Chapter 26
TWENTY-SIX
The two of us remained crouched at the back of Aubergine National Bank with a stolen Anna Perry painting between us as footsteps headed our way.
It was still dark inside the bank, but we could see a small circle of light coming toward us with each step.
I swallowed hard and prayed that this person didn’t have a gun pointed in our direction.
“Hello? Anyone here?” a woman’s voice called, the words tentative. There were steps on the tiled floor as she slowly made her way through the lobby before opening another door and letting herself into the back of the bank. “You’re not in trouble. I just want to talk to you.”
Suddenly, I recognized the voice. It was Charlie’s deputy, Jill Wright. Her footsteps moved closer, but she was slow and methodical as she ran her flashlight across each piece of furniture and underneath each desk.
“It’s okay. You’re not in trouble.” She paused. “Yet.” The deputy’s words echoed against the steel cabinets and tables, the cold laminate flooring, and the blank walls. “Charlie told me that you might be here.”
I frowned at Lacy, who looked uncertainly back at me. I didn’t like Charlie tattling at all. He was supposed to be hiding things from his deputy, not from me.
As soon as I had the thought, I realized that Jill might be lying. I blinked into the darkness, no longer knowing who or what to believe.
Deputy Wright obviously had a key to get inside, so she must’ve gotten permission from the manager to be here.
She didn’t flip on any lights, which likely meant that she didn’t want to draw the attention of prying eyes in the lofts above Main Street to the goings-on inside the bank at this late hour.
Jill was also moving slowly, indicating she likely wasn’t scared or frantic about what she might find. I wasn’t much of a danger, after all.
“You set off the alarm,” Jill said as she circled the cabinets, moving steadily into our orbit.
We must’ve triggered a silent one. I cursed under my breath.
“When we got the call, Charlie said I should come alone,” Jill continued. “He said that it would be fine, that it’s just you and me, Dakota. Don’t make him into a liar.”
Lacy’s fingers gripped my arm, and my heart pounded hard in my chest. We could stay hunkered on the ground and hope that the deputy’s light wouldn’t fall on us, which was a shot in the dark, or I could reveal myself of my own accord and hope for a good-faith response; hope that Jill would appreciate the fact that I’d been honest by giving myself up.
My head said to stay down, but my gut said that I should take a chance, that if Charlie had trusted Jill as his partner for so many years before bringing her to Aubergine as his second-in-command, then maybe I should give her a chance too.
In a split-second decision, I chose to stand and confront whatever the consequences would be for breaking and entering a bank. I could only hope that Deputy Wright was telling the truth and that she hadn’t brought anyone else with her.
“I’m back here,” I called, as Lacy tried to pull me back down—we both knew that crouching in front of a lockbox while holding a stolen painting wasn’t a good look for either of us. “We’re back here.”
Jill shone her light on me. I blinked against the brightness.
“We? Who’s with you?” she asked, but even in the darkness, I could see her shoulders relax as the beam of her flashlight wandered to where Lacy was hunkered. Her relief told me that she must’ve been less sure than she’d sounded when combing the bank for us.
“Thank God, ladies.” Jill huffed out a long puff of air and bent forward, her elbows on her knees as she put a hand over her heart and tried to calm herself.
“I was scared out of my mind that it was one of those Swanson goons. I had no idea what I’d actually do, and Charlie told me not to bring backup. ”
The confession and the vulnerability in Jill’s voice made me want to trust the deputy even though that did not sound like advice Charlie would ever give.
Still, I also would’ve never expected him to slip me a key before being escorted to jail.
He was changing his tactics as he grew into this job. I supposed that, unwittingly, so was I.
“Charlie didn’t want any of the other officers getting involved,” Deputy Wright said, answering my unasked question. “Said that they might do something reckless, because they don’t understand what’s really happening here.”
I wondered if she understood what was really happening. I wasn’t sure I did.
“Has he contacted the FBI?” I asked, trying to get a feel for what she knew.
“They’re already on their way to Swanson, getting their search warrants in place.” Jill lifted her head and met my eyes as she said the words, letting me know she was in the loop and daring me to trust her. “What did you find with the key Charlie slipped you?”
