DF08 - The Night Killer (23 page)

The package was a huge, wide, framed photograph of an expanse of savanna with brown grass, umbrella trees, and an orange sunset. Looking closer, Diane saw a family of lions in the grass.

“I love this,” said Diane, not taking her eyes off the photograph. “It’s beautiful. It’s enthralling.”

“I thought I would do a painting of one of the photos we took, to hang somewhere in the museum,” said Neva.

“I imagine you have lots that would be terrific in the mammal room,” said Diane, looking up at her. “When did you get back?”

“Three days ago in the United States. We made a few stops before coming home. Kendel’s still in New York. She’s going to wait for our cargo and arrange for shipment here, then visit some friends while she’s in New York,” said Neva. “Speaking of friends, I met Andie’s new friend. Quite a hunk. Have you met him?”

“Andie hasn’t introduced him yet,” said Diane, looking at the photograph, touching the nonglare glass with her fingertips, tracing the lions.

“But have you met him?” asked Neva.

Diane looked over at her. She stood there, eyes slightly narrowed, studying Diane. There was a time when only Frank and David noticed when she didn’t answer the exact question that was put to her. Now most of her crew could. Neva and Mike waited for an answer with bemused expressions.

“It’s a long story,” said Diane.

“I’m anxious to hear it,” said Neva. “Is Andie serious?”

“She just met him a couple of days ago,” said Diane. “But she’s grown quite fond of him in that time. Apparently lots of chemistry.”

“And you haven’t met him yet?” pushed Neva.

“Not yet. He’s been busy,” said Diane. She believed he had been avoiding her. Not surprising.

“You know, I feel a mystery here,” said Neva.

“You have no idea,” said Diane. Her cell phone saved her from answering further.

“Fallon,” she said.

“Diane, it’s David. I have some preliminary information for you.”

“That was quick.” She looked at the clock on the wall.

“Like I said—preliminary. I just thought you’d like to know what I’ve found so far,” he said.

“Yes, shoot,” she said. She walked around her desk and sat down with pen in hand. She pointed at the chairs. “Have a seat,” she said to Neva and Mike.

“You have visitors?” said David.

“Mike and Neva are back,” she said.

“Really?” David’s voice brightened. “Tell Neva to get her little butt over here and get to work. We need her.”

Diane relayed the message.

“Tell David I still have a few days left on my vacation,” she said, loud enough for David to hear.

“Yeah, right,” said David. “At least ask her and Mike to join us for dinner.”

Diane did, and the two of them accepted.

“Now, what do you have?” asked Diane.

“His name is William Steven Dugal,” said David. “Isn’t that the guy Andie is dating?” he asked. “You aren’t checking up on him, are you?”

“Yes. And I have good reason,” she said.

“Still, this can get a little dicey. I mean, if it were me . . .” he said.

“What else do you have, or are you going to plead this as an ethics violation?” said Diane.

“No, I’m just trying to make sure I know what’s going on. He’s retired navy. I don’t have details yet. However, what flagged his prints was his license. He’s a private detective. Which, I’ll admit,
may
make your snooping justified,” he said.

Diane went still for a moment.
Private detective. What the hell?

“Are you still there?” asked David.

“I recognized his voice earlier today,” said Diane.

“Recognized? You’ve heard him speak before? Where?” asked David.

“In the woods,” said Diane.

She heard David’s surprise. “Damn. He’s the guy you met in the woods? The one who gave you the knife and rain gear? The one you went out of your way to keep Sheriff Conrad from being tempted to railroad?”

“Yes,” said Diane, “the same.”

“You’re sure?” he said.

“I recognized the voice, but if you are asking if I could be mistaken . . . of course, there is always a chance. But he has a very distinctive voice,” said Diane.

“I see why you want to investigate him.” David was silent a moment. “And that certainly makes the detective thing interesting, not to mention his interest in Andie.” He sighed. “Well, this could be messy. How are you going to handle it?”

“I don’t know,” said Diane. “Is there a firm involved, or is it self-employment?”

Diane was making an effort to disguise the topic of her conversation as much as possible from Mike and Neva. She didn’t want Andie’s business to become public knowledge, even if the public in question were good friends.

