt that,” Cassie said in response. “We’re installing new locks and cameras tomorrow, that’s for sure.”
“Was anything taken? Did they take my plants?”
“Why would anyone want your plants, Mom? And no, I couldn’t determine if anything is missing. We’ll need to do a complete inventory tomorrow.”
“Do you think it was someone trying to find food or shelter?”
Cassie wasn’t surprised her mother went there so quickly. In Isabel’s worldview, 99 percent of the US population struggled from hunger, homelessness, poverty, racism, and the greed and humiliation of heartless megacorporations. If someone broke into Dewell Investigations it was probably because they had a good reason, in other words.
“I doubt the intruder was looking for food in our filing cabinets,” Cassie said.
“Oh dear.”
Ben entered the dining room from the hallway. “I thought I smelled fried chicken.” He grinned.
Ben had grown six inches taller in the last year and he was already a head taller than Cassie. He was a strapping boy with dark hair and an open face and he looked more and more like his father, US Army Sergeant Jim Dewell. Cassie’s husband and Ben’s father had been killed in combat in Afghanistan. Ben had his father’s facial expressions and loping gait and it gave Cassie a slight chill because Ben had never even met his dad.
Ben was a junior at Bozeman High School, where he wrestled, ran track, and worked as a sports reporter for the high school paper. He ran with a good crowd, Cassie thought, and she had no reason not to be proud of him. Her biggest fear over the years was that Ben would suffer from growing up in a household with no men in it to serve as a role model.
Cassie had had men in her life, but she never brought them home. She had vowed to herself never to do it until she was sure the man was, in fact, the one.
But Ben had turned out fine, she thought. Ben was gentle, empathetic, and thoughtful. Those were qualities he hadn’t inherited from his father, but Cassie never told him that. Ben wanted to think his dad was a hero in every regard, and she’d never hinted otherwise.
The three of them talked about the break-in while eating dinner.
“Do you need some help going through everything tomorrow?” Ben asked. “You know—trying to figure out if anything you were working on was compromised?”
“What about school?” Cassie said.
Ben shrugged. “Those teachers made me wear a mask for two years. I don’t owe them anything.”
“That’s a bad attitude,” Isabel interjected. “It was for your safety and for their own health.”
Isabel had reveled during the pandemic and Cassie suspected that she missed it: the masks, the social distancing, the judging of others.
Cassie winked sympathetically at Ben and said, “Are you sure you don’t have an ulterior motive for coming to the office?”
Meaning the new intern from Wyoming. The girl was older than Ben by five years and she was a recent graduate from a community college in her home state. She was a brash cowgirl and rough around the edges, but there was no doubt she was attractive: blond, green-eyed, outdoorsy. Cassie had been charmed by her when she gave the reason she’d applied for the paid internship as wanting to “get garbage off the street.” Her new intern reminded Cassie of herself at around the same age.
When Ben dropped by the office he was instantly smitten. Now, his face flushed red at Cassie’s question.
“Geeze, Mom,” he said.
“You can do better,” Isabel said to him in a huff. “Much better.”
“I’ll let you know if we need any help,” Cassie said.
After dinner, Ben went to his room to do homework and Isabel sat in front of the television watching MSNBC.
Cassie placed the “Sir Scott’s Treasure” file on the table and opened it. The very first item was an eight-by-ten digital photo taken of a poem scrawled onto a whiteboard at an old-school lounge and steak house called Sir Scott’s Oasis in Manhattan, Montana. Apparently, the “poet” had entered the closed establishment after hours through an unlocked rear door and left the poem. The perpetrator, according to restaurant staff, had erased the specials of the day and substituted the poem itself. It was written with a dry-erase marker and the handwriting was elegant.
Before diving in, Cassie grumbled and reached for a pair of readers and put them on. It was a concession to age she hated to admit, and she was constantly misplacing reading glasses and buying new ones. Readers within constant reach was just one more thing that complicated her life.
The poem read:
Sir Scott’s Treasure
In the twilight of my being
I’ve filled the chest with gold,
And placed it in a special place,
That fate and time foretold.
Begin where the rivers marry
And take the hidden trail,
It’s not obscure or buried,
Stay in the shadows and you will prevail.
