Riptide (18 page)

“Not really, no. Sport didn’t get distracted much by other people’s feelings or mental states.” His eyes had taken on that speculative look he sometimes got, and she worked at not looking away. “You never met him, never saw him around town with Gregory?”

Maggie swallowed, tried to make it unnoticeable, but she saw that he noticed. “Your nephew wasn’t around much in recent years.”

“No, but when he was here, Sport joined him fairly often.” He was still staring, though not in a way meant to intimidate. It did, nonetheless.
 

Maggie pushed past it and decided to get a few things out in the open.

“How long had he been coming here?” She wanted an answer, but almost hoped he’d decline to give one.

“The first time he came down was when he and Gregory were freshman at Tulane. I think it was fall break.” He was still watching her.
 

“That would have been…?”

“Twenty-two years ago,” he said, like it had always been on the tip of his tongue.

Maggie looked down at the car keys in her hand for a second, just to break that gaze for a moment. Then she faced him again. She was trying to think of what to say next when he spoke.

“I suppose you would have been too young to have known them, really,” he said quietly.

“I was fifteen,” she said. “But I knew who your nephew was.”

“But you don’t recall meeting Sport?”

Hey, you want some?
 

“I don’t remember ever seeing him, no,” she answered, and she knew that they both knew they were now having a completely different conversation. She knew he was confirming for her, more directly this time, that Brandon Wilmette had been the other person in the woods that day. What she didn’t know was why he would do that. Why, after twenty-two years, would he care to impart that information?
 

She stood up, and he stood with her, looking a little surprised that she’d decided to leave. “Thank you. Mr. Boudreaux. I’ll let you get back to work.”

“Maggie?” She stopped and turned, one hand on the door knob. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said.

Maggie looked at him a moment. “For what?”

“Everything,” he said.

Maggie nodded and went out the door.
 

As she went back down the stairs to the processing room, she looked around at the stainless steel and the hoses and the drains. It was a place built specifically for messy work. A perfect place to chop up a body. As she came off the bottom step, she realized that she really didn’t want it to be.

M
aggie spent the next few hours talking on the phone to people in Atlanta, trying to find some kind of motive, any kind of motive, for the murder of Brandon Wilmette. Anything that did not involve Bennett Boudreaux. She came up empty. Wilmette was not liked by many, and he was even despised by a few, but there was nothing in his life that pointed to a motive for someone to follow him all the way to Apalach to kill him.

What she was left with was the same thing she’d had when she’d started, a near certainty in her gut that Wilmette had tried to blackmail Boudreaux with the fact that his nephew had once raped hometown girl and decorated Sheriff’s Lieutenant Maggie Redmond. How Wilmette planned to handle having his bluff called, when he would be at minimum an accessory, was beyond Maggie’s understanding, but she figured his bluff
had
been called, just in an unexpected way.

When the phone calls had been exhausted, Maggie drove around the marinas, walked downtown, visited Caroline’s and went back to the Bayview, hoping to find someone who had seen Wilmette after 10 p.m. on Tuesday the 24
^th
. Again, she came up empty. A few people remembered seeing him beforehand, no one remembered seeing him after.
 

At close to six, she decided to call it a day, pick up Coco, and head home. She pulled into the gas station first, pulled up to one of the pumps, and set the pump to fill the tank while she went inside to grab a cold drink. She automatically reached for the RC, but stopped short, then grabbed a can of Dr. Pepper instead.
 

As she walked out of the station, she saw Patrick Boudreaux getting gas on the other side of her pump. He was leaning up against the side of his blue Audi, texting on his phone. He looked up as she approached, and seemed taken aback for just a split second, before he managed to locate his usual arrogant expression.

“Hello, Maggie.”

Maggie continued past him to her side of the pump. “Hello, Patrick.”
 

She popped her Dr. Pepper and waited for the last few gallons of gas to pump.

“I was sorry to hear about your ex-husband. Terrible thing.”

His statement carried so little sincerity that Maggie didn’t feel obligated to thank him. Normally, she tried to have a civil relationship with Patrick, since she depended on him to prosecute most of her cases. She did this despite the fact that she was sure his inconsistent results were due to inconsistencies in his ethics. For his part, Patrick had never treated her with anything other than polite, smirking disdain. Patrick didn’t seem to care for women in law enforcement.

Maggie looked back over at Patrick, who had returned to his texting. “Patrick, do you remember Myron Graham?”

For a moment, she’d thought he hadn’t heard her. But his thumbs had stopped moving. Finally, he looked up, his eyebrows clenched together in thought.

“Doesn’t ring a bell, I’m afraid,” he said. “Who is he?”

“A drug dealer. Pot. PD arrested him in 2009 for possession with intent. It was assigned to you.”

“I can’t say I recall. What about it?”

“He’s dead.”

Patrick looked back down at his phone. Maggie’s pump had stopped. So had Patrick’s.

“Well, I guess that’s one less dealer we need to worry about,” Patrick said to his phone.

