Chapter 11 #4
“Communication is the number one killer of all relationships. Yet everybody says, Oh, we get along great. We can talk about anything, but then they don’t,” Kate snapped, glaring at him.
“How many times have you heard our suspects or witnesses say the same thing? And then you turn around, and they’re here on our suspect list. And they’re so convinced that they can communicate really well, but somehow they choose not to.
It kills the whole meaning of communication. Doesn’t it?”
Rodney smiled and offered, “I’ll call the second one.”
“You do that. And, if there’s any suspicion, just bring her in tomorrow too.”
He nodded and then suggested, “You should probably go chase down Simon.” She stared at him and frowned. He nodded. “Call him.”
Kate shook her head. “I don’t know that it was a call for help, but it was definitely a call for, Hey, I’m out of my element. So, it might be nice to have you around.”
Lilliana looked over at her and put her hand to her heart. “I would definitely call him. Hell, I would already be hunting him down, … especially if I had someone call me and say that.”
“I would have done the same.” Rodney seconded Lilliana’s response.
Kate stared at them, surprised. “He’s usually very self-sufficient.”
“Yeah, until they need you but don’t want to ask for help,” Rodney shared.
Lilliana agreed. “Usually but not right now though. The usual Simon deals with some woo-woo stuff that he’s never had to deal with. You can’t help him with that. None of us can. But this time it’s not that he needs help, but he might just want some support, even just a little more you time.”
“What about our murder suspects?” Kate asked, attempting to change the topic.
“You tell me,” Rodney suggested, “so we have something else that we can work on tonight.”
She frowned, just about to say no, when her phone rang. She looked down and announced, “It’s Smidge.”
Rodney immediately turned around. “I’m not even here.”
“Yeah, of course you’re not,” she muttered. She answered, “Hey, Smidge. How’s it going?”
“Shitty,” he snapped, direct and to the point and as prickly as always. “But I can confirm that there is a good likelihood that all three men were either killed by the same person … or—”
“Or,” she repeated, “maybe by the same group of people, following the same MO?”
Dead silence followed. Then Smidge exploded. “So, why the hell do you even need me? If you’ll come up with all this shit on your own, why am I wasting my time?”
She snorted. “I still need you to tell me that I’m not crazy when I do come up with this crap on my own. It’s really the only thing that makes sense, except for the fact that we do appear to have three women who slept with all three of our victims.”
He whistled at that. “How does that happen?”
“I don’t know. You have any clue?” she asked. “I would have voted for dating apps.”
“Oh Christ,” he muttered. “That makes a horrible kind of sense.”
“Yeah. It is a horrible sense, and that’s what worries me. I have one of the women coming in to talk to me tomorrow. I already had a long talk with her, but she doesn’t want her husband to find out.”
He snorted. “Of course she doesn’t,” he muttered. “That could be an inconvenience for her.”
“Exactly. She also seems to feel as if her husband wouldn’t be terribly bothered, but I also cannot rule out any husbands in this instance.”
“No, you can’t rule them out,” Smidge agreed thoughtfully, “but considering poison and drugs—”
“We don’t have the tox results on the third one yet, Robert Blake, do we?”
“Oh, we absolutely do. And it was drugs.”
“Shit.”
“So, maybe we have two connected, the don’t do drugs victims, and one isn’t, or you have three connected, and somebody just decided that it was a hell of a lot easier to take a druggie out by just giving him more of his poison of choice.
Anyway, over to you now.” And his tone was positively cheerful.
Then he laughed and added, “Don’t bring me anymore. ” With that, he quickly ended the call.
Rodney was staring at her, as if she had sprouted wings. “Did he just laugh with you?”
She nodded. “Yeah, we often laugh.”
He frowned at her, then looked behind her.
She turned to see Lilliana staring at her with a similar expression.
Finally Lilliana spoke. “Kate, you’re the only person who can get that man to even smile. The thought of him laughing is preposterous.”
Shaking his head, Rodney added, “It’s absolutely dumbfounding.”
Kate clarified, “In this case, he was laughing because everything associated with these three cases are now dumped back on my desk and then warned me to not bring him anymore.” She gave them a smirk. “So, yeah, he’s laughing because I’m not.”
At that, the others nodded.
Rodney nodded. “Okay, that makes a little more sense.”
