Swamp Sniper (24 page)

“We were scraping barnacles off of it and giving it a good scrub,” Ida Belle said. “How were we supposed to clean it without water?”

Carter shook his head, clearly exasperated. “So if I question your neighbors, they’ll tell me they saw you all out here working on this boat? You couldn’t possibly have been on Sinful Bayou behind the cemetery.”

Ida Belle shrugged. “Most of my neighbors are buttholes, so I have no idea what they’ll say. But you’re free to ask.”

Carter turned around and looked straight at me. “What were you doing in the swamp?”

The guilt was overwhelming and I chastised myself, once again, for letting things get personal. If I hadn’t allowed myself to get friendly with Carter, I wouldn’t feel bad about lying to him now. I never thought I’d admit it, even to myself, but being a normal person was so much more difficult than being an assassin.
 

“We weren’t in the swamp,” I said, working hard to keep my voice level. “We were here all afternoon.”

I could tell he was disappointed. Despite the fact that I hadn’t given him any tells, he knew I was lying. The evidence was simply stacked against us.
 

His cell phone signaled that he’d received a text and he pulled it from his pocket and frowned as he looked at the display.

“Fine,” he said when he looked back at me. “If that’s the way you want it.” He turned around without another word and strode back to his truck. Without so much as a backward glance, he drove off.
 

I felt my heart clench as I watched him drive away. I hated lying to Carter. And I hated that I hated lying. Why had I let things get so confusing? I needed to get back to basics, and the most basic rule was always “don’t get personal.” My partner, Harrison, would be the first to point out that every problem I’d had since my arrival in Sinful could have been avoided if I’d just followed rule number 1.
 

“What was that about?” Gertie asked. “I know he thinks we’re lying—”

“Because we are,” I pointed out.

“Naturally,” Gertie agreed, “but it’s hardly the first time we’ve done so. Hell, Ida Belle and I have been making up tales for local law enforcement since we were teens. Carter has been frustrated with us in the past, but I’ve never sensed he took it personally until now.”

“I don’t think his disappointment is because of you and me,” Ida Belle said.
 

Gertie looked confused. “Then why… Oh.” She looked at me.

“Why are you looking at me?” I asked. I knew why, of course, but I wasn’t about to admit it.

Gertie grinned. “Carter’s got a crush on you, and your duplicity is breaking his heart.”

“That is better fiction than I saw on television last night,” I said.
 

Gertie shook her head. “Ida Belle’s right. Carter’s never taken it personally when we’ve made up stories to cover our shenanigans. Not until now. And the only thing that’s changed is you.”

I felt a blush creep up my neck. “We barely know each other, and even you have to admit that we haven’t exactly had smooth going since I’ve arrived.”

“True,” Ida Belle said, “but despite all of that, he’s still interested. I may be an old maid, but I know what male interest looks like.”

Gertie waved a hand at her. “Walter slipping you a free pack of toilet paper with your grocery order hardly qualifies as the ultimate in male interest. But despite Ida Belle’s overblown description of her knowledge of how men think, I think she’s right this time.”

“Well, it’s all a moot point, isn’t it?” I said, desperately wanting to bring the discussion to a halt. “I’m not going to stop lying to Carter when it’s necessary, and he’s not going to be able to stand it. So we’re at an impasse. I’m more worried about that text he got. Regardless of what you two think Carter feels, I don’t think my lies had anything to do with his abrupt exit.”

Gertie sobered and shot a worried look at Ida Belle. “Do you think it’s about the tests on the poison?”

I shook my head. For Ida Belle’s sake, I hoped not because I didn’t think the outcome was going to be in her favor.

“Then we best get this show on the road,” Ida Belle said. “Please tell me the cameras didn’t go into the bayou with Gertie?”

“How do you know I fell into the bayou?” Gertie asked.

“You stink of it for one thing, and I think I’d remember if you left my house with your hair wet and stuck to the side of your head. Besides, you’re dripping all over my garage.” Ida Belle rolled her eyes at me and waved us back inside, where she sent Gertie upstairs to dry off and change.
 

I sat down at the kitchen table and retrieved the cameras from my backpack. Ida Belle connected the first camera to her laptop and pressed play. I watched as the view of the cemetery went from blurry to only slightly blurry and then focused on Shelly and Lyle.
 

“I hope the picture clears up some,” Ida Belle said.

I held in a groan. “I wouldn’t count on it. That was Gertie’s camera.”

Ida Belle glanced over at Gertie, who’d just walked into the kitchen, and sighed.
 

Gertie threw her arms in the air. “Fine. I’ll go get new glasses. Are you happy?”

“Immensely.”

“Absolutely.”

Ida Belle and I both answered at the same time and Gertie shot us both dirty looks.

I dragged my chair closer to Ida Belle’s and leaned forward a bit to get a better look at the monitor. “Unless I missed something, I didn’t see much going on while Father Michael was speaking.”

“Nothing but people trying to keep from yawning,” Gertie agreed as she stood behind Ida Belle’s chair and peered over her shoulder.

We watched Shelly and Lyle closely while Father Michael did his thing, but they wore either bland or slightly bored expressions. Nothing to indicate guilt or fear of being discovered. Finally, they began the dirt-tossing part of the ceremony.
 

I watched closely as Lyle tossed the dirt. “Stop that. Back it up and see if you can pause the video right before he turns to walk off.”

It took a couple of attempts, but Ida Belle finally managed to freeze the video at the spot I wanted. I smiled. I’d been right. “He’s smirking,” I said.

“Does that mean anything?” Gertie asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “Start it back up again, Ida Belle.”

“Shelly is coming up next,” Gertie said.

