“Huh.” Conley thought about it for a moment, wondering if the fight had anything to do with Symmes Robinette’s wreck.
“Could have been just some old drunks pulling off the road to settle a score,” Margie observed. “There’s a juke joint bar up the road, and we get our share of drunk drivers coming from there late at night. Couple of years ago, I heard a commotion and found a fella had driven clear off the road, through my fence, and into the pasture.”
“I know the place. The American Legion bar,” Conley said. “My friend and I were there that night, headed home when we came up on the wreck.”
“I’ll be,” Margie said.
“You didn’t hear the wreck yourself?” Conley asked.
“Guess not. I got Sport back inside and went on to bed. My room’s at the back of the house, and I’ve got a window air conditioner that kind of drowns out everything else. I fell back asleep, and at some point—maybe an hour later?—Sport heard all the sirens from the fire trucks and ambulances, and he woke me up yowling at ’em.”
“You didn’t see or hear anything at all?” Conley repeated.
“Not until the fire trucks got there,” Margie said. “After that, I got dressed and took the Ranger up to the road to see what had happened.” She shuddered. “I wish I hadn’t seen what I did. That poor man. Did the police ever say what happened?”
“Not so far,” Conley said. “Have you told the sheriff’s office about hearing those voices, and the fight, earlier in the evening?”
Margie shrugged. “Hadn’t even thought about it ’til just now. They sent somebody the next day—a deputy—to ask if I’d seen anything that night, and I said I hadn’t.”
“What did the deputy look like?”
“Big ol’ fella. A white boy,” Margie said.
Conley was fairly sure she’d met that deputy the night of the crash and afterward too.
She scribbled her name and phone number on a page of her notebook, ripped it out, and handed it to her hostess. “I was on my way to the sheriff’s office when I stopped here earlier. Guess I’d better get going. If you think of anything else from that night, anything at all, could you give me a call?”
“Be glad to,” Margie said. “I’ll take you on back to your car now.”
As the Ranger bumped along the dirt track road, Conley spotted a pair of huge black birds hovering over something up ahead among the green stalks of sunflowers. Sport, again sprawled on the floor of the vehicle, raised his grizzled snout, sniffed, then went back to sleep.
“Ugh,” Margie said, pointing at the birds. “There’s a big ol’ dead deer over there. I’ll be glad when those buzzards pick that poor thing clean.”
Conley stared at the birds in mute horror. As the Ranger approached, she saw a lumpy brown form sprawled on its side. Two buzzards hopped on the ground, tearing at the corpse, while two more circled closer and closer in the air above.
She turned her head and averted her eyes. True, she’d been raised in a small Southern town, had seen her share of roadkill—although not since she’d moved to Atlanta—but the sight still filled her with revulsion.
Her phone buzzed in the pocket of her jeans. She took it out and glanced at the caller ID. The area code was local, but she didn’t recognize the number, so she disconnected and put the phone away.
“Here we go,” Margie said, pulling alongside the Subaru.
“Thanks for the ride and the cold drink,” Conley said, stepping down. She leaned over and scratched the old dog’s ears. “Bye, Sport.”
30
Conley was pulling into the parking lot behind the sheriff’s office when her phone rang. It was the same number that had just called, so she didn’t answer. But it rang again a second later from the same number, and this time the caller left a voice mail.
It was Michael Torpy, the young reporter at the Beacon. He sounded breathless. “Hey, Conley. It’s Mike. Grayson told me to tell you to call back. It’s important.”
She hit the callback button on her phone.
“Hi, Mike. What’s up?”
“Sorry to bother you, but I just got back from city hall, and I heard something I thought you’d be interested in, and Grayson agreed.”
“Okay. Hit me.”
“Charlie Robinette just announced he’s going to run for his father’s seat in Congress,” Michael said.
“Who’d you hear that from?”