I raised my eyebrows, realizing that he must’ve decided to trust her with this too—and deciding that at this point I had no other choice than to do the same. I still couldn’t help but grip the key more tightly in my palm.
Jill sensed my hesitation. “It’s okay. I swear that Charlie sent me.”
“I actually want to believe you,” I said, my voice gruff with fatigue and emotion.
“As long as there isn’t a herd of officers standing outside ready to arrest us,” Lacy continued, standing to her full height, “we can work together.”
Jill balanced her flashlight face-up on a nearby desk. Then she placed her hands on her hips and tilted her perfectly symmetrical head as she looked from one of us to the other.
“Look, Charlie didn’t have a chance to tell me much of anything without another officer around or without us being recorded, but in the few minutes we had while I was getting him from the squad car into the station, he did tell me that he had found a key that he passed along to you and that when I got a security call from the bank, I should go alone and you would be here. ”
“Why didn’t he just give you the key?” I asked, my ego a bit bruised at not being the only one with inside intel.
“Charlie said he didn’t want me to have to answer to any higher-ups. In other words, you can’t lose your job over this.”
Jill inhaled deeply and rubbed at her forehead as if she couldn’t believe she was here with us, like this. “So, can you please—for the love of all things holy—tell me what is going on here?”
I glanced at Lacy and she lifted a shoulder. Time to dive in.
“Charlie was right,” I started. “Before you drove him back to the station, he gave me a key. We figured out that it must be to a lockbox, so we came here.” I unfurled the canvas that I’d been holding close and unrolled it onto the long steel table.
“This painting, which was stolen from the Salon at The Rose, was inside. I can only imagine that Charlie took the key from Todd’s room right after the man… fell.”
“You mean right after he was shot,” Jill clarified. “The coroner confirmed that it was a single bullet right through the heart, almost like a sniper had fired the pistol. They found it lodged in his sternum.”
Just as Charlie had suspected. The air left my lungs like I’d been punched. I’d known that Todd had been shot, but this confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that we were dealing with a murder.
But, I realized, it also meant that Charlie was in the clear. I turned to Jill. “Charlie was outside of Todd Anderson’s room right before he was shot, which meant he couldn’t have been the one to kill him.”
“Unless Charlie went inside Todd’s room, they had a confrontation, Charlie pulled a gun on him, and shot him as Todd was standing on the balcony.”
I shook my head. “That’s ridiculous.”
The deputy nodded. “I agree, but Charlie actually suggested the scenario.”
I tilted my head, studying her as if to determine whose side she was on.
“Not because that’s what happened. But because he’s thinking like an investigator, which is smart,” Jill clarified. “Charlie also said that he didn’t hear a gunshot before the man fell, which means someone was likely using a silencer.”
I studied the floor for a beat. “And I can only guess that Charlie’s not involving the other officers because he thinks they’ll either mess it up or that one of them may be in on it.”
The deputy flinched at the last few words as if I’d physically slapped her.
I narrowed my eyes, trying to read her but coming up short. “Wait. What’s wrong?”
Jill bit her lip, obviously considering whether or not to tell me, before relenting. “There is one person that I’ve been monitoring, but I have no idea how he would be involved in something to do with a man from the backwoods of Nowhere, Texas.”
“Who do you suspect?” I asked, my voice growing louder with urgency.
“Not suspect, exactly. Like I said, I’ve just been keeping an eye on one of our volunteers.
He only comes in on the weekends, so honestly, I don’t think he’d even have intel for something like this.
” As she spoke, Jill tapped a restless staccato against the tabletop and frowned as her mind moved quickly.
“Who is it?” I practically demanded. I needed to know if her thinking was paralleling mine.
Jill studied me for a beat before relenting. “It’s Will Hurt.”
As soon as she said the name, another piece of the puzzle fell into place. Valerie’s husband was indeed involved in all of this, though I wasn’t sure how deep.
“Will comes in for a volunteer shift twice a month, but once I found him snooping around files that he had no business accessing,” Jill continued.
“And another time Charlie said that he went on a ride-along with an officer. Not a big deal except Will didn’t sign in or out—or get permission from one of us.
It was almost like he wanted to observe under the radar. ”
“I assume the department ran a background check on Will before he started working there?” I asked, thinking about a way we might be able to figure out how far back Will went with Todd Anderson.
