“Where is she now?”
“Gone. Champlain’s attorney says she moved back to Philly Friday morning. But, so far, I’m not finding anything on her there. There’s no address, no DMV record, no social, no employment records. Fischer may be checking on tax records.”
“Maybe Elena Rodgers isn’t her real name.”
“Maybe.”
That was interesting. Hunter glanced out at the night fog moving through the pinewoods. “I guess no one checked her room at the Old Shore Inn?”
“I was there this afternoon. It’s been rented out twice since she left. People knew her, but not well. She was always polite. Made a nice enough impression. I still have a couple of folks to talk with.”
“Okay, good.”
He was looking at her intently, waiting for Hunter to bring him in.
“You’re acting like Sanders is a homicide,” he finally said.
“Yeah,” Hunter said. “I think it is.”
“Who? Why?”
“I don’t know yet.” Hunter knew that he had his own ideas about the case and he’d been waiting for her to see if they meshed with hers. “What do you think?”
“What do I think? I think maybe Susan Champlain was a crime of passion.”
“Perpetrated by—?”
“Joey Sands.”
“Okay,” Hunter said. “Why?”
His eyelids lowered a fraction. “I’m told he had a hair-trigger temper. And I found there was an assault charge against him in Pennsylvania in two thousand four. Involving a woman he’d allegedly been harassing. Also, his story didn’t hold together very well when he was interviewed.”
“Okay.”
“And the ID on the pickup.”
All of that made sense.
“But why a crime of passion with Susan Champlain?”
“Maybe he’d made an advance on her?”
“Maybe.”
“Or. Maybe she’d just looked at him wrong, and it got him upset. The husband was out of town at the time, Sanders had been drinking.”
“Although no one ever saw anything between them before, right?” Hunter said. “In fact, he was very careful around her, wasn’t he? Champlain was his livelihood.”
A slight tilt of his head conceded the point. “I’m just saying, I think he was capable of it,” Tanner said.
“And so, what—? Then he felt remorse and took his own life?”
Tanner shrugged. “Or maybe the husband came after him.”
Hunter nodded, although she didn’t believe it.
“I did talk with someone who’d seen her out there at Widow’s Point before. Jason Glasser, who works for the county parks. He says he saw her there twice. She’d ride her bicycle and sit on the rock behind the growth of bushes on the ledge. I went out and had a look. It’s a very dangerous spot.”
“I know,” Hunter said.
But he could see that she wasn’t buying it. “You think it was premeditated,” Tanner said.
“I don’t know, I’m leaning that way. A crime of passion, but a different kind of passion.” He lifted his head alertly, waiting for more. “Of course, these are often difficult cases to prove,” Hunter added, “as you know. Anyway, we’ll pick it up in the morning. Thanks for all your great work.”
“Okay.”
His eyes lingered a moment after he stood. Then he nodded at the envelope. A trace of smile lifted the corners of his mouth.
“Got that sealed tight, I see.”
“Yep.”
He moved toward the door. “I’m not sure Fisch has quite warmed to me yet.”
“Acquired taste, probably.” Hunter smiled up at him.
“Probably.”
She hadn’t indicated which was the acquired taste. Both, really.
Tanner lowered his voice. “I hope that’s all it is,” he said.
“Why, what else would it be?” Hunter asked.
“I don’t know. I’d hate to think racism has anything to do with it.”
Oh. His long face was like a mask again. Hunter had no idea what he meant, or if he was putting her on. But she was tired and didn’t want to know. She wanted to see what was in the envelope.
She was glad when Tanner finally said, “Hasta la vista,” and she heard his footsteps echoing down the hallway.
Hunter opened the envelope. She skimmed through the report the techs had prepared, the phone messages and e-mails from the ISP. Sally Markos, the housecleaner, and Joseph Sanders’s widow Beth, had both voluntarily let investigators access their cell phones; they’d found numbers and e-mail addresses for Joey Sanders, Elena Rodgers, and Nick Champlain. Tomorrow, she hoped, Moore would file warrants to access their phone and e-mail accounts.
She stayed another hour in the office, until she could barely remain awake. Walking to her car, Hunter stopped and listened to the night air. There it was again: that restless back-and-forth sound high in the trees that she didn’t quite remember from any other summer. She heard it later, too, waking in the middle of the night in her bed, with Winston snoring softly beside her head, the boat ties creaking on the docks and a soft cry of the rusty hinge on the old Texaco sign at the harbor: the wind back and forth in the trees like human breathing, the night inhaling and exhaling, as if someone else were there with her.
Chapter Thirty-one
Luke dressed quietly in the space they called the sitting room, careful not to wake Charlotte, who liked to sleep in until 8 or 8:30 and then stay in bed for another half hour or so reading.
But when Luke and Sneakers came in from their walk to the bluff, he was surprised to smell coffee and hear a rousing crescendo of violins.
Charlotte was at the kitchen table in her white silk bathrobe, listening to her classical music and gazing at the front page of the Tidewater Times. Sneakers trotted to his bowl and began to lap loudly.
“Did you see this?” she said, tapping the front page. “Iran wants to negotiate now?”
