The Peripheral Son by Dorien Grey

Author:Dorien Grey [Grey, Dorien]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
Publisher: Untreed Reads
Published: 2016-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Back at the office, the first thing I did was to open the not-completely filled notebook to Victor’s last notes to see if he had been anticipating or was worried about anything. Few of the entries were dated, so I had no real idea about how long after he wrote his last note he had died.

From a quick thumb-through of both books, they appeared to be a jumble of short notes with dates, places, people, figures, cryptic arrows and asterisks. An immediate problem I noticed was that there were almost no full names—mostly just initials—and I had no idea who they might refer to.

I did see several references to an “F” and a “B” and took a wild guess they were his father and brother; I wasn’t particularly surprised he might refer to his father by his first name. But if I had hoped to find any immediate, solid clue in any of the notes as to what might have happened to him, I was disappointed.

Of course, I intended to turn the notebooks over to the police—eventually—so as soon as I’d finished my first pass through them, I photocopied every page. Victor must have received gold stars in grade school for his penmanship, which made it much easier for me; I could read every name, every figure, and every note easily.

I considered returning the notebooks to Victor’s car then thought better of it. Detective Couch would be sure to bitch and moan about my “tampering with evidence” whether I returned them or not, but screw him. He knew I was working on the case, and if he thought I was just going to wait for him to get around to it, he had another think coming. And returning them to the car could risk something happening to them. No, better to keep them with me.

A glance at my watch showed it was getting close to quitting time. I was going to take them home with me for safekeeping but would resist a more careful reading until Monday. Wrapping rubber bands around the stack of copies then the notebooks, I put the copies in my top desk drawer and, picking up the notebooks, left for home.

*

My determination not to read the notebooks over the weekend lasted fine through Saturday, which was, as always, filled with chores and the things we didn’t have time for during the week.

However, no more than fifteen minutes after I returned from taking Jonathan and Joshua to church Sunday morning and settled into my ritual of reading the paper, I found myself distracted by thinking of the notebooks. Finally, unable to concentrate on the paper, I gave in, got up and went to get the notebooks, a pad of paper, and a pencil.

The first part of the filled book contained a lot of dates and dollar amounts that I gathered from the notes related to the Holcomb and Koseva Enterprises. Apparently, he also used the notebook as a datebook (“Meeting w/P, 10:30 Tues.,” “Call TL re: concession contracts,” etc.

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