Show Me (Thomas Prescott 4), Nick Pirog [classic children's novels .TXT] 📗

it odd that Odell was there all by himself. That big store and no checker, no one stocking shelves.

The anvil fell.

They were having a meeting.

I turned to Mallory and asked, “Why didn’t you go to the meeting?” Neil might not have been aware that Chief Eccleston and the Mayor where in on the cover-up, but from the pictures, he would have been certain Greg Mallory was involved.

“What meeting?” he asked.

I could feel Wheeler’s gaze on my shoulder.

“The night of the Save-More murders.” I was guessing that Neil wanted to meet with the parties involved before he did anything rash. That would mean Tom, Odell, and Mallory.

“I was on a cruise,” Mallory replied. “My wife’s and my fortieth. I don’t know anything about a meeting, I swear.”

I believed him.

If he’d known, he would have been there, and he would be dead.

I wasn’t exactly sure how the meeting changed things. I wasn’t sure if the group was the target or if it was just Neil. Maybe Ramsey decided to clean house. Maybe he planned on killing everyone involved. Then again, the Mayor, Eccleston, and Mallory were all still alive. Surely, there were chances in the last four years to get rid of them. Ramsey must have decided it would have looked too suspicious and that someone would eventually put the pieces together.

I looked at Eccleston and asked, “Were you invited to the meeting?”

His face flushed.

He was.

I turned to the Mayor. “What about you? Where you invited to the meeting?”

She shook her head.

I didn’t know whether or not she was lying. I would need an hour in a locked room with her to know for sure.

“Anyhow,” I said, “Lowry shoots the six of them, killing five. Then he jumps in his car and makes a getaway. He pulls over on the side of the road.” I pointed to Team Blackwater and said, “I’m guessing that Lowry was meeting someone. That he was to get another big bag of cash for having completed the job. But Team Blackwater has strict instructions from Ramsey that Lowry needs to be terminated. It’s too big a risk to let him walk. So they kill him in his car and make it to look like a suicide.”

“You sonofabitch!” the Mayor yelled, running toward Ramsey, banging her manicured hands against his shoulder. “You murdered all those people!”

Dolf peeled Mayor Van Dixon off David Ramsey and stood between them. She screamed, “You’ve made us all accessories to murder!”

“Calm down, Paula, just calm down.” Ramsey put his hands up. “I did no such thing.” He turned toward me and said, “You spin a good yarn, Mr. Prescott, but I hate to disappoint you. Neither I nor anyone I employ had any part in any murder.”

It was the way he said it.

Wheeler glanced in my direction.

She must have felt it too.

“Neil Felding was getting fifty thousand dollars a month for the rest of his life,” Ramsey continued. “There’s no way he ever would have risked that by talking. Trust me, I knew the guy for twenty years. Money talked with him. There was no need to murder him.”

“Seems like you were paying out a lot of money,” Eccleston spat.

Ramsey snorted, then said, “You think you were worth more than twenty thousand a month, just to sit on your fat ass?”

“Twenty thousand a month?” Eccleston huffed. “Try half that. And I did plenty. I protected you.”

“Protected me?”

Eccleston glanced at me. I could almost see him straddling an invisible fence. Keep his mouth shut and hope for the best or speak his peace and accept the worst.

He chose the latter. “Mike Zernan.”

“Who?” asked Ramsey.

“Don’t act like you don’t know,” Eccleston scoffed. “He was the Save-More investigating officer. He wouldn’t leave the murders alone. Kept at it even a couple years after. Said it just didn’t feel right. Then he came to me one day and told me that he thought maybe Lunhill was somehow involved in the murders.”

I’d never been able to figure out what had tipped Mike off and I asked, “What made him think that?”

“Something about the murders had never set well with him. I think it was the way Lowry yelled at Odell. Mike thought it sounded rehearsed.”

I’d never seen the video, so I couldn’t speak to this.

Eccleston continued, “So he started looking into all the victims’ backgrounds. Will Dennel ran a sports book, even had his little notebook on him when he was killed, and Mike thought maybe there was something to that. But that quickly sputtered out and he started looking into Felding. He thought it was suspicious that he’d had this skirmish with the CEO of Lunhill, then resigned just three weeks before he was killed. Then when he found out that Lunhill had ties to Blackwater, that’s when he really started to think that they might be involved.”

I’d cracked open many cases following the same formula—a gut feeling substantiated by coincidence and correlation.

I said, “And that’s why you made Mike see a psychologist and paid them to diagnose him with PTSD from his time in the military. Not to mention bouts of paranoid schizophrenia. Anything that would mandate he retire.”

Eccleston nodded. He was all in now.

I almost said, “That’s when Mike stopped investigating the murders and turned that energy into restoring his hot rod. But then when I came to his house asking questions, he found a way to pass his suspicions along to me. He’d been paranoid that perhaps the unfriendly folks from Blackwater had bugged his house, hence the cloak-and-dagger operation of creating a replica of Will Dennel’s Moleskine and its surreptitious message of ‘Lunhill.’” I kept this to myself.

“But I liked Mike,” Eccleston said. “We were fishing buddies. I leveled with him. I told him that if he retired and stopped looking into the Save-More murders, I would get him a full pension with benefits.”

“And he took it?” I asked.

“He did, but apparently he didn’t stop poking his head into the investigation, which is why Ramsey over there had him taken out, just