Nancy called the police station and arranged to meet Detective Lee in an hour. Then she went upstairs to the guest bedroom. She looked through Marisa’s handbag until she found the money identifier. She tucked it into her pocket, with plans to return it later that night.
At the police station, Nancy found Detective Lee kicking the vending machine. “It won’t take my dollar,” he explained. Nancy pulled a crisp dollar from her pocket. “Let’s trade.”
“Thanks.” Detective Lee inserted Nancy’s bill into the machine and selected a chocolate marsh-mallow crispy bar. The red light on the machine began blinking, and no candy was delivered.
Detective Lee pressed the change return button. Still nothing happened. Detective Lee kicked the machine again. “This thing hates me,” he said.
Nancy took Detective Lee’s crinkled bill and inserted it into the money identifier. “One dollar,” the device said.
“Wow,” Detective Lee said. “That’s amazing.”
“It seems to work on money in poor condition.” Nancy pocketed the bill. “I wonder whether it works on counterfeit money.”
“Why do you need to know that?” Lee asked.
Nancy shrugged. “Just curious. Would you mind if I tried the device on some of the counterfeit bills you seized from the inn?”
“I don’t see why not,” Detective Lee said. “But I’ll have to escort you to the evidence room.”
“Lead the way,” Nancy said.
Nancy followed Detective Lee through a maze of rooms on the first floor of the station house. Finally, they reached a room jammed full of everything from rusty tricycles to jewelry.
Detective Lee found a labeled plastic bag filled with money and brought it to Nancy. He put on a rubber glove and extracted one counterfeit twenty-dollar bill.
As Nancy held the device, Detective Lee inserted the money into it. “Error,” the device said. Detective Lee tried another bill. “Error.”
Nancy sighed. Her hunch was right. The device wouldn’t read counterfeit money. Marisa was smart, and she knew all about the counterfeiting case, Nancy thought sadly. If Marisa had received the phony twenty-dollar bill as change, she should have had good reason to suspect it might be counterfeit.
“Okay,” Detective Lee said. “Are you going to clue me in here? What does this mean?”
“I don’t know yet,” Nancy said quietly. “May I look at those old case files now?”
“Sure.” Detective Lee led her back through the station to another room containing wall-to-wall filing cabinets. He wove through several rows until they reached a tall, gray cabinet near the back of the room. He knelt on the floor and opened the bottom drawer. “Half the files in this drawer pertain to the old counterfeiting case.”
He stood up to make room for Nancy. “Have fun. I’ll be at my desk if you need me.”
Nancy thanked Detective Lee. After he left, she sat cross-legged on the floor with a file folder in her lap. It contained technical information regarding the production of the bills and a list of places where counterfeit money had been found twenty-five years earlier.
The second file folder described the arrests of Frank Goetz and Don Blevins for transporting the counterfeit money to Chicago. Goetz’s work history included six months in the kitchen at Candlelight Inn before it was converted into Emmaline Whitby’s private residence.
Blevins had been a gardener at several prominent River Heights homes. Nancy wondered whether he, too, had worked at Candlelight Inn. If the inn had been the headquarters of the counterfeiting ring, maybe this was how Goetz and Blevins had met their boss, Nancy figured.
In the third file folder, Nancy found a transcript of a police interrogation of a suspect in the case. She gasped when she saw the name of the suspect—Larry Marshall, Devon and Amber’s father.
Nancy flipped through the rest of the documents in the file. Mr. Marshall had been arrested twenty-five years ago after passing several counterfeit bills at the Westmoor college dining hall. Like Eric, he was an architecture student with excellent drafting skills. He was considered the lead suspect, but there wasn’t enough evidence to pursue the charges against him, so he was eventually released.
Nancy squinted at a notation written at the bottom of one of the pages of the document. When Mr. Marshall was arrested, his girlfriend had posted bail for him, the note said. Her name was Susan Whitby.
“Susan Whitby,” Nancy whispered. “That’s Marisa’s mother.”
11
A Handful of Suspects
Nancy’s mind raced as she drove from the police station to Bess’s house. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t made the connection sooner. Marisa was Emmaline Whitby’s granddaughter. That made her the most obvious suspect of all.
Marisa had inherited Emmaline’s furniture, but the Guiding Eyes got her fortune. What if Marisa wanted the money for herself? Nancy thought. Marisa was a law student. She must realize that if the plans to renovate the inn were sabotaged and the Guiding Eyes couldn’t open the school, she would have a good chance of contesting her grandmother’s will. And if Marisa was successful, she would get the money that Emmaline had left to the Guiding Eyes.
When she reached Bess’s house, Nancy found George and Bess playing on the floor with Casey. “How was the 5K race?” Nancy asked George.
“Except for all the mud, the race was pretty good,” George said.
“Don’t be so modest,” Bess said. “She came in first in her age group.”
“That’s great!” Nancy said. She looked through her wallet for the money she had pledged to the Guiding Eyes and gave it to George.
“Thanks, Nan.” George looked at Bess. “Marisa and Nancy are the only people who have paid me so far.”
“I told you, I’m too embarrassed to show my face in the bank right now,” Bess said. “I’ll pay you in a few days, okay?”
George laughed. “Okay.”
“Where’s Marisa?” Nancy asked.
“She had a late class tonight.” George threw Casey’s tennis ball across the room, and Casey raced after it. “I dropped her off at the university.”
“When will she be able to go back to her apartment?” Nancy asked Bess.
