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He knew his wife too well.
He glanced her way now, seeing her huddled behind the steering wheel, Bronco’s dog on the passenger seat beside her.
“I just can’t believe he’s gone.” Jasper took another long drag and expelled smoke through his nose. He was a big man with a rotund belly, dark eyes and a receding hairline, dressed in black, only his white clerical collar giving any indication that he was the pastor of a local church. He watched as two EMTs carried a body bag to the back of an ambulance parked between the Jeep and a cruiser from the department.
He studied the tip of his cigarette and watched the smoke curl toward a sky starting to turn lavender with the coming dusk. “You have to find out who did this. Bring him to justice.”
“We will.” It was a promise Reed intended to keep.
“You said you came by because you hadn’t heard from Bronco—er, Bruno, for a few days. Was that unusual?”
“Not really. I mean, we talked once a week or so, but I just had this feeling. I’d texted and called and he hadn’t returned them, so I came out to see what’s what. I saw this other car in the driveway”—he motioned to Nikki’s Honda—“along with Bruno’s, and my first thought was that he had company and maybe I should just leave him be, but I noticed the front door was open, so I changed my mind. No one was in the house, but I found his rifle, my dad’s old Winchester, on the kitchen floor like someone dropped it in a panic. So I picked it up and walked throu
gh the house and found . . . Well, you know.” He dropped his cigarette onto the gravel and crushed the butt with the heel of his shoe. “Haven’t had one of those in thirty-three years.”
“Did Bruno have any enemies?” Reed asked.
“God knows,” Jasper said. “Probably. He had his share of troubles, but if you mean who are they?” He frowned, squinting upward where the tree tops met the lavender sky. “I couldn’t tell you.”
“Girlfriends?”
“None recently. Last one was Daria, no, that’s not right.” He rubbed his jaw, where a five-o’clock shadow had developed, as he thought. “Darla. That’s it. Darla something or other. Don’t know if I ever heard her last name. She’s the one who gave him the dog. Fender.”
“Right.” The dog was with Nikki in her car. Dirty, but apparently unhurt.
The ambulance drove off and Jasper’s shoulders visibly tightened and he blinked hard as if fighting tears. “Bruno was a good boy,” he said. “But he lost his ma when he was eleven. Cancer. Never got over it, I think. And maybe I wasn’t all that good at being a single dad.” He rubbed his head and sighed. From their vantage point they could see the photographer in the house, taking digital images that might have been missed in the video that had already been filmed.
“Bruno was the one who discovered the bodies at the Beaumont estate.”
“What?” Jasper said. “I hadn’t heard. He never told me.”
“Do you know why he would be over there? We talked to him about it, but he was pretty evasive.”
“The treasure,” he said, his eyebrows drawing together. “Oh, man, I bet he was over there looking for the jewels or cash or whatever the hell old Beulah stashed there.”
“What?”
Jasper snorted. “It’s something my dad used to talk about. The Beaumont treasure. I think it was just talk that Beulah Beaumont hid valuables in her basement. My dad swore he helped her stuff a bag into a hiding spot in the basement and Bruno ate it up. I thought it was all folklore, you know, a grandpa amusing his grandson, and he made Bruno swear not to ever go looking for it. But Dad died a few weeks back and he had a set of keys to the place. I’m betting Bruno went looking. He was always broke. And was always looking for that big score, you know. He didn’t put a lot of stock in working and saving for a rainy day, nope. He always talked about hitting it big, and Dad always fed him a line of bull about the Beaumont fortune.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “That’s got to be it.”
“We searched that place top to bottom,” Reed said, “looking for other victims. Found no treasure.”
“My guess, it was stolen long ago, or more likely never existed in the first place. If it did exist, I think there was a good chance that someone else in the family found it.”
“You do?”
“If my father knew it was there, then you’d think Baxter would have found out.”
“Baxter is Beulah’s son?”
“Adopted. But yeah. Beulah was Arthur Beaumont’s second wife. His first was Marianne, as in the Marianne Inn just up the road on this side of the river. Named it after her and I’m thinking that didn’t set well with Beulah. She was a bit of a . . . let’s just say she was a colorful character.” He gazed through the trees where the river was visible between the trunks. “You know, there was a time when the Beaumont house was always bustling. They all were. When the whole family lived there and when Beulah threw those massive parties of hers. They had a whole staff then—maids, gardeners, cooks, even a nurse, and Dad, of course. My dad worked over there and he’d tell us about what went on. Not just about the hidden treasure.”
“Like what?”
Jasper frowned. “Don’t like to gossip.”
“This is a murder investigation.”
“I know.”
