Whispers at Midnight (3 page)

Until it had come flying out of the passenger side window just as he’d returned to the car after settling things up with Marsha.

For a moment, as it continued to snarl and back away, he contemplated just turning around and leaving it. Limping and dripping blood like it was, it didn’t look like it had a chance of surviving for long out here in the country. If it didn’t die of its injuries, likely the coyotes or some other predator would finish it off by morning. But still, it was a loose end. He’d already made up his mind that he wasn’t
going to leave any more loose ends around. Once upon a time he had made the biggest mistake of his life by erring on the side of restraint. He wasn’t making that mistake again.

Not when all of a sudden he had so much to lose.

“Here, dog.”

Trying to sound pleasant, he crouched, snapping his fingers. The dog shivered and tucked its tail between its legs, watching him but keeping a safe distance.

Giving up after a few more tries, he had a thought and went back to the car to retrieve the Twinkie Marsha had been eating. One was squashed all over the driver’s seat, he discovered with a grimace as he opened the door, but there was another one still in its open package on the passenger side. Leaning in, he grabbed it. Then, Twinkie in hand, he headed back toward the dog.

“Here, dog,” he said in a honeyed tone as he approached, holding out the treat.

It started to bark hysterically.

For a moment he froze. The night was dark as Hades, the nearest house was unoccupied, and the chances of anybody hearing the damned animal were slim. But still the sound grated at him, made him jumpy, had him looking all around.

“Shut up,” he ordered, then as it kept barking he lost his head and lunged threateningly at it. The dog jumped away, barking even more shrilly.
This is stupid,
he thought, and threw the Twinkie at it.

Then he got into the car and floored the gas, sending showers of dirt shooting skyward as he did his best to run the ugly little thing down.

Yelping, it dodged and scuttled away, scooting under a fence as he sent the Taurus roaring after it. He slammed on the brakes just in time to keep from hitting the fence, cursing as the dog disappeared in a sea of tall corn.

So it got away, he told himself savagely as he nosed the Taurus back onto the road a little while later. So what? It would probably be dead by morning. Anyway, it wasn’t a loose end he was leaving behind, not really. It was just a damned dog.

3

June 28

“I
HEAR YOU TWO
had a fight.”

Matt Converse watched the boyfriend’s eyes. They flicked away, came back almost immediately. The guy—Keith Kenan, thirty-six years old, one divorce, employed on the line at Honda for five years and resident of Benton for that same period, clean police record except for one brawl over in Savannah two years back and a couple of old DUIs—was nervous. Nervous didn’t always equal guilt, but it bore watching.

“Who told you that?”

Matt shrugged noncommittally.

“So what if we did? That don’t mean anything. Everybody has fights.” Kenan’s tone was defensive. He was getting agitated. Matt observed the quickening of his breathing, the tightening of his jaw, the narrowing of his eyes, with clinical detachment. Kenan was a big, burly guy with a dark blond buzz cut, smallish pale blue eyes, and a tattoo of a heart pierced by a dagger on one pumped-up biceps, which was bared by the ratty tank top he was wearing with black nylon gym shorts. The two of them were standing in the combination living/dining room of the apartment Kenan shared with Marsha Hughes.

Correction: had shared. Marsha Hughes had been missing for just
over a week. This was Matt’s second conversation with Kenan. He’d first talked to him five days ago, after one of Marsha’s friends at work had become concerned enough about her unexplained absence to report it to the sheriff’s department.

“Everybody has fights,” Matt conceded. Kenan started to pace. Matt took advantage of his distraction to glance around. Except for a single meal’s worth of dishes on the diningroom table—apparently the previous night’s supper because, upon answering the door, Kenan had complained about being rousted from bed—the apartment was neat. Furniture by Sam’s Club or Wal-Mart. Worn green carpet. Gold drapes drawn against the bright morning sun. Walls painted white, hung with a few nondescript prints. As far as he could tell, nothing out of the ordinary. No telltale brown stains on the carpet. No suspicious dark spatters on the walls. No corpse sticking out from under the couch.

Matt’s mouth quirked wryly. If it were only that easy.

“Look, Sheriff, I ain’t stupid. I know what you’re getting at,” Kenan burst out, turning to face him. “I didn’t lay a hand on Marsha, I swear.”

“Nobody’s saying you did.” Matt’s voice was calm, his demeanor nonconfrontational. No point in provoking Kenan by escalating the discussion into more than it needed to be at this stage of the investigation. It was still quite possible that Marsha had left on her own; she could turn up alive and well somewhere at any minute. On the other hand, he didn’t like the feel of things. Call it instinct, call it applied common sense, call it whatever you wanted, but he didn’t think that a woman who’d lived in the area most of her life, who’d shown up like clockwork since she’d started at the Winn-Dixie eight years ago, who had regular habits and a good number of friends, would light out to parts unknown without letting somebody know.

“She just took off,” Kenan said. “She got in her car and took off. That’s what happened. That’s it.”

Matt took his time. “Mind telling me what the fight was about?”

Kenan looked harassed. “Baloney, all right? I had some baloney in the refrigerator and it was gone when I got home from work and went to make a sandwich. Turns out she’d fed it to a damned dog.”
He took a deep breath. “It was stupid. Just one of those stupid things.”

Over Kenan’s shoulder, Matt watched his deputy, Antonio Johnson, emerge from the bathroom down the hall. Antonio would turn fifty in two weeks. He was black, a little less than six feet tall and nearly as wide, built like a linebacker gone to seed. He had a bulldog’s pugnacious face, a more or less permanent scowl, and basically looked like a thug in deputy’s uniform. He had asked to use the john right after Kenan had let them in, as a way of getting a look at the areas of the apartment the sheriff or his deputy were not normally allowed to see without benefit of a search warrant. It was a ploy they had used before, and would use again. Sometimes it netted them valuable information. Today, apparently, they weren’t going to be so lucky. Antonio replied to his questioning look with a negative jerk of the head.