“I heard,” Luke said. “Which, to me, is nearly as surprising as you being up at seven fifteen in the morning.”
“Well, I must’ve caught what you had overnight.”
“Which is?”
“I don’t know. Restless brain syndrome?”
“Oh, that.”
She nodded out the kitchen window at the marshlands. “Beautiful morning, isn’t it? I thought we might take a drive down to Widow’s Point after breakfast and have a look. The three of us.”
“Widow’s Point?”
“Mmm-hmm. Isn’t that where you’re heading? Or will you wait until later. Two oh three, perhaps?”
Sneakers lifted his head and looked at Luke, as if following the conversation.
“How’d you know?”
“I called the church yesterday afternoon,” she said. “I was told you’d just gone out for an hour.”
“Why do you say two oh three?”
“Low tide?”
“I see.” Not much got by Charlotte. “You haven’t been spying on me, I hope?”
“No. But Aggie knew, somehow. She said she’d seen you there.”
Luke snorted and smiled to himself. He shouldn’t have been surprised that Aggie would know, but he was.
Fifty minutes later, he parked along the access road and the three of them walked in silence out across the isolated beach where Susan Champlain’s life had ended. The air was cool and salty, smelling of wet sand. There was a couple way down by the south point, walking the other way; otherwise, the beach was empty. Luke had that same unsettled feeling as he’d had before, a sense that some unfinished business had been left here. The beach was wide, slick with receding waters; seagulls screeched, diving through the shadows, the morning sunlight giving the cliff fringe a fiery yellow glow.
“How many times have you come here?” Charlot
te asked as they walked through the shade.
“Three?”
“Not including this one.”
“No.”
“So, four.”
“Okay.”
“What are we looking for? The phone?”
“Not really.” Luke stopped and turned to the water, the light causing his eyes to squint. “At first, I guess I was.”
“Something more intangible, then, now.”
“Probably.”
“Okay.”
Charlotte reached for his hand. She swung it slightly as they walked down the beach out of the shade. It’d been a while since they’d done this and it felt good.
“You wanted to come here alone,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m glad we’re doing this,” Luke said. Adding, after several steps, “I’m disappointed in a way that more people haven’t come here. It feels like Susan’s life has receded too quickly. As often happens.”
She tightened her hand on his. Sneakers charged ahead chasing seagulls, acting as if he might actually catch one.
“Should we try throwing him a stick?” Charlotte suggested. “I don’t know that we’ve ever tried that.”
“You know what they say about old dogs.”
“Old?”
“Middle-aged.”
Charlotte managed to find a stick, a branch that must’ve fallen from the cliffside. She pulled her hand over it, pruning the leaves, and then shook it enticingly in front of Sneakers’s eyes. “Want this?” she asked. She shook it a few more times, and then feigned a throw. But Sneakers just sat, pulled back his ears, and made a sound like he was hungry.
“Want the stick?” Charlotte said. “Want the stick?!” She wound back and hurled it, a pretty good throw, Luke thought. “Go on, Sneak! Go! Go get it! Retrieve!”
The excited tenor of her voice caused Sneakers to run several steps, but they were in the wrong direction. He stopped, looked down the beach, then turned around and trotted to Luke.
“He’s not a stick dog,” Luke said, crouching as his ears pulled back.
Charlotte looked momentarily stricken.
“I think the fad of chasing sticks may be passé now, anyway,” Luke said. “Like Frisbees and bandannas.”
“You think?”
“It’s an idea, anyway. Chasing sticks always struck me as kind of dumb to begin with.”
“Well, yes,” Charlotte said. “But you could say that about most human activities.”
“True.”
Luke gave Sneakers what he really wanted—a vigorous neck and chin rub—and Sneakers soon got on his side, turning it into a full belly rub. Charlotte began to walk away by herself up the beach, into the breeze. Luke sat in the sand and watched her for a while, a little spellbound by her shadow and silhouette against the blue sparkles of the Bay.
Sneakers broke away from him and galloped off in Charlotte’s direction. Seagulls, again. Charlotte turned to him, walking backwards. She made an exaggerated shrug, turning her palms up. Luke smiled and stood. He looked up at the bluff, the fan of sunlight reminding him of the police floodlights last Wednesday night, the crowd gathered to look. Would it ever be possible to come to Widow’s Point and not think about Susan Champlain, about how her life had ended?
Luke began walking, scanning the surf for a while, rubbing his feet in the sand. The dead don’t come back; but the objects they’ve left behind don’t just disappear, either. Susan hadn’t come here wearing one sandal. And it wasn’t likely she’d come without her cell phone. Something had happened to them.
They searched the beach separately for close to twenty minutes, Sneakers staying mostly with Charlotte, although at one point he sprinted back to Luke like a greyhound racer.
“What is it, Sneak?”
Sneakers made a small circle in the sand and then just sat down and stared at him, breathing wildly. He trotted back, at a more reasonable pace, to Charlotte.
A few minutes later, Luke noticed Charlotte moving her arms overhead in semaphore-like motions, her voice lost in the blue expanse between them. Luke began to jog to her.
