20. Petty-ass Shit
TWENTY
Petty-ass Shit
Harry
W hen they got back to the station, Rus headed in Karen’s direction. She was one of Harry’s deputies, and when Harry wasn’t partnering up with Rus, Rus partnered up with Karen.
They were going out to find Roy Farrell to ask a few questions.
Harry headed to his office to get whatever admin shit that was undoubtedly waiting for him out of the way so he could go with Rus later to meet the medical examiner.
On his way, Polly came out of her office and waylaid him.
“Got word from Idaho,” she said. “As you asked, I sent Wade to go get Sonny and Avery. He left about an hour ago.”
Harry took a breath into his nose and nodded.
“Also sent all we had on the Dietrich robbery to them. It was embarrassing, what little I sent, but I sent it,” she continued.
Embarrassment for an administration that wasn’t of their making was going to be the least of their concerns as they cleaned up Dern’s mess.
“Thanks, Polly,” he replied.
She moved into her office.
Harry went to his, sat behind his desk, and as he powered up his computer, he pulled out his phone and called Lillian.
“Hey,” she greeted.
“Hey,” he returned. “Where are you?”
“At Jenna’s greenhouse.”
“Is Ronetta with you?”
“Yeah, her and Trey.” Her tone had turned cautious. “What’s up?”
“They’ve released your parents, honey,” he told her. “I need to know where Wade should take them when he gets back from Coeur d’Alene. He’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Oh my God, I didn’t—” she started.
Harry heard Ronetta in the background. “What’s happening?”
“Mom and Dad are coming home,” Lillian told her. “We’ve been running around. I didn’t think?—”
“Hand me your phone, Lilly Bean,” Ronetta ordered.
Lilly Bean .
Cute.
There was a handoff, and then Ronetta said, “Hello, Harry.”
“Hey there, Ronetta.”
“You can take Sonny and Av to Pullman’s Mortuary Chapel. They’re expecting them.”
“They are?” Lillian asked in the background.
“It’s all taken care of,” Ronetta told her.
Harry then heard nothing but a faraway sobbing hiccup.
“Ronetta,” he called tersely.
“Trey’s got her, Harry,” Ronetta said in his ear. “She’ s a little choked up. I made some calls last night. It’s mostly arranged. I didn’t know we’d get them back this fast, so I didn’t mention it to Lillian. She’s pulling it together. I’ll go over everything with her now.”
“Right.”
“Harry…” She said no more, but he sensed she was moving somewhere private and that didn’t make him happy.
“Ronetta,” he repeated sharply.
“Okay, we called Lillian’s grandparents this morning.”
Shit.
“Needless to say, they were upset,” Ronetta continued. “Though, unlike Lillian, I sense not really surprised. That said, they’ve been hiding a few things from Lillian, probably because they wanted her to think they’d be there if she needed them.”
This made Harry even less happy. “What are they hiding?”
“Her grandpa Rainier isn’t getting around real great, at this point, essentially wheelchair bound, and he gets tired very quickly. Grandma Rainier is dealing with dementia. And her grandma Nowak’s diabetes means she has to have dialysis several times a week.”
Harry was mildly ticked. “That’s a lot to hide.”
“I agree, though I also understand,” Ronetta replied. “Lillian has taken more than her fair share of licks. But this means they can’t make it to Sonny and Av’s services.” A pause then, “I sense this also has to do with how devastated they are at the news. Even though they weren’t surprised, I got the feeling they also couldn’t hack it. Some of us, answers and closure help. Some of us, we wish we never knew. They’re all in their eighties. This is a blow for anyone, but for them, it’s not a memory you want to be making when you’re at that time in your life.”
He could understand that.
“Lillian told them she’s going to go out there for Thanksgiving,” Ronetta went on. “They’ll do something to memorialize Sonny and Av then.”
“How’d she handle all of that?” Harry asked.