“He has a partner. Apparently they own the agency together. The partner’s name is Louis Ruben. The name of the agency is Peachtree Investigative Services,” said David.

“So he’s in Atlanta,” said Diane.

“Looks like it,” said David.

“Anything else?” asked Diane.

“The Web site says he was a captain when he retired,” said David.

“Is that good?” said Diane. “I know that’s ignorant, but I have no idea how that system works.”

“Yes, I think that’s very good,” said David.

“You think it’s true?” asked Diane.

“I don’t think he could get away with having that on his Web site if it weren’t,” said David.

“Thanks,” said Diane.

“This is strange,” said David.

“I know,” agreed Diane.

“What was he doing in the woods? Not photographing owls, I’ll bet,” David said.

“Probably not,” said Diane.

Diane and David hung up and she turned her attention to Neva and Mike, who looked at her with interest. She smiled at them.

“We’re going to meet in the restaurant about sevenish,” said Diane.

“It’ll be good to see everyone again,” said Neva. “I feel like I’ve been gone a year.”

Diane started to respond, but was interrupted when Andie walked through the doorway—followed by Liam Dugal himself.

Andie’s face was a still mask, but her eyes were moist and Diane could see she was holding back tears.

“Liam would like to speak with you,” she said, her chin held high.

“Very well,” said Diane. She locked gazes with Liam Dugal.

Neva and Mike exchanged glances.

“Andie,” said Neva, “we’re going to hang this in Diane’s other office. Why don’t you come help us?”

Andie nodded and swept out of the room.

Diane watched her go and turned her gaze back to Liam. He had also watched her leave and was still looking at the closed door. Diane gestured to a chair and he turned and sat down slowly, as if testing for some lethal trap she might have installed in the seat.

“What kind of detective work were you doing in the woods the night we met?” said Diane.

He raised his eyebrows. “You recognized me?” he said.

“I heard your voice this morning and recognized it,” she said.

“And you looked up my name on the Internet?”

“I got your fingerprints off the glass you were drinking from,” said Diane. “I didn’t trust that you gave Andie your correct name.” Diane leaned forward, resting her arms on her desk, and glared at him. “You know, Andie is a good, kind, trusting person. Using her to get to . . . to get whatever you are after is small and mean.”

At least he had the good grace to wince, thought Diane.

“It wasn’t my intention to use her. That was, uh, a happy accident,” he said.

“Happy accident? Andie didn’t look very happy just now. Did you confess your duplicity to her?”

“I was going to, but she guessed it first. Andie’s very smart. I thought I had sufficiently couched my interest in your recent archaeology acquisition as an interest in Indian artifacts. I also thought I had spread out my questions about you so they wouldn’t arouse her suspicion. However, Andie guessed. She apparently has more suspicion and cleverness than either of us credited her with.”

“Somehow I thought you would be more contrite. You were kind to me in the woods—for which I’m grateful. It led me to expect more self- reproach from you,” she said.

“Did you really expect better of me, or were you afraid I killed the Barres and the Watsons?” he said.

“Did you?” asked Diane.

“No, I did not. I wouldn’t have left such a mess,” he said.

“How do you know what kind of mess was left?” said Diane.

“I know their throats were cut, and that leaves a mess. Look,” he said, moving his chair forward and leaning toward Diane, “in the interest of disclosure, I could have killed them any number of clean ways. In the woods you told me I might be able to overpower you, but you could hurt me in the process. You couldn’t have. It’s not bragging. It’s just a fact. I can kill, but I didn’t. And like you said, I did try to help. And for the record, you made the right decision to refuse it. Not because I would have harmed you, but on general principles.”

“What were you doing in the woods? Why are you interested in a bunch of arrowheads?” asked Diane.

“I’m not interested in the arrowheads. I’m interested in the diaries,” he said, settling back in the chair.

Diane cocked an eyebrow. “Indeed? Had you approached the Barres?” she asked.

“I spoke with them at the Waffle House in Renfrew. I was working up to it. You don’t just start off asking if you can see their grandfather’s diaries,” he said.

“You do if you are an honest person,” she said.

