I shrugged. “I don’t know what it says about me, but I love the Devil. I don’t think you could make a worse enemy or a better friend than him. And let me tell you, there are a lot worse things in life than having the Devil angling for your general happiness. It definitely beats the alternative.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
ChapterFourteen
Thomas Hardy’sreceipts implied he owned and operated an entire aquarium. With hundreds of huge fish tanks and other supplies unaccounted for, it fell to me to do some more thorough investigation of his life. Fortunately for us, his financial information did a good job of telling us where he often went.
He paid a rather hefty mortgage payment once a month for a property in Pennsylvania, deep in the country, a prime spot to commit a large-scale crime of almost any sort. While it took some work, the chiefs got us jurisdiction to make a visit to the place. While I disliked the idea of taking a green cadet to a completely unknown location in the woods, I held back my complaints.
The Pennsylvania State Police joining us for the ride helped convince me we probably wouldn’t be murdered and dumped somewhere, never to be seen again.
“Do we normally get to take field trips like this?” Alec asked, eyeballing the line of cruisers escorting us across the state to our destination. My cruiser, which proudly declared my status as a member of the NYPD, drew more attention than I liked.
“No, we don’t, but since it’s our case and the CDC wants to get down to the bottom of it, they asked Pennsylvania to play nicely with us. Normally, we hiss at each other from the state lines like angry cats in a territory dispute.”
“Is that true?”
I laughed at his skeptical tone. “Not really. We try to get along. Investigations can go to hell in a hurry if there are jurisdiction issues. This is one big jurisdiction issue. The CDC handling the jurisdiction issues makes things easier. In reality, nobody wants this case.”
“Now that I can believe. He had how many fish crammed into him?”
“Too many.” By too many, I meant hundreds, and the total species count had come out to fifty-three, with a collection of endangered or threatened species to go with the four unidentified species removed from his body. Excepting the precinct’s new pet hagfish and the two sturgeon, none of the other fish had survived.
The sturgeon were headed to an aquarium to become permanent and spoiled residents in an effort to help preserve the species.
“Do we have a count of the actual number of fish?”
“I can’t remember offhand, but it’s in the hundreds. I made a notation in the case file. Honestly, when the morgue called with the autopsy results, warning me they’d be sending an entire box of records over, I did my best not to think about it. Let’s just say the prosecutor is going to have a field day assuming we can lock down a solid suspect.”
We had more suspects than we needed and insufficient evidence to do anything more than question people about their relationship with the deceased. My current favorite subject was a woman Alec had located through the financials.
She was listed on four different life insurance policies along with some of his credit cards, all of which had been opened within the past three years. According to the court documents flooding my office, they had filed preliminary documents to be married a little over a month ago.
None of those cards had been used for suspicious aquarium store purchases, which threw a wrench in the investigation. Was she aware of his fishy activities? If so, could his involvement have been part of the motive? The lack of overlap counted as a major red flag and implied he hadn’t wanted her to be aware of his activities.
In some ways, his financials had asked far more questions than answered, although that was fairly standard during an investigation.
While we had already questioned the woman about her fiancé, we hadn’t gotten much out of her. If I judged solely from appearances, she hadn’t had any idea he’d been killed until we’d notified her. Unfortunately, I’d already encountered several instances of loved ones having killed their family and doing a damned good job of putting on an act, so I no longer trusted my eyes.
Some people put on an act. Others reacted to their stress over having been questioned. Some genuinely grieved for the death they’d caused.
The lesson would remain a painful reminder my personal experiences and reactions to grief rarely matched another person’s, and I could not judge life based on what I felt or understood to be the truth. Once I had stepped away from my narrow field of experience, I had learned the world was a far larger place than I had imagined, and people were more varied than I’d believed possible.
When I stopped viewing problems with howIwould approach finding a solution, it became much easier to come up with other possibilities.
So far, I had at least twenty viable reasons someone might want to kill Thomas Hardy using a wide assortment of aquatics, and his fiancée’s access to his wealth after his death was only one of them.
“Do you think his girlfriend did it?” Alec asked.
I shrugged. “Right now, I don’t really have any idea who did it. Do I think she has motive? Yes. The life insurance policies we know about are worth half a million. A few weeks ago, I dealt with a case where someone killed someone else over twenty dollars. There are too many unknowns in the case. It could have been something dealing with all these aquarium store receipts, it could be involving the life insurance policy, or it could even be using the life insurance policy to clear off her credit card debt.” Getting a hold of the fiancée’s financials had taken submitting the mutual cards and life insurance policies to discover a mess of debt the life insurance policies would cover with a nice sum left over. “There is a lot of financial backing for the crime to be related to her and her debt.”
“But the fish?”
“If she found out about his fish operations, why not? The CDC has already submitted a lot of information to us regarding how the crime could have been committed. The level of practitioner magic required is within the grasp of most.”
“That surprised me. I would have thought it would have taken a lot of schooling and skill to commit the crime.”
“It surprised me, too. The hard part would have been getting those rare fish.”
