Deadline (22 page)

“Like a septuagenarian,” Dawson said. “Wrinkled, age spots. His hair has thinned considerably and it’s completely white. The limp could be faked. But maybe not.” He thought of something else. “The night of the storm, when he answered my knock, his eyes were red and he was rubbing them. I thought I’d woken him up. Now I think he must wear contacts to change his eye color. I’d caught him without them.”

Addressing Amelia, Headly said, “Bernie and Jeremy never let you see them side by side because you might’ve detected something. If not alike in looks, in mannerisms.”

“You’re still of the opinion that Jeremy knew who his father was, and that they were—”

“In cahoots? Absolutely. Bernie entered your life around the time your marriage started deteriorating. That wasn’t coincidental. He came here to keep an eye on you while Jeremy was in Afghanistan.”

“I was alone year-round. Bernie lived next door only during the summer months.”

“But when you’re in Savannah, your schedule is more structured,” Dawson said, picking up on Headly’s thread. “You stick to a routine built around your work, the boys’ schooling. You see the same people, go to the same places, do the same things. Basically, your life is under constant scrutiny.”

“That’s right,” Headly said. “You aren’t as free in town as you are at the beach.”

“Free?” She asked with a light laugh. “To do what?”

“To spend the night in another man’s house.”

Headly’s words fell like bricks. Amelia lowered her gaze to the tabletop. Dawson sat there seething for a moment, then said, “Tucker must’ve gotten a real kick out of telling you.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t.”

“Nothing to tell. Amelia stayed that night only because of the power outage.”

“Yeah, Tucker said you hammered that home. About two dozen times.” He divided a look between them. “Look, you’re grown-ups. I don’t care. I’m only saying what it looked like to—”

“That asshole Tucker.”

“No, to Jeremy and Carl. But let’s leave that for a moment. We’ll come back to it.”

While Headly paused to take several sips of coffee, Dawson looked over at Amelia with apology. For all their protests to the contrary, they hadn’t fooled anybody into believing that their night together had been entirely chaste.

Headly resumed. “They found the
CandyCane
tied up at a public, out-of-the-way dock on a channel on Tybee Island. I haven’t been there, but I hear it’s perfect for Jeremy’s purposes. Boaters come and go. Nobody pays much attention. Easy for him to get over here to spy on Amelia or watch his kids play on the beach. Last time somebody noticed the boat being there was early Monday.”

“He may not have been the man on that boat,” Amelia said.

“Knutz has a couple of people working it. Here’s a giveaway. The craft has been scrubbed down with bleach inside and out. So either it was piloted by a stocky, bearded, law-abiding germophobe who’s made himself scarce, or Jeremy made certain that if the authorities somehow linked the boat to the murder on Saint Nelda’s, it couldn’t be linked to him.”

“It wasn’t that hard to find,” Dawson said. “Which tells me that he didn’t see much risk of it being connected to the crime.”

“Or maybe,” Headly said, “he knows he won’t need it anymore and abandoned it like Carl did his car.”

“Either way, Jeremy doesn’t realize that he’s been had.”

“For the time being,” Headly said. “And that’s good. The longer we can keep him and Carl in the dark, the better.”

Dawson didn’t like the way Headly was eyeing him as he tacked on that last part. “What?”

“It would be nice if we had a decoy. Somebody to feed to the media sharks like chum. A pseudosuspect to throw Carl and Jeremy off.”

Dawson pointed to his own chest. “Me? I?”

“I’m just saying.”

“Forget it. What about Dirk Arneson?”

“He’s off the hook for everything except using his employer’s yacht as a bachelor pad. His poker pals were located in New Orleans and questioned. They backed up his alibi. He was released with an apology.”

“Poor Tucker. Foiled again.”

“He doesn’t like you, either. And he’d write me off as a crackpot for accusing a dead man of killing that girl if not for that fingerprint. But there
is
the print. And there
is
Jeremy’s kinship with Carl Wingert, a notorious criminal at large. Tucker’s wading through Carl’s history now to familiarize himself, but in a way that’s working against us.”

“How so?” Amelia asked.

