If I Should Die_ A Novel of Suspense - Allison Brennan [50]
Sean left his contact information, because waiting would drive him up a wall. If he was lucky, someone would call his cell before he left Canton. He much preferred face-to-face meetings because half of what he learned in conversation came from body language, which revealed what someone didn’t say.
He found the property records office, filled out the paperwork, and sat at one of the early 1980s monitors. They all fed into a larger mainframe but didn’t store any data. Searching for property records by parcel number was easy, but the actual records were on either microfiche or paper, depending on how old. New transactions were in a different database, but Sean wanted to learn more about the ownership history of the mine.
Bureau of Land Management leases would be federal, but Sean could get those online when he got back to Spruce Lake. Right now, he was more interested in the mine and surrounding property. He pulled all the files and didn’t see anything unusual.
He went to the new computer terminal that housed all property transactions for the last decade. He searched all parcels in the Spruce Lake area—and was surprised when Jon Callahan’s name popped up on almost every record. When Patrick told him Callahan owned the majority of the property, he hadn’t realized it was divided into so many individual parcels. To contrast, he looked up the Hendricksons’ property. They owned one large parcel of over five hundred acres; Callahan owned dozens of parcels anywhere from one acre—the lots in town—to upward of one hundred acres.
The transfer dates on Callahan’s properties were recent, starting about seven years ago. Most of them, however, were during the last two years.
Sean sweet-talked the clerk into letting him download the information to a flash drive, rather then waiting for her to burn a CD or print out the documents. He left wondering if Jon Callahan wanted Tim’s property, and if so, why? Property could be a good investment, but Spruce Lake was in a depressed area.
After finishing his research, he was almost back to the turnoff to Spruce Lake when he saw the sign to Colton, ten miles to the north. He glanced at the time. Nearly three in the afternoon—maybe he could get to the high school in time and catch sight of the teenage arsonist.
It was worth a shot.
St. Lawrence County had its share of crime, but compared to the rest of New York State, it was a safe place to live. In fact, Detective Sergeant Kyle Dillard had lived pretty much everywhere in New York and Pennsylvania, and he was set on raising his kids and retiring in Canton. While the bitter winter got to him from time to time, the St. Lawrence Valley was one of the most beautiful and serene places to live—without hordes of people to mess with his peace.
While Kyle handled a variety of calls from murder to petty theft, the bulk of his duties were investigating traffic fatalities. The roads were not kind, especially to inattentive drivers and those unfortunate enough to cross their path.
He’d just come from a particularly nasty crash—a truck went over the guardrail up on Route 56 outside Colton two nights ago, landing in the reservoir. They didn’t have the equipment to bring the vehicle up until this morning, and when they did, there was no dead driver behind the wheel. The truck was being taken to the police yard for inspection while a team was finishing up the preliminary accident report, based on the physical evidence. Kyle was certain drunk driving was the cause. Based on the skid marks leading to the crash site, the truck had been going far too fast for the road. While there was no body, the driver could easily have been thrown from the truck and be at the bottom of the lake. They’d searched up and down both sides of the lake downstream and found nothing. They’d send down divers this weekend.
The truck was registered to James Benson. He had a deputy working on finding next of kin for Benson, a firefighter stationed up in Indian Hills. He was a