Dance or Die (White Oak - Mafia Series Book 3) (3 page)

Andy spoke up. “They are company property, but you can take them home. However, if you forget your gloves, you’ll have to buy the next pair. No working without gloves or helmet.”

She smiled at her excellent crew chief.

As she brought the second group to the washout, she saw Sheriff Cobbs pull in on the other side of the missing road.

She left the car and hurried to his side. As the men crossed to his side, he spoke to some, gripping their shoulders, rather like a general encouraging his men.

He must have sent her men he knew and trusted, men who had no connection to her father, but most importantly, men who knew how to work hard.

She smiled as she approached him. He sent the last of the crew onto the hay bed and Andy drove them away, leaving her and Sheriff Cobbs alone.

She hugged him again. “Those guys are fabulous. Thank you for picking me such a great crew.”

He smiled then sobered. “Your concerns about your father turned out to be accurate. He’s claimed Helen didn’t have a will, and as her eldest son, everything should go to him.”

Her happiness faded as her stomach soured. “So I was too late to file?” Grams would be so disappointed in her.

“Nope. Helen’s proper will has been filed and Benito’s claim rejected. However, the will states you’re the executrix if Jonas is not able to perform the duty. And while Jonas’ body has yet to show up, I guarantee you he’s dead.”

Grams had said the same before she’d died. “What does being an executrix entail?”

He handed her a business card. “My advice is that you turn the responsibility over to this lawyer. He’ll send you the papers needed to make him the executor and you can focus on turning these woods into a State Park instead of dealing with all your angry relatives.”

She hugged him again. “Thank you!”

He chuckled. “Three hugs in one day. That’s got to be a record, at least since my wife died.” A faint tone of sadness bled through the end of his words.

An overwhelming sense of commiseration swelled inside her and she hugged him again. “I’m sorry the monster killed your wife.”

“Monster?”

“That’s what Grams called her husband.”

“Ah…an accurate name for him,” he said.

“I’ve always thought my father and brothers were the worst men possible, but the more I learn of the monster…he seems even worse.”

“He was by the time I knew him, but then Benito grows worse every year.”

His words terrified her. She couldn’t imagine her father being worse than what he was when she ran away at sixteen.

He patted her arm. “You should get back up before it gets dark.”

She nodded and hurried back to Dan’s SUV.

When she arrived at the cabin, Dan and Steel were on the porch pacing. By the time she’d killed the engine, unbuckled her seat belt, and retrieved the keys, Steel had opened the door and pulled her into his arms. “Where have you been?”

“I had to take my workers down the hill. Sheriff Cobbs was there.” She pressed herself against his chest. “I almost screwed up. I had forgotten to file Grams’ will. My father had filed papers saying she didn’t have a will and claimed everything should go to him.”

“Son of a bitch,” Steel growled. “We can contest that.”

She appreciated him saying ‘we’.

“When Andy asked for a job because he needs money for college, I started to remind him Grams left him money. That’s when I realized I hadn’t filed her will. When I told Sheriff Cobbs, he took the will and had it filed today, so my father’s plan failed. Cobbs also gave me the name of a lawyer who can handle my responsibilities as executrix.”

“Can I have his name?” Dan asked.

She hadn’t realized Dan had joined them. She reached in her pocket and handed the business card to him. “Don’t lose it. It’s my get-out-of-talking-to-my-relatives card.”

Dan slipped the card in his pocket. “Just want to check the fellow out.”

They entered the cabin and went downstairs to the living room. Frank smiled as she entered. “I can’t believe the amount of work you and your team got done today. Honest to God, my Harpers Ferry grounds crew couldn’t have done that much work in a month.”

Steel shoulder-hugged her. “It is impressive.”

Then he turned his attention to the readings from his men’s work. He would point to a blotch and call it an ax blade, but honestly, to her eye, it could have been anything. “Will you excavate the mounds or leave them intact?”

“Depends if there are skeletons in the mounds. If there are, then the local Indians can claim ownership and ask for the bones. If that happens, we’ll excavate the mounds. If they wish their ancestors to remain undisturbed, then we’ll leave them as is.”

“And how do you feel about that?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Honestly, I’m rather hoping they’ll want them left where they are. “There’s a good ten to twenty years of work up there without us excavating the mounds.”

She smiled at his answer. Truth was, she didn’t want the bird and bear torn apart, just to see what they put inside. In this case, she felt the packaging was more interesting than the contents could possibly be.

“How about the mound you found in the brush?” she asked. These, she didn’t have a strong feeling about.

“As of now, I plan to excavate them. However, once we remove the brush and perform our test, that may alter.”

“If you find human remains?”

“That’s one issue. Right now there seems nothing worth preserving in its current condition, so excavating the items they’d placed inside may assist us in interpreting the data on the bird and bear.”

That made sense to her. “So if your readings show a blob similar to the one in the bear mound, and upon excavation you discover it really is an ax head, that will increase your confidence that the blob in the bear mound is really an ax, too.”

“Exactly.”

Tess’s stomach growled, “Can someone cook dinner? I need to make badges for my crew.”

Dan’s head popped up. “Talk to me.”

“About cooking dinner?”

He chuckled. “No, about badges. I like that idea.”

She showed him the pictures she’d captured this morning as each man sat in the SUV and provided his address and social security number.

She loaded them into a program Sara had sent her.

“I’d like the list of social security numbers,” Dan said.

“But Dan, that’s an invasion of their privacy.”

“Let’s continue this in your room.”