“Thanks,” Antonio said to Kenan as he joined them in the living room. Kenan nodded, then glanced back at Matt.

“I didn’t do nothing to her,” he said, wetting his lips. “I swear to God.”

Matt looked at him. Kenan held his gaze.

“You mean besides yell at her,” Matt said agreeably. “And chase her down the stairs and out of the building. Isn’t that what happened that night?”

Kenan didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. The breath he sucked in through his teeth was as much confirmation as Matt needed this side of the courtroom.

“Might as well give it up,” Antonio said, folding his arms across his massive chest and glowering at Kenan. “We
know.
”

Matt barely stopped himself from casting his deputy a wry glance. What they knew was basically what Kenan and the neighbors had already told them: Marsha Hughes had had a fight with him, had left or been chased from the apartment and had not been seen by anyone important to her since. Without any kind of solid evidence that Marsha had come to harm, what they knew didn’t amount to a hill of beans. There was no case. But Antonio was an optimist. He was always thinking that if he applied enough pressure, potential suspects
would crack, confessing all and saving everybody concerned a boatload of time and trouble.

Sometimes it even worked.

Kenan’s expression changed. His lip curled angrily as his eyes slashed to Matt. “I saw you talking to that damned Myer woman the other day. Stayin’ home all the time, claiming she hurt her back and can’t work, getting her kicks butting into other people’s business.” His voice was tight with resentment. “She’s the one who told you that, right?”

“Actually, everybody in the building who was home that night pretty much says the same thing.” Matt’s demeanor was still mild, still neutral, although he made a mental note to keep an eye on Audrey Myer, who had indeed been the primary source of his information, in case Kenan should live up to his hair color and try something stupid. Reaching for a brass-framed picture of Kenan with Marsha, whom he recognized from a photo he’d collected for identification purposes on his first visit to the apartment, Matt paused and glanced at Kenan before picking it up. “Do you mind?”

“Help yourself.” The tension in his voice was still palpable.

Matt picked up the picture and made a show of examining it. It was a snapshot rather than a formal portrait, obviously taken at a fair or amusement park, showing the two of them dressed up in old-fashioned clothes, including a big picture hat for Marsha that hid most of her red hair. They were grinning at the camera, their arms around each other, clearly on good terms at that moment.

At another moment, had Kenan killed her?

“Good-looking woman,” he said, putting the picture back down on the end table. His gaze slid to Kenan again. “You must be worried sick about her.”

The point being that so far Kenan had shown no sign of being unduly concerned over Marsha’s fate. Chalk up one more red flag. Of course, it was possible that Kenan was a still-waters-run-deep type, with a lot more going on beneath the surface than Matt had been able to discern. It was also possible that Kenan simply wasn’t all that sorry she was gone, which still didn’t make him guilty of a crime.

The thing about it was, Matt wasn’t even a hundred percent sure
that a crime had been committed here. His gut instinct said that Marsha Hughes’s prospects for turning up unharmed did not look good, but then, his gut instinct had steered him wrong before.

“I am,” Kenan said. Belligerently.

Matt took note of the tone, of the clenching of Kenan’s fists, the reddening of his face.

“You’ve been known to hit her.” Matt’s voice was almost gentle. His purpose was to uncover information, not to accuse.

“Who told you that?” Kenan responded. He was breathing heavily even though he was no longer pacing.

Matt shrugged.

“Goddamned nosy-ass neighbors.” A muscle in his jaw worked. His stance had shifted, become aggressive, with legs braced apart, shoulders rigid, fists clenched into tight bunches by his sides. His eyes were hard as they met Matt’s. “Look, like I said, we had fights. Marsha’s no angel, either. Anything I did to her, believe me, she gave as good as she got.”

“Did you hit her the night she disappeared?”

“No! No. I didn’t touch her. She left, all right? We had a fight and she left. She got in her car and I watched her drive away. That’s the last time I saw her.”

Antonio made a skeptical sound that was not quite under his breath. Kenan’s gaze swung around to him. The look Kenan gave him was tense, angry. The interview was teetering on the brink of turning ugly, Matt realized. Pushing Kenan to the point of clamming up and calling a lawyer would be counterproductive. Time to hang it up for now.

“Well, thanks for your cooperation. We’ll be in touch,” Matt said, offering his hand before the encounter deteriorated irredeemably. After the briefest of hesitations, Kenan shook it. Antonio shook hands, too. It was clear from the expression on his face that he did so with reluctance. Making nice with those he considered bad guys was not one of Antonio’s strong suits.

Antonio tended to take crime personally. Matt had spent a considerable amount of time in the two years since he’d been elected Screven County Sheriff dissuading Antonio from breaking people’s
arms and legs. Figuratively speaking, of course. At least, most of the time it was figurative.

Suppressing a sigh, Matt turned to the door, then glanced back over his shoulder with his hand on the knob as if he’d just remembered something.

“Just so you know: we’ve got an APB out on her car, and her picture and stats have been sent to every law enforcement agency in the Southeast. Plus we’re still running down a few leads locally. We’ll find her.”

His tone was deliberately confident; if Kenan really was concerned about his girlfriend’s fate, it should provide some small degree of reassurance.

On the other hand, if he wasn’t revealing any concern because he knew very well where Marsha was, having personally put her there, it should worry him.

Either way worked.

“Yeah, we’ll find her.” Antonio turned it into a threat as he followed Matt out into the stuffy upstairs hallway.

Kenan closed the door behind them without another word. The sound, louder than it needed to be, echoed off the concrete-block walls.

“Think you could tone the hostility down a notch?” Matt asked as they took the stairs.