Chapter 18
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Doreen wouldn’t even have noticed when more moving trucks rolled down the driveway, except for the noise that they made, followed by Mugs’s need to raise an even louder alarm. She groaned, then looked back over at Mack. “Hopefully those are the furniture trucks.”
He got up and said, “Let me check.” He headed to the front door as she waited until he returned. It didn’t take long. He nodded. “Scott’s bringing in the furniture trucks, and, as it turns out, the car trailers are here too. Do you want to watch as they get loaded?”
She thought about it, then shook her head. “Honestly, I want to find a quiet corner and just think about these crazy murders.”
He grimaced. “We don’t have any jurisdiction down here. You remember that, right?”
“I know that,” she grumbled, “but I also know that, if we don’t do something, we could end up on the chopping block.”
He smiled at her. “I don’t think it’ll be that dire, not when we have Detective Clark and Captain Hawkins on this investigation now. Good riddance, Daniel.”
She wasn’t so sure, and, by the time she had made herself a cup of coffee and headed into Mathew’s home office, a room she still hadn’t gone completely through, she realized that, without Daniel around, she could think a little more clearly about all the events.
It made sense to her that somebody, somewhere, somehow, had told the criminals that this unoccupied house was a haul just waiting to be made.
But it didn’t change the fact that someone had killed somebody—two somebodies—and both on Mathew’s property—now her property.
And that estimated sales figure had not even been disclosed.
She didn’t know whether two dead bodies on the property would raise or lower the value of the estate.
Because people, … well, they were just people.
It blew her away that people could have such a macabre interest in homes where murders happened.
Yet being involved with these cold cases to the extent that Doreen was, in theory, it shouldn’t be hard to figure out other people’s interests too.
Regardless, since no one was living permanently in Mathew’s house, she would gladly leave it up to Nick and Mathew’s probate lawyer and Scott to handle the disposal of all the assets, including the house itself.
With that thought, she started to go through his desk drawers, looking to see if anything could be an issue.
She wondered if Daniel had gone through these drawers on one of the earlier days before he had been escorted in and out of this main house.
Regardless, she didn’t know whether that was a good thing or a bad thing.
As she worked her way through the desk, she opened up the two secret drawers and pulled out the file that she knew Mathew had always kept.
Whether she was happy about the contents or not didn’t matter and wasn’t relevant.
As she sat there, she muttered, “Mathew, you sure were messed up. You left all this here for me to deal with, and I’m sure, in your own mind, that was never your intention. Yet something went wrong between you and Robin, and it went steadily downhill after that. More than downhill for Robin too.”
They seemed to be a poisonous couple, and everything they touched turned to dust. It all had just blown up.
The fact that Doreen still had to deal with Robin’s house too was enough to make her groan, but, then again, maybe Robin’s association with some of her shady people had brought Mathew’s house to the attention of that element.
And now they had all come to clean it out, which made a lot of sense to Doreen.
As she thought about it, she realized how lucky she was that she and Mack and Nick had come down when they did.
Otherwise, if they’d left this house vacant much longer, for all she knew, this would have been cleaned out already.
Sure, not the heavy bulky furniture probably, but, if anybody had found the safes, the jewelry, the bags of cash, and all those bearer’s bonds, that would be gone for sure.
There was just so much here that it was ridiculous.
Most of it was gone, just with their day spent going to three different banks.
The rest would be going soon, with Scott now responsible for a lot of it.
A good deal more would be gone by the end of the day too.
And that was something she couldn’t wait for.
She looked forward to some joy in knowing that all this would finally reach a certain amount of closure.
When Mack found her a little bit later, she was still here, going through the drawers.
“Anything?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said, “which is weird because he always kept scratch pads to write stuff on, just bits and pieces, random thoughts. It wasn’t even so much that he would keep notes of any value or importance, but notes to himself, notes about what he was working on.”
“Did you find his notes?”
She shook her head. “I feel that’s missing. A pad is here, … but the top sheet has been ripped off.”
He came around, took a look, and asked, “So, what are you thinking?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know, but there is the potential that somebody else removed that note.”
He frowned. “Are you talking about an intruder, like here, right now?”
“Not right now, no, but I guess I’m considering that maybe an intruder came in over the last few weeks. I mean, we do have one dead person, and now a second one, so something is going on.”
“Right,” he agreed, “so in theory somebody could have been here in Mathew’s office, but they wouldn’t necessarily know what was important about his notes.”
She frowned. “The indentations are here, so maybe we can read what was written on the previous page.”
Mack nodded, coming closer to her. “Do you have a pencil in there?” She pulled out an old-style school pencil.
He smiled. “To think that Mathew had a mundane pencil in there as well?” He shook his head.
He dragged the pencil lead across the indented area in a smooth motion.
Almost all the lettering came up. He stepped up behind her to read it and then frowned. “Good God.”
“I know. He seemed to be making an inventory list.”
He read it out softly. “Move jewelry out of safe, relocate to safe deposit box, relocate cash into secondary safe deposit box.” There were a bunch of other notes, but Mack seemed stuck on these he had read.
“Do you think somebody saw this?” she murmured.
“If they did and thought jewelry was in here, maybe they found something. That’s a huge haul that we found, so maybe they found other jewelry elsewhere.
Still, I doubt that anybody else would have found this note because it was in one of his hidden drawers.
In fact, it was in the hidden drawer behind the hidden drawer. ”
She frowned, pondering that for a moment.
“If anybody was looking for this, it could have only been an employee, someone who saw Mathew writing some notes like this. In other words, someone who stayed here for days or weeks on end, doing whatever work for Mathew, and, therefore, he may not have even noticed them around him, even in his office.”
“Like his caretaker, outside his office window, working on the yard below.”
“Exactly,” she declared. “And what happened to the caretaker?”
Mack shrugged. “Mathew’s probate attorney told Nick how the caretaker hired by the property management company was told not to come.
There was some confusion as to whether the probate attorney did this on his own or whether the property management company told the probate attorney to do this.
Heck, some third party may have called the true caretaker, lying about being a representative of either one of them. ”
“Regardless, what are the chances,” she began, staring at him, “that Mathew’s probate attorney, or the property management firm that he hired, who then hired a caretaker, found some of this when dealing with the estate claims or the property issues or whatnot and decided that he should be the one to find everything?
He could have removed whatever he wanted before the place was sold, before we came down, and we would never have known. ”
Just then Nick walked into the room. “What’s this about Mathew’s local probate lawyer?”
She looked over at him and stated, “I know it’s a far-fetched idea, but the probate lawyer that you’ve been dealing with …”
“Yeah, what about him?” he asked, as he walked over, took a look at the notepad with the scribbled message revealed, and frowned.
“Is there any chance that he would have come here to the house and maybe helped himself?”
He looked at her in astonishment. “Are you thinking more is missing?” he asked, as he glanced around.
“No, not so much missing, especially without some stranger being able to find the safes or even knowing about them,” she clarified. “I’m not sure anybody would have been able to find everything, but I guess I’m just wondering …”
He turned to her and prodded, “Wondering?”
“Wondering if we had somebody who knew about all this stuff, potentially from this list of Mathew’s, somebody who stayed close by, thinking they could dig up the goods themselves and remove them before anyone was the wiser. I’m not sure how we would know what was here and what wasn’t.”