Chapter 14

Although his son said he wasn’t receiving visitors, I took a shot and called the hospice where Mr. Williams was living the next morning. Apparently, his son had anticipated this, because he’d called ahead and instructed the hospice to not allow his father any visitors, which is exactly the kind of thing someone with something to hide would do. He’d used the excuse that his father was weakening and any visits could cause long-term harm, which might have seemed reasonable to the staff, since they didn’t know what was happening.

Unfortunately for the son, he’d had to be a little vague on who he didn’t want seeing his father, since actually telling them he didn’t want his father to talk to the police might look suspicious. I didn’t come out and say I was with the police, but when they said his visits were currently restricted at the family’s request and asked for the reason I needed to speak with him, I explained that I was assisting the sheriff’s department’s investigation into the fire at the barbershop he owned and needed to ask a few questions, the lady on the phone put me on hold instead of telling me I couldn’t talk to him.

It was a fifty-fifty shot whether they were going to call the son for permission, which definitely wouldn’t be forthcoming, or ask the father. My luck was holding out because a few minutes later the woman returned and said Mr. Williams could speak to me and transferred me to him.

Of course, it also didn’t say great things about the kinds of security these places had for their residents, since she never actually asked for any proof of who I was before just accepting that I was working with the police.

“Hello?” a very tired voice said when he answered.

“Mr. Williams, I’m working with Sheriff Orville over here in Buxton, and I had a few questions about the fire at the barbershop you own with George Cooper.”

“There was a fire? Is everyone alright?”

I’d already assumed his son would probably be keeping things from him, but it hadn’t occurred to me that he wouldn’t have mentioned the fire at all.

“I’m sorry; I thought someone would have called to tell you. Yes. There was a fire at the barbershop and the building is pretty much completely gone. Thankfully, Mr. Cooper was able to get out safely and he’s recovering well.”

“Ohh no, that’s terrible,” he said, sounding choked up. “Thank God George is okay. Do you know what happened?”

“Not yet. We’re still investigating, which is why I’m calling. I had just a few questions for you, if you’re feeling up to it.”

“I’ll help however I can, but my son’s been handling most of that stuff since I got sick. Have you called him?”

“We have, but I was hoping you could help me with a few points.”

“I’ll try,” he said.

“Do you know if you have insurance on the building?”

“We did, although I think I remember Jeremy changing it just after Christmas. He brought me some things to sign, so he could take care of it for me.”

“Did he say why he was changing the insurance?”

“No, but Jeremy knows about these things. I’d always just used what Fred Spellman suggested, since he’d done our home insurance back in the day. Course, Fred retired years ago. Maybe that’s why Jeremy decided to change everything.”

“Was it insurance paperwork he had you sign?”

“No, it was something from a lawyer. He said it was something he needed to handle my affairs, so he didn’t have to keep bothering me. Today’s a good day, but on my bad days, I have real trouble focusing, you know? Jeremy thought it best if he dealt with it instead. Besides, he knows this stuff really well. Did you know he went to college for business? His mamma was real proud of that.”

“I don’t doubt it. So after you signed the paperwork, he hasn’t brought anything else to you?”

“No. I haven’t seen him much since then. He called a few weeks ago to check on me and see how I was doing. He’s pretty busy with his business and everything.”

If I had to guess, he’d had his dad sign over power of attorney, which would let him start making financial decisions for his father, including changing the insurance policies over. I wouldn’t know until Orville got the insurance policy back, but the fact that he didn’t even mention the fire to his dad threw all kinds of red flags up. I could understand not wanting to upset him, but I would have thought he’d at least mention it.

The one thing that was incredibly obvious was Mr. Williams had no way of knowing what was going on at his business, and wouldn’t be able to give me any answers. Jeremy had done a pretty good job of isolating his father from having any involvement in the business at all, which may have been why he’d tried to keep the hospice from allowing anyone to talk to his father.

I made my farewells and let him go. Odds were I’d be hearing from the son before long, since his father would call him next. I didn’t feel bad for the son, but Mr. Williams sounded very weak and probably shouldn’t be under the strain that the whole investigation was going to put on him if, or at least when, he found out the truth.

Instead of calling, I headed down to the sheriff’s office, since I had a few more things I wanted to check that required access I couldn’t get from my computer.

“Is Orville around?” I asked Sarah when I got there.

“No. There was a wreck up on the county road he had to take care of. A truck went over and is blocking the whole damned road.”

