Total pages in book: 137
Estimated words: 135696 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 543(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 135696 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 543(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
“Harry tell you about what we found this morning?” Riggs asked.
Cade took a sip from his own mug while shaking his head.
“Yesterday evening, someone was at the southeast end of my lake, tramping around. Not camping. Not hunting. Just tramping around a big, but not large, though contained location. We think a man and a woman,” Riggs told him.
“The younger brother and sister?” Cade queried.
Whoa!
What?
Why would it be them?
“No clue. But if you’re right, it could be,” Riggs said. “Whoever it was knew of an access road that’s still there, but mostly grown over, and you wouldn’t know it was there unless you knew it was there. It’s my understanding, Roosevelt used that road when he thought it was time to thin out the forest in that area and get some firewood or whatever other shit he got up to in those woods when he didn’t want to hoof it. But it’s been unused since his death.”
“Looking for something?” Cade inquired.
“Was the shotgun found?” Riggs asked.
“Lincoln had it with him when the first responders arrived,” Cade told him.
“Then I don’t know,” Riggs said.
“Is all the money accounted for?” Delphine asked.
“It’s dwindling by the day, because at this juncture, a judge has allowed its use for the children and their schooling, and the oldest boy is now a medical doctor, as well as other living needs, which means they’re also using it for attorneys’ fees, and as you know, this is contentious in the extreme, and motions are filed regularly. But bottom line, yes,” Cade answered.
“So it’s not like there’s buried treasure,” she said.
Cade’s lips twitched in a way I thought this was some kind of private joke before he replied, “Not unless Roosevelt was keeping something from the surviving members of the extended family.”
Which begged a question I hadn’t had the chance to ask yet.
What would someone be out there looking for?
“Did Harry tell you what the Seattle detective said?” Riggs probed.
“Yep,” Cade replied.
“Thoughts on that considering your theory?”
“Yep,” Cade repeated, then launched in. “It was well known that Lincoln was a man who enjoyed the finer things in life. He indulged himself, his wife and his kids. And we’re seeing the results of that last. If I’m correct, and he came home from the fishing trip only to happen onto his two youngest having killed his brother and wife, and he made the split decision to take the fall for them, he had seven very long years to consider that decision. Now, if I’m a kid fucked in the head enough to commit what could only be charged as capital murder against members of my own family, I’d be a little jittery Dad faced the horrors of prison, having time to ruminate on his dead wife and twin brother, doing it with no waterfront view, doing it for me, and knowing what I’d done.”
“So you think they killed him,” I remarked.
Cade nodded. “I think it’s not a coincidence he saw those kids in the days before. And he did not see all his kids together. He visited his oldest son at college, and the younger two together, meeting them wherever they were frittering away his brother’s legacy. And I think whatever happened during that visit scared the absolute fuck out of them, and they moved in. That said, they did that shit by forcing a bottle of arsenic down his throat, so I also believe they were prepared for Dad to get out and see which way it swung.”
Cade took his hand from Delphine’s leg, sat forward and rested his forearms on his desk.
“That cop said he felt Lincoln’s hotel room had been straightened after what could have been a struggle. He was found lying serenely on the bed. Death by arsenic poisoning isn’t pretty and would include seizures, and yet the bedclothes were unperturbed. Outside that, the detective couldn’t put his finger on it, and he had no proof, but in his gut, he thought that room looked wrong. He also noticed bruising around the man’s jaw consistent with someone taking a forceful hold and pushing his head back. Last, as pertains to the scene, there was no suicide note.”
Interesting.
Cade kept at it.
“They found traces of alcohol and a mild sedative in his system. But there were no suspicious prints or DNA found on the scene, and only his fingerprints on the bottle of arsenic. The coroner had no explanation for the bruising on his jaw, but, except for another minor contusion on his shin, there was nothing else on his body to indicate a struggle. And although they didn’t find evidence of him having a sedative in his possession, something he’d take to calm anxiety or the like, it isn’t outlandish to think the guy needed some hooch and a pill to deal with what had become of his life. That said, you can get drink at a bar, you can’t say the same about sedatives. And the tests show the man was definitively, if not significantly, as in, he’d been given Rohypnol, sedated. So how do you take two or three pills in your hotel room, and not have the pack?”