by Libby Howard
“It’s a bad road to be driving sober,” I commented, Eli’s accident always on my mind lately.
He shook his head. “Dark, moonless night like that. I’m just glad you’re okay. And I’m glad you saw where the truck had gone down or that poor Smith girl would have been trapped down there all night.”
I shuddered, then looked at J.T. in surprise. “How did you know it was Peony Smith in the passenger seat? None of that was released to the news.”
“It’s a small town.” He grinned. “And I know all the cops, remember?”
Of course I remembered. J.T. was worse than Daisy when it came to knowing all the gossip, although lately I seemed to be running a close third.
“She’s fifteen,” I mentioned with an arched eyebrow. Yes, I was just as bad of a gossip.
J.T. shrugged. “The girl told the police he was giving her a lift home from a party. Between the head injury and hysterical crying, her statement was a bit disjointed, but I’m guessing any naughty business between the two of them hadn’t yet occurred.”
Poor Peony. “How is she doing? I heard they kept her overnight for observation because of the head injury?”
J.T. sent me an approving glance. “Your sources are almost as good as mine. They ended up keeping her last night too. Released her this morning to the care of a mother who didn’t seem too thrilled about picking her kid up from the ER. Seems she was very worried about who was going to pay for all of it.”
I couldn’t blame Mrs. Smith for that. They probably didn’t have insurance, and hospital visits were horribly expensive—I knew this first hand.
“Pretty serious head wound if they kept her two nights,” I commented, remembering that Peony had been unconscious when they’d pulled her from the car.
“Broken arm, concussion, lots of bruises and cuts—some requiring stitches.” J.T. shot me a knowing look. “They breathalyzed her in the hospital. Point o-nine.”
Drunk. And probably Holt as well. I frowned. “She’s a minor. Could she consent to that? Did they have to wait for her Mom to give the okay?”
He waved a finger at me. “Good catch! If she had been driving, they absolutely could breathalyze her, especially because there is a fatality involved.”
“But she wasn’t driving,” I countered.
“No. So they’d need either a court order, search warrant, consent of the minor, or consent of the parent.”
I thought for a moment. “No judge is going to give the okay for that. There’s no legal reason to invade her privacy.”
“The other allowance is when blood alcohol content is needed for medical evaluation and treatment.”
“But then the results are private under HIPAA laws and wouldn’t be available to law enforcement except under a court order or search warrant,” I countered. “So back to square one. Either she or her mother must have consented.”
J.T. chuckled. “We need to get you your PI license. You’re good. In this case, Peony declined the breathalyzer. Her mother consented, ranting and railing the whole time that maybe a few weeks in a jail cell would do the girl good.”
I winced, feeling even more sorry for Peony. “Why do the police even need to breathalyze her? She wasn’t driving. The blood alcohol content of the passenger shouldn’t matter in determining cause of the accident. Are they really going to throw a fifteen-year-old girl in juvie after being in a serious accident because she was drinking?”
“Probably not, but it’s good to have that information.” J.T. sat on the side of my desk. “It’s always better to have too much data than too little.”
Not always. I thought about jigsaw puzzles, and how the five-hundred-piece ones were so much easier to put together than the three-thousand-piece ones, even if the smaller set was missing pieces. Too much data was overwhelming. It muddied the waters. It made it hard to see the forest for all the millions of saplings.
So says the skip tracer—queen of all data.
It was difficult to get any work done with the accidents—both Eli’s and Holt’s—on my mind. I read the announcement from the Falcons about how grieved they were over the loss of their newest draft pick, expressing their condolences to both Holt’s family and the community. It was well worded, with no mention at all of any suspected cause of the accident or that the deceased had an underage passenger. There was no comment from his family beyond a short depressing interview on News Nine with Holt’s mother clutching a picture of him, her eyes empty of life. There was no father, no siblings mentioned at all. Was the poor woman all alone now? It broke my heart to see her in that chair, a microphone shoved in her face.
I was just getting back to my Creditcorp files and thinking about what I might want to do for lunch when I got the call. A nervous girlish voice answered my greeting, asking for me by name. I recognized her voice right away.
“Peony? It’s Miss Kay. Oh, honey how are you?”
“They told me you were in the car behind us, that you saw…” She cleared her throat. “They told me you found the truck, that if you hadn’t spotted us down the ditch in the woods, we might have been there until dawn. I might have woken up next to…”
A corpse. Trapped in a car, injured and in pain, with the dead body of a boy she knew next to her. I knew where her imagination had gone on this one, and the thought horrified me as well. It wasn’t something a fifteen-year-old girl should be imagining.
“Well, that didn’t happen,” I told her firmly. “And I’m sure the police would have noticed all the broken trees once they finished with Mr. Coleman’s statement and the tow truck got there.”
“I wanted to thank you.” Her voice broke. “Thank you for being there and noticing. And I wanted to ask you to help me. Because I need your help. Please.”
I hesitated, then felt like a complete jerk because I was not sure I wanted to know what sort of help a wild girl from the wrong side of the tracks wanted from me—a fifteen-year-old girl who’d been drunk at a party and gone off with an older boy to probably engage in sexual activity.
She was a young girl, just like Madison. I should be willing to assist a girl in need regardless of her background and the poor decisions she’d made.
“What do you need, honey? A written character reference for your underage drinking trial? The name of a good lawyer? Or an alcohol treatment program?”
“I’m not an alcoholic,” she snapped back, sounding much more like herself. “I just was partying. Sheesh, you old people are such duds. No, I need you to help me with something. Can you meet me at the coffee shop on third?”
