A Reasonable Doubt by Susan Sloan (free novels .txt) 📕

the kitchen, and the family room before heading upstairs.  Carson had been right.  Six months after the fact, there wasn’t much of Dale Scott left in the house.  His gun collection had been sent to his father, his fishing gear had been given to the Boy Scouts, and his books and magazines had been donated to the public library.

In the master bedroom, one side of the huge walk-in closet was vacant, devoid even of hangers, his clothes having gone to the local thrift shop.  The top of the armoire was bare, and its drawers all empty.  The nightstand that sat to the left of the king-size bed had nothing either on it or in it.  All his personal effects had simply disappeared.

“It’s kind of creepy,” Lily murmured.  “It’s almost as if he never even lived here.”

“Or as if someone didn’t particularly want to remember that he had,” Joe murmured back as he moved toward the bathroom.

“Whatever it is you’re looking for,” Lauren said, “you aren’t going to find it.  I mean, whatever Dale was doing in that alley, it couldn’t have been illegal.  Being a policeman meant everything to him.  He would never have jeopardized that.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Lily said.  “I don’t think Dale would have been involved in anything illegal.”

“We just want to know why he was where he was that night,” Joe added.  But he wasn’t an ex-cop for nothing.  He opened the bathroom door.  Like the rest of the house, the room was pristine, without a trace of the man who had once lived there.  Only one set of towels hung on the rack.  Half of the shelves in the medicine cabinet were empty.  It was as if someone had come through and scrubbed away every last speck of Dale Scott’s existence.

Still, there was one last place to look, and it was a place that, unless someone knew what to look for, the scrub brush wouldn’t reach.  Joe pulled the cover off the toilet tank, pried the lever out of the inflow pipe, and reached a finger as far down as it would go.  And there it was, about two inches down, taped to the side of the pipe.

“What are you doing?” Lauren asked.

“There’s something in here,” Joe told her, carefully sliding his finger out, already knowing what it was.  “Is it okay with you if I have a try at getting it out?”

“What is it?” the widow asked.

“I won’t know until I see it,” he replied.

She hesitated for a moment, biting nervously at her lower lip, before finally nodding.  “Go ahead.  It’s probably nothing but some toilet tissue.”

Joe plucked a long thin pair of tweezers from a kit he carried in his jacket pocket, and began to work at the tape until it came loose, and then, slowly, carefully, he pulled a small plastic packet from the pipe.

“What is it?” Lauren demanded, peering over his shoulder.  “Oh my god, what is that?”

What Joe had found was a sealed waterproof bag containing two smaller bags, each of which was about the size of a commercial sugar packet.  He carefully opened the outer bag, and pulled out one of the inner bags.  Inside it was what looked, to the former police officer’s eye anyway, to be about a gram of cocaine.  To make sure, Joe dipped a finger into the powder and licked it.  Then he sighed.  He had found Dale Scott’s rainy day stash.

“I’m not sure,” he told the widow.  “Will you let me take it and have it tested?”

“I don’t care what you do with it,” Lauren cried.  “Just get it out of here!  Get it out of my sight!”

. . .

The Van Aiken brothers, Neil and Karl, had started life in Los Gatos, California, the youngest sons in a blue-collar family of ten.  Recruited by dealers when they were still in high school, they moved out on their own after graduating, but came up short of expectations in San Jose, had no luck in San Francisco or Portland, got rebuffed in Seattle, and so made their way out to Port Hancock, arriving in the late seventies to find an almost virgin territory.  The drug boom of the decade had barely touched Jackson County.  The brothers could hardly believe their good fortune. They staked their claim, set up shop, and never looked back.

The shop they set up was a real estate office in the heart of town.  The market had been moving in the right direction, making it a perfect front.  What the two young men lacked in real estate acumen, they more than made up for in other ways.  They quietly let it be known around the county that they were a pair who would be happy to fill whatever need anyone might happen to have.

With their old Los Gatos connections and ready supply route -- by way of a chartered boat that made routine late-night trips from California and Mexico to the Port Hancock docks, they found it easy to build a network.  There were always enough folks looking for a quick way to make a quicker buck.  And it wasn’t just high school dropouts and dead-enders, either, it was respectable people, too -- underpaid teachers, unemployed professionals, struggling laborers, and bored housewives who were more than willing to help -- for appropriate consideration, of course.

They began with marijuana, slowly, in no hurry, hooking anyone and everyone, from eighty-year-old tribal elders to twelve-year-old school kids.  By the end of the eighties, goods were moving in and out of the back of the real estate office at a prodigious rate.

By the late nineties, they had stepped up to oxy and meth and cocaine, where the real payoff was.  The Indians, who by that time were making more money from their casinos than they had ever dreamed they could make, went wild for it.  And the Van Aiken brothers were only too happy to accommodate them.

It was the turn of the century before serious competition began to make inroads on their territory.  A few scuffles