First Kill All the Lawyers (9 page)

“No.”

“No what? No, you don’t want this story? Or, no, you don’t want breakfast at the IHOP?”

“None of it.”

He paused. “Okay, you’re right. The IHOP’s a bad choice.”

It was, for they’d eaten scores of blueberry pancakes there when they were lovers. The peaked-roof restaurant was filled with memories. Sam had avoided the chain ever since, even in San Francisco.

“How about the Silver Skillet?” he suggested.

“No.”

“Gravy and biscuits, along with the skinny on Forrest Ridley? First dibs on what the Watkin County sheriff had to say? Wear your raincoat. It’s pouring.”

He was tempting her. But the Silver Skillet was another of their old haunts.

Then, as if he could read her mind, he said, “Melvin’s, and that’s my best offer.”

“Where’s Melvin’s?”

She could hear his grin as he gave her directions.

“This had better be worth it.”

*

In the parking lot Sam spotted what had to be Beau’s car, a silver BMW with MD plates. Except for the color, it was a twin to hers. She frowned. The coincidence didn’t please her.

As she ran for the front door, raindrops were dancing in the puddles.

Melvin’s, on Northside Drive, had that look of most of Atlanta’s favorite breakfast hangouts: decorated with a medley of chrome and Formica, it was ramshackle, greasy, and seedy. But the biscuits were fluffy, the coffeepot bottomless, and you could order fresh pork loin, country or sugar-cured ham, a pork chop, or two kinds of sausage with your eggs, grits, and redeye gravy.

Beau stood at the counter talking with a waitress whose nametag declared her to be Bernice. He was dressed in a dark gray suit with a raincoat tossed over his shoulder. She hated the way he looked; he was absolutely, even first thing in the morning, beautiful. She was glad she’d just thrown on jeans, a bright red sweatshirt, and a matching smudge of lipstick. Let him see how little she cared about this meeting.

“God, you look wonderful,” he said, turning as she approached. “I love the yellow slicker. Makes you look like a kid.”

“Coffee, please,” she said, looking straight at Bernice.

“Make that two.” Beau took Sam’s elbow and led her toward the last booth in the back corner.

She wondered if he often brought women here for breakfast. Was this his early morning hideaway? Or did he and what’s-her-name, that woman from Boston he’d married, have a match made in heaven?

“So what was so important that you dragged me out of bed this lovely morning?” she demanded.

“The straight poop on Ridley,” he said.

“What makes you think I care?”

“You’re here. You’re a reporter. You have a nose for murder. And you were already asking questions about him.”

“How do you know that?”

Beau just smiled. His smiles always had been infuriating.

She shrugged. “Okay, I’m here. Shoot.”

*

Even with his lights flashing and siren blaring, it had taken Beau an hour and a half to drive the seventy miles to Apalachee Falls State Park, where a hiker had found the body of Forrest Ridley. Route 400, the expressway, petered out north of Cumming, where he cut over to Route 19, and after that there was a maze of two-lane roads with ill-marked intersections and little towns with blinking red lights in their centers. The farther north he went, the more winding the roads and the slower his pace, for these were the foothills of the Appalachians. The 2,050-mile hiking trail, which stretched all the way to Maine, began at Springer Mountain just north of Apalachee.

It began to rain, but Beau had no trouble finding the entrance to the park; at its gate were two deputy sheriffs’ cars, their revolving blue lights projecting an eerie lightshow across the deserted road. He flashed his identification, and the deputies waved him through with the slow, sly grin of the country lawman.

It was the kind of grin, Beau thought, that made you uneasy, encouraged worry about whether they only
thought
they knew more than city slickers, or really did. It was the kind of grin that made you feel that they were on the verge of writing you a speeding ticket and would make it stick, even if you’d been in your car sitting still.

The body had been found at the bottom of the falls, pinned beneath the overhang of a large flat rock. Lee Boggs, a kind-faced older man who was the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s very best investigator, was already at work.

“Dr. Talbot.” He nodded, pushing up his rain-spattered, rimless glasses.

“Boggs.” Beau returned the nod. “What have we got here?”

“Well, not a hell of a lot. You can see what the terrain looks like.” The creek was sheer on one side, edged with rocks and leaves on the other. “Course, if we’re looking for footprints, I suspect they’d be up at the top anyway. I’ve got Masterson up there. But it’s gonna be tough. You get a million hikers and campers up here with the first sign of good weather, and you know we had that more than a month ago. No telling how many people’ve tromped around here while he was lying in the water.”

“Where the hell is the body?”

Boggs’s cherubic face, more suited to a man selling lollipops than to one sifting through scenes of death, clouded over. “Sheriff took him. Said it was an open and shut case of accidental death, and hauled him right off to Monroeville.”

“He
what!
”

“Sheriff Buford Dodd, his name was, said he didn’t even know why we bothered to come up here anyway. Said the man obviously fell off the top of the falls and was killed. Said it’s happened five or six times in the past ten years.”

“Son-of-a-bitch!” Beau smacked his hand down on a rock, then shook it as if he was surprised at the pain. “Who called us, then? The sheriff do it just because the law says he’s supposed to, even when he’s not doing anything else by the book?”

“Don’t know. I do know that we’re probably not going to learn much here. You might want to go on down to Monroeville to the courthouse. Sheriff’s office is there. That’s where they took him.”

Beau turned away in disgust, heading back to his car. Then he stopped. “Thanks, Boggs. Didn’t mean to blow up at you.”

“’S okay, boss.” The man grinned. “It’s happened before. Prob’ly happen again ’fore it’s over.”

