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“Okay, fine. I’ll try. And we’re meeting in the conference room in about ten,” he said.
“About what?”
“The Donatella homicides. O’Halloran’s got something new apparently.”
“Really?”
“That’s the word.”
“I was just at Bankruptcy Bluff,” she said, surprised.
“I know.” He shrugged.
Savannah and the rest of the department had been working on the Donatella case for long months and were no closer to an arrest than they’d been when the crime was committed. The double homicide of Marcus and Chandra Donatella had taken place at their home on Bancroft Bluff. It was weird that she’d just come from there today, after rousting out Mickey, and now there was new information? Kind of mind-boggling.
But sometimes cases were like that, she reminded herself. Nothing forever, and then things suddenly broke open and started running hot as a fever.
Maybe they were actually going to solve this damn thing.
CHAPTER 2
“Could you put that down for one minute?” Declan Bancroft grumbled irritably from the oversize executive desk chair in his home office. He pointed to the cell phone pressed to his grandson’s ear.
“I want to catch Russo before he leaves work.” Hale St. Cloud stayed on the line, waiting for the Portland manager to answer. “Vledich said we were red tagged, and I want to know who he talked to at the city and why construction was stopped.”
“Who’s this Vledich?” the old man demanded.
“The foreman,” Hale answered, staring through the window of his grandfather’s sprawling Bancroft Development home, the grounds of which meandered over several acres along a rocky tor with a spectacular view of Deception Bay. “You know Clark Russo in the Portland office. Vledich works for him.”
“Of course I know Russo,” Declan said grumpily.
Russo was one of the newer managers employed by Bancroft Development. He had started in the Seaside office and had recently been transferred to Portland at the recommendation of Sylvie Strahan, Hale’s right-hand woman. Their Portland manager had quit after the debacle over Bancroft Bluff, and when the opening in Portland popped up, Sylvie suggested Russo, at least for the interim. It had taken a little talking as Russo had been reluctant to leave the area; he’d grown up on the coast.
“But this Vledich I don’t know,” Declan said, taking a deep breath, as if he was about to launch into a diatribe about being the last to know, a favorite gripe of his, but Hale held up a hand as he left a message for Russo, asking the manager to call him. As soon as he was finished, he clicked off, but Declan snorted and waved at his phone.
“What’s happened to the world? Yes, yes, it’s good to be able to catch someone at a job site, but all this texting and e-mail and playing with the phone . . . ack.” That was his grandfather’s favorite sound of disgust: ack.
“If I don’t hear back from him, I’ll send him a text.”
“In my day we answered the phone so as not to lose a customer.”
Another favorite diatribe, which Hale ignored. There was no changing his grandfather’s mind about the evils of technology, and he’d wasted enough breath trying to last him a lifetime. That was why Hale had built his own home north of Deception Bay, closer to Seaside and the Bancroft Development offices, on a similar rocky bluff, a little bit removed from his grandfather.
But Declan had made his home in Deception Bay for most of his life, preferring the sleepy oceanside hamlet to the joint tourist mecca of Seaside and Cannon Beach. It was pure irony, therefore, that through his own real estate development, Declan was helping change the landscape of the town, and Deception Bay had recently become the new destination for those with disposable income and wealth. Bancroft Bluff, built south of the bay that Deception Bay was named after, was supposed to have been the first jewel in the crown of successive Bancroft luxury home developments around the area, but the unstable dune had turned that plan to, well, sand. Declan had pushed for Hale and Kristina to build on the spot, but Hale had resisted, and in hindsight it was fortuitous that Hale had decided to build his home closer to the Seaside Bancroft Development offices.
“What are you doing?” Declan demanded, frowning at Hale as his fingers pressed buttons on his phone.
“Sending that text. I want to know what the city said about the Lake Chinook project,” Hale added as he pressed the button that sent the message to Russo and Vledich. Bancroft Development had purchased a section of lake frontage land—three adjoining lots on Lake Chinook, the two-mile-long lake ten miles south of Portland—and the older homes and cabins that had been there had already been demolished, readying the site for new construction. Now the City of Lake Chinook had determined there was a sewer easement that ran under the water, and they’d red tagged the job, stopping construction of the first of the three boathouses that were being erected before the actual houses.
“We get red tagged when we shouldn’t, and we’re allowed to build on a goddamn dune. I’d like to kill DeWitt!” Declan bit out furiously for about the millionth time. His blue eyes burned with rage at the thought of the engineer who’d green-lighted the Bancroft Bluff project. Hale had just started with the family company when that project was under way, and though he didn’t say it, he still remembered that there was an undercurrent of worry about the dune’s stability even then. That fear had proved founded, but it was too late. Only the fact that his grandfather had made a boatload of money over the past decades was saving the company now from the pending lawsuits. Bancroft Development had bought most of the condemned properties back, settling the first lawsuits, though now some of the home owners were suing for mental anguish and suffering. Not that the lawsuits had merit, the settlements had precluded that. But it didn’t mean it wasn’t more bad publicity, and then, just when things had looked to be settling down, the horror of the Donatella murders had occurred right in their own Bancroft Bluff home.
Hale had seen the words scrawled in red paint on the wall with his own eyes—blood money—and even now the memory sent a chill down his spine. Worse yet, the Donatellas had been partners with Bancroft Development in Bancroft Bluff, and with that horrific message, it was generally assumed that their deaths had to do with the debacle of the doomed project. One of the prevailing thoughts was the perpetrator was a home owner or investor who’d lost their property to the dune, but since Declan had purchased, or offered to purchase, all the homes back, that theory didn’t make a lot of sense. What was the motive, then?
Hale wanted to take down all the abandoned houses and let the dune go back to nature, but since Bancroft Development still didn’t own all the homes, there was myriad red tape to untangle before any demolition could happen. He just wished to high heaven that the Tillamook County Sheriff’s Department would figure out who had killed the Donatellas and arrest the bastards.
As if his grandfather’s thoughts were traveling down the same path, Declan said, “What about that detective? Your sister-in-law.”
“Savannah?”
