A Golden Opportunity (continuation)

Welcome to The Spot Writers. The prompt for this month is to continue with last month’s prompt (a story told through a camera, any type of camera in any circumstance). This next story will be what happens AFTER what is told through the camera. This week’s story comes from the pen of Phil Yeats.

In April 2024, Phil published The Body on Karli’s Beach, the third book in his Barrettsport Mysteries, a series of soft-boiled mysteries set in a fictional South Shore, Nova Scotia town. For information about these books, The Road to Environmental Armageddon, his trilogy about the hazards of ignoring human-induced climate change, and his latest, a novella titled Starting Over Again: A Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy visit his website: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com/.

  

A Golden Opportunity (continuation)

by Phil Yeats

 

Detective Sargeant Sam Taylor was off chasing down information on Matt MacDonald and Chris Martin. Detective Max Beech began filling in the details of their victim, Percival Smythe Jones, while he waited for reports from the coroner and the crime scene officers.

Max was a successful detective but known as a maverick in the Halifax Police Department because he charged off following his hunches while he waited, sometimes what he considered inordinate lengths of time for those official reports to make their way to his desk.

Today, however, he was behaving himself, searching for information on their victim’s life from his graduation from a small Squamish, BC college to his demise in his upscale condo in Halifax. The two events were a long way apart, in both kilometres and years.

After graduating from college with a science degree, he enrolled in a course at a Vancouver technical college that provided him with certification as a mineral prospector. After that, Max lost his trail until he showed up again several years later, listed as vice president in charge of prospecting at a gold mining start-up whose stock price rocketed ahead before fading into oblivion. Then his trail went dark again.

He had the fancy apartment, a Lamborghini sports car and an almost new Hummer electric SUV. His father denied subsidizing any of Perry’s activities after his second year at college.

“So,” Max said to Sam after a day trolling for data, “where did he get the money?”

“Can’t answer that question, but I learned things from Chris Brown, the geology student living in Australia.”

“Don’t hold me in suspense.”

“First, he has the photos and will send them to us. But more important, he said they were all similar to the one we have. What puzzled Chris was that he knows Perry several shots that zoomed in on the scar on the hillside. He never showed them to us, but after the visit to that viewpoint opposite the landslide, Perry changed. He became less of a pest, sort of off in a world of his own with a sudden interest in geology.”

“That is interesting,” Max said as he searched his computer for information on faculty members in the Dalhousie University Department of Geology. “Which one should we contact?” he said when he found a page with faculty members and their specialities.

“Talk to the head, I guess, see where that leads us. Should give us a contact at the University of British Columbia.”

Max nodded. “That’s your job for tomorrow.”

“It’s early afternoon on the West Coast. I could bypass Dal and go straight to UBC.”

“Fine, give it a shot. I have something to do this evening, something that’s best done alone. We’ll get back together in the morning and compare notes.”

An hour later, Max arrived at an apartment hidden away up an exterior flight of stairs behind a vape shop in a rundown part of the city. He rang the bell and a few seconds later heard a click as a servo motor released the door lock.

Inside, a voice called out from another room behind the apartment’s sparsely furnished main room. The kitchen area in this great room had a counter with a single stool and a few utensils, dishes, pots, and pans. Many were in the sink, unwashed; others were stacked on the counter. The rest of the room contained a single recliner chair with a small side table, tucked away behind the main door.

Another click released the door to the back room, and Max entered a small room cluttered with electronics on shelves and a large desk. A chair on wheels in front of the main computer terminal was its only other furnishing. A baby-faced but bald young man swiveled around. “Hello, Max. What can I do for you?”

Max only knew him by Min, the name he laughingly gave himself when Max saved him from a suicide attempt when he was a teenager. Under Max’s tutelage, and often with Max’s financial support, he finished high school and three years of university. He appeared again four years later, when Max needed the help of a computer wizard to solve a case.

Min sat silently, brow furrowed, for a minute after Max described his problem. He swivelled to his keyboard and tapped away for several minutes. “Right. This shouldn’t be difficult. Meet you at, say, seven tomorrow for dinner at the trattoria.”

Min was sitting at a table with a glass of red wine in his hand when Max arrived at the restaurant. A waiter arrived with a glass of wine for Max.

“These two are on me. I expect you to pick up the tab for the rest of our meal as payment for a job well done.”

Max nodded. This was their normal arrangement—a small payment for the information Min extracted from the world of computer networks.

“Percival Smythe Jones is a con man, a thorn in the side of his father, a prominent politician. Daddy Dearest spends a lot of time and money keeping young Percy out of the limelight. It started with Percy’s mining venture, the one you mentioned to me. Good old-fashioned gold mining scam. You spike some preliminary drill samples with traces of gold, or alter the results of the sample analyses, generate interest in the market that drives up share prices, then when followup cores come up empty, share prices plummet. Meanwhile, you’ve sold your stake and the top of the market and disappeared.”

“I’d guessed that was the outcome, but there was no fuss from investors or legal ramifications.”

“That’s because Daddy Dearest paid off the disgruntled investors and hushed it up.”

“Doesn’t sound like that gives me a motive for murdering Percy, unless his father did him in.”

Min ignored Max’s suggestion. “Next chapters get more interesting. First, he multiplied his ill-gotten fortune several-fold speculating in bitcoins. Then he started a new venture.”

“Another stock scam?”

Min shook his head. “More diabolical. He started a privately funded investment fund that promised huge gains for investors willing to bend or break rules to find or generate sure bets.”

“Sounds illegal.”

“Very, but also well hidden. And if anything goes wrong, they can’t go to the police. They’d be implicating themselves.”

Min tapped the man-purse slung over his shoulder. “It’s all in here, for your use but not for public consumption.” He smiled. “My methods are not always strictly legal, and you’d be implicated.”

“So you’re giving me a number—”

“—twenty-seven potential perpetrators, plus Daddy Dearest, who could have orchestrated a hit.”

“Useful, but it doesn’t solve my case.”

“True, but don’t despair. After I’ve enjoyed my dinner, the first proper meal I’ve had in weeks, I’ll provide you with a summary of my findings.”

“But not the perpetrator,” Max said.

“Verbally as we leave. You’ll have to prepare your case with admissible evidence before you make a bust.”

 

***

The Spot Writers:

Val Muller: http://www.valmuller.com/blog/

Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com

Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com/

Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.com/