Page 50 of Luck of the Devil (Harper Adams Mystery #3)

Unsure of what to do next, I headed back to the tavern. I still hadn’t looked at the papers, although every thirty seconds or so, I asked myself why. I could pull over and go through them, looking for anything that would justify murdering my mother.

But I realized I didn’t want to do it alone. I wanted to do it with Malcolm.

So, I drove, my hands tense on the wheel while my mind raced over the implications of Dad’s potential mistress showing up at the bank.

It was possible she’d followed me, but my first theory still seemed the most likely—that she’d shown up intending to impersonate my mother.

While the assistant manager knew my mother was dead, it was possible the teller wouldn’t have made the connection.

What would have happened if I’d showed up half an hour later?

I pulled into the tavern parking lot, scooped up the paperwork, clutching it to my chest with one hand, then headed to the unlocked back door.

I peeked in James’s office, and when I saw it was empty, I headed into the dining room.

It was still several hours until they opened, but I knew they had plenty of prep work to get ready for the day.

I found him sitting in a booth with his open laptop, staring at the screen with a look of concentration. When I walked in, his face lifted, his eyes widening in surprise.

“You’re back already.” His gaze dropped to the papers in my hand. “I take it you got in. What did you find?”

“I haven’t looked yet. I wanted to do it with you. Especially after my father’s mistress showed up at the bank, asking to open my mother’s safe deposit box.” My fingers curled into a fist at my side. “She said she had a key.”

James’s gaze caught the movement, then lifted to my face. “Your mother’s copy?” His voice was low. Not soft, just careful, like he knew the last thing I wanted was to feel weak.

Funny, I hadn’t stopped to consider how I felt about it. “Yeah. Maybe? I don’t know.”

“What happened?”

I filled him in on everything, including my theory about her presence.

“Maybe she got the key from your father,” he said.

“Maybe not.” I gave a slow shake of my head. “What if she got it from my mother? She was in the house, and we don’t know what happened after they left together. The key could’ve been in my mother’s purse or her car. The woman might’ve taken it before the car was dumped into the river.”

“Then why didn’t she try to get in the box sooner?”

“If she wasn’t working with my father, then maybe she didn’t know which bank to go to.”

He frowned. “Then how’d she figure it out now? Because if she followed you, you’re right that it would’ve made more sense to wait until you came outside and take the papers then.”

“Yeah.” I sat across from him in the booth. “I don’t know.”

He drummed his fingers on the table. “If she disappeared after she left the bank, someone must’ve been waiting for her. They probably drove off before you made it outside. Did you ask the bank manager to see video footage?”

“No. She was sympathetic about the box, but I doubt she’d pull surveillance footage without a warrant.”

He nodded, his jaw tightening. I could see he was processing this, trying to put it together.

Silence settled between us. We were getting close to piecing everything together—I could feel it. But I couldn’t shake the sense that my father was one step ahead of us.

“You could report it to the sheriff’s department,” he said, slowly, like he didn’t like the idea but felt obligated to suggest it. “Impersonating your mother has to be a crime.”

“But did she impersonate my mother?” I countered. “The teller said she never gave her name, just asked to get into box one-seventy-two. Even if they find her, she could say she got the box number wrong.”

“They still might be able to find out who she is.”

I narrowed my eyes. “And if something happens to her, I’d be their prime suspect.”

He gave me a pointed look. “What would happen to her?”

I met his unwavering gaze. “If I bring the sheriff into this, we lose all control of the investigation.”

“True,” he said, thinking. “But they might be able to find her faster. Carter still hasn’t turned up anything.”

I shook my head. “No. We’re doing this ourselves.”

His eyes turned dark and serious. “Why?”

I swallowed hard, unsure how to answer. I knew what he was really asking: What are you going to do when you find her?

The truth was, I didn’t know.

And that scared the hell out of me.

“No sheriff,” I said, my voice low. My mouth had gone dry.

He held my gaze and said quietly, “Okay. No sheriff.”

I nodded, the weight of my decision settling in my chest. I wasn’t committing to vigilante justice. Not yet. But I wasn’t turning this over to the authorities either.

I had to see this through. And I wanted to do it with James.

“Well, you’ve got a stack of papers that could take down your father and we haven’t even gone through them yet.

” James closed his laptop, the soft click of the lid punctuating his words.

He slid out of his seat and sat next to me, close enough that the heat from his body brushed mine. “Let’s take a look.”

My breath caught, not just from fear of what we might find, but because James’s thigh was a mere three inches from mine. Solid. Still. I caught the faint scent of cedar and leather.

The room felt too warm. Too confined.

I cleared my throat, worried the quiver in my voice would give me away. I needed to focus, not lust after a man I could never have. “The original, signed copy of my mother’s will.” I flipped the first stapled stack over on the table.

“You’ll want to keep that safe,” he murmured, his voice low and rough. “We’ll lock it up in my safe when we’re done here. Along with anything else that proves he’s shady.”

I nodded, then slid the stack of papers between us so we could read them at the same time. It was hard to concentrate with him so close, his shoulder brushing mine, but I reminded myself that I was trying to solve my mother’s murder, not get laid.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, forcing myself to refocus—to find my mother’s killer. Once I felt grounded, I opened my eyes and realized part of me wasn’t ready to face what might be in those papers.

But I couldn’t turn away either.

The top paper was a contract for the purchase of a company two years ago. The company, Copper Ridge, was sold to a corporation James and I had first heard about while investigating Hugo Burton’s murder—Larkspur, LLC.

I sucked in a breath, lightheaded. “Larkspur.”

Larkspur had purchased Hugo Burton’s residential property when it went into foreclosure shortly after his disappearance.

