Dead Man’s List. Mike Lawson

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      “But his body was found in the lake, near the kayak,” DeMarco said.

      “Yeah, but there’s other stuff. Like Terry’s laptop is missing. That laptop was always with him. If he wasn’t carrying the thing, it was close by—in his car, on his desk, wherever he was. I asked the sheriff where his computer was, and at first he said he didn’t know. Two days later he calls back and says that Terry had filed a report with the D.C. cops before his death saying it had been stolen.”

      “And you don’t think it was?”

      “No. I talked to Terry the day he died, that morning. If his laptop had been stolen, he would have told me. He’d have been going nuts to find it. And the sheriff said that Terry reported the theft over the phone, not in person. So who knows who really filed the report?”

      “I see,” DeMarco said.

      “And that’s not all,” Finley said. “Terry was working on something, something he said was going to win him a Pulitzer. He wouldn’t tell me what, but he said when he filed his story the dome was gonna come off the Capitol. Now to tell you the truth, I didn’t think too much of that. Terry was always working on some story he said was gonna be big, but usually wasn’t. But then he goes and dies, and now I don’t know. You want another beer?”

      While Finley was getting his beer, DeMarco looked down at the beach and noticed a pudgy, middle-aged man walking a small dog. He watched as the guy tossed a stick of driftwood into the water. The stick looked heavy and was as long as the dog, but the dog—poor, dumb creature that it was—charged into the water after it. A wave crashed into the animal and it disappeared for a moment, then it reappeared with the stick in its mouth. The dog fought its way back to the beach and brought the stick to the man, who immediately tossed it again, farther out this time. DeMarco felt like going down to the beach and throwing the stick into the water and making the pudgy guy go fetch it.

      After Finley handed him his beer, DeMarco said, “Do you think there might be something in your son’s house that would give me an idea of what he was working on?”

      “Maybe you can find something, but I looked a couple days ago,” Finley said. “I went all through his desk, even looked in his safe to see if he’d put something there, but all that was in the safe was some cash and some old coins he’d collected.” Finley smiled then, but it was a sad smile. “The coins were like the kayak,” he said. “Terry bought ‘em ten years ago and probably hadn’t looked at ‘em since then. But if you want to look in his house, I’ll give you the keys.”

      “That’d be good,” DeMarco said. “I’ll take a look later if I think I need to.”

      “I did find one thing that I can’t explain,” Finley said, and he reached into his shirt pocket and carefully removed a wrinkled piece of paper and handed it to DeMarco. The paper was water-damaged and torn. It was a cocktail napkin from a place called Sam and Harry’s, a bar in D.C. that DeMarco went to quite often.

      “That was in Terry’s wallet,” Finley said. “His wallet was in his pants when he died and it got wet, of course. All the cash and credit card slips were all stuck together and I tore that when I tried to separate it from the other stuff. That’s all of it I could salvage.”

      DeMarco studied what was written on the napkin for a moment but could make no sense of it. “You think what’s written here might be related to whatever he was working on?” he said.

      “I don’t know,” Finley said. “It looks like he was just doodling on that napkin—Terry was a real doodler—but I don’t think he would have put it in his wallet if it wasn’t important. Look, the only thing I know for sure is that he didn’t fall out of a damn kayak at ten o’clock at night.”