"Did you eat on the plane?" she asked.
He snickered. "Been a while since you've flown anywhere, huh?"
Never, actually. If not for a few family vacations to the Great Smokies, the Rockies and Disneyland, she'd have never crossed the Missouri border.
"I can reheat the veggie casserole we had for dinner, and there's plenty of Jell-O salad."
To his credit, he didn't grimace at the menu. "Thanks, but I'm really not hungry. Should be, but maybe pretzels and snack mix are more filling than I thought." He glanced downward at a rustling noise. "Outski, you nosy mutt."
Nabbed with his snoot in the grocery sack, Phil schlumped back into the living room and flopped beside the ottoman. A dog's life wasn't merely seven times a human's; it was fraught with unending disappointments.
"So," Jack said. "Got anything interesting to show me?"
"Mm-hmm." A finger traced down her neck, then followed the scoop of her tank top. "And I found some interesting stuff on the Internet, too."
"Oh, yeah?" Eyes hooded, he blew out a growly sigh. "If I ever get you alone
"
"Promises, promises." There was plenty more double-talk where that'd come from, except Dina sensed the governess in a smock and elastic-waist jeans tuning in.
She wanted him, and was damn well going to have him. Give to him completely, body and soul
but not on a lumpy couch. Or a pallet on the floor. Not like horny teenagers half listening for Mom's footsteps in the hallway.
Jack wouldn't want her that way, either. The time for lovemaking would come and so would they. In private, if only for a few hours.
Moving aside the laptop, Dina slid over the sheaf of papers reordered after her charming repartee with Gerry Abramson. Yes, the man had a right to be angry. It was her prerogative to not remind Jack of the deadline. Messages stacked in his voice mail queue undoubtedly contained several from the insurance broker.
Beginning with the mundane, she showed Jack sheets of photos from the seminar posted on F.D.I.C.'s Web site. "Carleton deHaven was in most of them. I didn't waste ink on the ones without him."
Jack sorted through them, discarding a few at a glance. "No time-date stamps in the corners," he grumbled.
Professional, not amateur photography, Dina assumed. Or the shots were cropped to look that way. "I compared them with the seminar schedule. They're more or less in chronological order."
The beer sluicing down her throat brought an involuntary shudder. A half can and already a nascent buzz was commencing at her temples. Once a cheap date, always a cheap date.
"MentalWealth," she said. "These people really believe they can
think
themselves rich?"
"Every generation has a guru." Jack shrugged. "Positive thinking is better than wallowing in the negative. Like me being positive the ones raking in the cash aren't the pigeons flocking to these mumbo-jumbo conventions."
"Is that legal? Promising people they
will
get rich that way?"
"Never underestimate the power of greed, kid. If it doesn't pay off, the onus is on the pigeons for not believing
enough.
"
He bent over a photo sheet, then held it up, angling it toward, then away from the light. "Got a magnifying glass?"
Guy-speak for "Go get me a magnifying glass," knowing the two Harriet used to read with were on the tray table. He wasn't being rude. Men were genetically programmed to pose supply questions, rather than state demands. Primarily because women were genetically programmed to answer them.
After a few seconds' examination under Harriet's lighted, rectangular model, Jack turned the sheet around and passed Dina the magnifier. "Second row, third shot from the left. Tell me what you see."
A beaming fat man with a comb-over was shaking hands with F.D.I.C.'s dissipated has-been celebrity endorser. In the background, Carleton deHaven looked on, an elbow braced on a crossed forearm, a self-satisfied smirk on his face.
"Compare it to this one." Jack slid over shots of Sunday's informal brunch. In those, deHaven presided over a round table of nattering disciples. At each surrounding table, a MentalWealth associate held court with seven attendees not quite as enthused to break muffins with an aide-de-camp.
"Okay," she said. "DeHaven doesn't seem to be chatting up his group like the other men. He isn't eating much, either."
"Look closer at him, then at the later one in the hotel lobby."
Frowning, she bobbed the magnifier left to right. Obviously there was something important Jack wanted her to find on her own. As if she'd ever been a whiz at those What's Different? panels in the funny pages.
A final sweep begged a double take, then another. "The resolution's not great, so I can't be sure," she qualified. "Maybe it's just a shadow, but in the lobby photo, deHaven's hair is"
"Creased," Jack said. "Hat hair."
"Could be."
"Well, it ain't a shadow. And he's wearing the same three-button sport shirt and jacket he wore at the brunch." Jack tapped images of others in both photos. "Everyone else at the brunch, then in the lobby, is in a business suit and tie."
He related deHaven's alleged late-morning migraine attack and the desk clerk's report about Comb-over's frantic pacing. "If deHaven didn't go AWOL midafternoon, why would Comb-over be in a tizzy about the endorser's incoming flight? No doubt, a flunky checked the parking garage and saw deHaven's car there. It's logical the minions kept dialing his room and his cell. Probably even knocked at 220's door a time or two, but they wouldn't dare get a passkey and barge in."
"Why not, if he was ill?"
"Also logical that at some point, possibly from day one at MentalWealth, deHaven convinced them to never invade his privacy. For all I know, he was screwing around on Belle every chance he got. In any event, if he hadn't established a do-not-disturb policy, going missing at this gig would be too risky."
Dina said, "He wasn't scheduled to speak again until the banquet that night. But if Comb-over did call deHaven's cell phone, why didn't he just answer it?"
"Because he was either in the Park City airport or on the plane, flying back to Little Rock. The background noise, either place, would give that away."
"He could say it was the TV," she countered.
"A migraine makes you extremely light and sound sensitive. A TV that loud would be excruciating. Plus, one PA announcementat the Missouri airport or in flightblasting in the speaker holes, and deHaven's screwed."