From there you’ll have to summon strength
The walls are closing in;
Depending on the season,
You may have to wade or swim.
If you’ve been smart and found the burn,
Look west to spy the treasure,
Then pick it up and take it home,
And be wealthy beyond measure.
Many will ask why I won’t say more,
And why I hid my riches,
The answer is I’ve done my time on earth,
And taxmen are sons of bitches.
So listen hard and dream my dream,
And begin your quest with muscle,
If you are wise and full of grit
My fortune is your puzzle.
The Treasure case was easily one of the strangest assignments Cassie had ever taken on. It had begun a month and a half before when a call was placed to her office. Isabel fielded it and announced over the intercom: “The man wants to talk only to you. He has a very strange voice and he won’t give me his name.”
Cassie had frowned while she connected the call on her handset. She noted that the caller ID read UNKNOWN.
“Cassie Dewell,” she said. “Who is calling, please?”
He laughed and said, “If I told you that there would be no point in hiring you.” His voice was odd and tinny and she guessed he was using software that altered it.
“Excuse me?”
“Miss Dewell, I’ve been following your career from afar and I’ve done some discreet inquiries in Montana and North Dakota where you’ve been. My inquiries confirmed my thesis that you’re the best around.”
“Thank you for the compliment. What can I help you with?”
“I’d like to hire you in the hope that you don’t solve the case. In fact, I want you to fail.” Then he chuckled.
“What’s this all about?” Cassie had asked. “You’re wasting my time. I ask because if you don’t provide more information—like your name—I’ll hang up this phone.”
“First let me ask you a question,” he said. “Have you heard of Sir Scott’s Treasure?”
She was obviously thinking along the same track but she didn’t reveal it. “Of course. But I have no interest in finding it. I doubt it even exists. So with that I’ll say goodbye. There are plenty of other PIs out there so I’d suggest you call them.”
Again, the annoying chuckle. He said, “Don’t hang up until you at least hear me out.”
“You’re on the clock,” she said.
“What is your rate?”
“We charge a hundred and fifty dollars an hour with a thousand-dollar retainer. That doesn’t include expenses.”
Cassie was purposefully increasing her actual rate by fifty dollars an hour to put him off.
“I’ll have two thousand dollars sent to your office this afternoon to get you started. You accept cash, I assume.”
“For what?” Cassie asked.
“I don’t want you to look for the treasure,” he said. “There are too many people on that quest as it is. What I want to hire you for is to try to find out who hid the treasure and wrote the poem. It’s my thesis that if one of the treasure hunters finds out the identity of who hid it they’ll be able to figure out where it’s located much more easily.”
Cassie was suddenly intrigued. Since the poem had appeared two years before at Sir Scott’s Oasis, thousands of people—no one knew how many—had been in search of the gold. It had become a big thing in the mountain west primarily but also in locations around the country and overseas. People quit their jobs to look for it and some spent their entire vacations scouring the countryside.
Sites on the internet were devoted to “Sir Scott’s Treasure” and every word of the poem had been analyzed for true and hidden meanings. Cassie had overheard treasure hunters talking about the poem and speculating on every line. Because the poem appeared in Manhattan and contained lines including “Begin where the rivers marry” and “Look west to spy the treasure,” most of the hunters thought the treasure was located in Montana. Others thought that conclusion was based on red herrings and that the gold was actually hidden in Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, or Colorado. Rumors circulated that the poem itself was bogus and there was no treasure at all.
That’s when a post appeared on a popular treasure website from someone claiming to be the person who had hidden the gold and written the poem. The poster urged that the hunt should continue and it included a tightly cropped photograph of an open chest filled with gold coins. Internet sleuths determined that the post had been sent from a public computer located in a library in Billings, Montana. The user couldn’t be identified.
“Are you one of the treasure hunters?” Cassie had asked the caller.
He laughed again and said, “No. Not at all. I’m the man who hid the gold and wrote the poem. I’m hiring you to try and find me.”
She sat up and raised her voice so that Isabel turned around in her chair. “What?”