“Unfortunately, Buddy Bright broke the news a few minutes ago,” Michael said. “When I got to city hall, everybody was talking about it. I don’t think anybody saw it coming. He’s formed a campaign committee and everything. But it gets better. You’ll never guess who else is getting ready to announce for Robinette’s seat.” He didn’t bother to wait for an answer. “It’s Robinette’s wife.”
“Vanessa? She’s going to run for Congress? Against her own son? Where did you hear that?”
Michael hesitated, then lowered his voice. “I’ve, uh, been dating this girl who works in the county clerk’s office. She was running copies for one of the lawyers in town this morning, and she overheard him talking on the phone.”
“Hmm. Thirdhand. Not so reliable.”
“No. It’s true,” he insisted. “I checked around. One of my old classmates at FSU works in the governor’s office as an assistant to Roy Padgett’s director of communications. The governor is going to call for a special election to fill Robinette’s seat, and according to Jill, Vanessa Robinette started calling his office late last week to ask him to support her.”
“Can you get anybody to go on the record that she’s going to run?” Conley asked.
“Grayson’s working her contacts in Rotary,” Michael said.
“Call up Vanessa,” Conley said. “Just ask her flat out, ‘Are you running?’ If she says yes, that’s a hell of a story. Unless damn Buddy Bright already broke that too?”
“He hasn’t so far,” Michael said. “I’ve got the radio on in the office right now.”
Conley stared out the window of the Subaru, absentmindedly watching the front door of the sheriff’s office. “Is Grayson in the office now?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Hang up and tell her to call me back ASAP.”
* * *
“Gray?” she said when her phone rang a minute later. “This is a hell of a story, if we can confirm it.”
“I know. Amazing, right?” For a change, her sister sounded just as breathless as her young staff member.
“If we can break this story ahead of everybody else, especially Buddy Bright, it could be huge,” Conley said. “The wire services and the national press will be all over it. But we’ve gotta nail it down and go with it, like, right now.”
“We don’t go to press until tomorrow night,” Grayson reminded her.
“Doesn’t the Beacon have a digital edition?” she asked.
“Sure. We run local calendar listings, high school scores, the Humane Society’s pet of the week, that kind of stuff.”
“But you never run actual news stories?”
“Sometimes we run briefs, like on an Election Day. We have a hard enough time putting out the actual paper,” she said, sounding defensive.
“That changes now,” Conley said. “Gray, this is important. If we can nail down a story saying Symmes Robinette’s widow is going to run for his seat—against her own son—it’s crazy good. This is some seriously Shakespearean shit. Even if we just break it on the website, it means the Beacon owns the story. Not some crappy radio station. We do.”
“I’m not even convinced anybody pays attention to the digital Beacon,” Grayson said.
“They will,” she vowed. “After you left this morning, Vanessa admitted to me that Symmes was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma back before Christmas. They’d kept it a secret from the public, probably to allow Charlie to begin quietly building up a campaign war chest to run for his father’s seat in Congress. I’m over at the sheriff’s office in Bronson right now. Start working those phones. If Cha
rlie has started raising money, he will have had to have filed some kind of financial disclosure. We’ve gotta get Vanessa on the record that she intends to run too. If it’s for real, Michael needs to get his friend in the governor’s office to try to get a quote from Padgett about whom he plans to support. He’ll probably try to weasel out of endorsing either one at this point, but we need to at least have a ‘no comment’ comment.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Grayson said warily. “Man, what a morning! What’s going on at the sheriff’s office? Has Goggins been at all helpful?”
“He hasn’t had a chance to shut me down yet,” Conley said. “But that’s only because I just got here.”
* * *
Merle Goggins donned a pair of half-moon-shaped reading glasses and looked down at a document on his desktop, then back up at Conley Hawkins.
“You seem to think there’s something sinister about Congressman Robinette’s death. Why is that?”
“I have questions,” Conley said. “That’s my job. I assume it’s yours too.”
“That and keeping the peace and running the jail and fighting with the county commission to give me enough funding to do my job,” Goggins said. “But yes, I have questions too. Tell me yours, and I’ll answer to the best of my ability.”
