Skip Case (David Dean Mysteries)

In spite of the cloudy weather and the threat of rain, Dean ended the daylight hours listening to the hum of his bike tires on the country roads west of Parkside. Crouched astride a bike was a great place to think and he surely needed training with his July week in Iowa getting closer all the time. With all other thoughts lulled from his mind by the steady cadence of the wheels, he moved step by step through every facet of the Byrne case.

Overwhelming evidence demonstrated it was totally out of character for Jeffrey Byrne to discard his world like yesterday's trash, and yet, piece by piece, the picture was emerging that he'd done just that. First, Byrne's strange day at the Whitney Motel and the date of his business in Scranton. Then there was the apart­ment rental with Burgess's identification of Byrne, however tenu­ous, followed by the newspaper subscription and the motor home purchase. Albeit none of it definitely proved to be duplicity by Byrne beyond strong circumstantial evidence, but together the coincidences were compelling. Of all, it was the newspaper that bugged Dean the most. Where was it?

Complicating the picture was Baratto's tip to the mob-prob­ably via Arthur Atherton-that Byrne might be involved with the missing money. That unfortunate gaffe complicated matters and most likely was the impetus behind the break-in on Collingswood Avenue. But why was Fred followed from the motor home seller's house? That didn't make sense. If it was the mob, how had they gotten there first? It seemed they had but then why bother to chase down Fred? He was no threat.

How else did Arthur Atherton fit into this? He was Vinnie Baratto's attorney, so presumably Vinnie told him of his suspicions that Byrne might have taken the drug money. While Arthur might have been feeding the organization tidbits on Dean and Fred O'Connor's progress, how much could Arthur really know? Certainly his ties to Ethel helped, but Ethel herself knew little and Dean had never told her he was chasing down the possibility that Byrne was alive. Could Fred have slipped up? Might it have been one of those situations where Fred mentioned something to Cora Abernathy who told it to her second cousin, once removed, whose brother-in-law's best friend was seeing the sister of Arthur's housekeeper? Things like that happened in a town the size of Parkside. But no, Fred O'Connor was a lot of things, but loose-tongued wasn't one of his failings.

Where was Fletcher Brunel, the last person to meet with Byrne in Norfolk? Norfolk had all but ceased trying to locate the ex-World Wide employee, but Dean still considered him a missing piece in the puzzle and wanted to talk to the man. Tracking him down would be difficult without stepping on the jurisdictional toes of the Norfolk Police Department. While there was no clear reason to believe Brunel was involved in any wrongdoing, his con­tinued absence was disturbing.