Thirty-Six and a Half Motives
Page 80

“Exactly. He was reported missing right after Thanksgiving twenty-five years ago. Around the time of the factory fire.”
“Anything else?”
“I looked up anyone with the name Steyer from that time period.”
“And?” I asked.
“Allen Steyer owned the fertilizer plant and several other businesses.”
“Why would he be involved with Thaddeus Brooke?”
“I don’t know, but he died around the same time. I found his obituary.”
My eyebrows rose in surprise. “What? Why didn’t someone from the state come investigate if all these people died or went missing?”
“You know the answer to that.”
“J.R.”
She nodded, then leaned her head closer to mine and whispered, “Rose, think about it. Steyer was rich and powerful and obviously dirty.”
The answer hit me like a ton of bricks. “Oh, my word. Allen Steyer was one of J.R. Simmons’s Twelve. Skeeter didn’t know who he was, but he said he thinks the man who covered this area disappeared around the time of the factory fire. Instead, he died. It fits.”
“Yeah, I think so, too.”
“Find out anything about Nick Thorn?”
She shook her head. “No record of him here, but I suspect he’s from Little Rock anyway.”
“Agreed.” I had to confess that I’d just seen Mason, but I didn’t want to upset her. “I have someone looking into him. Someone with the resources to get information fast.”
“Skeeter?”
I shook my head. “Although I suspect he’s lookin’.”
“Joe?”
“No. But he’s next on my list for a chat.” I paused. “I saw Mason.”
“What?”
The two women working in the room looked over at us, so Neely Kate grabbed my arm and dragged me down a short, empty hall. “You told him about Nick Thorn? Are you crazy?”
I straightened my back and gave her a defiant look. “I trust him.” When she started to protest, I held up my hand. “I know you and Skeeter don’t, but if I’ve learned one thing, it’s to go with my gut. And my gut tells me that Mason Deveraux would sooner die than put me in harm’s way.” I paused. “And if you can’t accept me sharing information with him, maybe we need to tackle this separately.”
Her mouth dropped open. “You would do that? You would let a man come between us?”
“No. This is no different than if you’d asked me to stop trusting Jonah. Or Bruce Wayne. Mason can help us.”
“Well, we don’t have a heap of evidence implicating either of them.”
“Everything you have is circumstantial and hearsay.”
She put her hand on her hip. “I thought he didn’t want to be caught in the middle.”
I shrugged. “There’s nothing shady about looking up some information. We need all the help we can get.”
“But can you trust him?”
I looked her in the eye. “I would bet my life on it.”
“You just did. Let’s hope you picked the winning side.”
 
 
Chapter 28
 
 
When we left the courthouse, Neely Kate called Skeeter to fill him in on what she’d discovered. She hung up grinning.
“What did he say?”
“He said he’d look into Allen Steyer and get back to us.” Her grin spread.
“What else did he say?”
“He said if we didn’t get off the damn street, Jed was gonna hang out with us again.”
I laughed and spotted Jed sitting in his parked car. “Let’s go to the office. It’s after five o’clock, which means we have less than five hours. We need to figure out what to do next.”
“We keep diggin’,” Neely Kate said, stopping by Skeeter’s car. She stuffed our guns into her purse. “We keep looking until it’s time.”
I dug out my keys and unlocked the door to the landscaping office.
“I say our next task should be to find out who rented that shed twenty-five years ago,” Neely Kate said.
“But do we need to do that?” I asked as I locked the door behind us. “We were only looking into it because we thought the storage unit might be the shed mentioned in the shorthand page.”
“Maybe so, but my gut tells me to keep digging. If you’re listening to your gut, then we should listen to mine, too.” She shrugged. “Besides, we’ve got nothing else to do, but I think we should wait another hour until it’s dark.”
“Why?” I asked. “Jed couldn’t find the Pelgers. What are you proposin’?”
She grinned and plopped down on the sofa by the front door. “We’re going to snoop in the Pelgers’ office.”
“In the antique store?”
“Yeah. And the beauty of it is that we aren’t breaking and entering, because the place was already broken into when the crowd looted the store. We’re only entering, which sounds so much less illegal.”
My eyebrows rose as I sat down next to her. “And yet it is illegal.”
“So you want to sit this one out?” she asked.
“Shoot, no. I’m comin’.”
“So now we need to figure out what to do for the next hour.”
I studied her for a moment. I suspected she wasn’t going to like what I was about to propose. “I need to talk to Joe.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Why?”
I sighed. “I want to ask him what he knows about Kate and her boyfriend. And to make sure he knows about her threat against Hilary.” And while that was all true, I had other reasons. Would Neely Kate understand? “There’s more . . . I have no idea what’s gonna happen tonight. If anything happens to me, I realized there are too many things left unsettled between us.”
Her mouth pinched tight. “You’re not dyin’, Rose Gardner, so stop talking like that.”
“They still need to be said, Neely Kate,” I said softly.
She was silent for several seconds before she said, “So what are you proposin’? It doesn’t sound like you’re talking about a phone call.”
“No. I need to talk to him in person.”
She nodded, then a grin spread across her face, and she jabbed my arm with her elbow. “Hey! If you get back together with Joe, we’ll be related. Maybe I should support that endeavor.”