Going Home - Chapter 14

Although his son said he wasn’t receiving visitors, I took a shot and called the hospice where Mr. Williams was living the next morning. Apparently, his son had anticipated this, because he’d called ahead and instructed the hospice to not allow his father any visitors, which is exactly the kind of thing someone with something to hide would do. He’d used the excuse that his father was weakening and any visits could cause long-term harm, which might have seemed reasonable to the staff, since they didn’t know what was happening.

Unfortunately for the son, he’d had to be a little vague on who he didn’t want seeing his father, since actually telling them he didn’t want his father to talk to the police might look suspicious. I didn’t come out and say I was with the police, but when they said his visits were currently restricted at the family’s request and asked for the reason I needed to speak with him, I explained that I was assisting the sheriff’s department’s investigation into the fire at the barbershop he owned and needed to ask a few questions, the lady on the phone put me on hold instead of telling me I couldn’t talk to him.

It was a fifty-fifty shot whether they were going to call the son for permission, which definitely wouldn’t be forthcoming, or ask the father. My luck was holding out because a few minutes later the woman returned and said Mr. Williams could speak to me and transferred me to him.

Of course, it also didn’t say great things about the kinds of security these places had for their residents, since she never actually asked for any proof of who I was before just accepting that I was working with the police.

“Hello?” a very tired voice said when he answered.

“Mr. Williams, I’m working with Sheriff Orville over here in Buxton, and I had a few questions about the fire at the barbershop you own with George Cooper.”

“There was a fire? Is everyone alright?”

I’d already assumed his son would probably be keeping things from him, but it hadn’t occurred to me that he wouldn’t have mentioned the fire at all.

“I’m sorry; I thought someone would have called to tell you. Yes. There was a fire at the barbershop and the building is pretty much completely gone. Thankfully, Mr. Cooper was able to get out safely and he’s recovering well.”

“Ohh no, that’s terrible,” he said, sounding choked up. “Thank God George is okay. Do you know what happened?”

“Not yet. We’re still investigating, which is why I’m calling. I had just a few questions for you, if you’re feeling up to it.”

“I’ll help however I can, but my son’s been handling most of that stuff since I got sick. Have you called him?”

“We have, but I was hoping you could help me with a few points.”

“I’ll try,” he said.

“Do you know if you have insurance on the building?”

“We did, although I think I remember Jeremy changing it just after Christmas. He brought me some things to sign, so he could take care of it for me.”

“Did he say why he was changing the insurance?”

“No, but Jeremy knows about these things. I’d always just used what Fred Spellman suggested, since he’d done our home insurance back in the day. Course, Fred retired years ago. Maybe that’s why Jeremy decided to change everything.”

“Was it insurance paperwork he had you sign?”

“No, it was something from a lawyer. He said it was something he needed to handle my affairs, so he didn’t have to keep bothering me. Today’s a good day, but on my bad days, I have real trouble focusing, you know? Jeremy thought it best if he dealt with it instead. Besides, he knows this stuff really well. Did you know he went to college for business? His mamma was real proud of that.”

“I don’t doubt it. So after you signed the paperwork, he hasn’t brought anything else to you?”

“No. I haven’t seen him much since then. He called a few weeks ago to check on me and see how I was doing. He’s pretty busy with his business and everything.”

If I had to guess, he’d had his dad sign over power of attorney, which would let him start making financial decisions for his father, including changing the insurance policies over. I wouldn’t know until Orville got the insurance policy back, but the fact that he didn’t even mention the fire to his dad threw all kinds of red flags up. I could understand not wanting to upset him, but I would have thought he’d at least mention it.

The one thing that was incredibly obvious was Mr. Williams had no way of knowing what was going on at his business, and wouldn’t be able to give me any answers. Jeremy had done a pretty good job of isolating his father from having any involvement in the business at all, which may have been why he’d tried to keep the hospice from allowing anyone to talk to his father.

I made my farewells and let him go. Odds were I’d be hearing from the son before long, since his father would call him next. I didn’t feel bad for the son, but Mr. Williams sounded very weak and probably shouldn’t be under the strain that the whole investigation was going to put on him if, or at least when, he found out the truth.