“No bullshit?”
He smiled. “As little as possible.”
“Okay. First, do you have a cause of death from the medical examiner?”
He tapped the document on his desktop. “It’s still preliminary, but it looks like Symmes Robinette suffered a fatal head injury consistent with the impact of his vehicle flipping over at high speed. Probably sustained when his head hit the steering wheel or dashboard. As you know, the subsequent fire left very little other evidence.”
“About the crash. Any thoughts on what could have caused it?”
“Again, the fire didn’t leave us a lot to work with as far as the vehicle was concerned. We talked to the dealer in Tallahassee who sold the car to the congressman. It had been serviced regularly. A local mechanic who did minor maintenance said everything was in order with the Escalade when Robinette brought it in for an oil change last month.”
“Okay. So. Relatively new car. No traffic that night. Do you get why I’m seeing sinister?”
“I didn’t say there was no traffic that night,” Goggins protested. “You told one of my men you didn’t see any other cars as you arrived on the scene. That doesn’t mean there weren’t any.”
“Correct.” She tapped the end of her pen on her open notepad. “Did your man talk to Margie Barrett?”
“That’s the widow lady who lives on the property near the crash site?”
Conley nodded.
“Yes. He talked to her. She told him she didn’t hear the crash or see anything. That house is a good ways off the highway, according to Poppell.”
“I just came from there myself,” Conley said. “At first, she told me the same thing. Then she remembered that when she took her dog outside to pee way after midnight, he was agitated. The dog is mostly blind, so she thought he was hearing or smelling a possum or a raccoon in the trees. But then she heard two men arguing loudly. And then a woman’s voice. After that, she heard car doors slamming and a car racing off.”
“She told you that?” he said sharply. “Wonder why she didn’t tell my investigator?”
“We kind of hit it off,” Conley admitted. “It turns out she and her late husband used to bank with my dad.”
His leather chair creaked as he leaned back in it and reached for the cell phone on his desktop. He tapped a key. “Poppell? I need to see you in my office.”
Five minutes later, Walter Poppell, the deputy who’d interviewed her the night of the crash—and who’d hit on her during her last visit—strolled through the sheriff’s door.
He glanced over at Conley, then did a double take. “Oh, hey,” he said, smirking.
“Poppell, you remember this lady? Sarah Conley Hawkins? She was a witness at the scene of Symmes Robinette’s wreck,” Goggins said. “And she’s a reporter for the newspaper over in Silver Bay.”
“Yes, sir,” Poppell said. His right hand rested lightly on his holstered weapon, and his broad face looked anxious.
“Margie Barrett, that lady who lives in that farmhouse near the crash site, just told Ms. Hawkins here that she heard two men arguing that night, up by the highway. And a woman’s voice too. Did she mention anything about that to you?”
“No, sir,” Poppell said, shaking his head vigorously. “Said she was asleep when the wreck must’ve happened and couldn’t hear from her bedroom because of a noisy air conditioner.”
“This was earlier in the night,” Conley said. “Sometime after midnight.”
He shrugged. “She never said nothing like that to me.”
“I reckon you need to go back out there and interview her again,” Goggins said, his face stern. “And make sure you ask her about all night. What did she hear earlier? Or see? Go ahead and canvass the whole area again. Knock on doors and ask questions. Find out if anybody else heard or saw two men arguing that night. They might have had a woman with them.”
“But I already talked to everybody out that way,” Poppell objected.
“Talk to ’em again. Just do it.”
“Yes, sir,” Poppell said. He slunk out of the office, leaving the door ajar.
“Dumb-ass,” Goggins muttered under his breath. He returned his attention to Conley. “What else?”
“Did you know Robinette had terminal cancer?”
He blinked. “Where did you hear that?”
“Vanessa Robinette told me this morning, when she came into the office to complain about my intrusive questions. She said her husband was suffering from chemo brain and couldn’t sleep, which was why he was driving around way out in the country at three in the morning.”
