What Washes Up (9 page)

She stood there and watched him for a minute, though she couldn’t see anything but a shock of dark hair peeking out from under the covers. He was curled into a comma, his back to her. She could see the steady movement of his back as he breathed.

She reached into the side pocket of the backpack, pulled out a small, stuffed Mickey Mouse, and tucked it near his head on the pillow. Then she turned around and walked away.

T
he next morning, Maggie was sitting at her desk, filling out her report on the previous night, when Wyatt set a to-go cup from Cafe con Leche on her desk.

“Gertrudis says hi,” he said.

Maggie looked up at Wyatt with pure gratitude. He had his own cup of coffee in hand. “Oh, my gosh, thank you,” she said.

“They miss you over there.”

Maggie took a long swallow of her
café con leche
and sighed. “I miss them, too.”

“She also said that if you need to, you can call ahead from your car and she’d run your coffee around the corner to you,” Wyatt said.

“I’d feel stupid and melodramatic,” Maggie said. “I can look at a river. I’ll stop in there tomorrow morning.”

Wyatt looked at his watch. “Tomlinson’s on his way over to brief us on what he’s got so far.”

“Okay.”

“What are you working on?”

Maggie shrugged. “I’m doing my prelim on last night. Hopefully, Tomlinson’s got something I can do. Otherwise, I’m going to be waiting around for someone to rob the Piggly Wiggly.”

“Well, I wouldn’t count on getting much from Tomlinson,” Wyatt said. “Nice guy, I like him. But he’s going to include us only as much as he needs to.”

Maggie sighed. “I’m sure that’s true.”

“Don’t worry,” Wyatt said as he headed out of her office. “Somebody’s bound to kill somebody soon.”

“You’re always such a glass-half-full kinda guy,” Maggie said to his back.

Half an hour later, Maggie rapped on the side of Wyatt’s door and walked in. Tomlinson was leaning on Wyatt’s desk drinking a cup of the office coffee. Wyatt was still drinking his, leaning back in his leather chair.

“Morning, Lieutenant,” Tomlinson said.

“Agent Tomlinson,” she answered, and sat down in one of the vinyl chairs in front of Wyatt’s desk.

“Thank you for bringing that stuff by for the boy,” Tomlinson said.

“How is he?” she asked.

“Sleeping, mostly. They were out there for at least three days. The kid’s not real sure of the timeline.”

Tomlinson sat down in the other vinyl chair and pulled out his tablet, tapped at it as he spoke. “His name is Virgilio Munoz. His father was Emilio, his mother Fernandina. His little sister, age four, was Lupe.” He took a sip of his coffee and tapped at the screen again. “They’re from a village about two hours inland from Amatique Bay, called El Paraiso. I’ve been to that area, and I’m here to tell you there’s nothing about it that’ll remind you of paradise.”

He drained his coffee and set the empty cup on the desk.

“He’s not absolutely positive how many people were traveling. Coast Guard hasn’t recovered any more bodies, though. He really only paid attention to his own family and the other kids on board. There were two, besides him and his sister.”

“Did he tell you what the hell happened?” Wyatt asked.

“Yeah, pretty much. From his limited perspective,” Tomlinson said. “From what I can put together, there was an argument between Virgilio’s dad, a couple of other passengers and the guys that were running the boat. Americans, by the way. They were supposed to get the passengers closer to shore, but they decided to put them out sooner.”

“Does Virgilio know why?” Maggie asked.

“No. Could have been the weather, could have been a fuel issue, maybe they saw another vessel that made them nervous. Who knows?” Tomlinson said. “To make matters worse, there were originally two dinghies, but they had a problem with the outboard on the other one, and piled everybody into one. That dinghy wasn’t meant to hold more than five people. According to the Coast Guard, the four-stroke they had mounted on it was way too heavy, too, and too light in horsepower.”

“Do you have any idea yet who these Americans were that were running them here?” Wyatt asked.

“Not yet. The boy says the word ‘wave’ was in the boat name, which is probably going to give us a ton of hits. He has no idea what kind of boat it was. His people were farmers. But, the boat was out of Texas, he could read that,” Tomlinson answered.

“Lot of boats in Texas,” Wyatt said, sighing.

“No kidding,” Tomlinson said. “So, according to what the kid told me, they got into some pretty big swells out there. The storm had already broken when they were put in the dinghy. They were already taking on water because of the weight, but he thinks they got a hole in the stern, because it pretty much went under, and the outboard conked. I’m waiting to hear from the Guard on that. Anyway, everybody ended up in the water.”

“Where were they going?” Wyatt asked.

“Here,” Tomlinson said. “They were coming here.”

“What for?” Maggie asked. “I mean, what were they going to do when they got here?”

“They had work lined up. Picking vegetables on a farm not far from here. According to Virgilio, they were going to work for some rich man with a big farm.”

Maggie’s stomach felt like someone had just reached into it. She put her elbow on the arm of the chair and put her face in her hand.

“What?” Wyatt asked.

Maggie looked up at him. “Boudreaux.”

“Boudreaux what?” Wyatt asked.

