Clint Faraday Mysteries collection A Muddled Murders Collector's Edition (46 page)

“
He’s a
proponent of euthanasia in limited cases where the person is known
to be incurable or deteriorated to the point where they are in
unstoppable pain or severe depression from physical
causes.

“
Rasmussen is a reputable mouthpiece. He handles estates and
dabbles a bit in politics. Not anything too odd or negative about
him. Faced Orison in court once about five years ago on a case
where he lost. Prosecuted for wrongful death, but the woman was
terminal at the time he took her on. He may have hastened the
process.”

“
Assisted
suicide? That would explain a lot! Thanks, Manny. You’ve shortened
a long process for me, I think. It fits with a character in one of
Dave’s stories in a way. It does NOT explain Donald!”

“
Then
they aren’t connected very closely.”

“
I begin
to believe that more and more. The problem is that they were found
in the same room killed with the same weapon. That is a bit too
connected for my tastes. I have to find why.”

“
Do you
know who?”

“
Closer
than the family, no. It could be someone hired by that lawyer and
doctor so even that bit’s not definite enough for me.”

“
Well,
good luck! Call me if I can do anything.”

Clint hung up, shook his head, called Orison
to make an appointment for later and went down to breakfast.

“
Let’s
not beat around the bush here,” Clint suggested. “I can figure that
Lawrence came here to kill himself. I don’t know why at this point.
Why it was here, not why suicide.

“
Doctor,
you are well-known as someone who believes in euthanasia in certain
cases. I tend to personally agree with you if there are definite
and unbreachable limits. No one should be forced to live in
constant pain or as a vegetable. I have no argument where Lawrence
Lesley is concerned. I’ve watched a few people die of lung and bone
cancer and it’s horrible beyond belief. If only you were here there
would be no question in my mind about it.

“
You, Mr.
Rasmussen, are here. I do have questions.

“
How and
why was Donald involved?”

“
I can’t
tell you – only meaning I don’t know why he was specifically
involved. The whole family’s involved in something I can’t
discuss,” he answered.

“
Something any one or all of them might kill
over?”

He looked thoughtful, then shrugged.

“
Something they might even kill to stop from being
discovered?”

“
I
suspect ... possibly, though I don’t see it.”

“
You are
here because of the will?”

“
Will? I
don’t ... his will is attested and filed. I doubt there would be
any challenge to it.

“
Mr.
Faraday, there is the possibility – and I am musing alone in my
room – that someone in that family has been taking very large sums
of money through various nefarious means from accounts of the late
Lawrence Lesley. Perhaps that is the real reason he has asked that
I come here to Panamá. I wonder if perhaps that person or those
persons might be driven to commit murder to avoid being discovered.
If the taker was shown the will would instantly be modified to
where the psychological bent of Lawrence would make him seek total
legal ramifications against that person or those persons. He was
suspicious of such things since immediately before his wife died.
His suspicions have increased greatly.

“
There is
no doubt whatever that the funds and assets are gone. It remained
to discover which of the people with access to those monies might
be the perpetrator of the embezzlement. Perhaps I must now find
someone with enough savvy of monetary processes to discover ...
things.

“
Well,
that’s what I know. It is certainly beyond my skills to do these
things personally. I will have to think much on this matter. For
the moment that is what I know.”

“
Thanks.
Perhaps I can find out if the possibility of embezzlement is any
part of this weird puzzle. The opportunity is certainly
there.

“
I wonder
who kept his financial accounts?”

“
He kept
them himself,” Rasmussen replied. “It is why I have no means to
further investigate the matter.”

“
Is
Switzerland?”

“
In
California. I suppose it’s in his computer. He was quite the expert
with the machines, as incongruous as that may seem. I have no way
to know. I am not authorized to practice in the United
States.”

“
I think
I can use the fact that he was murdered as leverage to get access.
Thanks. I’ll get on it.”

“
The
guilty party will get there first and will erase it,” Orison
warned.

“
I can
also prevent that!”

He took what little added information they
had and headed for his place to pack a bag. He got to Bocas just at
dawn where he called at immigration to arrange for an emergency
passage, then went to have Sergio tell the family that they
couldn’t leave until his investigation’s preliminary search was
complete, maybe three or four days. That would be three or four
days Panamanian time. He had a week.

He didn’t want to go to the states for a
week. The only reason this would work was because it was in
California. When he was ready he called Marko. Then he called
Dave.

“
Dave?
You studied a lot of odd things for your books. What’s an organic
source of scopolamine and that kind of drug?”

“
Here?
Datura
,
probably,” he answered.

“
Datura
?”

“
Datura metel
,
specifically. Those pink angel trumpet flowers that are all over
hell and back. Jimson weed. That kind of thing. Belladonna. Chalice
flower.”

“
I’m
headed for California. Want to come?”

“
Fuck
you!” Dave has sworn he will never go back to the
states.

“
I
believe Mr. Lesley’s attorney has contacted you?” Clint asked the
housekeeper and general manager of the Lesley Horse Farms Estate
out of Mendocino, California.

The woman was a storm-trooper type with a
look that told Clint he would go through hell to get anything at
all from her.

“
Yes. I
have already opened the office, that room there (pointing to a door
just to the side of the entrance). If I may aid you in any way,
please push the button on the interphone three times and I will
answer. I must attend my duties.”

THAT was almost a shocker! Cooperation?

Clint thanked Frieda Helmut and went into the
room. It was stern enough for an office, a place for everything and
everything in its place. The two computers were side-by-side on a
long desk against the back wall of the room. Clint called Frieda to
ask why two.

