EIGHTEEN

“I love younger men,” Jo said, bouncing into Wy’s house an hour later. “Give your friend Mr. Wiley my compliments, and tell him I said so.”

“First thing on my list,” Liam said.

Jo peered at Wy. “You look like you’ve been up all night.”

“So do you,” Wy said, and shoved a cup of coffee at her and another one at Liam.

Jo perched on the stool next to Liam’s. “Your father is a piece of work,” she told him.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” he said before he thought, and then scowled away any lingering trace of willingness to discuss his father with the press, or with anyone, for that mattter.

Jo sipped her coffee, looking at him over the rim of her mug. “He came here planning on retrieving that C-47.”

Liam sent Wy a warning glance, and shrugged. “So? Like he said, the air force brings back its own. Nothing new or wrong in that.” He kept his inevitable reflections to himself.

“This wasn’t an ordinary crash,” Jo said. “I just got off the phone with a friend in D.C. This wasn’t an ordinary crew on board this flight, either.”

“What do you mean?”

“The copilot’s name was Aloysius March.”

Liam and Wy exchanged glances. “That name supposed to mean something to us?”

“Aloysius March was Walter March’s father.”

“And Walter March is…?”

Jo huffed out an impatient sigh. “How the hell am I supposed to make a living if my own friends won’t read my own paper?” Snit over, she smiled, and it was a low-down, mean, dirty, nasty little snake of a smile. “Gen. Walter March is the nominee for chief of staff for the U.S. Air Force.”

They absorbed that in startled silence. “So Dad’s going after his boss’s dad’s body,” Liam said. “Sucking up to then th degree, one more step up on the career ladder, but so what?”

“He’s using air force funds to do it.”

“I’m shocked-shocked-to hear of misappropriation of funds going on in the U.S. armed forces,” Liam said, very dry.

Wy agreed. “I don’t see the big scandal here. Like he said, he’s going after three of their own. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, frankly. I think it’s kind of, I don’t know, right. We’re still looking for the bodies of American servicemen in Vietnam. We should be. How is this any different, other than being a different war?”

Jo added half-and-half to her coffee. “I don’t think recovering the bodies of the honored dead is what this is about, Wy.”

“Why not? Why does it have to be any more complicated than that? Honest to God, Jo, you see more conspiracies than John Birch.”

“Maybe you’re right, Wy, maybe I’ve been in the newspaper game too long, I can’t see the simple truth when it’s staring me in the face. But I don’t think so. Not this time, anyway.”

“Why not?”

“Because I asked my friend to pull the service records of the three crew members.”

“And?”

“And he couldn’t. They’re listed as classified.”

Moses’ side of the bed was empty when Bill woke up. She found him down at the bar when she got there, back in the office growling at the computer. “If this keeps up, I’m going to hire you to keep the books,” she told him.

“I’d rather spend the rest of my life listening to Puff Daddy,” he said. “Look at this.”

She came around the desk to look over his shoulder. “Oh, man. Are you back at that?”

“I think it’s important.”

“Think, or is something telling you so?”

He leaned back. “I’m telling you, babe, there’s nothing going on here except my nose is itching.”

“I can fix that,” she said.

He dodged her hand. “Where’s the coin?”

“I gave it to Liam.”

“Damn it. I’d like to get another look at it.”

It was an hour before opening and she had time to humor him. “Tell me why you think it’s important.”

He decided to give her a little history. “The U.S. didn’t even make twenty-dollar gold pieces until the California gold rush. Until then, 1849, the U.S. minted only one-dollar, two-fifty, five-dollar and ten-dollar gold coins.”

“Two-fifty?”

“Yeah, I know. But we used to have a two-dollar bill, don’t forget. The early nineteen hundreds, man, they were making some cool-looking money. The buffalo nickel, the Mercury dime, you know the guy with wings, and the dime was still silver back then. The quarter with Lady Liberty on it.” He pulled a handful of change from his pocket and slammed it down on the desk in disgust. “Look at this crap. That could be Albert Lincoln who owns the Ford dealership, and Greg Washington who plays forward for the New York Knicks, and I can’t even tell who the guy on the dime is. Plus, ain’t none of them made of enough of any precious metal to actually be worth what the face value on the coin is. Always assuming you can read it without a microscope.”

Moses was very indignant. Bill concealed her amusement. “But our coin was minted in 1921, didn’t we figure? That’s not even a hundred years old.”

“Well, I haven’t quite figured out how valuable it is,” he admitted. “There a lot of stuff I don’t understand, like grading and luster and I don’t know what else.” He thought for a moment, and added, “I got tangled up on an auction site and accidentally bid five hundred dollars for one, though.”

“You did what!”

He looked a little sheepish. “It’s okay; somebody outbid me. It went for five forty-nine.”

She whistled, and he nodded. “So I been thinking, Bill.”

She matched his tone. “What you been thinking, Moses?”

“I been thinking there might have been more of those coins on that plane.”

She sobered. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

“Me, either,” he said grimly. “Imagine the treasure hunt a rumor like that would start.”

“It’s already started.” She told him about the Gray gang. He swore. She looked at the monitor screen. “It’s too bad Lydia isn’t still alive.”

“Why?”

“She knew about coins.”

Moses stared at her.

“It’s true. She had a collection of old American coins, old quarters and nickels and dimes and pennies, just pocket change really, that she’d been saving up since she was a kid. She subscribed to a magazine,Quarters R Us or something like that. I used to see it lying around the house when we were at her place for book club.” She brightened. “In fact, I’d forgotten all about it, but I think she had some other, more valuable coins, too. Yeah, I remember she pulled out an album one time, it was really cool, had all these little pockets inside it for each individual coin.” She smiled. “She was annoyed with me, because I was more interested in the album construction than I was in the coins.” Her smile faded. “You know, now that I think of it, she might have…” Her voice trailed away.

Moses’ face had gone very hard. “Might have what?”

“It’s silly, it couldn’t possibly…” She met his eyes. “I’ve got to be wrong about this, Moses.”

He was inexorable. “Wrong about what?”

“Now that I think back, she might have had one of those coins in that album. Just like the one that was in the hand.”

Wy had a pickup in Ekwok she couldn’t get out of, so Jo accompanied Liam to the post. They arrived at the same time as Diana, who looked as drug-out as Liam felt. He brought her up-to-date. She listened, nodding, and when he finished said, “Makes sense to me. I just rousted Brewster Gibbons out of bed and hauled his butt down to the bank. Karen bought her town house for cash.”

“How much?”

“A hundred and twenty thousand.”

“Jesus. What’d she do, write a check?”

“She did, and this is the interesting part. She didn’t have much left over.”

“Her bank balance looks pretty good.”

“Yeah, but that’s the least amount it’s ever been. Gibbons says she’s been steadily depleting her trust fund.”

“What else?”

“While I was at it, I checked on Lydia’s finances. Her house is paid off, too, although that’s not quite so surprising. I checked on the other kids. All of them have very healthy cash balances, and none of them have any outstanding debts, at least not with Brewster’s bank. Jerry’s balance is just as healthy, it’s just that every check has to be cosigned by his mother.”