Hot Blood by Ken Englade

Author:Ken Englade
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2023-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

23

The Missing Piece

Sacramento, 1992

Joe Edward Plemmons swung his brown eyes calmly from Pete Cullen to Jim Delorto to Steve Miller. “So help me,” he said guilelessly in his high-pitched, con man-sincere voice, “I’ll tell you the truth. You can take it to the bank.”

Over a period of several months, Plemmons had been dribbling details of his connections to the Chicago scammers drop by drop. In jail awaiting trial for selling a horse that didn’t exist, Plemmons was facing a stiff prison sentence unless he could work out a deal with Miller: information in exchange for his freedom.

“So you want to bargain?” Miller asked, his skepticism evident in his voice.

“Yes, sir,” Plemmons replied, grinning broadly.

“Okay,” Miller said after a brief pause. “You tell us what you know and I’ll see what we can work out.”

After his interview with Cathy Jayne Olsen, Miller asked his investigators to redouble their efforts to try to find someone who could corroborate Olsen’s claims that Brach represented a danger to the scam operation. When Olsen told him about her father, Frank Jayne Jr., and his alleged conversations with Bailey and a rogue cop about having Helen “shut up,” the pieces to the puzzle slid into place.

Although he lacked documentation to prove it, Miller felt certain that Olsen had been correct when she told him that Helen had bought a string of broodmares from Bailey. He knew she had bought three racehorses from P. J. Bailey and that they had been disasters. From what he knew about Bailey, he was certain the con man could not have resisted the temptation to try to sell her some more horses. It would have been impossible for him not to have tried.

Knowing how Bailey operated, any horses he sold her would also have been overpriced and of poor quality. Then he asked himself, what if she had found out that she had been cheated? What would she likely have done? He knew she had not filed a civil suit against Bailey or any members of his group. He was about 99 percent positive that Helen had never talked to an attorney about it or the lawyer would have come forward after she disappeared. But the chances were she had not done anything before she was abducted.

The Brach name and the Brach money would have spoken loudly. If she had been contemplating filing a suit, Miller knew that it would have been all over the newspapers as soon as it was registered with the clerk of court. The publicity would have shattered the con scheme and Bailey et al. would never have been able to gull another unsuspecting woman.

Then he had an even more exciting thought. What if Helen had been planning to go to the state’s attorney’s office and file a criminal complaint against Bailey, as Barbara Morris had tried to do? Prosecutors undoubtedly would have treated Helen differently; they probably would have been only too happy to act on her complaint. If she had been thinking about doing that and if Bailey had found out about it, that could have been the motive for having her disposed of.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.