Instead of calling, I headed down to the sheriff’s office, since I had a few more things I wanted to check that required access I couldn’t get from my computer.

“Is Orville around?” I asked Sarah when I got there.

“No. There was a wreck up on the county road he had to take care of. A truck went over and is blocking the whole damned road.”

“Nothing chemical, I hope.”

I’d never had to deal with that in New York City, since we didn’t get fuel and chemical trucks through like they did out here, but I knew what a pain it would have been to deal with. I remember a train carrying some kind of corrosive chemical derailing when I was a kid and the county having to evacuate houses for miles around until they could clean up the spill, because it was so toxic.

“No. Just a coal truck. A new driver tried to take one of the turns too sharp and flipped his load. They’ll have it cleaned up in a few hours.”

“Did he mention if he’d gotten the subpoena for the insurance on the Williams’ Barbershop yet?”

“He did one better than that. He got the subpoena last night and called them first thing this morning. They sent it over about an hour ago. Orville was already out on the spill, so I hadn’t had a chance to give it to him yet.”

“Can I look at it, or do you want to wait and hand it off to him?”

“You can have it. He made it clear this was your baby and he was just doing the leg work. Speaking of which, he also has a bunch of notes from the interviews he did yesterday. He figured you’d call about the subpoena, so he was gonna give them to you when you did.”

She handed me a yellow legal pad full of scribbled handwriting along with a printout that looked like it was probably the insurance forms and a business card paper clipped to the legal pad. I made my way over to the empty deputy’s desk that I’d used the other day and started going through everything he’d gotten for me.

I started with the insurance paperwork, since I was already pretty sure I knew what I was going to find. It took a few minutes to work out the purposely confusing way the information was presented, but I’d expected that. Between the injury that got me out of the NFL and my more recent surgery, I’d had to spend a lot of time sifting through the labyrinthine insurance documents and had at least some idea of where I needed to look.

Sure enough, right about the time Jeremy had his father sign over power of attorney, he’d also changed the insurance policy. As expected, he’d increased the payout from one hundred thousand to three-quarters of a million dollars. It increased the premiums by quite a bit, but since he had already taken over his father’s finances, he would have been able to pay those without either his father or Mr. Cooper realizing it. That might also account for why the fire happened now. He’d been paying the increased premiums for months now and it was starting to add up to a non-trivial amount of money. I hadn’t looked into his finances yet, but if I had to guess, I’d say he was starting to feel the pinch and needed something to happen soon.

I did find one thing I hadn’t expected, or at least hadn’t expected entirely. I’d guessed he wouldn’t change the beneficiary since that, along with the sudden increase in the size of the policy, might raise some red flags when the building suddenly burned down. The thing I hadn’t expected was to see the beneficiary listed as the partnership itself, which meant Mr. Cooper would have access to the entire amount and would be the only one with access once Mr. Williams died. If Jeremy was trying to get the money to his father so he could inherit it when Mr. Williams finally passed, he’d have to get rid of Mr. Cooper as well. That meant Mr. Cooper wasn’t an unfortunate bystander, but an actual target of the fire. It wasn’t enough to prove premeditation, but it put it one step closer to first-degree murder, which was a big step up from where I thought this was going.

Switching from the insurance report to the legal pad, I was quickly impressed with both Orville’s thoroughness and succinctness. I’d written a fair number of reports in my time with the NYPD, and read a fair number as well, and found that most, or at least that most of the good ones, were either thorough or succinct, but rarely both. Orville had a way of explaining everything in complete detail without adding anything extraneous. It was frankly pretty impressive and much better than any report I’d ever written.

The first thing to jump out at me after reading the notes on several of the interviews was that no one had seen Jeremy in the area the night of the fire. That wasn’t completely surprising. While Jeremy wasn’t a criminal mastermind, he’d been smart enough to not put himself as the beneficiary on the insurance and to try and change it without either his father or Mr. Cooper noticing. I’d already guessed that meant he’d be smart enough to make sure no one saw him setting the fire. The store backed into a wooded area, with the closest house through a fairly thick stand of trees. For whatever reason, the city still timed its street lights with the time the sun went down and not when it actually got dark. With the way Buxton sat in between hills and mountains, the sun dipped below the horizon sometime around four, making every late afternoon feel like a cloudy day. This went double at dusk, meaning it would have been almost completely dark, and very hard for any of the neighbors to see him.

