Clint Faraday Mysteries collection A Muddled Murders Collector's Edition (88 page)

Why that comparison in his mind? He just
couldn’t focus and seemed to be making up silly fantasies. What was
damned certain was that SOMETHING was missing. There was someone
else involved. Someone who was very good at being invisible. They
left footprints, even if you didn’t see them go by.

If this stupid mood didn’t break he wouldn’t
solve anything. His mind seemed locked onto a circular track. There
was too much he didn’t know. He was letting his own emotions get in
the way of strict rationality.

The phone rang. He picked it up. Judi asked
him what the hell was wrong with him after one minute of
conversation. He told her he couldn’t get his mind into gear and
laid out what he was thinking, in brief.

“
Clint? I
know you don’t use drugs, but you’re acting like you’re on
methamphet or crack!” She sounded strange. “What have you....
Clint, what’s wrong? Really?”

“
Judi, I
don’t know! I have a headache – which I never do – and can’t
focus.” He stretched and looked at the comp. The clock said
10:14.

“
My god!
What time do you have?”

“
Time?
Around a quarter after ten. Why?”

“
I
haven’t been up for a half hour! I never sleep past five thirty! It
was dark and raining. I ... Judi, something IS wrong!”

“
What
time did you get home? What did you have to eat or
drink?”

Clint tried to think. He remembered coming
home, in a displaced sort of way. He had stopped at ... he couldn’t
remember the bar. He had talked with ... someone. He was confused
as to who or what they had talked about.

“
Judi,
this is weirder than ever. I think I was drugged! Why? Who? I only
had a beer. Nothing else.”

“
You
usually have a tequila at Neil’s. Why a beer?”

“
It
wasn’t at Neil’s. I stopped at a bar on the way home. Gina went
back to the hotel and I was down because of that. Someone was there
and waved for me to come in, so I ... no. There was someone or
something in the road and I was waved down ... it would have to be
someone I recognized or I would have waved and gone on. I can’t
remember who it was! I can’t remember which bar.”

“
Stop
trying and it may come to you. You’ll see or hear something that’ll
remind you. Association works a lot of the time with that kind of
thing. You might have been told to forget.”

“
I think
I was. I remember someone saying it would not be a good idea to ...
something.”

“
Get
Sergio to have you tested for scopolamine. It sounds like you were
given a hypnotic, for some reason.”

Clint agreed. He would go get tested. He
headed for the hospital. In a taxi.

“
Serg,
Clint was given scopolamine last night on his way home,” Judi
explained. “We want to find which bar it was and who it was he saw
there. They’ll answer you where they would look blank and say he
wasn’t there and didn’t talk to anyone if we asked.”

He grimaced and agreed. He took the police
truck and Clint and Judi to stop at all the bars between The Rip
Tide and his house. It was the fourth one, a little local place.
The old man who ran the place said Clint came in with a man and
woman. She was about forty, may have been a Tica. He was a gringo.
He said Clint had stopped to help him start his car and he wanted
to buy him a drink. Clint ordered a Balboa and they talked for
about half an hour at the little table in front.

Clint cried, “I remember stopping to help
someone with a stalled truck! His name was ... George? Something
like... I don’t remember any woman.

“
Someone
came by in ... on a bike. A Ho Fai. I remember that. I was sitting
at the table and he went by. I can’t ... there was a woman who came
from around back. She sat and was drinking a rum and coke. It was
already there, so she was ... now it’s gone again.

“
I’d
recognize George. She’s a blur. It was Carlos Ramirez on the bike.
He saw me and will remember the woman.”

Sergio thanked the prop and they headed out
toward the Bluffs. Carlos had a few hectares out there. Carlos said
he didn’t know who the man and woman were, but he’d seen them
around. He drove a Toyota truck. Green and black with a yellow band
on the doors.

“
John
Brandon. The woman is his wife, Sylvia. She’s a Tica,” Sergio
said.

They thanked Carlos and headed out toward
Drago to John and Sylvia’s place. No one was around. A neighbor
said they went to Costa Rica early in the morning. They’d be back
in four days. It was for the passport visa renewal. That left
everything up in the air for the moment. Clint was thinking a lot
better now, so would try to find who was connected with the
Brandons – and if it had anything to do with the chest and murder.
Sergio drove them back and said he was working on an angle he’d
uncovered where Avenidas was concerned. It seemed he had tried to
buy a lot of land on the coast on the other side of the Bluffs.

“
So. He
knew it was in that general area, but not where,” Clint said. “No
one had any real information except Blakley. Now she’s dead and all
of these people are in big trouble with someone – but
who?”

“
This
mean this crap doesn’t stop when we tag Avenidas, doesn’t it?”
Sergio asked.

“
It looks
that way,” Clint agreed.

Clint called Manny and asked if he could find
out anything about John and Sylvia Brandon. He said he’d check them
out. He called Manolo to see if he could find a connection. He
called Judi and asked if she could check out Sylvia any way.

“
I
already asked some people about her,” Judi replied. “It seems she
was from Colombia, not Costa Rica. She just goes with John when he
gets his visa updated. She has a two year visa on some kind of work
card. That would mean she works for John. She’s not his wife. They
let people think she is. They have that place – or John does – for
the past two years, but almost never come here.

“
They
asked a lot of questions about Avenidas, at first. John said he
might want to invest in stocks and was he trustworthy and such.
They seem to keep an eye on him and on who goes to that office.
When Avenidas is here they sit in the Seahorse Café across the
street from the office for hours. They don’t go there when he’s not
around. DUH!

“
A little
note. They were in town until after midnight night before last. I’d
say you have another suspect or two.”

“
You’re a
jewel! Thanks, Judi. You get more information faster than I can.
You’re a damned good detective.”

