a cigarette butt. “Was the man smoking a cigarette, Dale?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay.” She put the butt in a zippered plastic bag anyway and began raking her fingers through the soft dirt. “I’m afraid I’m not finding—” She pulled something from the ground. “Well, what do you know?”
“What?” I asked.
“A cufflink. A gold cufflink.” She held it up.
“Why would a guy in a hoodie have a cufflink?” I asked.
“Good question. We don’t know for sure that it’s his, but why would anyone hanging around a schoolyard be carrying a cufflink?” She examined it. “It’s engraved with initials. CM.”
CM. Oh, God. “Colin Morse?”
“That’s the only CM I know who has anything to do with any of this.”
“But Colin…” I shook my head. “It’s a plant. It’s got to be.”
“That’s my first instinct as well. You ever thought about becoming a cop, Marj?”
I chuckled. “The cooking cop? No, not for me.”
“There are a lot of people with the initials CM,” Ruby said. “Not a lot of people hanging around schoolyards with gold cufflinks, though. So yeah, probably a plant.” She placed the trinket in another zippered bag and sifted through the dirt again.
“This reminds me of something,” I said. “When Mills and Johnson were searching Jade’s room after that rose got left in there, they found one of Colin’s business cards shoved under the wall-to-wall carpeting. Obviously a plant.”
“If this belongs to Colin, someone out there wants him involved in this. But why?”
“I guess that’s what we have to find out. I can ask Colin if this is his, if you want.”
“I want to keep it, but you can certainly ask him if he’s lost an initialed cufflink. That would help.”
“Will do.”
Ruby searched the ground for a few more minutes.
“I don’t see anything else,” I said.
Dale turned to me. “I do.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Bryce
Nothing like sneaking out with the boss on your second day of work. Joe and I arrived at my father’s cabin complete with shovels…and armed.
He followed me to the bedroom we used to share, the place where Marj and I had found my mother’s jewels along with the firearms and file folders.
“There could be more,” I said. “We’ll have to pull up all the floorboards.”
“Why would he put this stuff in the room we used to sleep in?” Joe asked. “Wouldn’t it make more sense for him to hide them in a place only he goes into?”
“Like his room?” I nodded. “I had that same thought, which probably means…” The remaining words clogged my throat.
“…what’s in his room is worse,” Joe finished for me.
I nodded. “Yup.”
“You want to start there?” Joe asked.
“I don’t want to start anywhere, but we don’t have a choice.”
“We have a choice,” he said. “We can leave right now and hire someone to do this.”
“Then we have to put our trust in someone else.”
“True, and I’m not overly comfortable with that.”
“Neither am I,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
“It’s odd that the Feds didn’t already dig this stuff up. This was your dad’s cabin, after all.”
“Except that it’s owned by the Tamajor Corporation, and we still have no idea what that’s about.”
“The PIs are on it. Surely the Feds checked this place out,” Joe said.
“They might have, but they probably didn’t pull up floorboards. Obviously they didn’t, or they’d have found this stuff already.”
“Maybe they didn’t come here,” Joe said. “When was the last time your father used it?”
“I have no idea. He kept Colin at that Fleming Corp house.”
“Maybe this place didn’t appear anywhere in your dad’s papers. Maybe the Tamajor Corporation was something he kept entirely to himself.”
“There has to be a person behind every corporation.”
“But it doesn’t have to be your dad.”
“True. I’ll have to ask my mom if she mentioned the cabin to the Feds when they talked to her. I never mentioned it. Honestly, I never even thought about it.”
“All this stuff was so long ago,” Joe said, his voice echoing of memory.
“It was.” I cleared my throat. “Let’s look in my father’s room. We’ll have to face it eventually. I’d just as soon get it over with.”
“I hear you.” Joe followed me out of the small bedroom and into the larger one where my father had slept during our many camping trips.
It looked the same.
An eerie feeling of unease swept over me. Ghosts lived here. My father’s presence was unmistakable in this room. No, I didn’t believe in ghosts, but this room reeked of Tom Simpson. I inhaled. It even smelled like him. Cigar smoke, sweat, and woodsy cologne. My mother hated