winced, stopping outside the entrance to his offices. “Please don’t tell me Adam has uncovered more financial problems.”
“None that we didn’t know about already, thank goodness. Between the platinum mine in Belize and the disputed wills, I couldn’t take another financial disaster, or more documents to sign and send off to the probate court. No, this is something quite different. Do you remember Tricia Riley? She’s a distant cousin on Dad’s side of the family. Her grandmother and our grandmother were sisters.”
“I have a vague image from Grandma’s funeral.” Liam wrinkled his forehead. “She’s got curly hair a bit like yours, right? She was on the ditzy side, but smart in a geeky sort of way. As I recall, she used to work for a dotcom in Houston. She must be in her fifties by now.”
“Yes, that’s the one. She still does work in Houston, apparently for a company that manufactures household robots. She asked me to call her back when I had time to talk. She claimed she had something important she needed to discuss with me.”
“That sounds ominous. If she’s asking you to invest in her robots, I recommend you ask for a demonstration first.”
“That was precisely my thought, but we’re both offtrack. I called her back this morning and what Tricia had to say turned out to be a lot more worrying than robots designed to scrub the floors. Liam, she told me that she’d seen Dad in a shopping mall in Houston.”
“What? You’re kidding. She’s claiming to have seen Dad recently?”
“She says she saw him last week.”
“Good lord, she must be even more ditzy than she looks. So is she claiming to have seen him for real, in the flesh? Or are we talking visitations by a ghost?”
“Absolutely not ghosts. Tricia says she saw Dad going into Nieman Marcus in Houston. She called his name and hurried to catch up with him, but he ignored her. By the time she got into the store, he’d vanished.”
“Obviously she suffers from an overactive imagination,” Liam said, not sure whether to be irritated by his cousin or to pity her. He never understood why some people felt the need to turn commonplace events into major dramas, with themselves as the stars. “The guy didn’t turn around because he had no idea he was being called. He didn’t respond to somebody calling Ron Raven for the simple reason that wasn’t his name!”
“You’re singing my song. That’s exactly what I suggested to Tricia, but she wasn’t persuaded. She says she’s sure the man she saw was Ron Raven, or else his double. I pointed out that she didn’t know Dad all that well and that she hadn’t seen him in the twelve years since Grandma’s funeral, and she informed me that I was wrong. She’d had dinner with him in San Antonio a couple of months before he died. Apparently they discussed the possibility of Dad investing in her darn robots! She claims that she knows exactly what Dad looked like right before he was murdered and that this man—quote—had Dad’s way of walking.”
“That’s what Tricia’s basing her identification on?” Liam was torn between laughter and exasperation. “The way this man walked? She saw him at a distance, from the side at best and possibly even from behind, and now she’s positive it was Dad?”
“Apparently. That and the fact she insists the man saw her and recognized her. According to Tricia, he dodged into the store in order to avoid her.”
“She’s paranoid. Not to mention delusional.”
“Very possibly. But she’s already called the police in Miami to tell them they’ve made a mistake in assuming that Dad was murdered. Cousin Tricia has informed them he’s alive and they need to refocus their investigation.”
Liam rolled his eyes. “And what did the cops have to say?”
“Nothing that satisfied Tricia.” Megan groaned. “They thanked her for letting them know what she thought she’d seen and said they would investigate her claim as time and manpower permitted. In other words, they totally blew her off.”
“Are you surprised? My sympathies are with the cops on this one. They’d never get any work done on the real cases if they allowed themselves to get distracted by reports like Tricia’s.”
Megan hesitated for a moment. “You don’t think we ought to follow up with a private detective?”
Liam leaned against the wall outside his office, wanting to finish the call before he went inside. “Follow up what? How? There’s nothing to follow up.”
“That’s true, I guess.”
“You sound uncertain.”
“I am. Tricia may be nuts—”
“Tricia is nuts.”
“Okay, I’ll grant you that much. But there are problems with the official police account of what happened the night Dad disappeared. The cops in Miami have closed the investigation, except for a half-hearted effort to track down Julio Castellano. But as I already told you, when Adam and I were in Belize, we met Castellano and spent quite a bit of time with him. He swore he wasn’t the killer.”
“I know. And you told me you and Adam are both inclined to believe him.”
“We’d be dead if not for Castellano,” Megan pointed out. “He put himself significantly at risk for our sakes, which makes it hard to see him as a brutal killer. And if he didn’t kill Dad, who did?”
“Well, if Tricia saw him in Houston, apparently nobody! Did she have any suggestions as to why Dad hasn’t let anyone know he’s still alive?”
“She suggested he might have amnesia.”
“If he has amnesia, why would he have run when she called his name?”
“You’re right. Her story is incoherent.” Megan hesitated for a moment. “Unless Dad deliberately chose to disappear.”
Liam’s stomach lurched, then quickly righted itself. “Why would Dad walk away from every penny he possesses? Does that seem likely to you? Or even remotely credible?”
“No,” Megan conceded. “But we have to face the fact that the cops in Miami have no idea what really happened the night Dad died.”
Now it was Liam’s turn to hesitate. He was much less convinced than his sister that Julio Castellano was as innocent as he had claimed, despite the fact that the guy had definitely helped to rescue Megan and Adam from the dangers they faced in Belize.
“We talked about this when you first got back from Belize,” he said in the end. “I agree the cops might have screwed up on the details of what happened the night Dad died, but their basic outline seems to be correct—”
“Sure. Apart from the minor detail that they have the wrong name pinned on the hit man.”
“In a sense, that is a detail. From what you told me about your trip to Belize, it seems that Uncle Ted knew plenty of people who wouldn’t have hesitated to kill Dad for quite a small sum of money. If not Julio Castellano, then take your pick of a dozen or so other smugglers and thieves hanging out in Las Criandas.”
Liam found it depressing to think about his Uncle Ted, a maternal uncle with
