Page 78 of A Rose of Steel
I waved the envelope at him. “I brought you a present.”
“Ahh,” he said. “Now I see why you’re here.”
“One day I’m going to surprise you and just stop by to say, hi.”
He laughed. “I look forward to that day.”
“I thought you’d be on your way out, not still working.” I glanced up at the clock on the wall.
“I’m busy, what can I say.”
“Who knew there was so much crime in Roble,” I said, almost facetiously, although things were a-changing.
“Yeah, all this murder business is something.”
“The crime I’m talking about was some kind of Medicare Part D scam I just found out about earlier. Someone perpetrating it on the seniors around here.”
“You’ve been talking to Miriam Colter.”
“Yeah,” I said and raised an eyebrow. “She said something to you about it?”
“Oh my, that’s all I can hear from her.” He shook his head. “She wants me to go and arrest every person in town under eighteen.”
“Oh,” I said, “because the voice sounded young that made the call to her house?”
“Right and when it first happened that might have made sense. But that was two years ago. It’s possible that by now they’d be an adult.”
I laughed. “You weren’t even sheriff two years ago.”
“I know, but when I got elected she thought she had a new ear to bend about it. Somebody she hoped who would open up an investigation.”
“Are you going to look into it?” I asked.
“The other sheriff did some preliminary work on it, I guess. He looked into some juvie records, found out who were some of the little hooligans at the time who might be involved in it or maybe knew about it.”
“Didn’t find anything?”
“No. But that might be interesting to you, Michael Hackett was one of the juvie records he pulled.”
“Bumper?”
“Yeah, seems like he and a couple of his friends liked to cause a little havoc back then. Got into a little trouble.”
“They’re all in college now,” I said. “Well, Bumper was in college. And his friends are—the ones I met that is.”
“Yeah, one of them had been into some trouble for credit card theft. But what I’ve learned from the last sheriff’s investigation, if you want to call it that, there was no way a bunch of high school pranksters could have pulled it off. Someone older, more experienced had to have been running that scam.”
“Maybe they employed teenagers?” I asked. “That’s why the seniors thought the voices were of young people?”
“Seniors?” he asked. “Who else?”
“I was at Angel’s Grace when I heard about it. Seniors from the JOY Club told me about it.”
“Oh,” he said and slowly nodded. “No one has come to me but Miriam Coulter. She’s probably filling their heads with it.” He huffed. “Hope it won’t make more work for me.”
“Why didn’t you tell Mrs. Coulter that the FBI would have to be in charge of a federal scam like that?”
“Do you think that would have stopped her from bugging me about it? No. Said she couldn’t get to ‘no FBI office’.”