“It’s true,” he said. “I got this whole thing started. I think it’s wonderful. I think I’ve covered my tracks well enough that none of the treasure hunters will be able to figure out who I am. My fear is that if one of them does they’ll look into my history and know where the gold is hidden. I don’t want it to be found that way because it isn’t fair to the others. I want them to find the gold by parsing the clues in the poem. I want it found legitimately, not because they know who I am and have therefore traced my history and writings.”
Cassie noted the word “writings” and tucked it away without comment.
She said, “Let me get this straight. You’re hiring me to try and find you but you hope I fail. Do I have that right?”
“You have that perfectly correct,” he said. “If you’re able to find me then it’s very possible a treasure hunter can do the same. But if you’re unsuccessful, which I hope you will be, the hunt for my treasure will remain pristine.”
“Your treasure hunt has caused the death of at least five people,” she said. “It should stop.”
People had perished by plummeting down canyon walls or drowning while swimming across rivers. State and federal authorities had put out pleas urging the end of the treasure hunt.
“Ah,” he said, “every one of those deaths is a tragedy. I mourn for their families. But frankly, the individuals who died were wildly off base in their search. They were reckless. I’m not saying they deserved to die, not at all. But the careful, thoughtful treasure hunters shouldn’t get cheated by me calling off the search. Many dedicated people have put weeks and months into this treasure hunt. One of them will find it. I’m sure of that. And whoever does find it the right way will deserve every penny.”
“How much is the gold worth?” Cassie asked.
“Three and a half million dollars, give or take,” he said. “The value fluctuates based on the price of gold, of course. Right now it’s quite pricy.”
“Are you really telling me you could afford to hide three and a half million in gold?”
“It’s worth it to me just for the fun and adventure of the thing,” he said. “Who doesn’t love an actual treasure hunt? It reminds me of pirate treasure and sunken ships. This is the stuff of boyhood dreams, really. I can’t wait to shake the hand of the person who finds it.”
“How will they contact you?” she asked.
“Now I’d consider that a question from a clever private investigator on the job,” he said with a laugh. “Don’t worry about that. If the treasure is found and I authenticate it, I’ll contact the lucky person and congratulate them myself. I don’t mind going public at that point, but not before. And if the lucky person asks me to keep it all confidential for tax purposes or some other reason, I’ll honor that request as well.”
“How do I know that you’re who you say you are?” Cassie asked.
“Oh, you don’t. You either trust your instincts or you don’t. Either way, I’m paying you your exorbitant hourly fee. I’ll even add a bonus of twenty-five thousand dollars if you show up at my location and we shake hands. It’s worth it to me to find out where I might have slipped up.”
“This is insane,” Cassie said. “This isn’t what I do. I do skip tracing, asset searches, background checks, fraud, criminal defense investigations, domestic cases, and surveillance. I don’t try to learn the secret identities of my clients.”
“See,” he said. “You’re already thinking of me as a client. So I think we’re getting somewhere.”
“How do I contact you?”
“I’ll send you details.”
He terminated the call and left her flummoxed.
That afternoon, a manila envelope marked “Dewell Investigations” arrived at her office. Inside was two thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. The person who delivered it worked at the coffee shop next door and she said she found it taped on the door of Cassie’s building with “Cassie Dewell, Esq.” written on the outside. The barista didn’t see who had left it there.
Also inside the envelope was a scrap of paper with a website address for the Alberta Beekeepers Commission. Under the address, in the same elegant handwriting she recognized from the whiteboard poem, were the instructions: “Use the name Cassie Buzz-Buzz and be vague and discreet. I’ll respond as King Bee.”
She’d called up the site and registered using the Cassie Buzz-Buzz handle. No further information was required. It appeared to be a very legitimate chat forum dedicated to amateur and professional beekeepers throughout the province of Alberta, Canada. There were questions about how to maintain hives in winter, parasites, honey extraction, and other bee-related topics.
Cassie typed a very simple message as Cassie Buzz-Buzz: “I’m so glad I found this forum.”
The next day, among the responses welcoming her to the community, was one from King Bee. It read simply, “Welcome to the mysterious world of bees.”
Cassie had done very little further on the Treasure case since the envelope arrived except to think about it. Thinking, in her profession, was working.