“Well, she didn’t do cartwheels, but I felt a little relief. Bearing your own grief is a heavy enough load. Looking after your elderly grandparents and adding theirs is too much. Not that our Lilly Bean wouldn’t stand strong, just that would be asking a lot.”
“Agreed,” Harry grunted.
“Thanksgiving in Indiana with some time between the news and then will be a much better way to spend time together.”
“Again, agreed,” Harry replied.
“Hang on, she wants the phone,” Ronetta said.
Another handoff and he had Lillian back.
“I’m okay,” she assured, sounding a little husky, but other than that, like she said, okay. “I just…it gets overwhelming, having such good friends.”
“I know, baby,” he murmured.
“Did Ronetta tell you about my grandfolks?”
“Yeah, sweetheart. It’s probably for the best, yes?”
“This might sound weird, but I don’t think Mom or Dad would want them there. I don’t think they’d even want me, Ronnie and George or Shane and Sherise there. They weren’t about being sad. They were about…everything else other than that.”
“I definitely got that from what everyone says about them.”
“So I guess, in a way, this is working out as it should.”
“Good way to look at it.”
She put a line under that, asking, “What time will you be over tonight?”
“Gotta get the dogs, get some things packed. I’m aiming for six. Cool?”
“Definitely cool. See you then.”
“Yeah, sweetheart. See you then.”
They disconnected, and Harry was able to deal with some email before he heard a commotion out in the hall.
He got up and was heading to the door when he heard Polly say, “Now is not the time, Kimmy.”
Shit.
Kimmy wasn’t only the town’s lovable, nosy curmudgeon, she was their local conspiracy theorist.
Reopening old cases, dead residents being found a state away, was candy to Kimmy.
He hit the door to see Polly barring Kimmy in the hall.
“It’s okay, Polly.”
And it was because this was part of his job. He never had time for it, but he always had to make time.
Polly looked over her shoulder at him.
“Harry,” she said by way of protest.
He looked beyond her at Kimmy, who was wearing a green and red plaid sweatshirt with a headband in her hair that had a puffy Christmas tree sticking out of the top.
The tree illuminated, and he knew this because right then, the tiny lights on it were lit.
In this getup, especially seeing someone wearing it in late September, most people would have trouble taking the woman seriously.
Since it felt like he’d known Kimmy Milford his entire life, and he’d never seen her in anything but some incarnation of that outfit, Harry didn’t even blink.
“Kimmy, you have something to report?” Harry asked her.
Kimmy shot Polly a look and huffed by her. Harry moved out of the way so she could enter his office.
As he followed her, he was surprised to see she didn’t settle into a seat so she could share in detail her ideas about what was happening and put every effort into pumping Harry for information she could disseminate freely, doing this adding her own spin to anything Harry would say (not that he was going to say a damned thing).
He was also surprised when she started it off by stating, “I’m not gonna take a lot of your time, Harry. ’Spect you got better things to do.”
He stopped by the side of his desk and crossed his arms on his chest. “What you got for me, Kimmy?”
“I heard about the Rainiers. I kinda knew Av. She liked Christmas.”
Kimmy ran the local holiday shop, and no surprise to anyone, her specialty was Christmas.
“Her girl likes it too,” Kimmy went on. “She decorates some of the houses she looks after as well. I know her a lot better.”
Harry had no doubt Lillian put on a show at Christmas.
“I’m just gonna say, Michelle Dietrich always kitted out their place at Christmastime,” Kimmy reported.
That got Harry’s attention.
Kimmy kept going.
“She was always buying new gear to shake it up. But that year, the Christmas before the Rainiers went missing, and everyone was talking about them maybe stealing a bunch of stuff before they did, Michelle asked to do Christmas on account. Told me she’d pay me, just invoice her. I never did that kind of thing, but she was a good customer. She did it up big for Halloween too. So I made an exception.”
“And you invoiced her,” Harry guessed.