And they all returned their attention to the cases at hand.
*
Simon was walking through a jobsite, checking on the plumbing, the building scheduled to be completed in the next six months. Yet supply chains messed with that. There was always a problem getting in enough product when you needed it.
Bathtubs, sinks, faucets, … it was endless. Trucks upon trucks upon trucks. Some of them were stuck at the loading docks in Vancouver, which was never good.
That was money just sitting there, but, when there were shipping problems, they affected more than just him. He tried his best to close his eyes on all that—the things he could do absolutely nothing about—and just keep track of issues within his control.
Then his accountant called him, getting Simon out of his head. “Hey, Quinn, how you doing?”
“I’m doing fine. Look. … Can you talk?”
“Yeah, just give me a minute. I’m walking out of one of the buildings here,” he replied. “I’ll be just a couple minutes getting back to the ground floor.”
“Good enough,” he replied.
“Problems?” Simon asked.
“No, maybe some clarification but I’m really not sure.”
“Oh, that sounds critical.”
“Not critical. The important word here is that it’s not critical. I’m just not sure how to handle it from here. It’s about David.”
“Okay, and what about David?” he asked, as he stepped out into the sunshine, waving at his foreman, pointing at his phone, and walking away.
“I talked with him today, and he’s in a tight spot.”
“Moneywise? He can always come to me. He’s good for money, and the way he is taking care of things, you are authorized to make transactions on my behalf.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. Somebody’s been getting some intel from someone at your company who supposedly knows that you’re overextended and running into all kinds of financial issues, which is giving the whole crew the heebie-jeebies.”
Simon froze in place. “Somebody here is telling people that?” he asked in shock. “Nobody even knows my finances here. I deliberately keep it that way for a reason.”
“That was my thinking. I wasn’t sure what the scenario was, or if you were having issues with any of your foremen, but I wanted to get it out into the open.”
“Nope, not one person on these jobs knows how I handle my finances. They don’t know,” he declared. “I mean, the office staff would have a little bit to do with it, but nobody knows the overall picture, except you and me.”
“That was my assumption,” he noted, “and David’s hoping you can find where the leak is.”
“Why didn’t he tell me that himself?”
“Because you were in his office, and he’s worried some illegal activity may be happening in the bank and didn’t want anyone overhearing what he wanted to tell you. He feels that could put him in grave danger.”
“He could have called me at home anytime.”
“I know, so I’m thinking that calling me maybe was his way of trying not to get his ass in trouble legally, and, yet at the same time, trying to help you.”
Simon pondered that. “I’ll have to think about that one. For Christ’s sake, what’s next?”
“I know you are already worried and pissed, so I absolutely understand.” Quinn continued. “The bottom line is, you’ve got somebody somewhere causing trouble, right? So, what do you need?”
“That is something I can handle. It would help, though, if I had a name.”
“David didn’t have a name, but he thought it was potentially family of somebody within the bank system.”
“That’s clear as mud.”
“Yes, I know,” he muttered. “I’ve started a search to see who might be related to someone involved in your renos because obviously we have to nip this in the bud.”
“If you can get the names of the honchos in David’s bank or of the bank management in general, then maybe we can do a run to see if any sisters, sons, or whoever may work for me.
Not that anybody will know anything about my finances, but obviously they don’t have to know the facts to cause trouble. ”
“Exactly. If he’s just intent on causing trouble, he’s making up lies.”
“Yeah. That’s called defamation.”
His accountant laughed. “You have lawyers on tap for that. If you want to do something about it, we’ll have to find out who it is first, and then we’ll go from there.”
Feeling better and yet having absolutely no idea how that worked, plus realizing that he probably no longer needed to see his billing accountant tonight, he texted him to double-check and got an all-clear.
So, he headed back home, hoping that maybe Kate would get home early.
He sent her a text message. Evening plans are canceled.
You coming home? Immediately he got her reply.
Yes, providing …
The three dots dragged after her proviso. He knew that meant providing nothing helpful came through on her case or one of them.
He pondered that because it was so much harder for her to find information sometimes, and, if he could do anything to help, he would be happy to.
He just had no clue what that would even look like.
And how did anybody find a possible killer in this scenario?
It made no sense to him. And yet it made a lot of sense in some ways to Kate, as usual.