Dead But Not Forgotten (12 page)

“You wrote me back for a while. You answered when I called.”

“Until they told me I couldn't. If anybody figured out I was talking to you, they could find us through you. So I had to stop, and I couldn't say why. I'm so sorry, Andy.” She met his gaze again, her eyes liquid, her lower lip trembling. He hoped she wouldn't cry. He never had liked it when women cried. A cop saw too much of that. “I'm really, really sorry.”

“I can't say I wasn't hurt,” he said. “But that was a long time ago. I'm over it now.”

She managed a smile, though it looked a little pained. “I'm glad to hear that. When I knew we were coming here, I hoped I'd be able to see you. I admit, I looked you up online, saw that you and Portia were still here. I even knew you were a cop before you gave me your card, even though I pretended to be surprised. And I saw some pictures of you, so I knew how handsome you'd become.”

Andy felt heat rising into his cheeks. “Not half as handsome as you are pretty, Casey-Lynn.”

“Oh, stop.” She waved her fingers at him. “I'm practically haggard.”

“You're crazy. You look beautiful.”

“Obviously the years have affected your eyesight, but I'll take it.”

A production assistant came over with a legal pad and took lunch orders. A little while later, they were eating burgers and fries that weren't half-bad and hardly tasted like paint. Casey-Lynn told him how she'd wound up in the television business, and Andy tried to bring her up to speed on events in Bon Temps. To the extent that he could, anyway; as he talked, he realized that a lot of people around Bon Temps seemed to have secrets they wanted to protect. That was probably true everywhere, but it seemed especially pronounced here. He stopped short of telling her what he knew of Sookie's abilities, but he did bring her name up after she got him talking about Vampire Bill. He couldn't tell if she was more fascinated by the fact that Bon Temps now harbored an out vampire, or that Sookie was dating him.

“I would love to see Sookie,” Casey-Lynn said. “I never knew her that well, but I always thought she was cool. And I wouldn't mind a look at that vampire. When do they get back?”

“Sam's not sure,” Andy replied. “Couple of days, maybe.”

“Okay, good. I mean, we should still be here.”

“I meant to ask you something, Casey-Lynn. Sam says he doesn't remember signing any contracts. How did you approach him in the first place?”

She let her gaze fall to her plate and tapped her fingernails on its edge. “E-mail, I think. It might have been a phone call, though, then e-mail. I do whatever I can to line up the places Tristan wants to visit.”

“How did he hear about Merlotte's?”

“I told him about it.”

“But you'd never been here.”

“Andy, I spend my life studying up on bar and grills, roadside cafés, that kind of thing. When I heard about it, that it was in Bon Temps, of course I was intrigued. I did some more research and it sounded like it was right up Tris's alley. So I got in touch with Sam and made the arrangements.”

“Which he forgot all about. He sure wasn't expecting you yesterday.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Are you trying to say something here?”

“I'm just curious about how y'all do things in Hollywood,” Andy said. “Sam was genuinely surprised.”

“We usually call a few days before we show up. Somebody might have dropped the ball on that. Or else not been able to reach him. I hear there was quite a stir over here the other day.”

Andy had wondered when that would come up, and how. He told her what had happened that night, admitting that he'd been emotionally ravaged by a pedophilia case and gotten much drunker than he'd intended. Talking about the case, even in the most general terms, twisted his guts into knots.

When he was finished telling Casey-Lynn about that, and the aftermath—Sookie finding the murdered Lafayette in his car—she was holding his hands, trying to quell their trembling. He swallowed, hard, and knew the blood had drained from his face. Casey-Lynn regarded him as if trying to decide whether she should dial 911.

“I'm so sorry, Andy,” she said. “That's truly awful, start to finish. I'm sorry you had to go through it, but I'm glad you're strong enough to stand up for people who can't stand up for themselves.”

“I guess,” Andy said. He'd never been great at accepting praise. “Thanks.”

“How did Sookie handle it?”

“She's pretty tough, I guess. She's okay.”

“When did you say she and Bill Compton are getting back into town? I'd hate to miss her.”

“I'm not sure,” Andy said again. “Shouldn't be too long.”

Kowel had gone inside while they ate, but now he came to the back door. “Casey-Lynn, I need you,” he said.

She gave Andy's hands a final squeeze. “Duty calls, babe. I'll let you know when I can get free again.”

“Okay, Casey-Lynn,” he said. “See you later.”

She went inside. He waited a few minutes longer, not sure his legs would support him yet. His own story had affected him, as he had known it would. He was more surprised by the impact of hers. He had thought there was something off about her family, about their disappearance. Who just picks up and vanishes like that? For years, he had woven fanciful tales of intrigue in his mind. Thinking about it now, he suspected that taste of mystery might have been one of the factors that had driven him to become a detective.

When he felt stronger, he pushed back his chair, rose, and headed through the restaurant. The crew had finished putting up the strange egg-carton construction on the west wall. Now one of the clean-shaven guys stood on a ladder, inserting what looked like six-inch wooden dowels into the holes in the center of each depression. Andy wasn't sure what the point was, but he was impressed by the crew's thoroughness. He even saw one of the female crew members spraying something onto a cloth from an unmarked bottle—some cleaning solution, he guessed—and wiping out the inside of each glass.

Driving home, he couldn't get the lunchtime conversation out of his mind. Casey-Lynn hadn't quite been all over him, but she had been more physically affectionate than he'd expected. Did she want to pick up where they left off, all those years ago? That was impossible, wasn't it? Too much had happened—and, he had to admit, he had been really hurt. He wasn't sure he had entirely forgiven her. He'd thought he had, but her showing up again had peeled away the emotional scar tissue, exposing the original wound again.