“Yeah, and she didn’t pay it. Like, months , Harry, she didn’t pay. I sent reminder after reminder, then I started calling her. She got pissy at me. Told me she was just busy. She’d get to writing me a check. She couldn’t believe how rude I was being when she’d always been such a loyal customer. Now, we’re talkin’ I delivered a truckload of Christmas to her house in November, and I don’t do deliveries either, and the next May, she still owes me thousands of dollars. It wasn’t like I demanded a check the next day, but just to say, I never sent Christmas on account to anybody . I did her a favor. She dragged her feet for six damned months.”
“Did she eventually pay you?”
“Yeah, she came in, nose right up in the air, handed me the cash and told me, since I didn’t value my customers, she was going to go to Spokane or Seattle to do her Christmas from then on. Woman never stepped foot in my shop again. Gotta say, it was a loss to my bottom line, but not my peace of mind.”
Harry felt his pulse thump.
“She paid in cash?” Harry asked.
“Three-thousand-five-hundred-some-odd dollars in cash,” Kimmy confirmed. “I keep my receipts, Harry. Would have to dig, may take some time, but you need it, bet I’d be able to find it.”
“I don’t know if I need it, Kimmy, but it won’t hurt to have it,” he told her.
“Then I’ll get on it.”
Harry narrowed his eyes on her. “That all you got?”
She jerked up her head. “What’s concrete that I know. But you want rumor and innuendo?”
Fuck yeah, he wanted everything he could get on Gerald and Michelle Dietrich.
“Hit me,” he invited.
Kimmy didn’t hesitate.
“Gerald and Michelle made an art of in-your-face living large. They wanted everyone to know they were the haves, and the rest of us poor suckers were the have-nots. They both came from money, and I guess that crap is ingrained in people like that.”
Not all of them, but some, definitely.
Kimmy continued, “So they weren’t big on letting that reputation slip, even if, around that time, they were living large everywhere ‘on account.’ It wasn’t only me they strung along, waiting to get paid. And it wasn’t only me they threw attitude at for expecting money for goods and services rendered, pulling the ‘loyal customer, how dare you’ card. They sure did quiet that all down once they got stuff sorted, though. They burned a lot of bridges, but it wasn’t that. It was like, they were suddenly being careful not to bring any attention to themselves.”
It sucked, but the truth of it was, rumor and innuendo often uncovered the nasty shit.
As Kimmy just proved.
“And you’re absolutely certain all of this happened around the time the Rainiers disappeared,” Harry pushed.
She gave him one nod. “Absolutely. Wasn’t long after, Michelle came in with her cash. Now, I know some time has passed, but we didn’t have serial killers hanging around back then and no sex tape scandals were going down. It wasn’t usual for people to get robbed and other people to go missing. So I remember.”
That worked for him.
“You know who they had these accounts with?” Harry asked.
“I’ll go back to my shop and write you a list. Then I’ll get on that receipt.”
“It’d be appreciated, Kimmy.”
She gave him a salute that was so smart, it had the Christmas tree on top of her skull wobbling, then she trudged out.
Harry stared at the door, thinking insurance fraud was so fucking on the table.
The shit of it was—with what was reported missing, which meant the claim paid out was hundreds of thousands of dollars—this would land the Dietrichs into the felony arena for fraud, and that carried prison time as well as fines. He’d seen people kill for much less.
But as far as he knew, that couple had their rough patch, got beyond it and carried on with their lives. They might have been quieter about it, but they did it.
So, if Lillian’s parents lost their lives in that deal, whittling this down, the Dietrichs took those lives for the sole purpose of not only not wanting to sort their shit out in a legal way, but also not wanting to lose face.
And that was some petty-ass shit.
Harry stood still, having to take a second to calm himself down so he didn’t do something man-stupid, like throwing his computer through the window.
When he got a lock on it, he sat down and called Rus.
First, he wanted to know where the fuck the Dietrichs were.
And second, he was allocating Rus not only Karen, but Sean, because once Kimmy gave him her list, they were going to run down everyone on it.
And then keep digging.