Unspoken (6 page)

She put the handwritten inventory list on the display case.

He wrote her the check that made the coins his.

“Thanks.”

“How many more coins do you have, Charlotte?”

“That’s a conversation for another day. Will you lock up?”

“Sure.”

“Thanks for the chocolates.” She pulled out her keys, picked up the gift-wrapped box, and disappeared down the back hall.

He heard the security door chime as she left. A twin. There were two of them. He felt immensely grateful he was only dealing with one.

“Has Charlotte told you much about herself?” Paul asked, turning over one of the coins he had bought.

Bryce paced Paul’s home office. “She likes Irish setters.”

Paul laughed.

“She’s told me a bit,” Bryce expanded. “Graham Enterprises. Lives in Silverton. Details Chapel had already given me. She’s got a twin sister, Tabitha, in New York, and a brother-in-law, Thomas, who gambles. Chapel is now certain she’s the sketch artist CRM.” Bryce turned to look at his friend. “Would you be interested in confirming that?”

“I’ll confirm it because she’s not made it a secret,” Paul replied. “She’d tell you yes if you asked directly.”

“We haven’t had the kind of conversation that lends itself to the question.” Bryce forced himself to settle in a chair. “She met her grandfather for the first time about six years ago, got to know him a bit before he died. She’s selling things from his estate at several storefronts—antique furniture, collectibles, odds and ends. She’s sold me about a thousand coins, and has more to sell.”

“So another layer of the puzzle.” Paul set aside the coin.

“I’ve got the feeling you know the whole story, Paul.”

“I do now that it’s become of interest to me.”

“What else can you tell me?”

Paul studied him. “She’ll tell you what she wants you to know.”

“Which is probably why I feel off-kilter every time I’m around her. I’m aware I’m seeing only part of the truth, and it is annoying, not to mention frustrating. She’s mentioned John a couple of times. Would you know who that is?”

“John Key. An interesting man. I’ve met him more than once.”

“Can you tell me more without crossing into what is private?”

Paul thought about it. “John was her bodyguard for a few years, back when she was twenty.”

“There was trouble?”

“The kind most people don’t survive.”

“You don’t see that when meeting her.”

“From what I hear, there’s a lot to admire about the lady. I know cops who worked the case. They were surprised to hear she was in Chicago.”

“She’s what, mid-thirties, forty, now? Would I find an answer if I went back looking for one?”

“Probably. Would suggest you don’t. You’ll feel like you’re standing on hot bricks if you know the story. She doesn’t need that.”

“It’s history for her.”

“Don’t know how much of it’s forgotten history, but I’d say she left it behind a long time ago.”

“Then I guess I’ll find out when she decides to tell me.” Bryce got up to pace again. “She’s interesting, Paul, in an oddly
she’s-dangerous
kind of way.”

“Ginger is easy to be with, Charlotte is not.”

Bryce walked over to the bookshelf and thumbed a book. “Yeah.”

“Don’t start planning a future. I think she’s already got one.”

“She’s not my type—” He turned when Paul laughed. “Seriously, she’s just this unfamiliar aberration that has turned up in my life, and I can’t easily take my mind off her. And John Key—she doesn’t wear his ring but you can hear it in her voice. They’re close.” Bryce stopped pacing and returned to the chair and the point of the visit. “You said you wanted to talk about the buyer syndicate.”

“Talking about Charlotte is more interesting.” Paul held up a hand to stop the reply and went with the change of subject. “You’re pocketing cash commitments for six months?”

“I’m buying with my own cash first. But if I need more cash than I’ve got ready at hand, I’m willing to make a buy for a syndicate. I’ve bought three million six, and she’s still got more coins. She hasn’t said, but I’m beginning to think she’s got the full spectrum. I’d like to be ready for whatever she has.

“If you want in,” Bryce continued, “the commitment needs to be liquid and able to be wired. Any U.S. coin pre-1964—it might be ten-dollar gold pieces or it might be Buffalo nickels and Mercury dimes. If I think it’s a good deep value, I’ll buy it. If I deploy the cash, it’s locked in with the coins as the collateral. I’ll sell them however seems best to maximize their value. Cash distributes at the end of each year based on syndicate share.”

“The upside being you’re buying coins at incredibly good prices.”

“That’s the plan. The bulk of the profits are locked in by the initial purchase price. But it’s likely to be illiquid for a number of years.”

“I’ll talk it over with Ann and get you a number. Dad wants in.”

“You were showing off your coins?”

“Oh, yeah.”

Bryce smiled. “The nice thing about you having a wife who used to be a coin dealer is you can tell me yes to fifty coins for
two fifty and not get a lecture about diversifying your investments.”

“Ann wanted to buy another hundred and flip them. I told her it would be impolite to go into business against a good friend who was selling you the coins in the first place.”

Bryce laughed. “I like her instincts. It confirms my own. I marked the coins up to make a nice profit on my buy, and pros are still circling wanting to seize the opportunity for the value. Hence the reason for the syndicate. If I let what Charlotte is selling make it to the market, I’ll miss the biggest profit opportunity I’ll probably see in my lifetime.”

“She’s leaving value on the table.”