He was glad to see her, and the attraction was still strong. But he felt there was something she wanted, and he couldn't figure out what it was.

He was a smart guy. He was a detective, a good one, who solved real crimes. So why couldn't he figure out Casey-Lynn? If she had an angle, it was opaque to him. If she wanted to rekindle something long since buried, what was the purpose? She wasn't likely to stick around in Bon Temps, and he had no interest in going to Hollywood. And she was still beautiful, but he would never have anything like movie-star looks.

So it wasn't that. There was something else going on. But he didn't know what it was, and that fact wouldn't stop gnawing at him.

He woke shortly after two in the morning and sat up in bed, eyes wide.

He sat there for a few minutes, trying to talk himself down. What he was thinking just couldn't be.

But he couldn't make it
not
make sense.

He dressed and left the house quietly, so he wouldn't wake his sister or grandmother, and got into the Honda. He followed the twin cones of its headlights down Magnolia Creek Road to Parish Road 34, then turned onto Hummingbird Road and took that to Merlotte's. The restaurant was dark. Andy drove around it and parked outside Sam's trailer, feeling a little guilty about what he had to do.

He pounded on the trailer door until lights blinked on. Sam opened the door a minute later, wearing boxer shorts and holding a shirt closed over a chest furred with tightly coiled, golden hairs. Andy looked away. “Sorry if I woke you, Sam,” he said.

“
If?
Of course you woke me. Those Hollywood people ran me ragged all day. What is it?”

“How do you organize your e-mails?”

“What?”

Andy repeated the question, though it had seemed straightforward enough the first time.

Sam blinked a couple of times. “Organize? I run a bar and grill. I'd be surprised if I get ten e-mails a day, if you don't count groups asking for money and junk mail about growing a bigger—”

“I get those, too,” Andy said, cutting him off. “Not that I need 'em.”

“Anyway, I don't organize my e-mails. I just leave them in the order they come in, except for the ones I trash. Why?”

“Your computer in here or in the restaurant? Or both?”

“In there. When I'm here, I want to be away from the business.”

“Can't blame you for that.”

“What's this all about, Andy?”

“Open the place up and I'll tell you.”

“You're not drunk again, are you?”

“Hell no, Sam. I might be seeing clearly for the first time in days.”

“Okay, hang on.” Sam let the door swing closed. When he emerged a minute later, he had shoved his feet into some shoes, pulled on a pair of jeans, and fastened a few of the pearl snaps on his shirt. “Wish you'd tell me what this is about.”

“It's about what those people are doing in your place,” Andy said.

“What people? Tris? The crew? They're getting ready to shoot a TV show. This could really put Merlotte's on the map.”

“You sure you want to be on the map?” Andy asked as they crossed the parking area to the restaurant's back door. “Seems like for some of the people working here, being put on display in front of the whole world might not be their most favorite thing.”

“Maybe. What's that got to do with e-mail?”

“Nothing,” Andy replied. “I'm just saying.”

Sam stuck his key in the lock, turned it, hit some light switches on the way in. “Andy, you're not making much sense.”

“Just find me the e-mail Casey-Lynn sent you when she asked if they could film here. Hell, doesn't even have to be the first one. Find the one where she sent you a contract, the one where she offered you money. Anything.”

Sam stopped, halfway toward his office, and turned slowly. He looked at Andy, something like comprehension beginning to glimmer in his eyes. “You know? I'm not sure I can.”

“That's what I'm thinking.”

“What, though? This is all some kind of setup? For what?”

“I don't know yet. That's what I want to find out.”

“Yeah, okay. I'll check my e-mail. I really don't remember any, but she and Tris said they'd been in touch. They knew so much about the place, I believed them. And you know, things have been a little crazy around here, these last couple months. I could've been distracted.”

Sam went into his office, and Andy wandered around the restaurant. It looked like a different place. The crew had remodeled and repainted and refinished. The furniture had been brought back inside, but it looked new. Polished glassware was arrayed behind the bar, and there was a new mirrored back bar with tiny spotlights illuminating the bottles of liquor and artificial blood, creating an elegant effect.

“This looks great!” Andy called. “They did a hell of a job!”

“They did, didn't they?”

“I thought the point was to show the world the places they found, though, not to turn them into something else.”

“Andy, it's TV. Nothing's real on TV.”

“I wouldn't know.”

Sam emerged from his office, looking glum. “I can't find them. Not a single e-mail.”

“I'm not surprised.”

“What the hell is going on?”

“I don't know, Sam. But I got a feeling Casey-Lynn Jennings is right in the middle of it. Do you know when they'll be here?”

“They're shooting tomorrow. Today, I guess. She said around six.”

“Know where they're staying?”

“They have some fancy tour buses over at Don's trailer park. They need the hookups, Bradley said.”

“So we got, what, almost four hours? That should give us time.”

Sam was wide-awake now, but confused. “Time for what?”

“To figure out what they're up to.” Andy glanced toward the egg-carton construction. “What's that thing?”

“Bradley called it a decorative accent.”

“I think it's a lot more than that,” Andy said. He dragged a table and a chair over beside the wall, then stepped up into the chair and onto the table.

“Careful.”

“Don't worry,” Andy said. He reached inside the little hole at the back of the indentation with two fingers, and withdrew what he had thought were dowels.

They weren't.