Free Think Before You Speak by D. A. Bale

ask, no. I don’t recognize the handwriting.”
    I gingerly held the envelopes. “Maybe we
should wear gloves so we don’t disturb the fingerprint
evidence.”
    Zeke would be proud of me for thinking that.
Too bad we’d already marred the paper handling them.
    Reggie stared at me as if I’d sprouted
antennae from my head and my skin had turned a vile shade of green.
“And why would we need to worry about fingerprints?”
    “To help lead us to the culprit, silly.”
    “And how are we going to get fingerprints?”
Reggie asked. “We’d have to turn these over to the police, who
would then open an investigation, about which the topic would be
available for public consumption when it hit the papers, which
would bring about the ruin of my life, which is what the
blackmailer is threatening to do anyway.”
    “Gee,” I muttered after that long soliloquy.
“Why didn’t I think of that?”
    “Now who’s silly?”
    The present discussion took me back to the
car conversation with Nick on the way to San Antonio, and his
little V-8 juice comment when I’d been trying to discuss engines.
Made me want to slap my own forehead right about then. Maybe
hanging out with Nick so much had dulled my brain cells.
    See ladies? This goes to show you that even
good sex isn’t enough to justify staying with someone who brings
you down instead of up. Mentally, that is.
    I opened the earlier postmarked letter then
the second and studied the calligraphy. Such handwriting style
wasn’t widely known these days but still taught in cotillion
circles. Same nice, heavyweight linen paper. Not cheap. Dallas
postmark, so the culprit was someone local, or at least someone who
had access to the local postal service.
    This didn’t mean the San Antonio girlfriend –
or date – was off the hook. Might be the blackmailer’s first
mistake or a clever ploy to focus more on the local populace. The
conversation I’d had with Detective Dingbat about the two simple
motives of a blackmailer had me leaning more toward the former –
for now.
    The first letter referenced the demand for a
hundred grand or they would release Reggie’s juvie record to the
media. The enclosed copies of the New York court documents showed
the legal name change accompanied by the design school admissions
forms, neatly tying the pieces of Reggie’s past and present
together.
    After my experience in June of obtaining
copies of Amy Vernet’s vital statistics records, color me impressed
with the blackmailer’s resourcefulness. But then that threw a
wrench into my supposition the culprit was local. Maybe he or she wasn’t in the Dallas area or even Texas, for that matter. Or
perhaps he or she had friends in or near New York willing to help
in this scheme. Yeah, I was gonna get a monster headache if I
didn’t reign the brain in. For now, I’d keep it simple and work
from the local angle.
    The second letter included reference to a
post office box key and the location of said box for delivery of
the cash. At least that was pretty straightforward. The envelope
had a faint outline puckering the corner, but no key.
    “Okay,” I said, after studying the letters
and settling in for the long haul. “These appear to have been
written by the same individual. First one postmarked four weeks
ago. The second two weeks after. Do you have the post office box
key this one mentions?”
    “Yes,” Reggie affirmed, producing the key
from his bag. “I’ve spent the better part of the last few weeks at
the bank, going from branch to branch every couple of days to
withdraw cash since I couldn’t do it in one transaction without
some document reporting the withdrawal to the Feds. The last bit I
obtained Tuesday morning before leaving San Antonio.”
    “Ah,” I replied. “A currency transaction
report.”
    “You know about them?”
    I nodded. “Anytime my dad dealt with a bunch
of cash in hand, he’d spend the next week running around the house
just grousing and grumbling about how the