They settled at the table in the library, the binders between them.
“These were Ricardo’s projects,” he said. “Masterpieces, every one.” He slid them toward Lana with a sad smile.
“I miss him,” he said.
Lana was always suspicious of a man with tears in his eyes. She placed the binders side by side, running her hand over the textured canvas cover of the one on the right.
“He sounds very special,” she said. “Did you know much about his life outside of work?”
Victor hesitated for a moment before answering. “Ricardo was devoted to his work. And a handsome young man. I imagine he had girlfriends, but I wasn’t familiar with his romantic life.”
Lana wondered if the detectives had found any angry exes worth investigating. For now she focused on the information at hand. She looked down at the binders. “May I take a closer look at these? I might find something that can send the detectives in a more appropriate direction. So you can have peace, and justice, for Ricardo.”
“Justice would be welcomed.” Victor took one last, longing look at the binders. For a moment Lana thought he was going to grab them back from her and whisk them away. But then he nodded. “Take all the time you need.”
He rose, turned, and tipped an imaginary hat. Then he walked out, closing the library door firmly behind him so she would not be disturbed.
Perfect.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The first thing Lana did was take the aspirin. And another one. Her head was throbbing in time with her left arm, and Victor’s history lesson hadn’t helped.
She shoved aside the pain and started working her way through Saint Ricardo’s land conquests. He certainly had been busy. Lana counted seventeen projects in the binders, hundreds of pages of correspondence, site maps, and contracts. Some projects were small, like a single-acre lot inhabited by endangered salamanders. Others were complex, involving multiple parties and pages of legalese. Each project file ended with a letter of agreement between the property owner and the land trust and a handwritten thank-you note. The flowery signatures on monogrammed notecards spoke of an earlier time, when penmanship and stewardship were drilled into would-be land barons.
But not every project file was complete. The file on Hal Rhoads’s property appeared midway through the second binder, one of three projects in progress when Ricardo died. The thin file contained mostly printed emails and a calendar of meetings stretching back six months. Ricardo visited Hal weekly, at first with Victor, then later, on his own. The men toured the ranch. Ate picnics. It looked less like a business transaction than a multigenerational bromance, complete with horse rides over the hillside.
And, strangely, medical appointments. The Rhoads project calendar showed some listings for an unspecified doctor on Wednesdays. It seemed Ricardo had been accompanying Hal to a regular checkup, presumably one trivial enough that a non-relative could take him. Blood tests, maybe. Lana thought of her own datebook, the business meetings replaced with DR this and DR that. She hated having her daughter chauffeur her like a child, to appointments she wouldn’t have chosen, days drained of her own control.
The rest of the Rhoads file focused on the ranch—parcel descriptions, maps, lists of active leases. There were grainy black-and-white photographs and historical documents that had been photocopied several times, not always at right angles. Before she flipped each page, Lana took a photograph with her phone, figuring she could make better sense of it on a day when the words weren’t vibrating off the page. She imagined Beth rolling her eyes at her with every click.
She was almost surprised to see the letter of intent just sitting there, sandwiched between copies of the subleases Mr. Rhoads maintained with his tenants. For a moment, she debated whether to take it. But she decided a simple photograph would suffice. Nothing about the letter screamed coercion or foul play to her, but it was strange. It was short, just a page, and didn’t say anything about transferring ownership of the ranch. Instead, the LOI described the potential to form some kind of easement. Even stranger, none of Ricardo and Hal’s correspondence appeared to acknowledge or build on it. The emails between the two men spoke in lofty tones about unprecedented opportunities. There were no specifics. No contracts.
It was time for a bathroom break and a more pointed conversation with Victor about the future of the ranch. But when she moved to stand up, Lana discovered her left leg had gone numb. Great. Now she had a limp arm and a dead leg. She was a pirate joke in the making.
She wheeled her chair back from the table and grabbed under her left hamstring with both hands, shaking her leg to jolt it awake. She used one of the binders to massage her thigh, pressing the hard spine into her muscle to squeeze it back to life.