Page 118 of Burning Caine

A half hour later, we rang the doorbell and waited. The house was like many in the area, older homes which had taken up riverfront property a half-century ago. The neighborhood was mostly brick and vinyl houses and a lot of new roofs and upgrades from the original designs. The yards were well-maintained, with neatly cut grass and blossoming gardens.

A young woman came to the door, and I smiled politely.

“Hello, my name is Samantha Caine, and this is my partner, Lucy Chapman. We’re with Foster Mutual Insurance.”

She extended a hand to shake. “Nancy Shaeffer. Nice to meet you. I was expecting a man, though?”

“Mike Telford was supposed to come, but he had something come up. He asked us to come by regarding your vandalism claim. Can we take a look at the damage?”

“Sure.” She slipped some shoes on and led us through a gate at the side, into the small backyard. It was fully fenced with a shed at the rear, and the Grand River ran along behind, only thirty feet across at this point. Nancy walked us through a gate to her dock.

“We have a couple of jet skis we take out on the river. They’re in the shed. No damage to them. It’s all down here.” She pointed out the green paint splatters. I took a few photos to add to the file. From the dispersion pattern, it was clear they had been fired from the river.

“I don’t suppose you have any idea who did it?” I asked, on a lark.

“No, but we have a security camera.” She pointed at the back of the house. “We had some drunk guys land on the dock last year, so we installed it. They didn’t do any damage or anything, but it scared us.”

“The deck has a poly surface, and the concrete steps are painted, so it could simply be a matter of getting it all cleaned, maybe some touch-ups. Your deductible is…” I paused while Lucy flipped through the policy documents.

“Five hundred dollars.”

“It’s possible it will cost less. But, it’s also possible we can find the people who did it and recoup the cost from them.”

“Okay,” said Nancy. “You want to see the video?”

“Yes, please.”

We entered through the back door, and Nancy led us to her home office. She loaded the video from the afternoon the paintballs were fired at their dock. The camera was trained on the river, and the video clearly showed three men on jet skis, firing their paintball guns as they went by. They weren’t wearing helmets, masks, or even life jackets. She paused the video, and I was sure the police would be able to use it.

“That’s fantastic.” I was impressed with the quality of the image. I gave Nancy my email address so she could send me a copy of the files. “Given the video, I’ll forward it to the police department. They may want to handle this legally.”

“But we’ll get the dock and stairs cleaned up, right?”

“Absolutely.”

If only all claims were this straightforward. I looked at the backyard in the video, the clear faces of the men on the jet skis, the river, and the road on the other side. And the blurry house beyond the road. I leaned in closer.

I grabbed my phone and pulled up a satellite map, checking if we were where I thought we were. I zoomed out to the full width of the river and then zoomed back in on the property directly across from us.

“Lucy.” I turned my phone to her slowly to show her the map.

“Yeah?”

“Do you know what that is?”

Her eyes went wide as it dawned on her, too.

Nancy craned her neck around to look at the phone.

“How many days to you keep the files for?” Lucy asked.

“I don’t know. My husband deletes them when we run out of space.”

I offered a little prayer and crossed my fingers. “Do you have a file from the morning of July 31st?”

“Let me check.” Nancy closed the current video and scrolled through the file list. She highlighted three files. “These three are from midnight to noon that morning.”

Was this the ‘keep an eye out’ Quinn had suggested? I inclined my head to the chair while I looked at Lucy, who reacted.