Frank, Jack, and Sonny’s heads popped up, all of them glaring at Dan.

“We’re just going to argue,” she assured them and looked at Steel. “Would you like to come?”

“No, I’m working,” Steel said.

Once Dan closed the door to her bedroom, he leaned against it. “Tess, you are bringing twenty wild cards into close proximity of Steel. With their pictures and socials, I can clear them before tomorrow morning. And if we have a problem, I can have Sheriff Cobbs remove the fellow when he arrives at the road.”

She frowned, no longer worried about their privacy rights, but worried the social security numbers might belong to some nice person who had no interest in tree barrier building. “If my father’s got someone in that group, despite Sheriff Cobbs’ efforts, then the social will probably not belong to him.”

“Yes, but you took pictures. I can run them through the government database. Then we’ll know if a picture and the social match. If it doesn’t, we have a problem.”

“Okay.”

He left and returned a minute later with his laptop and copied the files. He then kissed her forehead. “Thank you. I’ve been fretting all day how the hell I was going to vet these guys. Cobbs assured me he knows each of them personally, but his job isn’t on the line; mine is.”

“What do you mean?”

“My boss has warned me that if Steel dies, I’m done.”

“That’s not fair.”

“No, but Britain is evidently very protective over their royalties.”

“Don’t mention his affliction in front of the guys.” Steel didn’t like anyone knowing he was a British Prince.

“I wouldn’t mention it in front of you, but you’ve known for a while.”

She nodded.

“So you understand why I can’t let anything happen to him?”

“Yeah,” she muttered. To be honest, she was pretty sure they weren’t on the same page as to why Steel needed to be protected. Her reason had nothing to do with his distant connections to the Queen. Steel was a good and honorable man in danger from a lunatic mobster. That was why she thought it so important to protect him.

Once she returned to the living room, she sat by Frank. “I need your opinion on something.”

“Can you talk here, or do you need me to go to your room?” he asked softly.

That caused Steel’s head to pop up and study them.

“I was going to give my guys temporary badges good for the month tomorrow. I thought it would help me with their names and ensure no one else shows up claiming to be one of my workers.”

His brow furrowed. “No one is going to sneak in and work for a check that will go to someone else.”

She sighed. “I’m guessing you don’t know who my father is.”

He shook his head. She noticed Jack was staring at her, clearly listening. She looked to Steel. “Any reason you don’t want me to tell them?”

“That’s your business, Tess,” Steel replied, once again focused on his computer.

She glanced back at Sonny, not wanting him to be left out. They all had the right to know the danger her proximity caused. “Sonny, can you leave the food for one minute?”

He turned off the flame and hurried over and sat on the arm of the couch.

“I’m sorry. I figured you guys knew who my father was…since everyone seems to know. He’s Benito Campinelli. My great-grandfather was a powerful and vicious mafia don in Chicago. Thankfully, he was assassinated and Grams escaped to Iowa and changed her name to Campbell. That’s why I’m Tess Campbell.”

Frank’s brow furrowed like a pug while Jack and Sonny stared at her in shock. She hurried her explanation on while she still had the nerve to share this.

“My father is a horrible man. My mother either killed herself because of the nightly beatings he gave her, or my father killed her because his mistress was going to have his feral sons. I think he hung her, but I have no proof of that.”

When no one said anything, she continued. “His mistress is now my step-mother. When I turned sixteen, he tried to marry me off to a Chicago mobster, so I came to live with Grams and tried to forget I had family other than her.”

Tess ran her hands through her hair. “Unfortunately, since Grams died, several things have happened which makes me believe my father has decided to interfere with my life.” She refocused on Frank. “So I have to worry he’ll sneak in one of his thugs into my workers so they can cause trouble. That’s why I need the badges.”

“Do you think they’ll hurt the mounds?” Frank asked.

“Not if my father sent them. He doesn’t know about the mounds.”

“Good thing you’ve got those badges,” Frank said.

Dan approached and placed his hand upon her shoulder. “It’s my experience that when someone has serious backing to their ill deeds, they’ll spend the money to reproduce an authentic looking badge as well.”

Frank nodded. “He’s right. Maybe you should wait on the barrier.”

“I can’t. I have a plan that has to be met. I’ll just have to put each guy to memory,” she said and rose, ruffling Sonny’s black hair. “And you need to finish dinner because I’m starving.”

“We’re all starving,” Jack grumbled. “We haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

“Sorry about that. I’ll show you where everything is so you can make lunches.”

Jack shook his head and laughed softly.

“What?”

“The bread is on the counter, and everything else should be in the fridge.”

“Well, it depends upon what you want. Mayonnaise, mustard, and relish are in the cabinet by the fridge because they haven’t been opened yet. I don’t eat that stuff. I just bought it in case you guys do.”

“Oh, thanks for buying real butter,” Frank said.

She smiled at him and hurried back to her room, grabbed her phone, and returned to the living room where she muttered names then covered the bottom of the phone screen so she could only see their faces.

She’d gone through them twice without a mistake when Sonny finally called everyone to dinner. Frank’s hand fell on her back as they headed to the counter. “The guys will appreciate you knowing their names so soon. It’ll make them feel less like a grunt.”

Tess picked the cheese out of her spaghetti and gave it to Jack.

“You don’t eat cheese?” Sonny asked.

“Nope.”

“What else don’t you eat?”

“Red meat, no oil unless it’s Canola or Olive Oil. No processed foods, no white potatoes.”

“What
do
you eat?” Sonny asked.

“Fish, white meats, most vegetables and fruits.”