“He can’t quite reconcile that Carl the terrible could pass himself off for years as Bernie the tenderhearted. So far, we haven’t got anything forensic to prove that Bernie is Carl’s alter ego, and until some turns up, Tucker’s waffling.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me!” Dawson exclaimed.

“He says a lot of older people have missing fingers, because reattachment wasn’t always the option it is now, and he’s right. He also backed me into a corner until I admitted that I’ve never seen Bernie, so I can’t ID him as Carl, whom I’ve also never seen in the flesh.”

Amelia asked, “How do they explain his car being abandoned, all that?”

“They can’t, except to say that maybe he’s having senior moments and forgot where he left it.”

“The phony addresses, the absence of public records?” Dawson said.

“All suspicious, but not a smoking gun.” Headly turned to Amelia. “I don’t suppose you have a picture of Bernie.”

“No.”

“Figured that. Carl wouldn’t have let himself be photographed. The SO is going to have one of those computer programs age the picture from Carl’s Wanted poster, see if it resembles your seventy-something neighbor, but for right now, they’re soft on him. Additionally—”

“Jesus. There’s an additionally?” Dawson left his chair and made an aimless circuit of the kitchen.

“
Additionally
, Tucker’s wrestling with Jeremy’s motive for killing Miss DeMarco. And if you believe that he wielded the murder weapon thinking he was killing her, then I allow that there’s a problem with it.”

“But he didn’t think he was killing Stef. He thought it was Amelia.”

“Tucker’s not sold on that, and he’s got some strong arguments.”

“Like what?” Dawson asked.

“Like how Jeremy could have planned it. How would he have known that Amelia would be in the village that night?”

“He couldn’t have known,” she said.

“Right. That’s the hangup. Even Knutz, who’s on my side, winces when I assert that it was a crime of opportunity. My take? Jeremy tied up at Saint Nelda’s dock to ride out the storm. He saw Miss DeMarco, mistook her for you, and seized the opportunity.”

Wryly Dawson said, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

“To them my theory sounds just that clichéd. Homicide detectives deal in facts and hard evidence. We’re short on those.”

“Except for the fingerprint,” Amelia said.

“
If
it’s a recent print—which is being argued—it places Jeremy there.”

“Then what’s the problem?” Dawson asked.

“I say again, motive. Murder is quite a leap from spooking Amelia with a busted beach ball. If Jeremy is only trying to mess with her mind, when he spotted her running through the rain, why didn’t he just jump out of the bushes and shout
boo
?”

“Tucker didn’t actually say that, did he?”

“It was almost that inane. But here’s their refrain,” Headly said, going back to Amelia. “Why would Jeremy want to kill you? Now, to me, his motive is obvious.”

“The children,” she replied.

“Ultimately. Hear me out,” he said, holding up both hands before she could say more. “What I think, Jeremy and Carl were too cautious to act before Willard Strong’s trial ended. They’d been impatiently biding their time until Willard was residing on death row and the dust had settled. They were almost there, days away from completion, the end was in sight when…a strapping, good-looking lad appears on the scene.”

He tilted his head toward Dawson, who realized they’d come back to the disconcerting topic of him and Amelia.

“He shows up out of nowhere,” Headly said, “and you start spending time with him. The children also seem gaga, which wouldn’t have set well with their father. To Jeremy, the new man in your life was a catalytic event.”

She looked at Dawson uneasily. “He’s hardly in my life.”

“And they wouldn’t want him to be.”

“But we’d just met.”

“Sometimes that’s all it takes.” After a short but awkward silence, he continued. “A romance between you two at least
appeared
to be blossoming. Jeremy had to stop it.”

“This means that Stef died because of me.” Shooting a glance at Dawson, she added, “Because of us.”

“No.” Headly propped his elbow on the table and shook his index finger at her. “Listen to me. Your perceived attraction to Dawson was only an excuse for Jeremy to act sooner rather than later. Eventually, no matter what, whether or not you’d ever met Dawson, he would have killed you. If not Jeremy, then his father would have. Because—and make no mistake about this, Amelia—the man is evil.