It was nearing midnight when Beau got to the Watkin County Sheriff’s Office, part of a new blond-brick county complex that had been built off to the side of the old red courthouse, which stood squarely in the middle of the road in the middle of town. Beau hadn’t had any dinner and had ruined a new pair of shoes. His mood could be summarized as mean.

But he met his match in that category when he met Buford Dodd. Not that the sheriff wasn’t pleasant on the surface—and neither was he hard on the eyes. He stood level with Beau at six-foot-one, though he outweighed the doctor’s runner’s body by a good forty pounds, most of which was muscle packed in his thighs, arms, and shoulders. Dark-haired, black-eyed, with perhaps a touch of Cherokee blood somewhere down the line, Buford Dodd was one handsome country sheriff who hadn’t gone to fat. He didn’t sound like a typical cracker either, the kind who sold trucks on television commercials; his voice was soft, rumbling, and warm, with a good-ole-boy chuckle just waiting for an opportunity to surface. But there was a warning in his eyes, which could go suddenly small, shrewd, and piglike, and behind that chuckle was a serpentine rattle. Buford Dodd was not a man to cross.

“Reckon we wasted your time, coming all the way up here from Atlanta,” Dodd said. Then he shook Beau’s hand, hard. “But I been hearing about you the past couple of years, so I’m glad we had this opportunity to meet.”

“Glad to meet you, too. Never a waste of time—just our job,” Beau lied. “So, you’ve got the body here?” He glanced around the room, where three deputies slouched here and there like hunting dogs. The overhead fluorescent lights made everybody look dead.

“Yep.”

“Had anybody look at it?”

“The coroner’s been and gone. We’re ready to release it to the family as soon as they get here.”

“Who’s the coroner in this county?”

“Doc Johnson.” Dodd grinned slowly, sharing the joke with his deputies, who grinned back. “He’s the vet.”

Beau didn’t even blink. “Mind if I take a look?”

Dodd hoisted his left buttock down off the counter where he’d been partially resting himself. “Not a’tall,” he said, and led the way to the morgue.

Forrest Ridley had probably been a handsome man. But it was a little hard to tell after the vicious beating he’d taken—presumably down the almost 750 feet of rocky falls. Though the body was fully dressed, contusions and abrasions were apparent about the face; the nose and right arm and left leg were at angles that indicated fractures. The neck was broken. And the flesh showed that the body had been in the water for more than a couple of hours. It was fortunate that the weather had been cool.

Even so, the little room, whose walls were painted mint green, was filled with a distinctively sweet and nauseating odor.

“Guess they’ll want to get him buried pretty quick,” Dodd observed.

Beau raised an eyebrow, then nodded. “Guess so. Of course, they can do that since there’ll be no autopsy. Do you mind?” He gestured toward the body.

“Be my guest.”

Beau reached over and opened Forrest Ridley’s mouth.

“What you looking for?” Dodd asked.

“Foam. You usually see it if the victim inhaled water while still alive.”

“Huh.” Three beats passed. “See any?”

“No.”

“Well, I’d imagine he was already dead by the time he hit any considerable water, wouldn’t you? Banging himself down all those drops from the top.”

“Probably. What do you think caused
that
?”
Beau was pointing at a round hole through the man’s shirt just below the right shoulder, inches above the heart.

“Some of those rocks are awfully sharp. Fall like that, Doc Johnson said you’re likely to see all kinds of things. Said you can’t tell one thing from another.”

*

“So, could you?” Samantha asked.

“Could I what?”

“Tell one thing from another?”

“I can tell you that what I was looking at was no puncture wound from a rock,” Beau said, his face grim. “It was a gunshot exit if I ever saw one.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? What do you mean, nothing?” Sam demanded.

“Samantha, you know as well as I do that Sheriff Dodd’s judgment is law in his jurisdiction. If he says the man died accidentally, he did. Open and shut, no autopsy, no inquest. What I want to know is what
you’re
going to do about it.”

“Me?”

“I can’t imagine that you’re going to stop here, once you’ve got going. Not with a
body,
for Christ’s sake.”

“It’s not my job. It’s police business.”

“Ha! Since when did that ever stop you?”

“How do
you
know what would stop me?”

He gave her a look. “I’ve read every word you ever wrote in the
Chronicle
,
Sam. I know you don’t get those kinds of stories by sitting on your sweet can waiting for the cops to feed you.”

She ignored the anatomical reference, and she was
not
going to ask him why he’d read the San Francisco paper.

“Besides,” he continued, “you’re ignoring the fact that there’s not going to
be
any investigation.” He waved Bernice over and requested a fresh carafe of coffee. Then suddenly he grasped Sam’s hand as she reached for the sugar. “Come on, Sam. Let’s do this.”

She jerked back as if the waitress had just scalded her. “What are you
talking
about?”

“I’m talking about working together on this story, this case, whatever you want to call it.” His voice dropped. “I’m talking about spending some time with you.”

Sam pushed her hands against the table, trying to get as much space between them as possible. She shook her head. She opened her mouth, but no words came.

He looked straight at her, unblinking, unwavering. “I made a terrible mistake when I let you go. I’ve paid for it ever since. I’m sorry. I’ve always been so terribly, terribly sorry.”

She half-stood.

“Don’t go.”

“I don’t want to talk about this.” She held her hands in front of her as if to ward him off.

“Please. Just listen. I have so much I want to say to you. Every time I went to San Francisco, I’d hang out in front of your house for days, hoping to catch a glimpse of you. And since you’ve been back in Atlanta, I’ve visited my mother so much she’s asked me if I want my old room back.”

His old room that she could see from her bedroom window. The room she’d yelled curses at just the other night.

“I want to go back to that summer and do it all over,” he said. “Do it differently this time, so we have a life together.”