 
“Well, he’s one less problem for somebody.” Maggie replaced the pump in its holder and grabbed her receipt.
 
“They found him burned to a crisp in Gainesville.”

Patrick glanced up as though he’d just heard his pump stop. “No. I don’t care about Alachua County.”

He stuck his phone in his back pocket and pulled the pump from his tank.

“You don’t care much about Franklin County, either,” she said.

He turned around, jammed the pump into place. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It’s not self-explanatory?”

“Maybe you could explain it to my father,” he said, and tried for a snide smile.

“I don’t usually have to explain things to your father,” she said, and was more successful with her smile than he had been with his.

He put an elbow on top of the pump, and leaned over her. “Listen, I don’t care what kind of crap you’re playing with the old man. Maybe you think you have a real romance going or maybe you’re just pulling his chain. Maybe he’s pulling yours.”

“You think I’m sleeping with your father?” Maggie asked, incredulous. She couldn’t help but laugh just a little.

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Patrick said. “But don’t come at me with your sanctimonious BS, because I don’t buy it.”

“I’m not in a relationship with your father,” she said evenly. “But I’ll tell you what, he’s twice the man you are on his worst day.”

Patrick leaned in again. “You keep thinking that. But
I’ll
tell
you
this. Bennett Boudreaux never met anyone he didn’t think was disposable.”

Maggie picked up Coco and her things and went on home. She returned her guns to their normal locations, fed the chickens, fed Coco, and took a hot shower, then went out onto the deck with Coco and a glass of wine.
 

Dark clouds crept by, low to the ground, but it looked to Maggie like they were going to head out to sea before they finally broke. However, the attending light breeze was welcome.

Maggie’s cell rang, and she saw that it was Wyatt.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey. How are you?”

“I’m doing okay. Better,” she said. “Are you back?”

“No, I was calling to let you know that I’m still in Gainesville. Alachua County’s trying to help us track down Fain, but it’s like he’s vaporized.”

“Have you learned anything new?”

“Only that Myron Graham was stabbed to death prior to being roasted, and that Fain is suspected in another murder from a couple of years ago, some girl who used to deal for him.” Wyatt sighed. He sounded exhausted. “Dwight said you were in the office today.”

“Yeah. I made some calls to Atlanta, but nobody had anything to say that would point to a motive for murder. I also canvassed the marina and downtown, but no one remembers seeing Wilmette after Tuesday evening.”

“So nothing new on the foot.”

“Well, I talked to a shrimper who saw Wilmette go into Sea-Fair Tuesday night, but we already knew he’d been there.”

Maggie felt a pang of guilt at neglecting to mention her conversation with Boudreaux, but going too much into Boudreaux meant going into Gregory as well, and she didn’t know how to do that. A small voice in her head mentioned that her reasons for staying silent were selfish and unethical, but she shut it out.

Just then, Stoopid, so known mainly due to his lack of ability to tell time, let out one of his odd half-crows from under the deck.

“Is that Stoopid?” Wyatt asked.

“Yeah.”

“Are all of your chickens in my yard?”

“No, I’m at home.”

“Why? Why the hell do you think I gave you the code to my security system?”

“So I could lock up.”

“And so you could come back,” he snapped. “Even if I’m not home yet, my house is a better place for you at the moment than yours.”

“I had to feed my chickens, anyway, Wyatt,” Maggie said. “Besides, the threat might be serious enough to get my kids out of town, but it’s not enough to warrant any real worry for me.”

“I don’t know that I agree or disagree, but it’s still not a good idea for you to be out in the middle of nowhere by yourself.”

“I’m usually out in the middle of nowhere by myself.”

“This isn’t usually,” Wyatt said quietly. “You need to take precautions, and by taking precautions I mean not be an idiot.”

Maggie sighed. “I’m fine, Wyatt. Are you coming back tonight?”

“At some point. We’ll probably leave it to Alachua in a couple hours, if none of these leads on Fain’s whereabouts pan out. Do you want me to come by?”

“No, I’ll probably be asleep.”

“Then I’ll call.”

Maggie couldn’t help smiling. “All right,” she said.
 

“If you need me, call.”

“I will,” Maggie said.

“I almost believe you,” Wyatt said.
 

Maggie’s face was pressed hard into the dirt and three inches of musty autumn leaves. Sticks and at least one rock cut into her left cheek.

The ground, and the weight on her back, made it hard for her to breathe. She was sure that her heart was pounding too hard to let her live, and her chest was on fire. Everything was on fire and yet she was so cold.
 

“Tell me you love me!” he said, his hot breath blowing like a dragon’s on her right ear.

She kept her lips tightly shut, her nostrils flaring as she tried to get enough air without opening her mouth. She could see her fishing rod a few feet away where she’d dropped it, the one Daddy had given her for getting straight A’s last semester. He didn’t know where she was, didn’t know she needed him, and she closed her eyes as hot tears flooded them again.