“Sweet, lovable Bernie is a sham. In truth, he never existed. It was Carl Wingert all along, and he duped you well. Because, behind the limp and age spots, he’s a terrorist who believes that you deserve to die. I’m as certain of that as I am that it’s gravity holding me onto the planet.”

“Why would he want me dead?”

“Punishment for leaving Jeremy.”

“Jeremy was the one who destroyed our marriage. I wasn’t the one having an affair.”

“This isn’t about morality. Do you think Carl cares who slept with whom? No. It’s about loyalty. He has strong feelings about it. But—and here’s the kicker—it’s one-sided. It’s loyalty to
him
that he’s a fanatic about.

“Conversely, he doesn’t blink over leaving someone behind. He saves his own skin first. He’s done it time and again. At Golden Branch, he sacrificed one of his men so he could escape, and, frankly, I’m amazed that he took Jeremy and Flora, straight out of childbed, with him when he ran.

“Once, during a standoff, one of his gang members tried to surrender. He walked out of a motel room with his hands raised. He was killed on the spot, but not by police. Carl, from inside the motel room, shot him in the back of the head and then escaped during the confusion that ensued.”

Headly was laying it on thick, perhaps for shock value, but Dawson was glad he wasn’t sparing Amelia the cold reality of the kind of man her father-in-law was. Jeremy had the same bloodline.

Headly continued. “Carl Wingert is unconscionable. He believes his actions, no matter how detestable, are justified. He’ll vanquish anyone he considers disloyal, and you, Amelia, were disloyal.

“I’m sure Jeremy’s mind has been poisoned against you. But even if he still worships the ground you walk on, even if he is madly in love with you and entertaining a fantasy about reuniting with you and his sons, Carl will never allow it. He’ll kill you.”

“Then why didn’t he yesterday when I was alone at the beach house?”

“Because he’s too smart to have followed up Jeremy’s mistake with another. He couldn’t kill you and then disappear. That would have been too obvious. It probably galled him, but he had to continue playing Bernie until he was safely off the island. Now he has time to plan something else.”

“What am I supposed to do in the meantime? While he’s
planning
. The boys and I can’t remain under lock and key indefinitely.”

“It won’t be indefinite.”

Dawson stopped prowling around the room and looked sharply at Headly, whose expression was as grim as he’d ever seen it. “What does that mean?”

“Everything I’ve told you up till now?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s the good news.”

I
s this Harriet Plummer?”

“Isn’t that who you asked for? Who’s this?”

“My name is Bernie Clarkson. I’m calling you from Saint Nelda’s Island.”

“Where?”

“Offshore from Savannah. I hate to bother you, Ms. Plummer, but he wrote your name on the back of his business card.”

“Who did? Dawson?”

“Uh…let’s see, I had it right here…Yes, Dawson Scott. Tall, long hair?”

“Why did he give you my name?”

“So you do know him? He does write for the magazine?”

“Yes.”

“Good. That makes me feel better.”

“About what?”

“About what he’s up to.”

“Look, if you’re a reporter—”

“Reporter?”

“The magazine has no comment other than to say that Dawson was questioned by the police, but it was pro forma, nothing came of it, and he was released. That’s it. Okay?”

“I know all that. I’m not a reporter. Just an ordinary person who wants to know if Mr. Scott is, well, safe to talk to.”

“Safe? Maybe you’d better back up and start at the beginning, Mr. Clarkson.”

“Well, I was walking on the beach, which I do twice a day. The exercise helps my hips.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Mr. Scott approached me and struck up a conversation. Seemed to be a nice enough fellow. We chatted about this and that, then he asked if he could interview me.”

“Why would he want to interview you?”

“That’s why I’m calling you, to ask why he would want to interview me.”

“He didn’t tell you?”

“He said he was working on a story for the magazine.”

“He’s covering the Willard Strong trial. Are you familiar with it?”

“It’s big news down here.”

“Well, Dawson is writing a story about the double murder of Strong’s wife and her lover.”

“Jeremy Wesson.”

“You knew him?”

“I never met him, but I know his ex-wife very well. Amelia and her children spend summers next door to me on the island.”

“Well, there you go. That’s the connection. The last time I spoke to Dawson, he was hoping to get an interview with her.”

