“That’s the question.” Darrell ran through the bank statements again. “The last deposit was made in December of last year. After that, nothing. He’s been working down the balance since then, but he’s still got a few thousand dollars built up in the account. He must have been getting those payments for a while.”

“December? That’s when they stopped?”

“Right.”

“That’s the month Brink was killed,” I said.

*

Later, Darrell and I drove back to the house that Gordon Brink had rented.

I didn’t like the feeling of déjà vu or the ugly memories in this place. But in the time since I’d been here, the law firm had made a clean sweep. The retired mine president had decided to stay in Florida permanently, and the house had been repainted and refurnished from top to bottom. There was almost nothing left to remind me that Brink and his wife and son had ever lived here.

The partner who’d taken over the lawsuit, JoAnne Svitak, was exactly as Norm had advertised her. She had an edge that could make you bleed. Her face looked molded into a wax shell of overly white makeup, and the only thing that moved was her eyes, which were blue and severe. Her hair was brown and flowed around her head like an ocean wave caught in an ice storm. She was probably in her midforties. We’d looked her up in a legal directory at the courthouse, and we’d learned that she was the only female partner at Gordon Brink’s Milwaukee law firm. I had no doubt that she’d followed a tough road to get there.

When we sat down, she made it clear that she didn’t have much time for us. Her clipped answers rushed the interview along.

“Do you know a sheriff’s deputy here in town named Arthur Jackson?” Darrell asked her.

“No, I don’t.”

“He went by the nickname Ajax.”

“I still don’t know him.”

“He was murdered over the weekend.”

The news of a homicide elicited no reaction at all. She simply tapped a pencil on the desk and waited silently for Darrell to continue.

“The nature of the murder was very similar to the murder of Gordon Brink, your predecessor,” he went on.

“How similar?”

“Almost identical. The same wounds. The same message left on the wall.”

“Didn’t your department conclude that Brink was murdered by his son?” she asked us.

“That was the sheriff’s conclusion, yes, but—”

“So what does this crime have to do with me or my firm?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Darrell said.

I leaned forward in my chair, which wasn’t an easy thing to do. “Ajax’s wife, Ruby, is a key witness for the mine in the litigation. It’s hard to believe you don’t know who Ajax is.”