Sneakers was half circling a spot in the sand when he got there, as if he’d discovered something. “What is it?” he said. “A giant meat bone?”
“No.” Charlotte showed him what she had found with her toes in the sand by the surf. She held it out and dropped it in his hand: a pendant, heart-shaped, covered with diamonds. Probably worth hundreds of dollars.
Luke had an idea what it might be before she said anything. They both stared at it in the folds of his hand.
“Maybe it goes with the necklace?”
“I was going to say that.”
“Which would mean she fought with someone,” Charlotte said.
“Yes.”
“Who tore off the necklace in the process. The clasp was broken, wasn’t it?”
“I think so,” Luke said.
He felt a sudden, inexplicable affection for Charlotte. As they began to walk back, he stopped and gave her a hug, feeling the breeze lifting her hair. And then he kissed her, and she made the kiss go on for a while.
“I’m glad we did this,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Me, too.”
They walked to the car holding hands, thinking about what she’d found, and then drove home along the coast road without talking. At one point, Charlotte reached over and wrapped her right hand around his left. He didn’t realize at first that she was trying to open it, to have another look at the pendant.
“I guess I ought to take this over to Hunter,” he said.
Charlotte smiled.
THE PENDANT FELT to Luke like a puzzle piece. And the idea of a puzzle seemed like a suitable container for Sunday’s sermon: the puzzle of how to best live our day-to-day lives; the puzzle of faith, of God’s “secret wisdom,” from First Corinthians; the puzzle of desire: wanting to fill the church each week with people who cared deeply, who took the message of the sermon home with them.
Sermon ideas came in flashes like that; sometimes they panned out, often they didn’t. He was mulling over the puzzle idea as he walked into the Public Safety Complex.
Hunter was in the lobby, waiting for him. “Morning,” she said, bounding up from a chair. “Sorry, I can’t ask you back.”
“No, that’s—”
“We’re meeting in a few minutes. It’s a busy morning,” she said, setting her hands on her hips. “I really enjoyed dinner the other night.”
“We did, too. No, that’s fine,” Luke said. “I just wanted to show you something. It won’t take more than a minute.”
Hunter seemed a little frazzled, Luke saw; her shirt was tucked in funny and one of her collar points was askew, her hair sticking out on one side as if she’d just climbed out of bed. But her light brown eyes had fixed on his like lasers.
“Is there anything new?” he said. “With the case.”
“Well. Yeah. Joey Sanders is dead, for one thing. Down in Virginia. You know who he was?”
“Sure,” Luke said, surprised. “Nick Champlain’s assistant. His bodyguard. What happened?”
“Don’t know yet. Local PD thinks suicide. I can tell you more after our meeting. It’s—” Her eyes widened briefly with an unfamiliar impatience. “What’ve you got?”
Luke opened his left hand to show her the pendant. “Something Charlotte found,” he said. “In the surf at Widow’s Point this morning. I thought you might find it interesting.”
Hunter carefully took the pendant between her fingers. She placed it delicately in the palm of her own left hand, and wobbled it side to side. Luke was struck by the intense interest that suddenly shone in her eyes.
“I—we—thought maybe it was possible that this goes with the necklace you found.”
She was nodding vaguely, studyin
g the pendant, the jewels glinting in the dull lobby light. “Tell me where you found it.”
Hunter’s impatience had evaporated; her fascination with the pendant seemed all-consuming. Luke watched her as she studied it, holding it inches from her face.
LUKE DROVE HOME with a new curiosity, as if Hunter’s interest had been contagious. The pendant went with the necklace Hunter had found in the sand the night Susan Champlain died, yes. But there was something else about it. Hunter had seen something that he hadn’t. He was fairly certain about that. He glanced several times at the dash clock, wondering how long she’d be in her meeting.
Chapter Thirty-two
There were two theories Amy Hunter had been playing with that morning, each exclusive of the other; each leading to a different explanation for Susan Champlain’s death. One was what Gerry Tanner had suggested the night before: that Joseph Sanders had killed Susan Champlain in an alcohol-fueled crime of passion; and that, for whatever reason, his own death two days later had been a consequence. This seemed the less likely of the two, but the easier to explain.
Pastor Luke had just nudged her toward the other one: that the perpetrator was someone nobody had considered.
One of the files that Sonny Fischer had sent to her yesterday contained thirty still images from security tapes turned over by four Tidewater businesses. Sixteen new images were in her e-mail this morning. Each corresponded to a digital file, which Fisch or another homicide investigator had looked through. For now, with the meeting minutes away, Hunter needed only a single image. She scrolled through the sixteen new ones, and found it—among the pictures of Elena Rodgers, not those of Susan Champlain. Time-stamped last Monday morning at 8:23: Rodgers walking through the lobby at the Old Shore Inn, where she’d been renting a room for the past six weeks. A fit-looking, nicely postured woman wearing a light-colored sleeveless dress, a thin valise under one arm. Headed over to Nick Champlain’s house, probably, where she worked for several hours three days a week, answering mail, keeping his appointments calendar. Cool but hard. Her dark eyes turned to the security camera in one of the images; wide shoulders, arms slightly buffed, thick swoops of light brown hair, hard facial features.
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