The Branson Beauty (29 page)

They took a squad car over to the glittering new offices of Gallagher Enterprises, a big building of rock and glass off Roark Valley Road that had to have been designed by the same nouveau-Ozark firm that had done Gallagher's mansion. Surprisingly for a Saturday morning, the front door was unlocked. Hank bet that was an oversight that wouldn't be repeated. They walked right in and up to the second floor, where the back of the building overlooked an undeveloped swath of trees. They could hear movement inside the main office.

Sheila strode forward and moved to plow through the half-open door. Hank stopped her and held his finger to his lips. He slowly swung the door open and stood there, arms folded across his chest, and waited to be noticed. In front of him was a very large desk and, behind it, an enormous window that took up the entire wall. No one sat at the desk. The noise was coming from a corner of the office, where the Company Man was hunched over a shredder, pulling tangles of paper out of its nether regions. He gave one last fierce yank, stood up with a fist full of strips, and froze when he saw Hank. He let out a squeak as Hank sauntered into the room.

He walked to the wall perpendicular to the window. It was covered with several poster boards that depicted what he assumed were various Gallagher Enterprises proposed projects. One looked like an addition to the resort outside of town. Another seemed to have something to do with the mostly vacant outlet mall east of the Strip. There were a few more smaller boards, and then a blank spot on the wall. Hank perused them all.

“Wow,” he said. “Gallagher Enterprises is in full expansion mode. Where're you getting the money for all of these?”

“What are you … you doing here?” the Company Man said. The hand holding the paper strips trembled slightly. “You … you can't be here. You don't have permission … you're trespassing.”

“What're you going to do,” Sheila said smoothly, “call the police?” Hank was frankly surprised she'd managed to stay quiet for as long as she had.

He finally turned away from the wall and toward the Company Man, who still stood by the shredder. Behind him sat a large trash can overflowing with paper strips. A broken piece of poster board stuck up like a sail from the top of the pile. He walked forward until he was a foot away from Cummings, who finally moved just in time to reach up and stop his glasses from slipping off his nose. The dude was starting to sweat heavily, even though the office was not well heated, what with the system probably being on a weekend timer.

“So tell me,” Hank said. “What is so urgent that you need to be working so hard on a Saturday morning? What are you shredding?”

“Oh, just junk. Old forms and such.”

“Anything regarding the
Beauty
?”

Cummings stared down at his fistful of strips.

“I suggest you tell me,” Hank said, crossing his arms again. “We're about to get a warrant for this whole place as it is.”

Cummings sighed. “Yes, some
Beauty
records. Just confidential employment documents. Since those people are no longer employed with us, I'm just correctly disposing of their records.”

“So it's only been four days, and you've already decided you're not giving these people jobs somewhere else in the company?”

“There are … there are no open positions right now,” he said.

“How much payroll will you get rid of?”

That took Cummings just a second. “Only two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars a year. See, we're not saving that much.”

Hank thought about Anna Fenton and her stump, and Mrs. Pugo and her bursitis, and all the other now-elderly leftovers from Crazy Otis's day. “And what about the health insurance? What were their premiums costing you? You're self-insured, right? You gotta cover all those bills yourselves.”

Cummings pushed his glasses back up his nose again. Then he stared at his feet. Then the ceiling.

“You know the numbers for everything,” Hank said. “Don't stand there and act like you don't. I'm getting warrants, remember? How much?”

The glasses again. “Two point three million last year.”

Sheila let out a low whistle. “And that would only go up as those folks got older,” she said.

Cummings's grip on the strips tightened, and he tried to glance nonchalantly out the window behind the desk. The trembling and sweating didn't do much to help him achieve that. Hank bet his next look would be to the clock hanging above all of those planning poster boards. He was right. It was 8:02, and the Company Man was expecting someone. Someone who was now late. He and Sheila both heard the downstairs front door open at the same time. She smoothly moved to the side of the office door and up against the wall. Hank took one step back from Cummings so the little guy would have a clear view of his boss coming into the room. He had been so busy trying to casually get a glimpse of the parking lot through the big window that he hadn't heard the outer door. That meant another squeak was coming.

