The Belial Stone (The Belial Series #1)(58)

“Do the police have any leads?” Jake asked.

Yoni shook his head, “Nothing. And the daughter didn’t have any idea why either. Before he died, her father had told her that he had a plan for making some more money. He never went into detail, though. According to the police, she’d said he’d been afraid he would jinx it, whatever it was.”

Yoni halted his story to smile at the waitress as she dropped off their drinks. “So I went by the Rusty Nail to see her last night. Nice lady. She’s got it tough, though. One of the kids is sick a lot. In fact, she had to rush home last night to take care of him. I stayed at the bar and talked to the owner who was tending bar, Travis Heymaker. I’d been sitting at the bar for about an hour when one of those political commercials comes on for Senator Robert Kensington. And Travis starts saying how this guy is a real shyster. That’s the actual word he used - shyster. So I start agreeing with him. Saying how you can’t trust any politician.

“And Heymaker just lets loose. He starts telling me how when Kelly’s dad died two years ago, Kensington bought up all his land after the estate was done with probate. Travis said he underpaid, but that he’d scared off anybody else who was interested."

“How’d he scare them off?” Laney asked.

“Anybody who was interested in the land got visited by the IRS or had a warrant issued for their arrest based on old parking tickets, or something else along those lines. Didn’t take too long for people to get the message and stop being interested. And the only money Kelly could get was half of what it was really worth. But she had a sick child and the bills were really beginning to pile up. So what could she do?”

“Does he know why Kensington wanted the land so badly?” Jake asked.

Yoni shrugged. “No. He knows something isn’t right. Apparently, Kensington put a fence around the whole property – all 300 acres. And he has guards patrolling it.”

Yoni stopped talking to give the waitress another flirtatious smile as she placed the food on the table. “So, I did a little checking into the property. I couldn’t do much recon on the land because, well heck, I just got here last night. I did check it out online. Kensington pulled a Cheney on Google Earth and had it removed. He even pulled some strings with the governor to have it declared a no-fly zone so that no planes can even fly over it. Seems like Kensington is trying to keep something hidden.”

“So we can’t get in?” Laney asked.

“I didn’t say that,” Yoni replied, swallowing a pickle slice and licking his fingers. “It’s just going to be a little difficult. I did a little recon last night and again this morning before I came to pick you up. It looks like the guards patrol every twenty minutes or so. The best call would be to go in at night. But there’s not much cover anywhere.”

“Ghillie suit?” Jake asked, a grin beginning to form on his face

Yoni returned the grin. “Ghillie suit.”

“What’s a ghillie suit?” Laney asked.

Yoni gave her a grin that was usually reserved for four-year-olds on Christmas morning. “Oh Doc, you’re going to love it.”





CHAPTER 51



Beaver Creek, MT



Later that night, Yoni and Jake prepared to recon the Kensington site. They were dressed like something out of the Swamp Thing.

After seeing their get-ups, Laney didn’t even attempt to get them to let her tag along. She knew she was out of her league. She might know how to run a hierarchical linear model analysis, but recon a target in the dead of night while dressed like a creature from the black lagoon? Not her thing.

After the last night’s attack, though, Jake wasn’t leaving her unprotected. She had a Beretta to the right of her laptop on the coffee table and a fully loaded shotgun on the kitchen counter across from her. All the doors and windows were locked, the blinds down.

Yoni had even set up trip wires out in the yard and drive as an extra precaution. At the first sign of trouble she was supposed to get to the truck and beat it out of there. And according to Yoni, if anyone tried to stop her, she was supposed to mow them down.

As he left, he’d even slipped her a machete with a wink. “Just in case. Remember, dismemberment will probably work, too.”

She smiled wryly. Her life had certainly taken a turn to the absurd recently. Last week around this time, she’d been settling down to watch a movie about a cat who wanted to sing in the movies with Max and Kati. Now she was sitting in a wired house, armed, trying to find information that tied a U.S. Senator to a bunch of missing cons.

And she was coming up empty. Although Kensington certainly had no love lost for the criminal population, all of it was pretty standard stuff. He was a strong proponent of the death penalty and reducing the number of appeals for a death verdict. He even wanted to increase prison time for all offenses across the board. Basically his motto seemed to be, if you couldn’t kill them for their crime, they should be locked up for the rest of their life.

Laney shook her head. She knew that politicians loved to take strong stances against crime, but the reality was that by the time the criminal justice system got involved, it was usually too late to do anything. Criminals weren’t made when they turn eighteen. They were made through a lifetime of experiences.

Effective crime reduction policies involved early parenting classes, increasing the quality of education that children received, and providing children with a safe environment after school. Those options always looked too soft in the public arena. So Senator Kensington was towing the party line with regards to the appropriate way to deal with criminals – lock them away for as long as possible.