“Why?”

“Because typically an ex-wife is a great source of information on a subject. If you’re well acquainted with the former Mrs. Wesson, it makes sense that Dawson would want to talk to you, possibly as an inroad to her. Okay? Now if there’s nothing—”

“I don’t know that I’d want to be quoted.”

“If you ask Dawson not to quote you, he won’t. Or he’ll refer to you as ‘an unnamed source.’”

“I wouldn’t want to hurt Amelia’s feelings by talking behind her back.”

“That’s very noble of you, but I can vouch for Dawson’s journalistic integrity. He treats his subjects with sensitivity. Sometimes to an irritating degree, if I’m being honest.”

“What made him want to write about this particular crime?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe an inside source tipped him to it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know, or you won’t tell?”

“I don’t know. But if I did, I wouldn’t tell.”

“Then I guess I’ll have to ask him myself.”

“Good luck with that.”

The bitch hung up on him. After patronizing him, she’d rudely hung up. About what you’d expect from a woman put in charge.

Carl had learned what he’d wanted to know, however. Dawson Scott had come to Georgia to cover the Willard Strong murder case and write a story about it.

What Carl still didn’t know was
why
? Why would a writer based in Washington, DC, recently back from overseas, become intrigued by this particular crime? When compared with writing about war, a double murder in Georgia seemed tame. Why would it have captured Dawson Scott’s interest?

There were several logical explanations, of course. But Carl mistrusted logic. Too often it didn’t apply to a situation. He had never staked his life on what was logical, and he wasn’t about to change that practice now.

“I’m coming in!”

The shout came from outside. He went to the door and opened it for Jeremy, who was tramping through the undergrowth toward the cabin, carrying several grocery sacks.

A road to the dwelling would have certainly made access more convenient, but one had never been included in the plan. Roads led people to places, and Carl hadn’t wanted anyone to accidentally happen upon this hideout after taking a wrong turn or following a road simply to see where it went.

He had bought the property under a name that meant nothing and continued to pay annual taxes to keep nosy bureaucrats from coming to check it out. He liked it okay, and having it had come in handy, but at any given time, he was willing to walk away from it and not look back. He never became attached to a piece of real estate. For that matter, he didn’t form biding attachments to anything. Sentimentality could get you killed.

After murdering Darlene and setting up Willard to take the fall, Jeremy had left the scene on foot, following Carl’s instructions to cover his tracks well. Carl had picked him up on the main road, provided some antiseptic cream and a gauze patch for the self-inflicted wound on his head, and drove him as close as he could get to the cabin. Jeremy had gone the rest of the way through the marsh on foot.

Sandwiched between that brackish marsh on one side and a dense forest on the other, the cabin was so far off the beaten path that Jeremy had been able to hide in it for fifteen months.

During that time, he’d changed his appearance. He’d let his hair grow out long enough to cover the bald spot, which had healed, but was unsightly. He’d also cultivated a beard and gained weight.

Carl had brought him supplies once a week. Occasionally Jeremy had complained about the isolation, the leaky roof, and the lousy TV reception, which could only be obtained with a camouflaged antenna on the side of the roof. But he’d endured these inconveniences, knowing that the sacrifices would eventually be rewarded by getting his sons back.

He and Jeremy had built the cabin themselves while he was stationed at Parris Island. Although it lacked amenities, Flora had loved it because it had allowed them to see Jeremy periodically. She had campaigned for it to become their permanent home. Carl had refused to live permanently anywhere, so she’d had to be content with short visits to the place.

Those times spent here with Jeremy had made her happy. In truth, she was easily made happy by the smallest of things and the most insignificant of gestures. But she also became sad easily and anguished over things that couldn’t be helped and should have been long forgotten. That was a character trait he’d found maddening.

Jeremy clumped inside. “Well?” Carl asked. “What did you learn?”

“The car was still in the lot where ‘Bernie’ left it. I didn’t get too close, but it looked to me like there was a parking ticket under the windshield wiper. Other than that, there was no sign that it had been noticed.”