“What she told us too,” Goggins said. “Gotta say that’s a new one on me.”
“Sheriff, have you or Poppell talked to the rest of Robinette’s family?”
“We talked briefly to the son, Charlie. He wanted to be present when we spoke to his mother. He didn’t have a whole lot to say. He was understandably broken up by his father’s death.”
“I meant his other family,” Conley said.
“I’m not getting your drift.”
“His ex-wife, Toddie, and their two kids. I forget their names. They live right down the road here in Bronson County on a quail-hunting plantation called Oak Springs Farm.”
“I know the place,” Goggins said cautiously. “They invite me and my department out for a dove shoot every fall. Nice folks. You say she used to be married to Symmes Robinette? I’ll be damned.”
“The marriage broke up in 1986 when Robinette got his twenty-five-year-old congressional aide pregnant,” Conley said.
Goggins raised an eyebrow. “And that’d be the present Mrs. Robinette? I’m surprised this is the first I’m hearing about that.”
“The divorce and remarriage was apparently hushed up at the time,” she said. “Toddie and the children were exiled out here to Oak Springs, and Vanessa and her kid stayed in Silver Bay.”
“Well, then, that’s old news,” Goggins said. “Don’t see it has any bearing on Symmes Robinette’s death.”
“You’d think so,” Conley agreed. “Except for the strange fact that a week before he died, Robinette suddenly deeded over a farmhouse and a big chunk of valuable timberland to Toddie, for one dollar ‘and other considerations.’ But before you tell me the congressman was just tidying up his affairs before his impending death, you should know that when I asked Vanessa about it this morning, she acted shocked. And pissed.”
Goggins gave her a patronizing smile. “Are you suggesting that Vanessa Robinette had something to do with her husband’s death? On what basis? That she was pissed that he literally gave away the farm to his ex-wife?”
“I think it’s worth noting,” Conley said. “I went out to Oak Springs this past weekend. It
’s what, five miles from here?”
“If that.”
Conley was tapping her pen on her notepad again. “I’m wondering if Symmes was trying to reconcile with his first wife.”
“And I’m wondering how you think Vanessa Robinette managed to arrange her husband’s death in a one-car accident when she was miles away, asleep in her own bed.”
Conley jumped on that last statement. “How do you know she was at home?”
“She told me. Once we got the accident victim’s identity verified from the license tag, I drove over to her house at Sugar Key myself, to notify her what had happened.”
“And what time was that?”
“Probably around 8:00 a.m.”
“Five hours after the wreck,” Conley said. “Plenty of time if you were doing something sinister.”
“You’re skating on thin ice,” Goggins warned. He scribbled something on the margin of the report he’d been looking at. “Since you’re here, let me ask you a question. I understand your grandmother employs a woman named Winifred Churchwell?”
“Winnie. Yes. She’s worked for us most of my life. She helped raise my sister and me. Why do you ask?”
He held up a sheet of paper, then whisked it back into the folder on his desk. “Were you aware that she did a stint in federal prison for assaulting Congressman Robinette?”
“Yes,” Conley said. “What about it? You’re not trying to say Winnie had something to do with Robinette’s death, are you? That’s crazy.”
“It’s been brought to my attention, that’s all.”
Conley felt her face grow hot. “Does that piece of paper you’re looking at tell you how Winnie ‘assaulted’ Robinette?”
“Nope.”
She recounted the story of the cancer cluster and how it had directly affected Winnie and Nedra and their neighbors, who’d been exposed to the contaminated soil and water in Plattesville, and Robinette’s role in defending the railroad.
“About a year after Winnie’s sister died from cancer, leaving Winnie to raise her three little boys, Winnie went up to Robinette at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a VA clinic and tossed a handful of her sister’s ashes in his face,” Conley said. “He had her arrested and charged with assault. And for that, she spent twenty months in prison.”
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