Half Past Dead

by Meryl Sawyer

  His thumb gently kneaded the back of her neck. “Let’s go to Jo’Mama’s for ribs. I think we’ve done all we can for one day.”

  She tried to resist the urge to melt into his arms. “What about having a deputy stake out the log?”

  “I don’t have the manpower. Even if I did, I don’t know who to trust. This is a small town. I don’t want word getting back to the ringleader that I’m onto this. Besides, I seriously doubt if they leave money more than once a week. We have time.”

  How much time did she have? Don’t think about it. Live in the moment. She shifted positions, pulled his head toward her, and crushed his lips with a kiss.

  He returned the kiss, one hand creeping up her leg and caressing the tender flesh of her thigh. She fumbled with the buttons on his shirt as his mouth opened and their tongues met. She finally managed to wedge her hand under his shirt and stroke his bare chest. A low growl rumbled from his throat.

  “Hey, if you’re not careful, we won’t get to Jo’Mama’s.”

  “Ask me if I care.”

  He chuckled, then began to kiss her neck and the sensitive spot behind her ear. She threw back her head and allowed him access to her breasts. He palmed her through the fabric of her blouse, the normally soft material abrading her sensitive nipples. Her legs weakened and parted as a low moan became a sensuous purr.

  Before she knew what was happening, he swept her into his arms and with long, purposeful strides crossed the living room. This time he took her down the hall into his room and kicked the door shut with his foot before the dogs could follow them.

  He gently laid her on top of the covers as if she might break. Stretching out beside her, he kissed her slowly, his fingers tunneling though her tousled hair. She arched her back and snuggled closer. Before she knew it, he had her blouse undone and her bra unhooked.

  They kissed. And touched. And caressed. By silent agreement they took time to explore each other’s bodies.

  This was how a man and a woman made love. It wasn’t just about sex, she told herself. This was so much more…fulfilling.

  She’d fallen hopelessly in love with him. She’d realized this yesterday, but now knew with absolute certainty this man was the love of her life. How could she love him and not tell him the truth about why she’d been sent here? Hiding this secret seemed almost like cheating, like being with another man behind Justin’s back.

  “THERE’S A MESSAGE for you,” Connie informed Kat when she walked into the office the following morning with Max in tow. She thought it might be from David. He hadn’t called last night, and she wondered if he’d found out anything from the bank examiner’s daughter at Duke.

  “Thanks,” Kat replied as she tried to ignore the flush rising up her neck to her cheeks. She was positive the copy editor had seen Justin drop her off and knew just how they’d spent last night.

  Connie hovered nearby. “Your sister left a message on the machine just before the paper opened. I guess she didn’t know how to get a hold of you.”

  Kat stared down at the slip of paper Connie had given her. What did Tori want? She guided Max into David’s office and let him settle under his desk before she used David’s telephone to return the call. Whatever Tori wanted, Kat didn’t need Connie to overhear her conversation.

  Kat waited while Tori’s cell phone rang several times. She was getting ready to hang up when Tori answered. “Tori? It’s me. Kat.”

  A muffled noise followed as if Tori had put her hand over the phone. A moment later, she said, “It’s Ma.” Tori’s voice cracked and the rest came out with a sob. “She went to glory last night. I’m at Gaylord’s Funeral Home. You need to come right away.”

  Without another word, the line went dead. Kat collapsed into David’s chair. How could her mother have died so suddenly? Not that it hadn’t been expected, Tori had warned her, but Kat hadn’t had the opportunity to see her mother and set things straight. Had she?

  Some dark corner of her brain wondered. She’d been so convinced her mother’s death was imminent—was it possible she had visited her mother but didn’t remember?

  A wellspring of guilt rushed through her. Instead of spending last night in bed with Justin, she should have gone to see her mother. Her father used to say “you never have a second chance to make a first impression.” Now she could add “you never have a second chance to say goodbye.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CURSING UNDER HIS BREATH, the man walked across the town square and mentally reviewed what had happened yesterday. Being Jekyll and Hyde was no longer as much fun as it had been. Until Radner and the Wells woman had returned to Twin Oaks, he’d seldom had to revert to Hyde. Usually, he played Dr. Jekyll, the man no one suspected of running the most lucrative drug operation in the Delta.

