As Deputy Wright said the words, I realized that she must have been going against all kinds of protocol to listen to Charlie and to trust me, especially after I literally broke into the local bank. Even as Charlie was trying to protect her job, she was taking risks. It made me appreciate her more as she made a few clicks and pulled up the information.
“Doesn’t look like much of anything,” Jill said, scanning it before handing me the electronic report. “Two speeding tickets, but even those are years apart.”
I ran my eyes over the information, which was indeed sparse, but it did have a list of four addresses, the most recent of which was in Aubergine.
“Are these the places Will has lived?”
Jill glanced at the list. “Yep.”
The other three locations were in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which surprised me since Will didn’t have a Northern accent—but then it hit me. Even though Will didn’t have a tell-tale Bostonian dropping of the “R” sounds on “car” or “scarf,” I knew someone this weekend who did have that heavy sound.
Todd Anderson.
“Can you run a similar report on the man who died?” I asked. “On Todd Anderson?”
Lacy seemed to catch my train of thought. “Will and Todd may have known each other before this weekend.”
“Maybe,” I muttered, but in my gut, I could feel that I was right. “Maybe they were working together to move the art. If Todd was the man on the inside of the Swansons’ illegal business, then maybe Will was working for him.”
There were a lot of uncertainties in my statement, but I knew from past experience that all of these maybes could eventually add up to something. We just had to keep looking, keep dropping details into place, even if they sometimes didn’t exactly match at the edges. Eventually, we would have a complete picture.
“I can only pull up reports that are already in the system on my phone,” Jill said. “I can’t generate new ones to see where Todd Anderson lived, unless I’m logged in at the station.”
“Let’s go, then.” I motioned to the back way out of the bank.
“You gotta put the painting back,” Lacy said.
“I think we should bring it with us,” I said, looking to the deputy for permission. I couldn’t exactly take it out of the bank without her say-so. “If this is one of the pieces that the Swansons were trying to move, and if Todd was the insider betraying them, then it feels important to keep it as evidence.”
Jill hesitated, though I could tell she wanted to agree withme. “Unless this lockbox is in the name of Todd Anderson, then we need to notify the owner that we are confiscating it. Who’s renting this lockbox?”
“I’m not sure.” I glanced around and spotted her heavy-duty flashlight. I gestured toward it. “May I?”
The deputy handed it over.
“There’s sure to be a hard copy of a registry somewhere around here,” I said. “Aubergine’s bank hasn’t quite made it into the twenty-first century.”
“Very true,” Lacy said, likely thinking about the fact that they still didn’t have direct deposit or online banking options.
I shone the flashlight on the rows of ledgers and notebooks on a tall bookshelf along the opposite wall, pulling out covers that had a variety of dates listed.
Lacy joined me with the light from her phone. “What exactly should I be looking for?”
“Anything that seems like it might tell us who owns which lockbox.”
We scoured the shelves for a few minutes before Jill spoke up from behind us. “Something like this?”
I turned to see that she’d picked a lock on a lower cabinet and pulled out a giant, cloth-bound book. Across the front was written the words, “Safety Registry.”
“Looks promising.”
“What was the lockbox number?” Jill asked, as she opened the book to the center.
“Four-three-six-eight,” I said, having memorized it by now.
Jill flipped through several pages until she reached a recent entry. “Looks like it was secured a few weeks ago.”
I followed her fingertip down the row, reading aloud. “Opened November 1 by…” I let out a gasp as I read the signature. “But why would…?” My words trailed off again as I tried to wrap my mind around what I was reading.
