Page 16 of Last Resort

“Why do you always live in interesting times—and drag me into it?” Hendricks muttered. He radioed for an ambulance and the forensic team. “You know any reason why someone would put a hit on your vacationer?”

Ben shook his head. “No idea. Met him once—seemed like a nice old guy. Figured he came for some peace and quiet. I’ll pull his paperwork, but given the circumstances, he probably used a fake ID.”

“You think?” Hendricks shook his head. “Since you and Mitchell moved here, my life hasn’t been boring. And Ilikedboring.” He took a deep breath. “I need to handle this. You know the drill. We’ll need footage from any surveillance cameras. Come down to the station this afternoon and give your statements. Try not to find any other dead bodies in the meantime.”

Ben and Sean walked back to the rental office. Jenny gasped when they told her about McRaney, sparing the details.

“That’s awful. I only saw him a couple of times, but he seemed like the gruff but harmless type,” she said.

“Since the police are looking into it, please don’t say anything,” Ben told her. “It definitely wasn’t a suicide.”

Her eyes widened. “Oh. Do you think it’s the Mob?” Jenny dropped her voice to a whisper.

“This is New Jersey. That’s always a good place to start,” Ben replied. “But the Chief will be pissed if word gets out, and doubly so if there’s speculation so…” He mimicked zipping his lips.

Jenny nodded solemnly and repeated the gesture. “Cross my heart.”

“Can you please pull any paperwork we have from McRaney? He must have filled out the forms, so there should be something in the files. Bonus if you can find a good photo of him on the security cameras. And put any video on a flash drive for the cops.”

“You got it,” Jenny replied.

Sean looked at him when Jenny went back to the front desk. “Now what?”

Ben held up a hand while he texted Erik.

Ben:Found dead guy in one of the rentals. Maybe a Mob hit. No details yet. Be careful. Love you.

He put his phone down before Erik could reply. “I wanted to warn Erik. This could be completely unrelated to either of us?—”

“Yeah, right.”

Ben ignored Sean. “But if it isn’t, he needs to take precautions.”

Sean sobered. “That’s why you carry a gun all the time?”

Ben shrugged. “It feels normal to me. And after everything that’s happened, I figured better safe than sorry.”

“Not exactly the norm for Cape May.”

“Neither are Erik and I, apparently. Although we’re certainly not the only people who came from somewhere else with a tarnished past.”

Sean followed Ben into his office.

“Let’s figure out who McRaney really was and why someone wanted him dead,” Ben said. “Pull up a chair unless you have somewhere else to be.”

Jenny handed off the rental agreement. “I’ll go back over the footage and see what I can find. If he wasn’t legit he might have tried to avoid the cameras.”

Ben pulled up the databases he could access given his private investigator license, which he kept current. “Hendricks won’t want to tell us anything, but if we find useful information first, we can pass it to him and maybe get something in exchange,” he told Sean after Jenny returned to the front desk.

He entered McRaney’s name and address, not surprised when it turned up an old warehouse in Trenton and a long-dead man from Point Pleasant. “Gave us bad info—there’s a surprise.”

“We could get lucky if Jenny can come up with a photo that’s better than his license, and we can get a hit on a facial recognition program,” Ben said. “In the meantime, I’ll enter his name into the ‘known aliases’ database and his physical description somewhere else to see if we get any matches. Same with his license plate. Sometimes people slip up and get careless.”

“Do you think there’s anything in his apartment that might be a clue?” Sean asked, leaning over Ben’s shoulder, enthralled.

“There might be, but I don’t want to get thrown in jail for disturbing a crime scene, even if it’s my own damn rental unit,” Ben replied. “Hendricks has cut us some slack in the past, but goodwill only goes so far. He’s basically a good guy, but I think there’s a little territory marking going on. You know—small-town cop defending his authority when a big-city hot shot comes to town.”

The computer pinged, drawing Ben’s attention to the screen. “Okay…we didn’t get an exact match on ‘Thomas McRaney,’ which is the name he rented under. But there’s an alias here for a Tom Raines that’s pretty close—and the person it’s associated with would be about the same age.”

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