“What on earth?” Gallagher stopped in the doorway. “What are you doing here, Terry?”

Squeak.

“I don't … Oh, my. Worth. Goodness. What are you doing here?” Gallagher stared at Hank. Hank stared back, silently. “Really,” Gallagher said, “I don't believe this. Terry, what are you doing with those papers? Why are you shredding them?”

The color drained from Cummings's face. He started to speak, but then closed his mouth, slowly, as if he'd decided there was nothing worth saying. His fist dropped to his side.

“Terry, did you and Mr. Gallagher have an appointment to meet here at this time?” Hank asked.

Cummings didn't speak, didn't move, didn't blink. Gallagher snorted.

“No, we did not. I came to get some paperwork I left by mistake. No one is supposed to be here. I really don't know … Terry, what have you done? Is this about the boat? What did you do to my boat?”

Terry stayed silent.

“What do you know about the boat?” Hank asked, turning toward Gallagher. The question gave him the pinched-nose look Hank had seen often on the day of the
Beauty
's grounding.

“I know that it was my most prized business. That I entrusted it to an incompetent captain. That it is now a total loss—for everyone in town,” Gallagher said.

“For everyone except you,” Hank said. “You get twenty million out of it. Everyone else just gets to apply for unemployment.”

Gallagher stiffened. “I am getting tired of you slandering me, Worth. I know nothing about any plan to sabotage the
Beauty
.”

Cummings took a hesitant step and managed to bump the overflowing trash can. Strips of paper tumbled out, and the broken poster board crashed down flat on the floor. Hank swooped down, snatched it off the carpet, and turned it right side up. It was the left half of the layout for a theater, with circular rows of seats radiating outward and stage parts labeled with terms he didn't know. The heading that remained read:
The Branson Sta
— And in smaller print below it:
Coming to the Stri
—

He raised an eyebrow. “What's this?”

“Nothing,” Cummings said.

“Then why do you look even more worried than you did two seconds ago?” Hank asked.

Cummings shrugged.

“You're coming down to the station with us—voluntarily, of course,” Hank said. “You're not under arrest.” Hank did not want Cummings clamming up and demanding a lawyer. “But some interesting issues have been raised here, and we need to talk about them some more.”

Sheila escorted the Company Man out of the room. Hank, still holding the broken poster board, turned to Gallagher.

“How'd you get him to burn down the boat?” he asked.

Gallagher looked at him calmly. “
I
didn't get him to burn down the boat. I didn't get him to do anything. I can't believe he has done this to my company. I'm heartbroken.”

Hank's eyebrows climbed in disbelief.

“Yeah, right,” he said. “It's still your show. You're running it. You're running everything. You ordered that boat sunk.”

“Well,” Gallagher said, smoothing the front of his wool coat, “I look forward to you trying to prove that, Worth. But you won't be able to. Because I didn't order anything done, and I will swear to that in a court of law. I'm just a local businessman, trying to do my best for the community.”

He reached out and plucked the poster board out of Hank's hand. “I believe you have a suspect to interrogate, so I'll bid you good day.”

*   *   *

Hank let Sheila drive over to the main station in Forsyth. He stared out the passenger window at the snow-spackled trees lining the roadway. He had just heard an awful lot of non-swearing for a situation that called for a lot of it. Everything had sounded rehearsed. From Gallagher, anyway. Cummings's reaction had most definitely not been. The guy had been completely blindsided. Hank's plan had been to turn the Company Man against his boss, but now he wasn't so sure that would work. Even right there, in the moment, Cummings had kept his mouth shut.

But why would Gallagher have chosen to hang Cummings out to dry now? He had been blaming the grounding on Albert, and the burning on accidental ignition. And it was working—with the fire marshal and with the insurance company. Why switch tactics now? By setting up Cummings to take the fall, he was almost certainly sacrificing the twenty million dollars. No insurance company would pay out if a high-ranking employee was convicted of purposefully destroying the boat.

