Sedona Law 6 by Dave Daren (best non fiction books of all time .TXT) 📗

She walked out the door. As soon as she was out of sight of our windows, we all laughed.

“Wow,” I said. “What was that?”

“Poor lady,” Vicki shook her head. “She’s at the end of her rope, poor thing.”

I pulled the coffee soaked, ripped paper off the ground and shook it off.

“It’s the coroner’s report,” I said.

“Well,” Vicki said. “At least we got it.”

“We got it,” I said.

I took it back to my desk and dried it off. Once I had it all dried, I skimmed it, and found it was longer than I thought it should be. But, it was coffee soaked, and so I ran a copy of it.

Then I looked through the accordian files she had given us. I tossed one to AJ.

“Find out what we have in there,” I said.

“A whole lot of paperwork,” AJ said. As soon as she opened it, receipts and papers came flying out. “This explains some things.”

I went through the other one. It seems James may have been a little bit more organized than his wife. There were motorcycle receipts, vehicle titles, insurance paperwork, and then the occasional receipt from Target crumpled in the middle of it all.

I spent the rest of the day going through these papers, piecing together a portrait of this man. Finally, smashed beneath a pile of electric bills, was a stapled document that I pulled out and smoothed. I skimmed the contents.

“Holy shit,” I muttered.

The document was a five year contract between Roy Oberland, and James Matthews. It was signed about a year before his death.

James was contractually bound to Roy as a manager for five years. This happened in the mainstream music world, but in the independent circuit, it seemed a little pretentious and unnecessary.

But, it was a simple homemade contract, not admissible in court. And, if any inference could be made regarding the physical state of the contract, it wasn’t important to James.

Suddenly, this case started to make a lot more sense to me. There was a residency in Vegas. There was a contract. There was an ego. There was a death.

But what was with the elephant tusks?

Chapter 9 

It was the next morning in the office, and now that we had fresh energy, we could look at the case with new eyes. This was great, because the arraignment was right up on us, and we still had nothing concrete.

“So our prevailing theory right now...” AJ conjectured. “Is that Roy killed James because he tried to fire the whole band, including Roy, before he left for Vegas. Roy told him ‘you can’t do that, we have a contract. Blah blah blah’.”

“Right,” I said. “And James said ‘then sue me with your little Microsoft Word printout’.”

“But why the smuggling?” AJ asked. “Who was doing that and why?”

“After the whole thing with Kelsi in the office,” Vicki said. “I find it difficult to believe she mastermind a smuggling operation.”

I laughed. “That would be hard to imagine.”

“Holy shit,” Vicki said. “I just got a notification. The police have picked up Irwin Montague.”

“Where was he?” I asked.

“He came back to his house for some reason,” she said. “That’s all I know. I want to talk to him. He’s supposedly the one that name Kelsi.”

“You think he’ll talk?” I asked.

“He already did,” she said. “He’ll talk more.”

She left the office and I turned to AJ.

“We’ve got the arraignment tomorrow,” I said. “Do we have a list of preliminary discovery requests?”

“I’m getting them now,” she said.

That just left me with the contract-smuggling link. I turned the details over and over in my mind. Did James smuggle with Montague, and Roy killed him over the profits? Was Kelsi indeed involved? All four of them? Why? Was the music a front? Why the donation to the wildlife fund? I still hadn’t found that receipt. As disorganized as Kelsi was, I doubted I would ever get it from her.

I searched Kenyan Wildlife Fund and came up with a perfectly legitimate looking website. I browsed through their social media, and it looked perfectly normal. Photos of giraffes, and smiling people in uniforms. Facts about endangered species and the like. There was nothing here.

Just when I couldn’t find any more leads, my phone buzzed.

“Henry Irving,” I answered.

“Mr. Irving, this is Gary from the James Matthews band,” he said.

“Hello, Gary yes,” I said. “How can I help you?”

“Well,” he said slowly. “I wondered if I could meet you for a coffee this morning.”

“This morning?” I said. “Yeah, I could do that.”

“The Starbucks on east side?” he said.

I made a face. I had a different worldview than many of Sedona’s residents. But, on the issue of coffee, I was a native coffee snob that would feel nauseated at having to darken the door of a Starbucks.

“Right down the block from our office is the coffee house Jitters,” I said. “The coffee’s better.”

“I don’t have time to drive all the way out there,” he said. “We can talk tomorrow.”

“No, no, no,” I said. “I’ll meet you at… Starbucks.”

The word caught in my throat and tasted bad on my tongue.

“You’re going to Starbucks?” AJ asked incredulously.

I shot her a dirty look, and she laughed. “Poor Henry.”

“Selling out his values,” Vicki laughed. “For a venti caramel machiatto.”

I laughed. “You guys are awful.”

I drove out to the Starbucks, and died a little inside when I walked through the doors. I placed the smallest order I could think of, then saw Gary sitting at a table. A thin wiry man, with wire rimmed glasses, he looked pale and nervous.

“Hey, Gary,” I greet him as slipped into a hard wooden chair.

“Hi, Mr. Irving,” he said. “I’m not sure who to tell about all of this.