Page 57 of Deputy Brand Gets Her Man
“Nope,” she admitted. “But I think I could ride.”
Jeremiah had put his search on hold while Willow had been in the hospital. But she was okay—thank the powers that be, she was okay—and she was with her cousin. According to his journal, de Lorean had kept a safe deposit box at the bank. So that was the first place he went.
“Oh,” said the teller, after clicking keys for a while. “It looks like that was an abandoned box. Note says the owner’s information was fraudulent. Sorry.”
“What would’ve happened to the contents?” he asked. As if, had someone found eight pounds of gold, they’d have turned it in.
Hell, he wasn’t sure they wouldn’t, here in Quinn.
“And was there anyone witnessing whoever opened it? Because I have reason to believe there could’ve been valuable property in that box.”
The teller, a pretty Mexican-American, just blinked at him for a moment, and he realized she was waiting to see if his mini-rant had ended. He took a deep breath. “Sorry,” he said. “Can you help me?”
“Have a seat,” she said, and nodded toward chairs against one wall.
“I don’t have a lot of time.” As if she cared.
“Have a seat,” she repeated.
So he had a seat. Eventually, the bank manager emerged from his office, through the swinging wooden gate that served no purpose and headed toward him. He was tall, white, bald, and Jeremiah didn’t know him. But he rose, shook the man’s hand when he introduced himself, and immediately forgot his name.
“Follow me,” the man said, and walked him into a small conference type room. He gestured to a chair, and Jeremiah sat.
“So the belongings of any abandoned safe deposit box are put into storage. By bank policy, that can’t be sold or given away, they must be kept. Every effort is made to contact the owners, and there’s always hope they might one day return to the claim their things.”
“I see.”
“A three-person board supervises the opening of an abandoned box, and the items are catalogued in front of all of them.” He crossed the room to a pitcher of water, poured some into a glass, held it his way.
Jeremiah shook his head, so the guy sipped it himself.
“I don’t mean to be rude, but…who’s on the committee?”
“Myself, the bank’s attorney, and the sheriff.”
“Sheriff Brand?”
“Yes, he was sheriff then, too, yes.”
“Do you remember what was in the box?”
The man leaned forward and removed his glasses. “I’ll never forget it. We had established by then that Daniel Carr, the name on the box, was an alias of Vincent de Lorean. He was a big-time criminal, you’ll forgive me saying so.”
“I’m aware.” So the guy knew exactly who he was, Jeremiah realized. Everyone in Quinn knew he was de Lorean’s son. It gave him an uneasy feeling to be reminded of that.
“So naturally, we expected, I don’t know, cash or passports or weapons, something but the only things in the box were baby pictures. Newborn, in the hospital bassinet. Either you or your brother, we figured. There were no dates, nothing to identify the kid. Well, Sheriff Brand, he made color copies of ‘em. Couldn’t just snap ‘em with your phone back then, you know. We put the originals into photo-safe sleeves and into storage they went. I can get them for you, though.”
He didn’t need baby pictures of himself or his brother. But he wanted to see everything all the same. “Yeah, could you get ‘em for me?”
“I can have them in an hour.”
Willow roped off a small area near a water hole for the horses. It was shaded by an overhang, and there was enough sweet grass to keep them happy for a couple of hours. Then she rejoined Drew on a high, flat rock formation that jutted out over the edge of the canyon the locals called Thompson Gorge. Their flat stone angled upward, so they wouldn’t be seen from below.
They had binoculars, cell phones, soda, and potato chips.
They’d only been there two hours before the chips were gone, and about fifteen minutes after that, the sound of an ATV buzzed in the distance.
“Is that him?” Drew asked.