Carl gnawed on that. “Strikes me as odd that they haven’t impounded it. How long do they usually wait to haul in cars with parking violations?”

Jeremy shrugged as he took a carton of orange juice from one of the shopping bags and gulped directly from it.

“You didn’t spot any cops staked out to watch it?”

“No, but there are industrial buildings surrounding that parking lot, each of them several stories tall. They could be surveilling it from any one of a thousand windows, but I don’t think so, Daddy. Who would be lying in wait for Bernie to return? Bernie is a nobody, a nonfactor in any of this.”

Carl eyed his son shrewdly. “Then why don’t you look happier?”

“They’re all over the boat.”

Carl muttered a stream of obscenities.

Defensively, Jeremy said, “They were bound to follow up on any boats that had put into Saint Nelda’s dock on Sunday. I guess the gas pump attendant remembered the name of it.”

“Stupid name. No wonder he remembered it.”

Flora had suggested the boat be named
CandyCane
because they had acquired it on a Christmas Eve. They’d used it to escape following the burglary of a church after its midnight mass when the coffers were full.

The owner of the boat, an embittered veteran of the Vietnam War, and a devotee of Carl’s, was also an atheist. He’d been so delighted over the theft of a church, he had graciously offered his boat to convey them far away from Maryland. He’d taken them all the way down to the Florida Keys.

When the need arose for a boat, the embittered vet, now suffering several forms of cancer, had been willing to oblige his hero again. He taught Jeremy basic boating and navigational skills, enough so that he could get himself to Saint Nelda’s from other islands and marinas along the coasts of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. Marina slips were rented under assumed names.

“That guy on Saint Nelda’s might be able to describe me,” he said now, “but he can’t identify me as Jeremy Wesson. Besides, I told you, the boat has been wiped clean. They won’t find any trace of me onboard.”

“One hair is all it would take.”

“That’s a worry, but a minor one. They’re still looking at Dawson Scott.”

“He was released.”

“Yeah, but the investigators are ‘reconstructing the time line,’ making me think he hasn’t been altogether cleared.” He gestured to the plastic bags he’d dropped on the table. “I bought a newspaper. The murder has been demoted to page five.”

Carl found the newspaper in one of the bags, opened it to that page, and scanned the text. Jeremy turned on his tablet PC. “If you’d ever learn to navigate the Internet, you wouldn’t need a newspaper anymore.”

“I don’t like computers.”

“By the time you read a newspaper, it’s old news. You get continual updates on the Internet.”

They’d had this conversation many times before. With the exception of firearms, Carl loathed gadgetry. He was leery of anything he saw or read on the Net.

According to the newspaper story, the sheriff’s office was being tight-lipped about the progress of its investigation. Deputy Tucker was quoted. He used the same hackneyed phrases that every law enforcement officer in the country uses whenever what he is saying, basically, is that they don’t have jack shit.

Dawson Scott had cooperated with the investigation. They hadn’t made an arrest, but were analyzing evidence. They were following a new lead. Blah, blah. Carl knew that whenever a lead petered out and cops were stuck, they always lied and said they had a new one to follow.

Jeremy had been reading aloud off the newspaper’s website, and the write-up on it more or less matched what Carl had just read. “So much for constant updates,” he said snidely.

“But here we get a color photo, too. The newspaper didn’t even have a black-and-white.”

Carl glanced at the tablet from over Jeremy’s shoulder. “Tucker is a tub o’ guts,” he remarked, pointing to the potbellied deputy pictured standing in the foreground of a group of uniformed officers.

Then, in the motion of turning away, he said, “Wait! Give me that.” Roughly he snatched the tablet out of Jeremy’s hands. “How do I enlarge the picture?”

“Tap…”

The photograph filled the screen. Carl looked hard at a man standing in the background. Although a deputy in a cowboy hat was blocking one half of his face from the camera, instant recognition suffused Carl with feverish heat. He clenched his teeth and sailed the tablet across the room like a Frisbee.

“Hey! What’s the matter?”

“I knew it! I sensed it! Didn’t I tell you something was out of joint?”

“What? What do you see?”

With unmitigated hatred, Carl said, “FBI Special Agent Gary Headly.”