and baring her teeth at the blanket in her ire. I smiled, distracted from my unhappy thoughts, and picked the ferret up to toss her gently back onto the bed where she bounced around crazily with her fur on end, chuckling until she was exhausted and flopped flat as a ferret-fur rug across the nearest pillow.
“Well, I guess you’re ready for bed, then,” I muttered, scooping the limp animal up and depositing her in her travel cage. She flounced into her nest of old sweatshirt fabric while I finished setting up the cage. I could hear her issuing tiny ferret snores by the time I’d returned with her filled water bottle and food dish.
I shed my clothes onto the furniture and burrowed into my own ferret-disarrayed bed, falling asleep as quickly as Chaos had. I had a lot to do in the morning....
FOUR
Six hours of sleep was less than I’d wanted, but I needed to start early since it was Friday and I wanted to get the paper trail wrapped up quickly enough that I could get back up into the mountains before dark. I did as much of a workout as I could manage in a hotel room with no equipment; then I showered and dressed while running interference in the ferret’s plans for world domination through shoe theft.
I got to the Clallam County courthouse as the building opened for the day. The modern low-rise of glass and concrete was just behind and around the corner from the graceful brick-and-marble edifice of the original courthouse that had been converted into a small museum. All current county offices and services were housed in the new building, and every person who’d come to court, gotten married, lost his house to tax foreclosure, or come to file a death certificate had left shreds of emotion behind, until the modern cement buildings had accrued a thin, constant cloud of Grey energy. The new building was well lit with skylights and windows, but it still had a touch of gloom to it under the drizzling clouds.
Even though all the offices I needed were in the same building, it took most of three hours to confirm that there was no death certificate for Steven Leung and to get through the tax and property records for his house. No one was obstructive, but the county was, like all counties in Washington at the moment, short-staffed to begin with and missing a few more who’d been furloughed for budget reasons or started their weekend a day early. The people who were at their desks were buried in paperwork and most were doing someone else’s job as well as their own, trying to wrap up as much up as possible before four thirty. As I searched for information, I kept seeing the flutter of otherworldly flames at the edges of my vision. I couldn’t quite catch a glimpse of Steven Leung, though. He seemed to have faded to the thinnest remains of a ghost—even more ragged than the mysterious Anna Petrovna had been before she vanished from my room the night before.
The assessor’s office, where Leung had worked, kept track of property taxes, but with so much staff doubling up, I struck it lucky—the clerk in charge of deeds and property records was also the acting tax assessor’s clerk. Property deeds and taxes are public records, so he was able to confirm that the house was still in Leung’s name and that the property tax payments were up-to-date via automated payments direct from his bank.
The clerk gave me the location of the parcel on which Leung’s house sat. I glanced at the slip of paper where he’d written the information and shook my head. “I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the area. Where is this?”
“It’s up by the lakes.” He pulled out a map of property lines and land parcels and opened it on a nearby table, passing a finger over the printed terrain until he came to the area around Lake Crescent.
On the map the big lake looked like the silhouette of a Chinese dragon puffing out a ball of flame in the direction of downtown Port Angeles. I followed his finger across the top of the dragon’s head, past the stretch of East Beach Road where I’d seen the phantom of Leung’s burning car, and across the highway to the irregular, elongated shape that seemed to have been spat from the dragon’s mouth.
The clerk tapped the map. “Right here on Lake Sutherland. Just head up to Lake Crescent and turn left at the sign for Lake Sutherland Road. Pretty country even at this time of year, especially if you can be up on that end of the lakes when the sun’s going down.”
My interest was definitely piqued since I didn’t recall anything unusual from my last viewing of the lake. “Does something happen at sundown?”
“If the clouds break right, the sun shines through a low point in the surrounding hills and turns the surface of the water pink and red and orange just before it goes under the horizon. It’s right pretty, but you can’t see it any other time of the year.” He made a circle on the map with his fingertip, covering the western edge of Lake Sutherland and over onto the northeastern shore of Lake Crescent. A distant, muffled roaring sounded in my ears and the flickering flames that teased the corners of my vision grew brighter for a moment as the clerk said, “Someone tried to name the area ‘Sunset Lakes’ once a long time back when they opened up the first leg of the highway, but it didn’t stick since you can’t see the phenomenon during the warmer months. People don’t want to hang around to watch the sunset when they’re freezing their hind ends off,” he added with a chuckle. “Even back in the day, tourists were big business. Not like the area’s had a lot of settlement up there. Mostly lumbering in the early days, fishing, a bit of mining for a while, but not much, and the whole area’s pretty much shut down from the end of October through April, when the resorts start opening up. A few hardy types live up there the entire time, but it’s mostly just summer places and the big lodges in the national park property.”
“Any idea if Steven Leung lived there full-time after he retired?” I asked.
He thought about it for a moment. “I’m not sure. It’s hard to get by on a retirement salary if you have to pay rent in town
“Did you know him while he was working here?”
“Only to nod to. He started out in the surveyor’s office and transferred here when he started slowing down a bit. But he still did a lot of the physical work on assessments and I didn’t work directly for the assessor then, so I didn’t see a lot of him. Seemed like a nice fella, but kind of quiet, as I remember.”
“Unrelated topic: Do you have any title records for a Darin Shea?”
He looked but could find nothing to show Darin Shea had any ownership or interest in any land in Clallam County. Not that I’d expected any—roving handymen aren’t the sort to invest in real estate.
The clerk couldn’t supply much more information on Leung, either, and his paperwork was backing up while he was chatting with me. I reluctantly let him go back to it. I had a bad feeling about what I would hear next, but still I went down the hall to discover what I could about Leung’s retirement checks.
The treasurer’s office was responsible for the retirement payments, and though the woman managing disbursements wouldn’t give me specifics, she was willing to confirm that the payments still went out every month, direct-deposited to Leung’s credit union account—another case of no human hands touching a check....
I wondered what happened when people died and how long it took for the county to demand the overpayments back from the family of the deceased. Her answer was complicated and not very reassuring. It seemed all too easy for a dead man to keep receiving his pay until some other authority—usually the IRS—got nosy. It occurred to me that if Steven Leung had been dead for the past five years, even a small retirement payment would add up to a big chunk of money. If he’d been killed, would that—and the taxes—have been worth the cost of murder?
I kept on poking, though I turned my focus mostly on Darin Shea. I tried the licensing bureau, the office of business taxes, the DMV . . . but I couldn’t find anything more on Leung that I didn’t have already; nor could I find any paperwork for Shea, not even a suspended driver’s license. Neither man had any criminal record or fingerprints on file that the county resources could turn up. That didn’t surprise me for Leung, but I had to hope I could find a crack in Shea’s blank wall before Nan went to trial with him. I had to admit, though, that I was less interested in Shea than in Leung’s disappearance.
Once I was done with the county offices, I went searching for a place to have lunch and compile my notes before I drove up into the mountains that loomed over Port Angeles. As I headed back to my truck, I mentally damned the systems that both invaded our privacy and made it possible for a man missing or dead for five years to continue to collect his stipend and pay taxes. Money is a remarkable motivator and unpaid taxes would have gotten someone looking for Leung a lot earlier than this, but with no human actually cashing or cutting a check, the organizations most likely to kick up a fuss and cause trouble hadn’t even noticed. And someone may have profited by that.
I had coffee and a bite to eat at a tiny place called the Veela Café, while Chaos hung her head over