“She calls these coins
chum
.”

“Charlotte used that word?”

Bryce nodded. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

“How deep have you had Chapel dig into who her grandfather was?”

“A lot of newspaper articles about Graham Enterprises, but only a few lines about the man who owned it. He wasn’t known in his community for his charitable donations to civic causes. I think he kept what he earned during his ninety-two years, had a place to store it, and just let it accumulate.”

“He built a nice collection.”

“I’ve floated his name to other dealers, and no one has a record of doing business with him, either buying or selling. Eventually one of these coins will be rare enough a dealer will remember the actual coin, know who bought it, and I’ll have the name of at least one of the straw buyers he was using.”

“Makes sense. These are raw coins, not slabbed, which suggests he built his collection long before the internet and professional grading became the norm for higher-end coins.” Paul thought about it. “Charlotte knows what she’s got to sell. The estate inventory for tax purposes would have seen to that. She’s
had that in her hand for over a year. If these are chum, it makes you wonder—are you going to see a large volume of coins, or are you going to see a few of the whales?”

A whale was one of the rare coins that came to market only once in a generation, which began at six figures and often kept going at auction to seven figures. Bryce pondered Paul’s question and then voiced his private worry for the first time. “Paul, I’m afraid I’m going to see both.”

P
aul leaned across Ann for the remote as the ball game entered a rain delay, muted the volume, and set it back on the table. They were trying to share the couch in the den, but it wasn’t working particularly well, both of them encircled with loose papers and open files. He stuck his pen and calculator into the insulated cup holder, looked through the snack options on the table, and opened the can of peanuts.

“What do you think of the ice-skating rink?” Ann asked, setting aside the file she was reading.

“I think Boone wants to drive around on a huge ice-resurfacing machine, a Zamboni they’re called. The numbers are fine. He can turn around the business easily enough if he converts the front part of the building into a pizza restaurant and staffs it with families of those who have kids coming to practice or have a hockey game. Nothing to say a two-hour shift waiting tables the third Wednesday of every month won’t be a popular and easy job to fill. He only needs extra help when the stands are full anyway.”

“We should plan a visit to see it once he’s got his kid’s hockey team wearing Falcon jerseys.”

“I’ll let you and Vicky set it up. Tell Margaret to put it on my calendar.”

“What did Bryce have to say last night?”

Paul hesitated.

“What?”

“What do you think of Bryce Bishop and Charlotte Graham?”

Ann sat up, startled. “No way.”

“I’m just reading the tea leaves, but I tell you, she has his head turning.”

Ann picked up a pillow and covered her mouth, laughed, lowered the pillow enough to ask, “How much, one to ten?”

“Sevenish. He’s intrigued. He doesn’t know what to do about that, but it’s got him thinking.”

“She’s a very nice woman, Paul. Top-ten-caliber nice. Wow. The idea of it is enough to set your head spinning. It’s not going to happen, not in a thousand Sundays, but the idea of it . . . they
would
make very good friends.”

“It’s going to be interesting to see that develop.”

“She won’t tell him. I mean she will, but not directly. The security is too drummed into her thinking by now. But she’ll give him the road map if he wants to pick it up.”

“He’s the one kind of guy I think about with Charlotte Graham and think . . . yeah. He’s another John Key in his own way.”

“Oh, you bring interesting news tonight, Paul. I’m sorry I wasn’t around to hear it in person.”

“Right now it’s just her selling Bryce some very nice coins. We’ll see if it goes further. I’m wondering if you want to go out to the Dance and Covey Gallery this weekend, see what new pieces she’s drawn recently.”

“I’d love that. I wish she’d sell
Lava Flows
. When you realize it’s just colored pencils, you wonder what God was thinking when he handed her that gift. She’s good with simple mediums.”

“She’s stayed with pen and pencils, and that may be part of
the gift. She had the wisdom to learn her tools and stay within them even as the art progressed.”

“Bryce and Charlotte . . . Give me a few days for that to settle in.”

“If you hear anything on your grapevine, share the news.”

“I will.”

He nudged the folder she had been reading to shift the subject. “Your story or the case?”

Ann got more comfortable on the couch, crossing into his space. “Baby Connor. Got a minute for an idea?”

“Sure.”

“From the summary report, the child was found buried near the walk path in the park. The boy was wearing a clean diaper and clean night sleeper. He was wrapped in the light-blue blanket that had been with him when he was abducted. The blanket was over his face, held closed with a small butterfly pin—the size of something you might wear on a lapel. The pin was not something the Hewitt family had seen before. The autopsy showed the child was a victim of ‘shaken baby syndrome,’ had died approximately three days after he was taken.” Her years on the force couldn’t keep out a slight tremor in her voice as she finished. Ann lowered the page. “I’m back to sorting out the clues about who we are looking for. Shake a baby to death suggests a guy not accustomed to being around a crying infant.”

“Agreed.”

“Someone bought diapers, baby clothes. Someone had a butterfly pin—the kind of thing a woman, or more likely a young girl, would have around. It was something lying around the house that was picked up and used after the baby died. Cops should have been looking for a home with other children in it, but I’m going to guess they didn’t realize that early in the investigation.”

