Deadly to the Core by Joyce Tremel

Author:Joyce Tremel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CROOKED LANE BOOKS

Chapter Fourteen

“Missing?” I said. “I just talked to Cindy Larabee a couple of hours ago and she never mentioned that. She told me he’d be back tomorrow and gave me his cell phone number.”

“Apparently she’s been worried that he hasn’t answered his phone or returned her calls,” Scott said.

“She never let on when I spoke to her.”

“It gets worse,” Scott said. “She finally called the hotel where he was registered and he never checked in. No one has seen him.”

Daniel and I shared a glance.

“You two know something, don’t you?” Scott said.

Daniel spoke up. “Not about him being missing. And none of it makes much sense.”

Scott looked at his watch. “I’m off the clock as of right now—”

“When are you ever off the clock?” Daniel asked.

“Some of us don’t get to leave the job.”

Daniel said, “Some of us didn’t have a choice.”

“You had a choice.”

“Not a good one,” Daniel said.

I kept looking back and forth between the two. What did all that mean?

“Anyway, I’m hungry,” Scott said. “How about we go inside and you can fill me in.”

The Tavern was nearly empty and we were told to sit anywhere, so we took a booth in a corner. After placing our orders, Scott said, “So, what do you know that I don’t?”

I told him what Cherry Perry had said about Robert and Carl arguing but that so far we couldn’t verify it.

“And you probably won’t be able to,” Scott said. “She calls at least once a day with her theories on who killed Randolph. I’ll ask around, though, in case she’s right for a change. I doubt she is, though.”

Daniel and I both told him what we’d discovered about the property sales and offers and Robert’s involvement with the mysterious buyer. Scott agreed that the money paid to Carl had something to do with it.

“The money deposited to Randolph’s account had been in cash,” Scott said. “He must have discovered something about those sales and was blackmailing Larabee.”

I shook my head. “I don’t want to believe that Carl was a blackmailer. Maybe it was more like hush money. Someone paid him to keep quiet.”

“What’s the difference?” Scott asked. “If something illegal was going on, he should have reported it and not taken a payoff.”

“We don’t know that it was anything illegal,” I said.

Scott actually rolled his eyes. “What else could it be?”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

“I don’t want to believe it either, but Scott may be right,” Daniel said. “I liked Carl, but people do funny things when money’s involved.”

I hated to admit that either one of them might be right. The fact was that I had only seen one side of Carl. I didn’t really know him. I hated the idea that he could have been a blackmailer, but I had to consider it. “What’s our next step?” I asked.

“Our?” Scott said. “There’s no our in this. My next step is to find Robert Larabee.”

The server brought our burgers and talk stopped, but not for long. After a few bites, I put my burger down.

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