I made a note that Orville should check with some of the people living down the cross street. They hadn’t seen him, or anyone matching his description, parking on the street and walking behind the building, which meant he’d probably parked down the Oak Ridge and walked his way down, cutting through the trees that ran between the neighborhood and main street.

Thankfully, Orville had asked about more than just the night of the fire, and several of the shop’s neighbors did remember seeing someone matching Jeremy’s description in the area the week before the fire. Although I hadn’t asked him directly, I’d gotten the impression from Mr. Cooper that Jeremy hadn’t been by the shop in some time. What’s more, the people remembered Jeremy being there with another man. It was probably the other guy that made the visit stand out in all of their memories, since they all indicated that he didn’t seem like he was from Buxton, where the standard dress, even for the local lawyer and doctor, was jeans and boots. They all described a man wearing a dark suit that they thought looked expensive, several saying they thought it might even have been tailored, which wasn’t something people around here often did, not even the bosses up at Dixon Mining.

Although it placed Jeremy in town leading up to the fire, that wouldn’t have been enough all on its own. Thankfully, the guy hadn’t just walked around the building with Jeremy. He’d stuck around after Jeremy had left, and gone into some of the nearby businesses to talk to their owners asking if they owned the land their store sat on and if they’d thought about selling it. He’d even helpfully left his card with one of the shop owners, who’d turned it over to Orville.

The card itself wasn’t that informative. It only said S.D. Investing with the name Jordan Spencer below that, along with a phone number and email.

“Spencer Dawson Investing,” a woman said when I dialed the number on the card. “How may I direct your call?”

“Can I speak to Jordan Spencer?”

“May I ask who’s calling and what this is regarding?”

“My name’s Henry Brewer and it’s in reference to the … umm, investment opportunity he was looking at in Buxton.”

“One moment,” she said, putting me on hold.

I’d quickly gone through a list of possible things someone might have been investing in, but not much came to mind. I couldn’t imagine any investment company being interested in Buxton, at least not one which wasn’t directly tied to Dixon Mining. And there was nothing I could come up with that Dixon might be interested in along main street.

After a minute, a man’s voice came on the line.

“How can I help you, Mr. Brewer?” He asked.

“I’m working with the Buxton sheriff’s department regarding the fire at Williams’ Barbershop here in town. Your name came up in our investigation and I have some questions, if you have a few minutes.”

“Fire?”

“Yes. There was a fire two nights ago that burned the building to the ground.”

“Ohh, I hadn’t heard about that. Are you calling to inform me the property was damaged?”

“No. I wasn’t aware you had any connection to the property that would require you to be notified, actually.”

“Technically, I’m not, since we hadn’t finalized our deal yet. I thought perhaps Mr. Williams had told you about the offer we’d made on the property.”

My first instinct was that this put another piece of the puzzle into place, but my second thought was that it actually opened up more questions. If he was selling the building, why would he need to change the insurance policy and then burn the building down?

“No, sir. I’m assuming you’re talking about Jeremy Williams, correct?”

“Yes. I was down there last week to look at the property Mr. Williams called us about.”

“You made an offer to buy the building?”

“Have you not spoken to Mr. Williams? Maybe I should give him a call real quick.”

“Mr. Spencer, I would ask you not to do that. The building is currently the subject of an ongoing investigation.”

I had been trying to avoid saying arson or investigation, since guys like this tended to lawyer up at the drop of a hat, but the last thing I wanted was Jeremy finding out I was talking to the people he wanted to sell the building to and causing them to clam up.

As if on cue, Spencer asked, “Should I be speaking with my attorney?”

I’d played this dance before. We couldn’t tell someone being questioned, even over the phone, that they weren’t allowed to speak to a lawyer, but the last thing any cop wanted was to get lawyers involved, since their first rule is to always have the client shut up. I was not technically with the sheriff’s department, so there might be wiggle room there, but I didn’t want to do something that might cause Orville problems later on, in the unlikely event this guy somehow turned out to be involved with the fire after all.

There was a game cops played with every suspect, where we tried to convince them to talk to us, something rarely in their best interest, instead of talking to a lawyer without ever directly telling them they shouldn’t get a lawyer.