“A useful observation.”

Ann sorted through the photos and offered two. “The clothing
is new. So there wasn’t a very young child in the house with a sleeper already around that could be used. I would have guessed the clothing would be bought before the crime, but notice the sleeper is the right size for Connor. That’s either a lucky guess or someone was comfortable going out clothes shopping after the child was taken. The diaper’s correctly put on the child, the sleeper, the butterfly pin—those point to there being a woman somewhere in this picture. A wife with a girl six to twelve years old, maybe.”

Paul shook his head. “Other kids in the house old enough to talk, you’d better have a good cover story for the baby. It’s one thing to say you’re baby-sitting for a few hours, another when the baby is there for days. Kids talk.

“We might be looking for a grandmother,” he offered. “She would handle the diaper properly, dress the child correctly, would care to use a pin to secure the blanket to cover the child’s face before burial. A granddaughter’s butterfly pin could easily be lying around the house. A grandmother, a couple sons, money trouble in the family. ‘We’ll take an infant, he can’t tell the cops about us. We’ll get paid fast, and we’ll give him back quickly. A week, we’ve got our problem solved.’ I could hear that conversation around a kitchen table.”

Ann set aside the pages. “I like working cases with you. A grandmother. I don’t think I would have made that leap. Now how are we going to work that idea nineteen years later?”

“First question—did the people we are looking for hold the child, and bury the child, in a place familiar to them? If they did, we need to look in the neighborhood where baby Connor was found and where the Dublin Pub is located—specifically at Meadow Park.”

“The media attention on the crime, the speed with which they buried the child after he died suggests they might have made the mistake of burying him near where they had held him.
They went out at night, probably with that particular park, that specific destination in mind. It’s decent odds.”

“Baby Connor’s father, Henry Hewitt, spent a lot of time trying to find who killed his son. After Henry died, those files went to his brother. What we don’t have in our case files about the neighborhood and who lived there nineteen years ago, we may find in his.”

“We should ask if we can see them.”

“When we’ve gone as far as we can ourselves. I don’t want to raise the family’s hope of solving this without cause.”

The ball game came out of rain delay, and Paul put aside the papers and the Falcon family business to watch the game. As heir apparent to the business empire, his job was to keep an eye on the overall picture while others in the family managed the various businesses. He enjoyed the role and would be ready when his dad decided to step aside.

“They never made a ransom demand,” Ann mentioned, still studying the file.

He rubbed her ankle. “First timers. They take the child, they have a plan to call with their ransom demand, have a plan for where to collect their ransom money, but the police and media arrive in larger force than they planned for, and they panic. They’re trying to rethink how to safely get their ransom money, days pass, the child dies. They bury him. If they had walked away at that point, the cops would have had no leads, and they would have gotten away with their failure. Instead, they call.”

He waited for it.

Ann poked him with her toe. “They called.”

Paul smiled. “Wondered when you would get to that obvious fact.”

“They had a falling out. No way I buy the caller is some
third-hand person they asked to help bury the child. He was one of the original group.”

“The person who drew that map and made the pub call is probably not the one who killed the child but the partner who lost the chance for a ransom because the child died,” Paul guessed. “He’s sitting at the bar having a drink, brooding over the turn of matters, says stuff it, and decides to make the call. A nice falling out between kidnappers. Otherwise, why call? The cops have no leads on the case, the child is dead, has been successfully buried—walk away and no one is ever the wiser. But you’re angry you didn’t get paid, and it’s the other guy’s fault. So you’ll leave your map and get some cash.”

Ann slowly nodded. “I won’t give my partner up because he can implicate me in the kidnapping, but I’m sure going to collect something for my efforts and not share the cash with him because he’s the one who ruined our payday.”

“It plays. We should look for murders in the neighborhood around the pub and, say, the surrounding ten miles. Maybe this dispute escalated even further after the kidnapping goes wrong. You’re angry your partner killed the child, he’s angry you called the father to get cash. Cops are crawling all over that bar, and they have your partner’s voice on tape. You kidnap and kill a child, it’s not much of a step to kill the guy who might turn you in.” Paul thought about it. “Actually, I’m going to be surprised if that isn’t how this resolved itself. The caller didn’t call back a second time because he’s dead.”

Ann was making notes. “He got paid ten thousand for a phone call. When the money ran out, he would be thinking about how he could safely make another phone call. It’s very easy money. Nothing says he wouldn’t have been able to make a phone call from, say, Montana, and asked to have the money mailed somewhere. He’s already proven he knows what happened. He knows the father would have sent it.”

“The father would have paid just on the hope of learning the names of those involved.” Paul settled back on the couch. “The money is too easy and the risks too low not to make a second call. So, he was dead before he spent the first ten thousand. Even if he was cautious about spending the money, I’m guessing ten thousand would last no more than a year. We look for people murdered within a year of baby Connor, and I bet we find one of our kidnappers.”

Ann nudged further into his space. “This is almost too easy, at least in theory.”

Paul tossed a few more peanuts into his mouth, his eyes on the game. “The snag is out there. Cops never put a name to the voice of the caller on that tape. I have a feeling that’s going to be where we smack our heads too.”