Chapter 11 Teething #2
“Cade thinks…yes,” Rus replied.
Shit.
Harry butted in. “After that, Enstrom bounced around, pretty much everywhere. Did odd jobs. Had brushes with the law. Can’t say entirely how he got hooked up being Mr. Flannery’s caretaker, but Mr. Flannery’s niece has a few ideas.”
“Those are?”
“Con artist is one. But she says her uncle had all his mental faculties until the day he died at eighty-three, and he might’ve gotten preliminarily hoodwinked, but he would’ve sniffed out a long con.”
“So?” Hutch prompted Harry.
“She thinks Enstrom scared the absolute crap out of her uncle.”
Hutch sat straighter in his chair.
“Threats,” Rus put in. “Intimidation. Even brainwashing. Lacey Diever said her uncle was one man before he met Enstrom, and he was another after he let Enstrom stay on the property, so he was around all the time. Lacey says it only took months for her uncle to fold in on himself, let go parts of his personality that she’d known all her lifetime, and eventually do everything Enstrom said, and finally, leave everything to Enstrom. ”
“Sounds like a teething cult leader,” Hutch remarked.
“Exactly like it,” Rus said. “And Cade agrees.”
“Did this Lacey ever meet Enstrom?” Hutch asked. “Before the court dates, that is.”
Both Rus and Harry nodded, but it was Harry who answered.
“A couple of times, before her uncle kicked her off the property and told her never to come back. She said that was entirely out of character, and from it, she got the feeling he was doing it for her own safety.”
“She said Enstrom gave her the skeeves,” Rus added.
Hutch looked to Harry. “You said you’ve dealt directly with this guy?”
Harry lifted both hands, palms facing up, from his desk. “Soul of amiability. Friendly. Helpful. ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘No, sir.’ If there’s a wildfire it was, ‘We’ll be gettin’ right on that evacuatin’ if we gotta leave our land. You need any help spreadin’ the word?’ That kind of shit.”
“You ever see any of the women when you were there?” Hutch queried.
Harry nodded. “Almost like they were trotted out so I could witness they were well fed, clothed, warm, had shoes on their feet. But it was all just glimpses and they went about their business nowhere near me.”
“This Lacey got a case, or is it lost?” Hutch asked.
“It’s Flannery’s signature on the will, that’s been established,” Rus answered. “That said, the family’s worked with one law firm for as long as anyone can remember, and this will wasn’t written up by someone in that firm.”
“Who was it written by?”
“Someone whose driver’s license states his address is The Lion and The Lamb,” Harry said.
“Fuck,” Hutch muttered.
“He’s got a law degree, passed the bar, licensed to practice in Washington, but transcripts show every judge they’ve gone in front of thinks that’s sketchy.
It smacks of conflict of interest. There’ve been a lot of continuances, but this is on Enstrom’s side.
Lacey thinks he’s dragging it out so she and her cousins will run out of money and give up. ”
“How long has this been going on?” Hutch asked.
“Since Flannery died,” Harry told him. “Six years.”
“Jesus,” Hutch said.
Harry nodded.
“She close to giving up?” Hutch inquired.
“That woman would wheel herself into a courtroom on her deathbed before she’d let go of that land without a court ordering her to do it,” Harry replied. “From what she says, the cousins feel the same.”
“Least there’s that,” Hutch murmured.
“Other than that, we’re still having trouble getting a lock on these folks,” Rus shared. “Can’t be super vocal, but what little we’ve learned, Enstrom homed in on Flannery, but he hasn’t had much to do with anyone else, except saying, ‘thank you, ma’am’ when someone buys his jam.”
“Flannery have money as well as land?” Hutch asked.
“A little,” Rus told him.
“Not enough to build that compound,” Harry said. He shrugged. “Rus told me you went up there, wasn’t sure the Google aerial shot was current, so he and I did the same. Took some pictures. It’s quite a setup.”
“Agreed,” Hutch replied.
“But we can’t find a bank account for anyone who has anything to do with that patch of land,” Harry said.
Hutch was surprised. “Anything they do, all cash?”
Harry nodded.
“What about the women?” Hutch asked.
“We don’t know who they are, but no female has any legal ties to that address,” Harry answered. “Not so far as we’ve found.”
“So, we got nothin’ except shit that makes this shadier,” Hutch noted.
“No, but we do have the names of all fifteen men who call that compound home,” Harry replied.
“And they’re up next. We also got your report about possible lumber poaching, and we got ideas about that, considering that’s not something you can easily hide.
” He paused, then reminded Hutch. “That said, CR 10 has sparse traffic.”
“So, if they’re illegally logging, they’re doing it local so they can use CR 10 for transport without anyone seeing, or if they do, it would only be one or two people who might not question someone hauling lumber, because a ton of folk haul lumber,” Hutch finished for him.
Harry nodded. “A lot of your neighbors have a lot of land. That could happen and it might take months, even years, for them to notice some downed trees. We gotta go careful in looking into that so we don’t tweak landowners, and if they find something, they don’t start getting ideas of who’s trespassing on their land and stealing its resources, then more ideas to do something about it. ”
Christ, Rus was right.
These men had a lot to juggle, an impossible task when most of the time one hand was tied behind your back.
And Hutch hadn’t thought it was smart coming down here, but it was.
He should have known Harry and Rus would be doing everything they needed to do, and then some. They’d even gone up to the bluff to get a good look.
“Only thing I can say to that is, I’ll keep my eyes peeled. I’ll also walk my land to see if I got targeted,” Hutch said.
“My guess, you won’t find anything,” Harry told him. “So far, Enstrom has kept his shit tight. He’s not gonna do something so stupid as to risk getting caught by a vet with special forces training.”
This made sense.
Hutch was still going to look.
“We’re workin’ on it, Hutch,” Rus said quietly. “And with you over there, working with Mabel and her dog, whatever trigger was tripped, she’s still single, she has a man around regularly, but no incidents. Maybe someone acted off script, and Enstrom reeled them back in.”
“We can hope,” Hutch replied.
Since that was all they got, they shot the shit for ten minutes before Hutch left them to do their jobs.
He had one more chore that day regarding Mabel, and when he got home, he’d be seeing to it.
Part of him hoped the result would end his attraction to her.
The other part betrayed him, hoping it would not.
In the end, what he would get, he couldn’t even dream.
No.
It would be a nightmare.