The sun bounced off the melting snow on the side of the road. Hank closed his eyes against the blinding glare. Only one thing would be serious enough for Gallagher to throw away that kind of money. Murder. Felony murder. A killing committed during the course of a different felony—say, insurance fraud—could make the defrauders guilty of homicide, too, even if they weren't on the boat at the time. And a man with a fancy Ladue lawyer would certainly have had that explained to him.

But what would link Gallagher to the murder? Thanks to that idiot Fizzel, it was public knowledge that Mandy had a stalker. And a stalker would have been after just Mandy, not the boat. Gallagher could have easily avoided involvement in that. So what had changed so quickly? Hank's eyes snapped open. Albert had changed. He'd woken up.

But nobody knew Albert was awake. Except the people at the hospital. So of course Gallagher knew. He obviously had sources in the hospital. But just knowing that wouldn't be enough to throw away his currently ironclad strategy. To be really sure that his blame-the-captain strategy wouldn't work, Gallagher had to know what Albert had said last night. And there was no way— Oh, God. Duane.

“Stop the car.”

“What?” Sheila said. “Are you kidding me?”

“Stop the car. Now.”

Swearing under her breath, Sheila pulled as far off the two-lane road as she could, driving the car half onto a snow-bank to get it out of the path of traffic. Hank climbed out onto the snow and slammed the door. He did not want Cummings to hear this conversation. He whipped out his cell phone and scrolled to Duane's number as he walked as far from the car as he could across the snowbank. He was pretty sure the kid was off duty. Duane picked up on the third ring, his voice shaking. Hank swore to himself. He really liked the kid.

“What'd you do, Duane?”

“I'm sorry, sir. I'm so sorry. He said I needed to call in when Mr. Eberhardt woke up. And that I needed to listen in on what you and Mr. Eberhardt talked about and then call that in. Or my mom would lose her job.”

And Hank had let him stay in the hospital room during the interview, so Duane had gotten to listen to the entire thing. He swore again.

“Who's
he
, Duane? Who told you to do this?”

“Mr. Cummings. The guy with the glasses and the nice shoes.”

“And who did you ‘call in' to?”

Duane paused. “I guess it was him. It was a cell phone number with one of those electronic voice messages. I just left a message about everything.”

“So you didn't actually speak with anybody?”

“No, I guess I didn't.” Duane's voice was still shaking. “Sir … sir, I'm so—”

“Gimme the phone number.” Hank fished a pen out of his breast pocket and wrote it on his hand. Odds were that it was a disposable cell and couldn't be linked back to Gallagher.

“Duane…” Hank stared at the trees. He thought briefly about doing some kind of job probation for the kid, but if it got around that that was the only penalty for such a huge violation, he'd have no authority left at all. This sheriff job sucked just about every way it could at the moment. He fired Duane and got back in the car.

Sheila glared at him and pulled back onto the road. Hank turned around and stared at Cummings. “So you threatened my deputy and his mother.”

Cummings nodded.

“Who does the phone he left the message on belong to?” Hank asked.

The briefest of pauses. “Me.”

“Really? Then what did his message say?”

A slightly longer pause. “He … he recounted Albert Eberhardt's interview with you.”

“No shit,” Hank said. “What exactly did Deputy Shrum say?”

Cummings turned away and stared out the window. “I think I want a lawyer.”

Marvelous. Hank spent the rest of the ride trying to figure out what the hell Albert had told him last night that had Gallagher throwing away twenty million dollars. And who the hell had sabotaged the
Beauty
and killed Mandy Bryson in the process.

 

CHAPTER

27

No one was home.

Ryan Nelson was on his way back to school in St. Louis, Michelle informed Hank before slamming the door in his face. And Roy Stanton had left that morning, according to the neighbor who had thankfully not slammed the door, but actually invited Hank in. For coffee, thank God.