Sedona Law 5 by Dave Daren (e book reader android .TXT) 📗

Clare,” I cut her off. “I’m not recording anything, and you’re right. I can’t record you without your consent or it’s not legally admissible, so I would never do that.”

“Okay.” She calmed down a little, but still looked nervous.

“But you called me out here,” I pressed gently. “You wanted to tell me something. What do you need to get off your chest, Clare?”

Suddenly, she started to cry. “What am I doing? What am I doing?”

Jim showed back up and jogged up to the cabin. He saw Clare and I sitting outside, and he shook his head.

“Did he take it?” he asked flatly.

“Take what?” I question with a frown as I glanced between him and Clare.

“I couldn’t do it,” she sobbed. “It’s not worth it.”

“Good,” Jim grunted. “Fuck the insurance money.”

Then he grabbed the envelope out of her hand, tossed it back into the cabin, and stood on the stoop with his hands on his hips.

Clare wept relentlessly.

“Honey,” he told her. “Why don’t you go inside? I’ll finish up here.”

Clare was such a mess she was completely useless, so she went inside, and I stood on the stoop with Jim.

“What’s going on?” I asked. I was ready for some answers.

“You know,” Jim sighed and stared out past me into the distance, “I’m glad this all came out. Because this is getting out of hand. It needs to stop. I make good money. And if we lose the settlement, well, we lose the settlement.”

“You want to tell me what the jig was here, Jim?” I questioned and crossed my arms over my chest.

“Clare was going to bribe you not to say anything about our marriage,” he blurted out.

I blinked in surprise, but schooled the rest of my face into a stoic expression.

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Because of the insurance,” he explained as he rubbed his face. “She’s got a generous payout coming for both Thad and herself, so long as she stays single. She gets remarried, either legally or common law, she loses her half, and the payout goes from two million to one million.”

“That’s insurance fraud,” I pointed out.

“Yeah,” he replied morosely and shook his head. “I went along with it for a while, but it’s getting out of hand. Like I said, I’m glad it came out.”

“So, wait, she didn’t kill Jerry?” I asked with a frown.

“Kill Jerry?” he repeated incredulously as he snapped his head up to stare at me with wide eyes. “No. She wouldn’t never do that. She’s a little neurotic, but she’s not that crazy. Is that what you thought she wanted to talk about?”

I raised an eyebrow, and he shook his head.

“Oh, geez,” he sighed. “You mean you didn’t know about the insurance?”

“No,” I replied. “I knew there was a policy and a big payout. But I didn’t know about the stipulation.”

He laughed. “Oh, that’s rich. So, look, you’re not going to report us or anything?”

“No,” I admitted, “but I’m not going to protect you if it comes up, and I would suggest you retract your insurance claim.”

“That’s fair,” he murmured before a broad grin broke across his face. “Man, it’s so good to be free of this. We’ve been sneaking around for so long.”

“Just out of curiosity,” I said, “how much was she going to bribe me with?”

“You don’t want to know,” he laughed.

“You’re probably right,” I chuckled, but my humor faded as the million dollar question continued to nag me. “So, then who killed Jerry Steele?”

Jim shrugged. “Fuck if I know.”

Chapter 15

“So, she tried to bribe you, really?” AJ asked incredulously.

Vicki, AJ, and I sat in the conference room over Fifth Street Bistro and Jitters and listened to Hindu techno. I paced the room in a mixture of caffeine and adrenaline. Our impending deadline was eating away at me.

“She didn’t actually do it,” Vicki said. “To her credit, she stopped just short of it.”

“What does it mean, though?” AJ questioned as she tapped her pen on the table. “For our case?”

“It means nothing,” I replied as I pivoted and began to pace the opposite way again. “It means Clare is a dead end. Now, we have an explanation for all of her shady behavior. The trips, the sneaking off. Leaving the kid everywhere. We’re back to square one.”

“I think we need to find out more about the Morales angle,” AJ mused and sipped a coffee cup.

“Go ahead,” I waved at her absently, “whatever angle we can.”

“Got it,” AJ murmured and ducked her head to make a note on her laptop.

As I reached the opposite end of the room, I leaned against the window pane and watched the empty sidewalk like the answer to the murder would suddenly appear in the concrete.

I ran my hands through my hair and sighed. “Geez, this music is making me nuts.” A headache was forming behind my eyes, and the pain was pulsing to the beat of the techno music playing through the speakers.

“Hey,” AJ chuckled, “it’s not all for nothing. Earlier I found out the cure for cancer.”

I looked at her quizzically.

“Yeah,” she went on, “Jerry had a two hour rant on this guy who found out all about how to cure cancer--”

I rolled my eyes and smirked. “Cyanide and arsenic?”

“Yeah,” she frowned, “you knew about it?”

I winked. “I’ve heard about it. A time or two, or five hundred.”

“Well, apparently, cancer is such a big business that makes so much money, that they can’t release the cure,” AJ continued as she held up a yellow legal pad and flipped through a few dozen scrawled pages. “Jerry was going to do a big expose on it. See, I’ve got all these notes.”

I just shook my head. Great. This was what we were using The