Dina had met her ex-husband's parents' and siblings' flights at the airport. Announcements and canned precautions were as constant as hospital pages.
"The hat hair is key," Jack said. "If the bastard wasn't sweating before or after he shot Belle, airplane cabins are stuffy as hell in February, let alone July. Besides that, just try and convince me that anybody with a migraine ripping his skull would sit in a hotel room with a friggin' ball cap on."
Excellent point. Gwendolyn Ellicot at TLC had migraines and prescription meds to combat them. The tablets were miracle drugs, but Gwendolyn had to lock herself in her office and lay her head on a dog pillow on the desk until the pain relented.
"You're thinking the ball cap was deHaven's disguise."
"Sort of." Jack leaned sideward to exchange his empty beer can with a full one from the sack. A waggled finger offered Dina a second round. She declined, rather than graduate from cheap date to a blithering, giggling idiot.
He cupped his hand over the tab to muffle the popping sound. "I figure he changed into faded-out jeans or shorts, and tennis shoes or sandals in the room. The dress shoes, slacks, sport shirt and jacket went into a small carry-on. Add a ball cap, the drugstore specs worn for both Simpsons' photo IDs and it's down the fire stairs."
"The sport shirt wasn't packed." Dina indicated the morning and evening photographs. "He wore that."
"No, he didn't. It's purple."
Not just purple. Bright, almost Barney violet.
"With the sports shirt buttoned," Jack said, "you can't tell whether there's a T-shirt under it at the brunch. Can't later in the lobby, either, but by then, it's under there for sure. DeHaven chose a memorable, can't-miss color he
wanted
to be seen in. But keep it on for the hustle downstairs and out the garage? Dead giveaway."
Dina looked down at the photos trying to imagine deHaven dressed as Jack described. In Web site publicity stills and previous seminar archives, deHaven was always business formal. Anyone accustomed to that uniform of sorts might not connect a man of similar stature and coloring in Sunday-go-to-Dairy-Queen clothes.
"But how do you know he wore glasses?"
"Done it myself a thousand times. Specs alter facial features more than you realize. For a few dollars more, you can buy lenses that react to sunlight and stay shadowy-gray indoors."
"Very impressive, McPhee."
"I have my moments." He grinned. "And the ticket agent at the Park City airport thinks P. David Simpson wore glasses."
"Cheater."
"Professionally, yeah. Personally?" Jack shook his head. "Just because you have me on a diet, I'll still read menus, but that's as far as it'll go."
"Define read," she said.
He chuckled. "Big boobs? Nice butt? Hey, I'm human. Usually I keep the drooling down my shirt to a minimum."
Ogling, but not touching, much less taking them home to hump their brains out in her bed was a new and refreshing concept for Dina. But if Jack didn't stop looking at her like that, Harriet was going to get a triple-X floor show any second.
Forcing her attention to the rest of the printouts, she said, "Speaking of P. David Simpson, and his brother, Robert K
."
"Brothers?"
"The elder went by 'Paul,' not 'David.'" Reproduced Ohio newspaper articles were placed on top of the photos. "On April 3, 1974, 148 tornadoes chewed an almost 2600-mile swath across a dozen states and into Windsor, Ontario. Over 300 people were killed. Nearly 5500 were injured."
Jack's expression hardened, his eyes flat and malevolent. "Then deHaven didn't buy a driver's-license-and-credit-card package off the street." He chafed his jaw. "Nah, too common criminal for a hotshot like him. He ripped off two disaster victims' identities."
"Oh, not just any two." Dina wriggled around and up on her knees to reach across the table. "I got in a hurry and misspelled his last name in a search box. The prompt said, 'Do you mean
Carl
Haven?' If it wasn't for the weird tangents Yancy went on yesterday, I'd have ignored it and started over."
"But there couldn't have been just one Carl Haven," Jack said. "Almost any name search brings up a million hits."
"It did. I knew Yancy would then enter 'Carl Haven + Robert K. Simpson' to narrow the field."
Her finger hopscotched from highlighted sentences and paragraphs in newspaper stories dated from April 4 to April 11. "Ellen Simpson, her daughter, Candice, and two foster kids, fifteen-year-old Carl Haven and twelve-year-old Melody Haven, made it to the storm cellar at their farm.
"Ellen's husband, Paul, her brother-in-law, Robert Simpson, and a neighbor, Vincent Pflanders, were killed trying to batten down the outbuildings."
Dina quoted Ellen Simpson, "'There wasn't nothing left of the barn. Over a hundred years old it was. Paul and Bobby's grandpa built it out of oak. Not a rafter, a feed troughit's like a bomb blew it to bits, then scattered the splinters as far as the eye can see.'"
Jack drained his beer and slammed the cozy on the table. He scraped a fist over his mouth, muttering under his breath. "Even if I believed in coincidences, this can't be one."
Another page was presented. "Mrs. Simpson's obituary. She died of cancer in January 1991. I tried, but other than later tornado-related hits, I didn't find anything else on Carl or Melody Haven."
She hesitated, then admitted, "Well, I might have, if I'd stuck with it, but"
"Glad you didn't. You nailed a wild goose. No sense in chasing it."
"Assuming Melody is his sister, I was hoping to track her down, so you could contact her."
Jack nodded. "If she's findable, I may, but Belle told me Carleton was an only child. Anything Melody could tell me about him would be ancient history."
He gestured at the rest of the pile. "Anything on how they became the Simpsons' foster kids?"
Damn. It hadn't occurred to Dina to look. Yancy would have zeroed in on their birth certificates.
"How about
Carleton deHaven
?" Jack asked. "We searched some the other night, but what's the earliest dated reference you found to him?"
Double damn.
"Jesus, cheer up, kid. I'm fishing out loud. That wasn't part of the homework assignment I gave you."