I watched as Shelly picked up her handful of dirt and leaned over to toss it on the grave. Something about it looked as odd now as it did when I’d seen her in the cemetery. “She’s doing something,” I said. “Rewind it again.”
 

I leaned forward and watched her body movements as soon as she approached the coffin, the uptick of her head, the glance to her left where the few remaining people were waiting, the slight lean over the grave site, and then the barely imperceptible forward movement of her head.

I sat up straight. “She spit on his grave.”

“I didn’t see that,” Ida Belle said and backed up the footage again.

“Do you think that means she did it?” Gertie asked.

“Unless she’s a complete idiot,” I said, “I doubt it. More likely she’s celebrating that someone else did the dirty work and taking a last shot at Ted since she couldn’t while he was alive.”

Gertie sighed. “What good is this doing? We still haven’t eliminated anyone from our list.”

“No,” I agreed, “but we may get a better idea where to start taking a harder look.” I waved at Ida Belle. “Start it up again.”

I focused back on the screen and watched as Toby and Blaine tossed their handfuls of dirt. Nothing untoward with either of them, unless you wanted to count the fact that they stood watching the burial rather than leaving with everyone else.

“What are they doing just standing there?” Ida Belle asked. “It’s morbid.”

“That’s what I said,” Gertie piped in.

I inched forward a bit more and squinted at the screen. “Go back again,” I said to Ida Belle. “To right after they step away from the coffin.”

Ida Belle scanned back. “What do you see?” she asked.

“I’m trying to see what they’re saying,” I said as I studied their lips, wishing Gertie wasn’t so stubborn about wearing glasses. There was just enough blur to prevent me from being certain of the words.

“You can read lips?” Gertie sounded surprised.

“Part of the job description,” I said. “Back it up again and I’ll translate what I think they’re saying.”

Ida Belle reversed the footage once more and I started relaying their conversation.

“Do you think…photos?”

“No, or we’d…jail.”

“Should we…find…?”

“With the…hanging around?”

“What if…find them?”

“…we’re fucked.”

“Who…think…killed…?”

“I don’t…like…shake…hand.”

“I don’t know but I’d like to shake his hand,” Ida Belle filled in the blanks of the last sentence and gave me an admiring nod. “That was incredible.”

Gertie nodded. “And even though you were missing some words, I think we got the gist of it. They are afraid Carter will get the photos but can’t look for them again, so now we know they were the two men in Ted’s house that night with us.”

I nodded. “More importantly, we know they didn’t kill Ted.”

“That’s two off the list,” Ida Belle said.
 

I considered this for a moment. “Is it possible that Toby killed Ted and Blaine doesn’t know? Or vice versa?”

“I really don’t think so,” Ida Belle said. “Those two have been partners in crime since kindergarten. I bet they even share underwear.”

I cringed. That was a visual I really didn’t need. “Okay, so we put them at the bottom of the list for now. Shelly is second, and I think Lyle is first up for further investigation.”

Ida Belle nodded. “I agree.”

“Okay. How do we do that?” Gertie asked.

“We watch him and see if he does anything to give himself away,” Ida Belle said. “That’s what they do on television.”

I looked back at the laptop. “Is he dangerous? I mean, other than the fact that he might have killed his blackmailer, which I sorta get on a criminal kind of level.”

“He was a pit fighter for a while in New Orleans when he was in his twenties,” Ida Belle said. “I never saw him fight, but I hear he was a real terror.”

“He served time for assault a handful of times—the last time was a couple of years ago,” Gertie said.
 

“Was this the bar fighting kind of assault?”

“No, some guy whipped in front of him at a gas station and took the pump Lyle had been waiting for. The guy refused to move, so Lyle beat him half to death with the nozzle.”

I stared. “That would be a ‘yes’ on the dangerous question.”

Great. I was about to stalk the bayou Mike Tyson.

Chapter Twenty-Two

After watching all the footage one more time from start to finish, we headed to the garage to get Ida Belle’s boat out of my Jeep. It took some serious muscle, and some ingenuity with tie-downs and an exposed rafter in Ida Belle’s garage, but we managed to get the boat back on the trailer and pushed into Ida Belle’s backyard. The gaping hole in the front would have to be addressed before it saw water again.

Once my Jeep was free and clear of all boat, we decided to call it a wrap and meet back at Ida Belle’s that night to plot our plan to spy on Lyle. I was just walking out Ida Belle’s front door when her phone rang.
 

“Wait!” she yelled. “It’s Marie. She says Tony is out on Paulette’s front porch, talking on his cell phone and smoking a cigarette.”

“So?” Apparently, I’d missed the significance of his actions.

“Hold on a second,” Ida Belle said. “Then she saw Paulette come out of her back gate and slink down the side of the fence to the street behind her.”

I frowned. “Why would she sneak out of her own house?”

“Sounds like she was trying to ditch Tony,” Ida Belle said.

“Why?” Gertie asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but maybe I can find out.”

I ran across the street and in between two houses to the next street over, then shifted a bit to the next open passageway between houses and took off again. When I reached the back side of Marie’s block, I skirted down several houses before crossing to the next block and slowed to a walk, in case Tony was looking. Someone running in between houses might attract attention, but a slow stroll shouldn’t draw his gaze.

When I got to the next block, I didn’t move directly to the sidewalk, choosing instead to stay closer to the front of the houses, skirting from hedge to hedge. When I got to the house that backed up to Paulette’s, I stopped and peered through the azalea bushes. So far, I hadn’t seen any sign of Paulette.

I pulled out my cell phone and called Marie. “Has Paulette returned?” I asked as soon as she answered.