“Nothing chemical, I hope.”

I’d never had to deal with that in New York City, since we didn’t get fuel and chemical trucks through like they did out here, but I knew what a pain it would have been to deal with. I remember a train carrying some kind of corrosive chemical derailing when I was a kid and the county having to evacuate houses for miles around until they could clean up the spill, because it was so toxic.

“No. Just a coal truck. A new driver tried to take one of the turns too sharp and flipped his load. They’ll have it cleaned up in a few hours.”

“Did he mention if he’d gotten the subpoena for the insurance on the Williams’ Barbershop yet?”

“He did one better than that. He got the subpoena last night and called them first thing this morning. They sent it over about an hour ago. Orville was already out on the spill, so I hadn’t had a chance to give it to him yet.”

“Can I look at it, or do you want to wait and hand it off to him?”

“You can have it. He made it clear this was your baby and he was just doing the leg work. Speaking of which, he also has a bunch of notes from the interviews he did yesterday. He figured you’d call about the subpoena, so he was gonna give them to you when you did.”

She handed me a yellow legal pad full of scribbled handwriting along with a printout that looked like it was probably the insurance forms and a business card paper clipped to the legal pad. I made my way over to the empty deputy’s desk that I’d used the other day and started going through everything he’d gotten for me.

I started with the insurance paperwork, since I was already pretty sure I knew what I was going to find. It took a few minutes to work out the purposely confusing way the information was presented, but I’d expected that. Between the injury that got me out of the NFL and my more recent surgery, I’d had to spend a lot of time sifting through the labyrinthine insurance documents and had at least some idea of where I needed to look.

Sure enough, right about the time Jeremy had his father sign over power of attorney, he’d also changed the insurance policy. As expected, he’d increased the payout from one hundred thousand to three-quarters of a million dollars. It increased the premiums by quite a bit, but since he had already taken over his father’s finances, he would have been able to pay those without either his father or Mr. Cooper realizing it. That might also account for why the fire happened now. He’d been paying the increased premiums for months now and it was starting to add up to a non-trivial amount of money. I hadn’t looked into his finances yet, but if I had to guess, I’d say he was starting to feel the pinch and needed something to happen soon.

I did find one thing I hadn’t expected, or at least hadn’t expected entirely. I’d guessed he wouldn’t change the beneficiary since that, along with the sudden increase in the size of the policy, might raise some red flags when the building suddenly burned down. The thing I hadn’t expected was to see the beneficiary listed as the partnership itself, which meant Mr. Cooper would have access to the entire amount and would be the only one with access once Mr. Williams died. If Jeremy was trying to get the money to his father so he could inherit it when Mr. Williams finally passed, he’d have to get rid of Mr. Cooper as well. That meant Mr. Cooper wasn’t an unfortunate bystander, but an actual target of the fire. It wasn’t enough to prove premeditation, but it put it one step closer to first-degree murder, which was a big step up from where I thought this was going.

Switching from the insurance report to the legal pad, I was quickly impressed with both Orville’s thoroughness and succinctness. I’d written a fair number of reports in my time with the NYPD, and read a fair number as well, and found that most, or at least that most of the good ones, were either thorough or succinct, but rarely both. Orville had a way of explaining everything in complete detail without adding anything extraneous. It was frankly pretty impressive and much better than any report I’d ever written.

The first thing to jump out at me after reading the notes on several of the interviews was that no one had seen Jeremy in the area the night of the fire. That wasn’t completely surprising. While Jeremy wasn’t a criminal mastermind, he’d been smart enough to not put himself as the beneficiary on the insurance and to try and change it without either his father or Mr. Cooper noticing. I’d already guessed that meant he’d be smart enough to make sure no one saw him setting the fire. The store backed into a wooded area, with the closest house through a fairly thick stand of trees. For whatever reason, the city still timed its street lights with the time the sun went down and not when it actually got dark. With the way Buxton sat in between hills and mountains, the sun dipped below the horizon sometime around four, making every late afternoon feel like a cloudy day. This went double at dusk, meaning it would have been almost completely dark, and very hard for any of the neighbors to see him.

I made a note that Orville should check with some of the people living down the cross street. They hadn’t seen him, or anyone matching his description, parking on the street and walking behind the building, which meant he’d probably parked down the Oak Ridge and walked his way down, cutting through the trees that ran between the neighborhood and main street.