The land had sat vacant since Burton’s disappearance five years ago.

We’d tried to discover who was behind it, but Larkspur had been incorporated in New Mexico, a state that helped hide the true owners.

“Obviously your father had something to do with Larkspur,” James said. “The question is whether he was working for them, or if he is Larkspur.”

I didn’t respond, unable to find the words.

“Never heard of Copper Ridge,” James said, reaching across the table for his laptop. “Have you?”

I shook my head. “No.” But the word came out in a croak.

He entered the name of the business, but nothing came up in a simple Google search. I swung the laptop in my direction and pulled up a PI site to repeat the search. A few seconds later, the name popped up.

“Copper Ridge was created five years ago, then sold to Larkspur two years ago,” I said. Unlike Larkspur, it had been incorporated in Arkansas. Two names were listed as principals: but one name was familiar from our investigation of Hugo Burton’s disappearance.

“Brett Colter,” James said with a tone of satisfaction. “Fuckin’ liar.”

Colter was a local land developer, and his name had kept coming up during our investigation. At the time, he’d denied knowing anything about Larkspur.

“Do you recognize the other one?” I asked.

“Clive Norwood.” He studied the screen for a moment, thinking. “He’s from Little Rock. I’m pretty sure he had ties to J.R. Simmons.”

“Wow,” I said. Another thread tying my father to Simmons. “Simmons died several years before this sale.”

“Your father drew up the paperwork,” James said as he started a search for Clive Norwood. “Maybe Simmons gave his name to a few friends.”

The results showed Norwood owned a small chain of furniture stores in Little Rock, Bentonville, and El Dorado.

“A land developer and a furniture store owner own a consulting firm,” I said, mulling it over. “What would they consult on?”

“Good question,” James said with a grim smile. “Since they don’t have a website and there’s no mention of them on LinkedIn, I suspect it was a shell corporation.”

“A shell corporation for what?”

“Anything,” James said. “Drugs, money laundering, arms dealing. We’d need to see more, like their financials, to know for sure.”

The next document in my mother’s stack was a copy of the sale of a building in north Jackson Creek seven years prior. The contract had been drawn up by my father, and the purchaser had been one of my early suspects in Ava Peterman’s kidnapping.

“Ricky Morris,” I said, my stomach dropping. “This is for the laundromat, isn’t it?”

“Suds and Duds,” James said. “Yep.”

The laundromat was a suspected drug front, and Ava Peterman’s father, who was on the city council, had been trying to shut it down.

“Was Morris known for criminal activity before he opened the laundromat?” I asked.

“I wasn’t here seven years ago.”

I gave him a pointed look. There was no way he didn’t know the man’s history.

A smug look lit up his eyes. “He’s been dabbling in drug dealing for a good twenty years. It’s no secret.”

“Then my father must have known.”

“Unless he lived under a rock.”

The next set of pages showed contracts for land and business purchases going back over twenty years. James said most of the people involved had ties to criminal activity.

We were down to the last few pages in the pile when we found paperwork for the formation of an LLC, Hollow Ridge Development, with three partners—my father, a man named Richard Bell, and Dale Ambrose.

I drew in a sharp breath. “Here’s our connection to Ambrose.”

“And a surname for the mysterious Richard.”

A search for Hollow Ridge Development showed they had bought and sold multiple properties, and the accompanying sales spreadsheet showed that the properties had been sold for excessive profit.

The corporation had been formed about thirty years ago, which meant my father had already been in deep while Andi and I thought he was Father of the Year.

“The question,” I said carefully, letting it all sink in, “is whether Hollow Ridge started out clean and turned dirty later.”

“And if it started out clean, was it turning corrupt that made them get rid of their partner, Ambrose?” James asked.

“Ambrose was killed twenty-five years ago,” I said. “Let’s see when it first started to look shady.”

We examined the spreadsheet. The first suspicious sale was twenty-six years ago, and it had closed two weeks after Ambrose’s “accident.”

“This doesn’t prove anything,” I said with a groan. “The timing sure as hell is suspicious, but it’s not enough to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt.”

“Who says you need a jury?” James asked, his tone low and dangerous.

My blood turned cold. “We’re talking about my father, James.”

He held my gaze. “It’s not just your father. This goes deeper than him. I know it in my gut.”

I suspected his gut was right most of the time. He couldn’t have gotten so far in the criminal world otherwise. Especially with a ruthless, international organization like the Hardshaw Group.

The next page was a folded newspaper page, the paper yellowed and the print slightly faded. At the top left was a newspaper article about Dale Ambrose’s car accident. In the margin, my mother had written Hannah heard P talking to R two weeks prior .

My mother had believed her sister and still cut her out of her life? Had she done it because she didn’t want her sister judging her, or had she done it to protect her?

Had she been trying to protect all of us?

There were still a few more papers, so I moved on and studied the next contract. Everything else had been in chronological order, but this one was more recent. It was dated last September, and it recorded the purchase of a building in Little Rock. The seller’s name was Black Claw, LLC.

James tensed but didn’t say anything. I shot him a questioning glance. Obviously the transaction meant something to him, but he kept it to himself as he turned the page.

Documentation for the creation of Black Claw was next, and of course it had been filed in New Mexico. I scrolled through the paperwork until I came to the names of the principal, Gerald Knox.

“Do you know who that is?” I turned to look at James. My heart skipped a beat when I saw the look on his face. His shoulders were locked, and every muscle in his body had gone rigid. “Malcolm?”

The corner of his mouth hitched up ever so slightly. “I think we just found J.R. Simmons’s replacement.”

Malcolm’s reaction told me what I’d already suspected.

Gerald Knox was a hell of a lot worse.