She’d placed the money in a dedicated escrow account and had not drawn a penny against it in case she decided to return it in full. She’d decided that she needed more verification on her “client” before proceeding full bore. She had plenty of work on her docket as it was.
She also concluded that it was good strategy on her part to lay low and wait for the man to get impatient enough to contact her again. She’d ignore the beekeepers forum and wait for him to call. When and if he did she’d be ready this time and she’d be prepared to try to smoke out his location or at least get more personal information like “in my writings.”
Cassie would also see if she could obtain authorization from a friendly judge and local law enforcement to trace the origin of the next call when it came. Although the first contact was likely made from a disposable burner phone that was discarded after the initial call, it would be extremely helpful to find out where the next one was placed to her even if the client got rid of the burner afterward.
During ongoing weeks of the waiting game, Cassie saw an item on the internet that mentioned that a second post had appeared on the Sir Scott’s Treasure hunters forum allegedly by the man who had claimed to have hidden the treasure and written the poem. She called up the site to read it.
The post was addressing persistent rumors that the gold didn’t exist and that both the poem and the treasure were frauds.
The post read:
Listen hard and dream my dream, people.
The treasure is real and it’s waiting to be found. It is not a hoax. That is why I posted a photo of it in this forum. You will find the gold by parsing the clues. No other methods will work. I know this because I’ve hired the best professional investigators in the country to prove me wrong and so far they can’t. The hunt for the treasure should be pristine. Have fun with it. Who doesn’t love an actual treasure hunt?
Cassie instantly noted the similar phrases in the post to those used by the man who had called her. “Parsing the clues,” “pristine,” “Who doesn’t love an actual treasure hunt?”
It was the same person, she was sure. The man who hid the gold and wrote the poem was the same man who had called her office. Either that, or he was the perpetrator of an enormous and cruel hoax that involved keeping the fraud alive for years while people died trying to find the nonexistent treasure. He’d also paid her two thousand dollars to try to find him. If it was indeed a hoax, he didn’t mind throwing cash at it to keep it alive. Cassie thought that was unlikely.
Had he actually engaged the services of other “professional investigators” as well as Cassie? If so, she found it annoying. Her waiting game strategy was hatched when she thought she was the only PI involved. He might not become as impatient if he had, in fact, employed others. Also, she didn’t like the fact that he revealed publicly that he’d done it because it might result in calling attention to her firm.
Which might have been the reason someone had broken into her office. If she later learned that was true, she thought, she’d charge the client expenses for installing cameras and changing the locks.
While she opened a bottle of wine and thought it over, she came to a couple of working theories that seemed to fit the facts as she knew them.
One, the man who called her office was more than likely the same man who wrote the poem, sent her a retainer and the note, and posted to the treasure hunters forum.
Two, an obsessive treasure hunter might very well have read the second post by the perpetrator and decided to break into Cassie’s files and find out what she knew about the identity of the client. Thus the break-in.
Three, her client was much more patient than she’d thought he’d be. Since she’d accepted the retainer and gone silent he hadn’t reached out to her again.
Four, although there was no way to be sure, her client was likely from Montana. There were several facts pointing to that. Sir Scott’s Oasis was locally recognized as an old-school out-of-town steak house (Manhattan was twenty miles away from Bozeman and a much smaller town), it wasn’t a tourist stop or known much outside the area. The restaurant would be an odd choice to post the poem to someone who wasn’t already aware of it.
That he said he’d done research on her was significant as well, she thought. Her name was fairly well-known in the state and somewhat in North Dakota for the high-profile cases she’d cracked in both places. But beyond those locations? Not likely. She’d been chosen for a reason, and she surmised it was because she was Montanan.
The retainer had been taped to her door. That meant he had physical access to her location. Although he could have been passing by later in the day that he first called her, it suggested he didn’t have to travel far. An accomplice could have delivered it, sure. But would a man this secretive about his identity have an accomplice?
Then there were the clues in the poem itself. Although Cassie hadn’t become obsessive about the clues in the poem as so many treasure seekers had, there were indications in it that the treasure was hidden in a state with mountains, canyons, and seasonal rivers or creeks. Montana had them all in spades.
Fifth, Cassie Buzz-Buzz was no closer to finding out the identity or location of her “client” than she was when she started.