Every cop had their own way of handling this. My trick in New York City had been to agree that it was their right, find a reason why they’d be better off just talking to us now, and then asking a completely unrelated question that, if they answered without actually asking for a lawyer, would put me free and clear to question them without a lawyer.

I hadn’t ever had a detective come back to me and say that my method had ended up getting a case thrown out, so I still assumed it worked.

“You can if you want to, of course, but I was hoping to clear this up quickly. You were seen walking around the property with Jeremy and we wanted to figure out what your interest was so we could rule you out as having any involvement. Could you walk me through exactly how you came into contact with Jeremy?”

He paused for a moment, probably deciding if he should call one of their lawyers or just answer the question now so he didn’t have to deal with it later. Thankfully, he went with the second option.

“He called about three weeks ago and talked to us about buying some property his ailing father owns in the town. We invest in a lot of property in West Virginia, which is why he said he’d reached out to us.”

“Which is why you came out last week to look at it?”

“Honestly, at first I was just going to turn it down out of hand. I wasn’t familiar with Buxton in particular, but small towns like that are all over the state, and most of the value is in the outlying areas of town, not in the center of town itself. After a little research, it became clear Buxton didn’t have much in the way of historical or other tourist interest, and was mostly there to support the mining operations in the area. The only reason I agreed to come out was the price he’d suggested he’d be willing to take. Even for a small town like Buxton, it was extremely low. Looking at other purchases in the area, there was a chance we could turn it over fairly quickly and make some money on the deal, so I went out to see it.”

“So the building was worth buying at the price he was offering?”

“Well, the propertywas. We’d actually have to cut some money off what we could sell the property for, since the new owners would have to knock the building down after they bought it, since I seriously doubt it would have passed any kind of inspection.”

I wasn’t surprised his initial reaction was to pass. I couldn’t imagine any investment company being interested in property in Buxton. It wasn’t exactly a boomtown. Hearing that Jeremy had offered significantly below market value, however, did make sense. He was looking to get paid on the property twice, once for the insurance and once for the property, so he could afford to give it away at a discount. Of course, to sell it, he’d have to get rid of George Cooper first.

“I was hoping to hear from him this week, in fact,” Spencer added. “I didn’t want to get into a whole drawn-out process with him, so I told him to get with his father, who I understand is fairly ill, and decide if they wanted to take my offer or not. The offer was set to expire at the end of this week if he didn’t accept it.”

The timing was almost incidental since no matter what, this plan would have to happen before his father died; since if his father went first, the assets would have gone to Mr. Cooper, and then to whomever he set as his beneficiary. It might have been what pushed him to do it this week, but he already had his father’s failing health pushing him to move sooner rather than later.

“He never responded to your offer though, did he?”

When George Cooper didn’t die in the fire, everything would have fallen apart. The insurance money would have gone to the business as planned, but there wasn’t a path to getting it as inheritance anymore when his father died. And he couldn’t actually sell the property, since he only had power of attorney for his father.

“No, and the deadline’s almost up.”

“Could you send me a copy of the agreement he signed?”

He paused for several seconds, clearly thinking he should check with their lawyer again.

“Again, this is just so we can wrap up these loose ends,” I added.

Of course, if this did go to court, he’d end up in depositions with the D.A., so it wasn’t actually wrapping up anything, but I didn’t point that out

“Sure, where should I send it?”

I got an email address from Sarah and gave it to him, thanking him for his help and hanging up.

I was pretty sure I had enough for the report, once the lab returned the samples I sent confirming they were from an accelerant but I wanted to check one more thing, since I had to wait, anyway.

“Is there a way you can run a credit check on someone for me?” I asked Sarah.

“For the case?”

“Yes, for Jeremy Williams. I want to see what kind of debts he has.”

“Sure, I can get that for you.”

I knew getting the credit check wouldn’t be hard, because detectives did that all the time on cases in New York City, but I also knew most counties made accessing that stuff a big deal, since it had been used so many times.

Once I got that and the lab report I could write up the report for Orville and be done with the whole thing.

Oddly, I found part of me was sad this thing was wrapping up. As much as I didn’t want to go back to how things had been in New York City, this experience had been interesting.