Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

and Yancy needed to have a car. There were other expenses to be paid.
    Bill insisted that he didn’t know how much money his sister still had after the bills he’d told her to pay. “She may have maybe only $500 or $700 left. I don’t know.”
    “Are you going to be able to get more?” Lisa pressed. “ ’Cause when we do this, we gotta go ! I can’t see us staying around.”
    “No, I understand.” Bill soothed her. “I explained to him that when this was done, there’s a shitload of money in each estate that should roll my way, but I don’t know how long it’s going to take to get that out. It’s all a legal process…but it’s all there. You see what I’m saying?”
    She did, but Lisa kept asking Bill Jensen questions. And he was apparently so anxious to have his wife, daughter, and sister-in-law dead within the next week that he was willing to explain in detail just how much money he would receive from their estates.
    “The house is paid for—it’s a $400,000 house with no debt on it.”
    She seemed to be impressed, and she wondered how he’d made that much money being a “computer geek.”
    “I did okay,” he said succinctly.
    Bill admitted that he was a little worried that his wife might have rewritten some documents that would make everything roll to his son.
    “You want us to get him too?” she asked again.
    “Well, it’s a possibility. Yeah.”
    “Yancy doesn’t do minors.”
    “I wouldn’t want to hurt him, but—”
    But there it was. Bill Jensen didn’t want anyone between himself and what he estimated was Sue’s and Carol’s million-dollar fortune, and he realized now that his son would probably stand ahead of him in the money line.
    Lisa assured him that Yancy would be “pissed” to hear that Scott was now part of the hit. He wouldn’t want to kill a boy.
    Bill had come to a decision. It had to be all four of his relatives. There wasn’t anyone else who would prevail over him when the estates were probated. Even if Yancy didn’t like it, he instructed Lisa: “Well, my suggestion then…is, Clean house. ”
    Although he spoke cryptically, she knew what he meant.
    Bill had promised Yancy $100,000 and he was now willing to add a $50,000 bonus if everything went right.
    Lisa countered with $50,000 per person, $200,000 for all four.
    Bill disagreed, saying that he had heard the going rate for hits was $20,000 to $30,000 per person.
    She wondered how he knew that, but she told him he would have to work it out with Yancy. That wasn’t her department.
    Bill was still worried that something might go wrong, and if it did, he told Lisa, she and Yancy and the other man had to promise to keep their mouths shut.
    “I’m gone,” Lisa said. “You don’t know me. My real name ain’t on nothing I been using. Everybody’s on their own. That’s the kind of people we are.”
    “Just make it look like an accident,” Bill Jensen said, “if you can.”
    “All right. Got it.”
    “Okay.”
     
    And she had, indeed, “got it.” Lisa, AKA Seattle Police detective Sharon Stevens, walked back to the Homicide Unit with a crystal-clear recording of her conversation with Bill Jensen.
    Jensen himself returned to his cell, pleased that he had managed to carry out such a clever plan to wreak vengeance on his estranged wife. Whether he truly believed that there was a huge fortune awaiting him when his wife, his sister-in-law, and his two children were dead, only he knew. He had whittled away at the bank accounts and stock portfolios he and Sue once had until they were much diminished. But he had bragged to “Lisa,” who was really an extremely effective detective, as well as a brilliant actress, that there was “big money” ahead. If, indeed, there was, one would suspect that Bill Jensen might do his best to avoid sharing much of it with Yancy Carrothers and his partners in crime.
    It may have been that revenge was even more important to Jensen than an inheritance. He had seethed for weeks when he found himself in jail. He’d always considered himself far smarter than his wife. He’d controlled her, lied to her, even terrorized her, and yet she was free and he was locked up.
    He smiled a grim little smile as he entered his cell, confident that he would be out soon. How could he be convicted of felony–domestic–violence if there were no witnesses against him?
    And he was sure now that by his court date there would be no living witnesses left.
     
    Yancy Carrothers wasn’t