  He had the world by the short hairs. When necessary, he ruthlessly and cleverly killed anyone who got in his way. He’d eliminated the Mexican broad who’d tried to blackmail him. Only dumb luck had led to the discovery of her body. He’d needed a little help tricking Elmer, but he would have pinned Bitner’s death on the Wells bitch if fate hadn’t intervened.

  He controlled the world around him, but fate—usually his closest ally—could be the downfall of even the smartest man. He’d planned to get rid of Kat yesterday. Then her lowlife friend from the beauty parlor showed up at the paper. From there he’d tailed them to a decrepit shack just outside of town where they’d left the car and had ridden off on an old motorcycle they’d taken out of the garage. In the middle of the day. Why?

  Then it came to him. PnP. “Party and play”—the Internet lingo for meth parties. When he was bored, he tracked meth parties advertised online. In cities they were usually held in abandoned buildings. In rural areas like this, “players” gathered in the woods. There the druggies met, got high, had sex, then split.

  Kaitlin Wells was on furlough from prison. She couldn’t be too careful. She needed to be completely out of sight before she used drugs. It bothered him—a little—that they’d driven off into the woods a few miles from one of two drop-off points his operatives used. There was no way he could follow them without being spotted.

  He chalked up his suspicions to being overly cautious. There hadn’t been a single sign his operation had been compromised. True, Willingham had gotten his rocks off with the broad from the beauty parlor, but their sources told them that Willingham was humping someone else now.

  Willingham didn’t know who masterminded the operation, but the laser would never divulge what little he did know. The last thing Willingham wanted was to find his ass behind bars again.

  He returned to his office and had tried to work, but he kept his eye on the clock. The cryptic call had come in from the casino just as it always did. He’d written down their count of the weekly take and subtracted the Sartianos’ cut.

  Business as usual, he’d reassured himself—except for one small hitch but not an unexpected one. The team of Mississippi state inspectors had arrived at the casino to verify the tallies and calibrate the slot machines, the way they always did.

  Not a problem, he assured himself. The state sent its team around once every month. The machines that generated the checks had to remain hidden along with the packets of drug money while the inspectors were onboard the riverboat. His money wouldn’t be brought back to Twin Oaks until tonight, when the inspectors left for another riverboat and the cover of darkness made it easy to transport his money.

  Last evening he’d concealed his car behind some scrub oak and wrangled his way through the woods until he found a hiding place in the thicket behind the sheriff’s house. Radner and his scruffy dog had driven up a short time later. Not long after, the floozy of a hairdresser dropped off Kat.

  Un-fucking-believable! The broad did have nine lives. They didn’t even open a door except to let the dogs out to piss around midnight. He had no opportunity to isolate her for the kill.

  He could have whacked them both as easy as shooting a treed ’coon. But murdering a law officer b
rought out all his brethren. The place would be crawling with cops. If the FBI were called in, his operation could be exposed to unnecessary scrutiny.

  The others would go ballistic. They had a game plan and went nuts whenever it wasn’t followed to the letter.

  Only a dumbfuck would snuff Radner and the bitch while they were together. But he had a plan—one he had no intention of sharing with the others. Let them sit on their asses in the woods being chawed on by mosquitoes and no-see-ums. He’d had an entire night to devise a foolproof scheme.

  Gone missing.

  Did he love that term! Once upon a time—a more rational time—people vanished or disappeared. Now they’d “gone missing.” How could anyone go missing? The phrase wasn’t even grammatically correct. It didn’t really make any sense, if you analyzed it, but what the fuck did he care?

  Kaitlin Wells was going to vanish into thin air. This time he’d make certain people believed she’d fled by planting drugs in her things. They’d all assume she was avoiding a return to prison. The trick was to kill her and dispose of the body where no one would ever find it.