“I couldn’t be honest. I had to be discreet,” he said.

“Why don’t you start at the beginning and tell me your story?” said Diane.

“I will, but also for the record, it wasn’t my intention to approach Andie and use her. My intention was to feign an interest in the Indian artifacts in relation to courses I was interested in taking, and see if I could get a look at the diaries. This is a research museum, or so I was told. I was going to speak to the archaeology collections manager. I was going to use what I figured were proper channels. I needed directions to the manager’s office and Andie was there to give them—and she was your assistant. She was charming and helpful and was interested in me. We had instant chemistry. My asking her out wasn’t completely about getting information.”

“What is your interest in me?” asked Diane.

“You discovered the Barres’ bodies. Their deaths are of interest to me,” he said.

“Tell me your story,” she repeated.

Diane leaned back in her seat. She still wasn’t sure what to make of Liam Dugal. His straightforwardness was less comforting than she thought it would be. Too much mystery.

He nodded as if he were relieved to be getting down to business.

“As you must know, I run a detective agency with a partner. We’re relatively new and take on anything that is legal—or on the edge. We get a lot of divorce work and such. I don’t like it, but we need the work and it pays the bills. Things started looking up several weeks ago when we were hired for a missing-persons case. A wealthy Atlanta couple had lost track of a daughter—and her boyfriend. The daughter is twenty-three and a rather free spirit who makes unwise choices in boyfriends.”

“Why all the cloak-and-dagger?” asked Diane. “Finding someone’s lost daughter is legitimate work.”

“The man who hired me is hypersensitive to publicity. I don’t know why. It seems like some kind of phobia to me, but he insists it’s all about personal privacy and business. At any rate, he’s writing the check, so I’m playing it his way. He wants me to be discreet.”

“But if it’s his daughter . . .” said Diane.

“He doesn’t think she is really missing. He just doesn’t know where she is at the moment. The parents are estranged from the daughter and she has a habit of just going off without telling them. It was her sister who finally insisted. The sisters are fairly close. Apparently they talked at least once or twice a week, but the sister hadn’t heard from her in over three weeks at the time they came to us,” he said.

“What about her boyfriend’s family?” said Diane.

“He has a worse record than she does of falling out of sight, under the radar. They’ve had him show up after a year of hearing nothing from him. He’s a free spirit too—taking jobs on merchant ships, research ships, that kind of thing.”

“Perhaps that’s where they are—at sea?” said Diane. “What brought you to the mountains?”

“The boyfriend is an avid treasure hunter. The sister considers him a step up from the dope heads her sister has tried to rescue, thinking they were tortured souls—she’s rather naive,” said Liam. “His family says he’s been interested in treasure stories all his life. But he caught the bug big-time while he was working on a treasure-hunting ship that actually found a sunken wreck with a modest amount of gold. Since then he has followed one lost-treasure story after another. I traced them here—well, to Rendell County—where he was looking for yet another lost treasure.”

“Treasure? Like buried treasure? Here?” said Diane. “Don’t tell me. It wasn’t the lost wagonloads of Confederate gold?”

“No, not that. And not buried, exactly. But it was gold. He was in search of a lost gold mine,” Liam said.

“You are kidding me,” said Diane.

“Not at all.”

“How did he arrive at that?” she asked.

“Well, in between the boyfriend’s road trips and sea adventures, he worked odd jobs for money to bankroll his treasure hunts. One of his jobs was as a janitor in a nursing home between Rosewood and Atlanta. Not the best of homes, but not too bad either, for what it is. One of the inmates—”

“I think they are called residents,” said Diane.

“Oh, right. There’s an elderly woman, Cora Nell Dickson, with early Alzheimer’s whose room he cleaned,” said Liam. “She grew up in Rendell County. Her family had lived in those parts for generations. According to one of the residents I spoke with, Mrs. Dickson told the story over and over about how her father was cheated out of his share of a lost gold mine. This was close to a hundred years ago she was talking about. Most everybody thought she was just batty. But my boy, being of the particular bent of mind that he was, believed he had found someone with just the kind of once-in-a-lifetime secret information that could lead him to that lost treasure he fantasized about.”