Ghost of a Chance

Alex didn’t like it, but Danny had a good point. One of Iggy’s first lessons in being a detective was not to get attached to any one theory. As his famous detective said, it leads to twisting fact to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. He’d been letting his need to find Leroy shoehorn into Danny’s case.

He sighed and took out a cigarette of his own.

“I guess that’s it then,” he said. “Can you drop me at a crawler station?”

Danny nodded and started the car.

As they drove, Alex racked his brain over Leroy. Nothing about his kidnapping made sense. He didn’t know anything a group of kidnappers would need and he had no money or family connections. The only thing that had any logic to it was the tunnel idea, but Sanderson had put the kibosh on that notion pretty effectively.

It was frustrating, and he angrily flicked the stub of his cigarette out the window. He was pretty sure Leroy Cunningham was going to die sometime in the next few days, and as things stood now, there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

* * *

The hall of records was an imposing building of white marble that always reminded Alex of a public library. In reality it was quite like the library except that people visited the library for fun. No one visited this monument to government red tape unless they had to.

Alex made his way inside and went downstairs to where he knew the permit records were kept. He only had an hour and a half until the office closed at five, but he’d only brought twenty-two of David Watson’s files, so it shouldn’t be hard to look up the permits for just those.

“Can I help you?” a white-haired man said from behind a raised desk. He was thin to the point of being gaunt, though the sagging skin around his jowls indicated that he hadn’t always been so. Alex couldn’t tell if the dark circles under the man’s eyes were a sign of lack of sleep, or just the stark lighting in the basement. He looked to be in his sixties, but seemed worn down, probably by too many years working for the government.

“I need to see some building permits,” Alex said, passing over a list of the permit numbers he’d copied from Watson’s files.

The man’s hand trembled when he took the paper and he had to put it down on the desk to read it properly.

“That’s a lot of records, young man,” he said, giving Alex an appraising eye. “Are you looking for something particular?”

“I’ll let you know when I find it,” Alex said with a shrug.

He lit another cigarette, leaving him only four more, while he waited for the old fellow to get the files. He came back after about ten minutes with five folders under his arm.

“We can only let out five at a time,” he said. “This will get you started.” He opened a register book and wrote down the numbers of the files he had, then turned the book around for Alex to sign.

“I’ll pull the rest and have them here for you, Mr…” He squinted at the name in the book. “Lockerby.”

“Thanks,” Alex said, picking up the folders.

“My name is Edmond Dante,” the old man said. “Let me know if you need anything else.”

Alex took the files to a nearby table and spread them out in front of him. The first one dealt with a piece of farmland Watson surveyed so that a mansion could be built on it. Alex was about to set it aside when he noticed that Watson’s wasn’t the only survey attached to the permit.

It turned out that the building permit encompassed six different parcels of land, only one of which had been surveyed by Watson as a condition of its sale to North Shore Development. It wasn’t anything major, but Alex wondered why the company used different surveyors for the other parcels.

“It’s because each parcel was surveyed as a condition of sale,” Edmond explained when Alex posed the question to him. “When this company bought the land, they had to get it surveyed. They used whoever was available.”

“Thanks,” Alex said, happy to have the mystery explained but not any closer to finding any meaning in the files.

He paged through each new file, looking for something, anything, that might explain why David Watson had been murdered, but nothing seemed improper or out of place. It was almost five when he opened the last folder and quickly looked through it. This one was for a large property owned by a wealthy family who wanted to build a home on it.

Alex checked the information on the parcel and found that, like most of the others, it had been put together from several smaller parcels.

That tickled something in Alex’s brain.

He picked up the folders on the desk and found the one he wanted. Opening it, he confirmed that this survey was for a five acre parcel of land. Like the first file he looked at, there were other parcels that made up the lot being built on, Watson had only surveyed that five-acre piece. The difference was, when aAlex checked Watson’s file, it said that he’d done the work for a woman named Martha Gibbons, not for North Shore Development.

“She probably got him to do it so she could sell the land,” Alex said, shutting the folder.