  No Pequita Romero situations this time. No dumb luck. No more half past dead. As far as he was concerned, Kat Wells was all the way dead.

  JUSTIN TOOK the precautions that David had insisted upon when he called. Evidently the reporter had discovered something that he didn’t want anyone else to know about. Without telling anyone where he was going, Justin had driven out to the pier at Cully’s Landing. The resort on the spring-fed lake hadn’t opened for summer yet and no one was around. David pulled up a few minutes later with Max.

  “Where’s Kat?” Justin called.

  David walked toward him without answering, and a frisson of alarm rippled through Justin.

  “She’s at the mortuary,” David replied. “Kat’s mother died just before dawn. She’s helping Tori make plans for the funeral. When I returned from Duke, Connie told me.”

  The news lanced through him like a shaft of ice. Aw, hell! Just what Kat didn’t need. She had enough stress in her life for ten women. Why did her mother have to die now, before they’d had a chance to talk?

  Sure, the woman had been cruel to Kat, but Loretta Wells had still been her mother. The emotional shield Kat had worn like a straitjacket had slipped away as he’d gotten to know her. She was softer than he’d first thought, more sensitive. Faced with death, she would forgive her mother anything.

  Justin suspected that Loretta had tried to poison Kat. Now they might never know the truth. Hell, for all the evidence he’d discovered, the killer might still be out there. He hated loose ends that left him wondering. The pit of his stomach burned with anxiety.

  “Maybe I should head over to the funeral home,” Justin told David. “I don’t want Kat alone with Tori. She might have been the one who tried to poison Kat.”

  David leaned his back against the wooden pier rail. “She’s not alone. Connie told me the mortician was meeting with them and so is Reverend Applegate. It’ll take awhile to plan the funeral.”

  Justin nodded without speaking. Too clearly he remembered how long it had taken to arrange a small private service for his mother. Every second had been agonizing.

  The type of coffin. Wood or faux wood? Should the casket be lined with satin or polyester? Would the dearly departed want her Bible in the coffin? Where would the dearly departed wish to spend eternity? On a hill? Near the pond?

  David turned to him, his expression solemn. “I asked you to meet me out here so I could tell you what I discovered.”

  Already alarmed, Justin’s pulse kicked up a notch. “Why? Do you think your office is bugged or something?”

  “No,” David replied after a moment’s hesitation, “but experience has taught me to be extremely careful.”

  “So what did you want to talk to me about?”

  “Pamela Nolan, the bank examiner’s daughter, had a lot to say about her mother’s death. Before she was killed in an auto accident, Ethel Nolan had been engaged in a disagreement with her partner, a man who’d been recently hired by the FDIC.”

  “About the inspection of Mercury National?”

  “Exactly. Ethel told her daughter she suspected certain loans taken out for real estate and automobiles were actually set up under false names to hide funds. Her partner disputed her assessment.”

  This confirmed what Justin already suspected but couldn’t prove—yet. “Laundering money by creating phony real estate and auto loans to conceal drug money.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  Justin considered what David had said for a moment. “The daughter just told you all this? Why didn’t she go to the police when her mother died?”

  “She wanted to, but her father wouldn’t let her.”

  “Someone paid him off.”

  “Possibly. A check of his bank records would tell us if he deposited money he can’t account for.” David let Max off the leash. The puppy scampered to the end of the pier and hung his head over the dock to check out the wind-whipped waves lapping the pilings. “His daughter’s still pretty upset that her father remarried so soon after her mother’s death. I think that’s the reason she told me all this.”

  “She’s getting back at her father.”

  “That was my impression. She doesn’t like the woman he married, but I also think she feels guilty about not doing something sooner.”

  “What about the partner, the other bank examiner?”

  “He filed the report after Ethel Nolan’s death, and it went through. He’s been promoted. The man is FDIC regional supervisor now.”

