AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You’re mean, you know that?”
Serena shook her head. “Somebody has to beat some sense into you. Now go take a shower. You stink.”
After a good rinsing of the squirrel fur out of my mouth, I steadied myself under the hot stream of the shower. The scalding water pulled my focus away from the creature trying to claw its way out of my skull.
Slowly, the pills won out, and the pain subsided to a dull ache.
When I returned to the kitchen, Serena had breakfast on the table.
“I’m not hungry,” I told her. What I really needed was a drink, except she’d fed me those awful pills.
“You need to eat.”
“When did you get so bossy?” I sat down, in spite of my complaint. I didn’t need the yelling of an argument this morning.
She finished chewing. “When did you get so stupid?”
My phone rang. It was sitting by Serena, and she answered it. “Yeah, he’s here, and he’s sober for a change… Winston,” she said as she handed me the phone.
“I’ve got information on those items you asked me to look into,” he said.
Finally some news.
“Shoot.” I scooped up some scrambled eggs.
“First, what I hear is that Detective Beal is a straight shooter, nothing weird about his cases. That Tanaka murder is still being worked, but nothing has popped yet. Our girl’s cousin is still top of the suspect list because she found the body and split, but they don’t have a motive for her, or anyone else, so it could go on a while.”
That wasn’t good news.
I finished a bite of toast. “What about the Rossi case?”
“Now, that one looks odd to me. The Coast Guard ruled it an accident pretty quickly, and it was closed.”
“What’s odd about that?”
“Nothing at that point, but looking into it, the dinghy was the only thing from the boat ever found, and that was two weeks later.”
I kept eating while he talked.
“Here’s the odd part: it was found back inside Marina del Rey.”
“So?” I asked.
“So, you leave Marina Del Rey harbor and your boat sinks out past the breakwater, and the dinghy breaks loose. How does the dinghy end up back in Marina del Rey, when the current would carry it up along the coast?”
I gulped down some more OJ. “I don’t get it. What does that mean?”
“Let’s say you want to disappear. You take your boat out, sink it, run the dinghy back to shore, and skip town. It’s been done a bunch of times.”
“That’s nuts. Why would they do that?” I asked.
“I didn’t think they had until I checked the banking records.” His voice grew animated. “Their main account had most of its money wired to a Cayman Islands account three months after they disappeared. By that time, after the search ended, they were presumed dead. The sinking had been ruled an accident, and nobody was watching anything anymore.”
“I don’t know that I can believe that.”
“I get it. Nicole is nice, and even though you never met her parents, you want to give them the benefit of the doubt.”
“From what I hear, they were devoted to her, and to their business. Why would they just cut and run, and leave their only daughter?”