“That was before I transferred here, but sure, that’s standard.”
“Can I see it?”
The deputy’s eyebrows tilted down as if she was trying to determine if this was privileged information. Then, she raised her shoulders as if to say she had nothing to lose at this point.
“Sure.” Jill sighed, pulling out her phone. “We’ve gotten this far, so why not?”
As Deputy Wright said the words, I realized that she must have been going against all kinds of protocol to listen to Charlie and to trust me, especially after I literally broke into the local bank.
Even as Charlie was trying to protect her job, she was taking risks.
It made me appreciate her more as she made a few clicks and pulled up the information.
“Doesn’t look like much of anything,” Jill said, scanning it before handing me the electronic report. “Two speeding tickets, but even those are years apart.”
I ran my eyes over the information, which was indeed sparse, but it did have a list of four addresses, the most recent of which was in Aubergine.
“Are these the places Will has lived?”
Jill glanced at the list. “Yep.”
The other three locations were in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which surprised me since Will didn’t have a Northern accent—but then it hit me. Even though Will didn’t have a tell-tale Bostonian dropping of the “R” sounds on “car” or “scarf,” I knew someone this weekend who did have that heavy sound.
Todd Anderson.
“Can you run a similar report on the man who died?” I asked. “On Todd Anderson?”
Lacy seemed to catch my train of thought. “Will and Todd may have known each other before this weekend.”
“Maybe,” I muttered, but in my gut, I could feel that I was right. “Maybe they were working together to move the art. If Todd was the man on the inside of the Swansons’ illegal business, then maybe Will was working for him.”
There were a lot of uncertainties in my statement, but I knew from past experience that all of these maybes could eventually add up to something.
We just had to keep looking, keep dropping details into place, even if they sometimes didn’t exactly match at the edges.
Eventually, we would have a complete picture.
“I can only pull up reports that are already in the system on my phone,” Jill said. “I can’t generate new ones to see where Todd Anderson lived, unless I’m logged in at the station.”
“Let’s go, then.” I motioned to the back way out of the bank.
“You gotta put the painting back,” Lacy said.
“I think we should bring it with us,” I said, looking to the deputy for permission.
I couldn’t exactly take it out of the bank without her say-so.
“If this is one of the pieces that the Swansons were trying to move, and if Todd was the insider betraying them, then it feels important to keep it as evidence.”
Jill hesitated, though I could tell she wanted to agree with me. “Unless this lockbox is in the name of Todd Anderson, then we need to notify the owner that we are confiscating it. Who’s renting this lockbox?”
“I’m not sure.” I glanced around and spotted her heavy-duty flashlight. I gestured toward it. “May I?”
The deputy handed it over.
“There’s sure to be a hard copy of a registry somewhere around here,” I said. “Aubergine’s bank hasn’t quite made it into the twenty-first century.”
“Very true,” Lacy said, likely thinking about the fact that they still didn’t have direct deposit or online banking options.
I shone the flashlight on the rows of ledgers and notebooks on a tall bookshelf along the opposite wall, pulling out covers that had a variety of dates listed.
Lacy joined me with the light from her phone. “What exactly should I be looking for?”
“Anything that seems like it might tell us who owns which lockbox.”
We scoured the shelves for a few minutes before Jill spoke up from behind us. “Something like this?”
I turned to see that she’d picked a lock on a lower cabinet and pulled out a giant, cloth-bound book. Across the front was written the words, “Safety Registry.”
“Looks promising.”
“What was the lockbox number?” Jill asked, as she opened the book to the center.
“Four-three-six-eight,” I said, having memorized it by now.
Jill flipped through several pages until she reached a recent entry. “Looks like it was secured a few weeks ago.”
I followed her fingertip down the row, reading aloud. “Opened November 1 by…” I let out a gasp as I read the signature. “But why would…?” My words trailed off again as I tried to wrap my mind around what I was reading.
The signature indicated the renter of the lockbox was Valerie Hurt.
If the deputy was suspecting Will Hurt of some kind of snooping around the station and if his wife indeed knew the contents of this lockbox, the Hurts were in a world of trouble.