  “And Mercury hasn’t been inspected again.”

  “Not surprising,” David assured him. “I checked. With all the federal funding cutbacks, banks are being inspected only once every ten years or so—unless there’s reason to suspect fraud.”

  “We were right. The answer is at the bank. Question is, how do we prove it?” Justin spent the next few minutes telling David about the drug drop-off in the woods, and his theory that the automatic counting machines at the casino were being used to tally the take before the cash was returned to town.

  “A slick deal. Simple, efficient, yet hard to trace,” David said.

  “Drexel Sartiano isn’t about to let someone run a drug scam under his nose without getting his cut.”

  David nodded, then said, “I had time to think about this on the drive back from Duke. Cloris Howard is the key, right? She has to be in on this, if the money is going through the bank.”

  “Right. Bitner, too.” Justin had already calculated how this had gone down. “Bitner wanted out so he could start his mission in South America. That’s what got him killed.” Justin paused for a moment, then continued. “Pequita Romero’s roommates claimed she was going out to pick up money. This may be a stretch, but I’m thinking both of them asked for money. Pequita was probably blackmailing someone, while Bitner wanted his cut so he could move on.”

  “Interesting theory.”

  “Hell. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “I say we get Cloris to roll over on the others and cop to a lesser charge.”

  “Never happen.” Justin leaned over the rail and studied the clear blue water below the pier. “Cloris is tougher than nails.”

  “People bend if they think they can avoid spending the rest of their lives behind bars.”

  Justin thought David’s smile was a little smug. Obviously, the man had an idea. “Okay, I’ll bite. How do we get her to cooperate?”

  “Remember my source out at the Lucky Seven?”

  “Yeah.” Justin didn’t say that so far his source hadn’t come up with jackshit.

  “He’s working as a parking valet and he’s made some interesting observations in addition to the license plate numbers he provided me. He’s taken photographs of visitors using his camera phone. Clay Kincaid appears in several of them. And in two, I spotted Maria.”

  “The woman who works at the beauty parlor?”

&nbs
p; “Exactly. I wasn’t surprised to see Clay there—I hear he’s quite a gambler—but what would Maria be doing at the Lucky Seven?”

  Justin recalled the first time he’d met the woman when she’d been delivering food to Kat. Food. Shit! Double shit! That could have been the source of the belladonna.

  “She could be visiting other illegals who work there,” David suggested.

  “Possibly, but remember that Maria was the one who gave Kat info about Pequita when no one else would. I think she’s involved in this somehow.”

  REVEREND APPLEGATE AND the mortician, Willis Benton, finally left Kat alone with Tori. They’d been at the funeral home since noon. Each minute had seemed like an eternity, but Kat hadn’t complained. She could tell this was more difficult for Tori than it was for her. Kat hadn’t seen—or didn’t remember seeing—her mother for several years. Tori had been with her every day. She’d suffered with Loretta until the end had finally arrived.

  Kat had concurred with each of her sister’s decisions. Tomorrow would be an open-casket viewing. Reverend Applegate had assured them the ladies in the church auxiliary would supply cookies and punch in the mourning parlor after the viewing. The funeral service was set for the same afternoon.

  Tori had stoically agreed and murmured her thanks. Her eyes were puffy, and although she wasn’t crying now, it was clear she had been. The only time Kat could remember her sister crying was when she hadn’t been elected homecoming queen. Get over it, Kat told herself. That was then. This is now.

  Kat said, “I’ll get you my half of the money to pay for the funeral as soon as I have it.”

  Tori leveled her red-rimmed green eyes on her. “It’s not necessary. I earn plenty of money, and Mother quit-claimed the house to me. I can afford it.”

  “I want to contribute my share. I—”

  “Don’t you understand? You’re not inheriting a dime from Mother.”

  Kat wasn’t surprised in the least. Considering how her mother had treated Kat when she’d been put in prison, Kat knew better than to think her mother would leave her anything. “I didn’t expect to inherit a cent, but I still need—”