Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 83912 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 420(@200wpm)___ 336(@250wpm)___ 280(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83912 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 420(@200wpm)___ 336(@250wpm)___ 280(@300wpm)
“The best criminals are always the best actors.”
He just keeps on throwing daggers. “Macom Maloy. Have you checked him out?”
He snorts. “If you thought I was an amateur, why’d you hire me and pay me so damn much money?” He doesn’t wait for a reply he has no intention of getting in the first place, moving on. “Of course I checked out the ex-boyfriend. And that dude is a tool, but he’s not smart enough to pull off the blackmail and murder, especially living in another city.”
“But he’s got money to pay someone else to do it.”
“That man isn’t thinking about Faith Winter, and he has no connections to Meredith Winter at all. That man is thinking about money, art, and some private fuck club like the one you own. He used to take Faith to it, but now he just takes himself—as in several times a week.”
I had no idea Beck knew about the “cigar club” that fronts for the sex club I bought from a friend and client last year when he went off and got married. But then if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be worth hiring. And the fuck club Macom took Faith to—and replaced her with—explains many of Faith’s references to her sexual past. It also indicates another uncomfortable disclosure with this woman I’m not looking forward to anytime soon.
“Let me run down what I know,” Beck says. “Thanks to the security feed from your father’s house, I’ve determined that Meredith Winter visited your father once a week for six months before she died. The checks he wrote her began at two months.”
I inhale a jagged breath. “So she did visit him.”
“She went to his home during those visits, and she stayed there for hours when she did. I have a few instances of them kissing by his door. He was banging her, but it went further than that. They had regular phone conversations in between their visits. No emails, unfortunately. But the bottom line here. A relationship between the two pokes holes in the blackmail theory. He sounds like he was giving her the money by choice. Paid sex, perhaps.”
“My father liked his women thirty years his junior,” I say. “He wasn’t paying a fifty-something-year-old woman for sex.”
“She was still a gorgeous woman.”
“That’s not it. Moving on. Meredith wasn’t paying the bills at the winery. She was taking his money and the money made at the winery and doing something with it.”
“I was coming to that. Her bank accounts were dry for that four-month window she was taking checks from your father. She’d deposit those checks, let them clear, and then clean every penny out of her accounts. I don’t know yet where it went, but I’m working on it.”
“She was giving it to someone,” I surmise.
“Or stashing it,” he says. “Meredith had a revolving bedroom door. She’d have a great many candidates for cohorts or enemies, but one option stands out. Jesse Coates was seeing Meredith for the few months before your father. Twenty years her junior and a successful stockbroker who moved from New York to San Francisco. He might be behind a scam.”
I scrub my jaw. “My father was too smart to be scammed. Blackmailed, yes, but not scammed.”
“Blackmail is a scam.”
“Blackmail is blackmail. Being seduced by a woman and stolen from is another.”
“You wouldn’t believe the people I’ve seen scammed, my man,” Beck says. “It would blow your mind. And if that’s what went down, it was done smartly. I see no contact between Meredith and Jesse in the six-month window that she was seeing your father, but that really doesn’t matter. That could be part of an end game.”
“What are we thinking was the big end game?”
“I don’t make assumptions I can’t back up. And what doesn’t add up to me is that Meredith wasn’t paying the bills at the winery. She could have sold the place for a small fortune.”
“Faith inherited on her death as a stipulation of her mother’s inheritance, which would mean her mother could not sell without Faith’s willingness. And I can tell you that woman appears to be holding on to a sinking ship because it’s her father’s wishes.”
“Yes, Faith. I’m still working on figuring out that hot little number.”
That possessiveness flares in me again. “And?” I ask tightly.
“And right now she looks clean, but so does Jesse. Not to mention the fact that you just gave her motive. She wanted to keep the winery; her mother did not. Maybe her mother was trying to force her hand into selling by not paying the bills and destroying the vines. The mother wanted the payday that property would be worth. Faith didn’t. Maybe your father was in on the payday.”
“Sell for the massive profit margin the property and operation are worth, or have them taken away.”
“That’s the theory I’m going to work on.”