“
I guess.
For this kind of thing. I can get the information, I just don’t
know what to do with it when I do.”

They chatted for a few more minutes, then
Clint went to the police station to tell Sergio what Judi had
learned.

“
I found
out that Sylvia has been asking a lot of questions about somebody
she calls Nicky. He’s supposed to be from Colombia and she says she
knew him a little in Cali and Medillin. She thinks he works for
drug lords – big surprise here,” Sergio reported. “I think I want
to know a lot about her. Maybe she’s the important one and John is
just being used.

“
Yeah! I
believe that!”

“
It looks
like there’re a bunch of weird people involved. There has to be
something about that chest that’s a lot more behind this than the
treasure or the cash,” Clint mused. “Can you arrange for me to give
it a close going-over?”

“
I’ll be
with you and say I’ve hired you. We did that before. It’s locked in
the big vault.”

They went over to the property department and
through to a room that was triple-walled. It had the most valuable
things, confiscated or otherwise, there. The chest was in its own
area, the cash neatly stacked beside it with the count and the ID’s
of the people who counted it. The slip said there was one million
four hundred eighty eight thousand two hundred dollars.

“
Who
stole the twelve grand?” Clint asked. Sergio laughed and said that
was the least anyone had taken from such a find yet and it was
taken before it got to the property room. Clint noted that he and
Sergio had to have positive ID to enter the room and their pictures
were taken along with a fingerprint scan. Sergio was the jefe of
the police and had to furnish the same things a stranger would.
Good system.

There was a careful listing of the other
contents, which were replaced into the chest. Clint mostly ignored
that and the money, except for the twenty money bands that had the
initials on them. He carefully checked every inch of the chest
itself, finding nothing new.

He sat back to think, then shrugged.

“
Sergio,
I think whatever was here was taken ... or maybe not!” Clint
exclaimed. He thought a moment, then asked, “Why were only those
twenty bands marked? Could there be a reason?”

Sergio grinned and said they would find out.
They slipped the bills out of the bands. There was nothing on the
inside of the bands.

Clint inspected the bills themselves and soon
exclaimed, “Clever! Sergio, note that there are bills with a single
letter in the left margin near the bottom. Six of them in this
stack. Take them in order and they read, ‘e-l-e-v-e-n’ See if it
holds..”

Sergio picked up a stack and said, “I’ve got
‘s-i-x-t-e-e-n’ in this one. ‘t-h-r-e-e-n-i-n-e’ in this.”

They went into all of them, listed the
letters, then carefully slipped them back into the bands in the
same order they were found.

“
We have
a neat puzzle,” Clint then said. “We have the numbers and the a
name, Southern.

“
The
number are an account. Southern is a clue to which bank it’s
in.”

“
Southern
... Trust?” Sergio wondered. “There used to be a Southern Something
Trust. Offshore. It merged with Secure Sentry Bank about thirty
years ago. We come across it, at times.

“
Now! How
do we find the proper order for the numbers?”

“
It’ll be
something ... crap! We don’t have the order of the packages in the
chest.”

“
It won’t
be that. They were loose enough that they could change positions a
bit.”

“
Hmmm.
The it’ll be something on the top or bottom bill.”

They checked, but there was nothing. Clint
was inspecting a package and said, “How about the serial numbers of
the top or bottom bills? This top one starts with a three. So does
the bottom.”

They checked. That was true of all the money
packages. Top and bottom were the same.

They ended up with 43971652902001103642.

“
It’s a
matter of hyphens. We have the bank and number we can check,”
Sergio suggested. “Clint, what if there’s been a few tens of
millions of dollars deposited and sitting for fifty years? With the
interest, what would it be now?”

“
Sheeez!”
was his only reply.

They went back out and were searched. Even
the chief!

In Sergio’s office they contacted Secure
Sentry, who said there was no way to find out anything about
accounts there, so piss off. Not in those words. Sergio said there
was a dead person who had an account there for fifty years, since
before the merger with Southern. The heir could cause them a lot of
grief. He’d give the turkey on the phone half an hour and call
back. All he wanted was information for the heir. They DID have the
account number.

“
In what
name?” he asked.

“
It
should be in the .. Blakley.”

“
Those
numbers do not match any account in the name of
Blakley.”

“
Then it
will be Halverson or the company name,” Clint replied.

“
I can
tell you there is something from nineteen sixty one in the name of
Halverson ... WOOO! Seventy million dollars original deposit, now
one hundred fifty six million dollars! You’re very damned lucky
that was before we had to worry about drug money
laundering!”

“
That
makes a difference now?” Clint couldn’t stop himself from
asking.

He laughed. “We have to account for where
particularly large sums come from – large being over ten million
dollars. If you can produce a receipt for selling your land for the
ten mil it isn’t seriously questioned later if you ever need the
information. I think it is not our responsibility to authenticate
such receipts if they are presented in a legal form, which means
with a notary seal.

“
Colombians, Mexicans and Peruvians seem to sell a LOT of
land at VERY high prices. Certain gringos, too. Did you know a
small villa in Ft. Lauderdale sold for more than fifty million
dollars? In the middle of the land crash?”

They laughed a bit. Clint said he’d tell the
heir what she had inherited so she could make a claim.

“
Well,
that accounts for a lot of things,” Clint said when he hung up.
“What in the hell will Gina do with a hundred fifty
million?”

“
She can
give whatever she has no use for to me!” Sergio suggested – which
got him a middle finger salute.

Off
Center
Day

Next step; find out how the other players fit
in. That was Brandon and wife or whatever. They were another weird
part of this. Clint still had a nagging feeling that something was
a long way off-center. How would Avenidas and/or whoever else know
about the bank numbers being in that chest?