“
The
black one is on the internet at all times, the grey one is used for
the business.”

Clint noticed that the two computers were to
one end of the bench/desk. There was plenty of room for one or two
more – and it would be much easier to use these if they were more
to the center of the desk and farther apart. He checked behind to
find a connected network cable down behind the comp closer to the
center of the desk and connectors for the printer on a small table
to the left end of the desk were down behind the desk and one to
the right. Two laser printers, one not connected to anything – but
plugged in?

There were two eight outlet surge protectors
with the printers and two present comps plugged into them. The
internet cable had a splitter with the one set plugged in and
another cable to nowhere.

Neat! She didn’t worry about what he would
find on those comps because the one(s) with anything were moved.
There was a small Polaroid picture above the office comp of Amanda,
Donald and Lawrence standing in front of the comp desk holding a
trophy. There were four comps visible behind them in that picture.
That meant someone who knew he was coming had warned her, which
meant she was in on something with one or more of this cast of
characters.

He spent a little more than hour on the two
computers making copies of the disks available as well as copying
the entire contents on the hard drives onto flash drives he dropped
into his pocket. There were four plastic CD/disk files neatly
arranged with spaces where four had been removed from one of the
comp areas and two from another.

He then found Frieda and told her he had to
look at Lawrence’s rooms and possibly glance across the rooms of
the others. She said that was understood. The second floor was the
children’s rooms and the top floor was Lawrence’s suite.

There wouldn’t be anything in those
rooms.

A few minutes later he saw Frieda going into
a cottage across the lawn talking on a cell phone.

He used his own phone to call Marko. There
was no way he could get a legal warrant here to search her cottage.
Everything he wanted to find would be there. Marko could have
everything searched and copied with no one the wiser.

Clint wasted over an hour looking around. All
he could find out was that Amanda and Lawrence had more pictures
together, starting from when she was born, than any of the others.
She was shown with a man who worked at the estate quite often as
well as sometimes with the others who worked there. Sometimes
Frieda was in the background, but there were no pictures with her
directly since Amanda was about ten years old. She was often on
horseback.

Of course, that might be because the others
didn’t keep them. Amanda seemed to keep every photo she had ever
taken, and that was at least a thousand. There was a drawer
full.

Clint got the three-ringer on his cell phone
that told him to get Frieda away from her cottage. He called her
and said he had to have some information she could give about the
family. She said she probably didn’t know anymore than he did, but
she would try. They were by the office and he stepped inside. She
couldn’t see the cottage from the front. He was to keep her
occupied for as long as he could, then was to press the “call”
button on his cell to warn Marko he couldn’t go on.

Later, when he was discussing the immediate
family, particularly Donald and Trudy Lesley (her given name was
Trudy, not Gertrude), he remembered something she’d said at that
table when Lawrence had pulled his choking act. He wanted a closer
look at her rooms! He pushed the phone button and almost
immediately an alarm sounded out back. Frieda jumped up and ran
toward the back of the house, Clint close behind, to see a dark
figure in a ski suit running from her front door carrying a black
bag. She screeched and raced toward the house. Clint went back and
to Trudy’s and Donald’s rooms. There was a disk in an envelope
taped behind a painting of a vase of flowers.

He had called the police as soon as Frieda
ran toward her cottage and was back downstairs when they drove up.
He told the officer there was an apparent break-in of the cottage
out back. Four officers went through with Clint and to the house
where Frieda was screaming into her cell phone that “... a lot of
it is gone! Gone!”

She saw them and asked what they were doing
there. Clint said he called the police, the first thing you do when
there’s a crime. She said there wasn’t much missing. Just some
music disks and DVD’s she had collected. It was probably some of
the teenagers in the village below. There were some very bad people
there. From Mexico and like that.

Clint said they would have to handle it. He
wasn’t even a very good witness. He’d just run back with her when
the alarm sounded and had called the police, then waited for them
to come. They took his ID and he left. He wasn’t staying in the
states for a week. He headed back to Panamá.

“
All of
this should be somewhere in the disks or on the flash drives,”
Clint explained to Dave, Judi and Marko. “I see your operative
copied the comps’ hard drives the same as I did. We can find who
and how much, I suppose.

“
The
first thing I want read is the one from Trudy’s room. I want to
know what she had on the old bastard. He backed right down when she
said she knew something that would surprise the others about
him.”

He dug around in his bag and brought out the
disk to slip into his computer. The index brought up pictures. More
than a hundred of them.

He clicked on the first and used the arrows
to look at them in sequence.

It was Lawrence meeting with a man for a few,
then with another, then with both. There were usually horses or
tackle in the pictures. Lawrence paid the two a big chunk of cash
in three toward the end. Then there was a picture of Lawrence,
Donald and Amanda putting two trophies into the case.

Clint and Judi shrugged. Marko looked
thoughtful. Dave smirked.

“
What?”
Judi asked Dave.

“
Those
things are dated,” Dave pointed out.

Marko grinned. Judi looked thoughtful. Clint
had a studying look on his face, then he nodded.

“
I can
find who they are. These are proof of Lawrence fixing horse races,
I think,” Marko suggested. “It will be a big race. Two of
them.”

“
Oh! If
it was the Derby or something ... but he never even had a horse in
that,” Judi said.

“
Not the
triple crown races, definitely,” Marko replied. “Still, big ones.
He passed a lot of cash for the wins.”