Too Sweet to Die T. Doyle (tharntype novel english .TXT) 📖

He wiped the crumb onto my floor and I wondered if dust bunnies were omnivores.

“Charlie?” Ray met my eyes. “If Polly’s computer has a calendar of Tyler’s old cases.” He put down the fritter. “Check to see when the number of adoption cases increased. I’m guessing Tyler would be particularly vulnerable after his divorce and when his ex-wife had the kid.”

“Okay. I’ll look for cases involving organized crime. Maybe he had an old classmate with a connection.”

“That’s good. If Oscar made the connection it was probably through work. They never found his phone, so I’m guessing the murderer took it hoping for access to Oscar’s cloud files. Oscar’s laptop was in his car, but that doesn’t mean that Tyler or his partner didn’t search it and delete any information. Or maybe they couldn’t get past his password. Our best bet is the tablet giving us access to his cloud files, and hopefully he saved a folder with any proof he found.”

“I’ll see what I can find and text you if anything interesting shows up. Do you want to come over for dinner?”

“Nah, I’ll have dinner with Ma. Hank Warrens promised he’d do the power-of-attorney paperwork tonight. Since Dad is her current power-of-attorney, I might not have to worry about Ma’s current mental status.”

“Silver lining.” I raised my coffee cup to toast him.

He stood and stuffed the last of the fritter in his mouth. “Hey, so Kristi is doing a thing for my Dad and Evie on Friday night. You guys are invited.”

I grinned. “Yeah? Great. Is the happy couple registered anywhere?”

Ray groaned. “Crap. I gotta get him a gift, too?”

I stood and patted his shoulder. “You don’t have to, but he’d probably appreciate the gesture.”

He shuffled toward the front door. “Maybe Amanda will want in on it.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Meaning you’re going to ask your sister to handle it and then give her cash?”

He faced me with a lopsided grin. “Unless you want in on it.”

I shoved his shoulder. “Go. I’ll text you if I find something that says, ‘Congratulations on not dying alone.’”

Ray scratched his beard and dead-panned, “That’s good. You should write greeting cards.”

I reached past him and opened my front door. “Have a nice day.”

He waved. “Be safe.”

I set up Polly’s cloned laptop and Oscar’s tablet, and poured myself another cup of coffee. Tyler’s calendar noted appointments with clients and court days. Long weekends were highlighted blue and scheduled every five to eight weeks like Polly had said. Using the USB cable, I printed off the last six months of Tyler’s schedule and searched Polly’s computer for the clients’ files. It didn’t take long to find Word docs. My eyes glazed reading the dry legal documents. Tyler wrote a lot of wills, and it looked like he contested a few, too. I had no idea some of the Forest Forks residents were so contentious, or petty enough to spend thousands of dollars to fight over a 1980s World’s Fair souvenir thimble collection.

Tyler’s client list included families I knew, people I went to church with, neighbors. I couldn’t imagine any of them having ties to organized crime. I pulled up the bookkeeping program. Unfortunately, I needed a password to gain access and it locked me out after my fifth guess.

I leaned back in my chair and rubbed my eyes. What I needed was someone who knew Tyler well but didn’t really like him. The answer hit me so quickly I jerked forward and spilled my coffee. Grace Godwin, Tyler’s ex-wife, would probably love to dish… I just needed to bump into her, somehow.

I wiped up the coffee spill and pulled up St. Paul’s Episcopalian Newsletter online. Grace’s husband was a first cousin to the minister there. While not born and bred in West Virginia, I picked up quickly that knowing what church people belonged to was akin to knowing their profession. And if someone was an atheist, well, they still attended church with their family.

St. Paul’s Tuesday afternoon schedule included Bingo, The Gardening Club, planting bulbs for the Spring, and the Fall Festival Decorating Committee asked for volunteers and costume donations to be dropped off from four to six today. I figured Grace would volunteer to decorate since her children would go to the Festival. Buried in the recesses of the hall closet I still had a box of the kids’ old costumes.

I pulled another donut out of the bag and allowed the delicious carbohydrate and fat to counteract the abundance of caffeine and forced my brain cells to prioritize what to do next. Besides, anxiety burns calories, right?

With the printout of Tyler’s schedule, I used Oscar’s tablet. He’d saved his password for his photo album on the cloud and I tried to match pictures to court dates. I started with the Bias’s adoption. The pictures on Oscar’s computers featured a historic neighborhood. They seemed familiar so I grabbed the photos Oscar had printed and that I’d hidden in the China hutch. The printed photo had been cropped, and focused on a license plate. The next photo was a wider view, and could have been the neighborhood near Tyler’s office. The photos that Oscar printed all featured a car, but never the same car. On the day of the Bias’s adoption, Oscar had taken a picture of a white Ford Taurus. The next photo featured a blue Toyota Camry, but there was nothing written on Tyler’s schedule either for an appointment or court. Maybe this was the car that picked up the baby? The third photo was taken in front of the courthouse. In the background a black SUV was parked against the curb and a white Nissan Maxima.

Weird that Oscar would take pictures of different cars. Boring cars. But then I realized Joe and I had rented similar at one time or another. The Taurus, Camry, and Maxima could be rental cars and Oscar took photos of