Tomlinson looked from Maggie to Wyatt and back again.

“He was at the beach last night. On the deck of one his vacation rentals.”

“Who’s Boudreaux?”

“Local rich guy. Dabbles in a lot of things,” Wyatt said. “Also figures in two other cases I have on my hands.”

“Two?” Tomlinson asked.

“Well, we don’t have a wide selection of criminals in Apalach,” Wyatt said. “We try to make the most of what we’ve got.”

“So what about him?” Tomlinson asked Maggie.

“He has a couple of farms. A melon farm over near Live Oak. I don’t know where the other one is.”

“So what makes you think he has anything to do with this?”

“I’ve never seen Boudreaux look anything less than perfect. He doesn’t dress up much, but even dressed down, he’s immaculate,” Maggie said. “But he was wearing the same clothes I’d seen him in earlier that day. He was all wrinkled. And he was drinking scotch at sunrise.”

Maggie realized that Wyatt might think she’d intentionally withheld this information and she jerked her head his way. “I thought he must have had a fight with his wife or something.”

Tomlinson looked at Wyatt. “What do you think?”

“Nothing would surprise me where Boudreaux’s concerned,” Wyatt said, sounding tired.

“Where do I find him?”

“He’s got a business called Sea-Fair about a block north of the Bayview,” Wyatt said. Maggie wished he would look at her.

“Okay, I’ll look in on him. I really don’t have anything, so I don’t expect him to offer anything, but maybe I can get a feel for the guy.”

“Can I go with you?” Maggie asked. She wanted to see Boudreaux’s face when Tomlinson questioned him, wanted to see for herself whether he seemed to be telling the truth, regardless of what he actually said.

“I’m sorry, but I think I’ll say no,” Tomlinson said, not unkindly. “I will brief you guys once I’ve talked with him, though.”

He sighed and scratched at his closely-cropped hair. “Damn sad shame. The boy’s father pushed him and his sister up on top of the bow of the dinghy, which was still partly above water, and told him to hang on. Then he disappeared. A few other people managed to grab hold, too, but not for very long.”

He rubbed at his face. “The dinghy was mostly underwater. At some point, the boy lost his grip on his little sister and let go of the dinghy to go after her, but he lost her. He woke up on the beach.”

The three of them were silent for a moment. Maggie blinked a few times, then focused on the back of Wyatt’s monitor to get a grip on her feelings. When she looked up at Wyatt, he was staring at his desk, his jaw clenched.

Tomlinson got up from his chair. “I’m gonna head over to this guy Boudreaux’s. I’ll get with you guys later on.”

After he left, Wyatt and Maggie sat without speaking. The tapping of Wyatt’s pencil on the edge of his desk was the only thing that broke the silence.

Maggie got up and walked out.

She walked down the hall to the ladies’ room and opened the door, smiled at Deputy Sue Thornton, who was on her way out. She was relieved that no one else was in the bathroom.

She turned on one of the faucets and splashed cold water on her face. She felt her chest filling up, expanding, like someone was blowing up a balloon inside her. She yanked a couple of coarse brown paper towels out of the dispenser and held them under the water for a moment, then shut it off and walked into the stall furthest from the door.

She slapped the door shut and locked it, then covered her mouth and nose with the bunched up wet towels. Then she cried surprisingly hard, given the silence with which she did it.

M
aggie was adrift.

She had no case to actually work. It was only three in the afternoon, and she had nowhere to be. She had thought about picking up the kids and taking them to the pool at the community center, but when she’d called her parents’ house, she’d been advised by Georgia that they’d gone out on the oyster beds with Gray.

She found herself with nothing to do but think, and too many things she didn’t want to think about. When she got off the bridge from Eastpoint into Apalach, she turned right, intending to go home, but the thought suddenly made her feel more alone than she wanted to be. Instead, she decided to stop at Boss Oyster. She hadn’t eaten since the day before, and Gray would be coming in soon; she’d be able to see him and the kids as they passed Boss on the way to the marina.

She got a seat out on the deck, overlooking the docks and Scipio Creek. There were several other occupied tables, a mixture of tourists and locals, despite the almost malevolent heat. There was at least a slight breeze off of the water, and Maggie lifted her hair off her neck and tried to feel it as she sipped her sweet tea. She found herself wishing it was a glass of wine, or even a mojito, but she knew that she was feeling far too introspective for alcohol to be a good idea.

Something had been slowly unraveling inside her since she’d walked across the dunes and looked at Gregory Boudreaux’s body lying on the beach. It was as though the string holding a package together was steadily working itself loose, and when it had finished, she would find that nothing was held together as neatly as before, that she would find that
she
was not as neatly put together as she had thought.

It had started with not telling Wyatt about her connection to Gregory. At that point, she had strayed from the very narrow path between right and wrong, law and unlawfulness that she had defined for herself.

Then Boudreaux had stepped into her life, and suddenly it was as though she were occupying two worlds. She was, in some ways, more honest with Boudreaux than she was with anyone else, and yet she was keeping secrets from Wyatt. She was even keeping Boudreaux’s secrets, which had inexplicably become far too intertwined with her own.