“Now?” Hadn’t she just been released from the hospital? With stitches and bruises, and a broken arm? Shouldn’t she be home in bed? Suddenly a horrible thought crossed my mind.
“Did your mom kick you out, Peony? Do you need somewhere to stay?” Judge Beck wouldn’t be thrilled, but maybe I could put the girl up for the night until we arranged something with child welfare.
“No. I just need to see you. Now. Can you meet me?” Her voice was wavering again, pleading. My chest hurt just hearing it.
“Of course, hon. I’ll be right there.”
Chapter 14
Peony looked forlorn as she sat at the high-top table, her coffee untouched. Her left arm was in a cast, about a third of the right side of her face swollen and bruised. There was a cut with some stitches above one of her eyebrows, and the tangled hair sticking out from under a knit cap made me wonder if she had stitches there as well.
I sat down across from her, preparing to offer some sympathetic words but she spoke first.
“Someone killed Holt.”
And now I was speechless. Again I saw the scene, the pickup truck passing me, the headlights, the smashed blood-splattered windshield.
“Oh Peony.” It was all I could say. When tragedy struck, everyone wanted someone, or something, to blame, a reason for why it had happened. Madison had clung to the drunk-driving cause that the police had put forth. It seemed Peony was going to blame whoever had given the party, or s
upplied the alcohol, or not insisted on taking Holt’s keys away.
“It’s true. I know you don’t believe me, but it’s true. Someone killed him.” She choked on a sob. “I knew him. We grew up together. I knew him.”
She’d been entranced by Holt as had all the young women, dazzled by his smile and flirty attentions, but this girl in front of me seemed so very young—too young for a college grad, an NFL draft pick with his whole future ahead of him, to be fooling around with. Maybe he had been innocently giving her a ride home. And maybe someone had been a little over generous with the booze at the party, but at the end of the day, it had been an accident, not murder.
“How are you doing, Peony?” I switched the topic to something other than Holt Dupree and his untimely death.
Her lip trembled and she bit down on it then lifted her chin. “I won’t be winning any beauty contests for a while, and it will be twelve weeks before I get the cast off my arm, but at least I’m alive.”
“I’m glad you didn’t have anything more serious than a broken arm,” I told her. “Twelve weeks will be gone before you know it.”
She shook her head. “But Holt is dead. And it wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t.”
Was she trying to blame the oncoming car? She’d had a head injury, and been inebriated. Perhaps her memory of what happened wasn’t the same as mine.
“Did they tell you I witnessed the accident?” I asked gently. “I wasn’t just first on the scene, I saw Holt’s truck pass me, saw you guys in the wrong lane when I came around the corner. You were right in the path of an oncoming car.” Maybe it would be easier to convince her this wasn’t murder if she knew I’d seen it myself.
She nodded. “But you didn’t see what went on beforehand. You weren’t in the truck with him. We were at a party, and he was giving me a ride home. He was leaving, and knew me, so I asked him for a ride….”
“You were hoping for more than a ride home?” There was a flush on her cheeks, something in her eyes that told me so. Whether Holt was on board with that or not, we’d never know. For some reason I was thinking ‘not’. In spite of what Judge Beck had told me about his past trouble, I couldn’t see him being such a fool as to risk his future on a fling with a young girl. But then again, many older men had fallen from grace by making the same foolish mistake.
Her smile was sheepish. “Well, yeah. Duh. It’s not like I’m going to turn that down.”
“He was seven years older than you, Peony. He used to date your older sister. And you’re fifteen.”
She shrugged. “Seven years isn’t a lot, and men don’t always think with their big brain when it comes to getting some. It was worth a shot. What’s the worst that could happen? Him telling me ‘no’?”
The worst that could happen was him telling her ‘yes’. Actually the worst that could happen was a horrible car accident with a fatality. She was so lucky to have come out of that one alive. This conversation was highlighting the differences between Peony and the rest of Madison’s friends. She suddenly seemed so much older than fifteen. She seemed jaded and a bit ruthless. I now knew why Judge Beck was uneasy about Madison’s friendship with her.
But in the end she was a fifteen-year-old girl who had been in a terrible car accident, who had lost a childhood friend. She might be cynical, but she was still a teen, and deserving of my sympathy.
“I know what people are saying,” Peony continued. “He wasn’t drinking. Holt didn’t drink. He wasn’t drunk. It was the car. Someone killed him.”
I winced. “If he wasn’t drunk the labs will prove it—but it still doesn’t make his death anything but a horrible accident.”
She squirmed. “The labs?”
“He’s a local celebrity that died in an accident. The coroner’s office will run a tox screen on him to see if alcohol or drugs contributed to the accident.”
“But why?” she blurted out. “It’s not like they’re going to charge him with driving under the influence or something. He’s dead.”
I winced again at her bluntness. “The M.E. report needs to include that, Peony. It’s for the insurance company, or in case there are lawsuits. You’re claiming that someone killed him. What if someone else thinks the same, like maybe his mother, and sues? The coroner’s office needs to make sure they’re thorough.”
Tears sparkled in her eyes and her hand shook as she took a sip of her coffee. “But it was the truck. Something was wrong with the truck. That’s what killed him.”
I thought for a second about the way the truck had jerked into the other lane. “Did you grab the wheel for some reason. Was he falling asleep, and you tried to steer back into the other lane?”
“No! I never touched the wheel.” She grimaced and lifted a hand to her head. “And he wasn’t drunk. Everyone thinks he was drunk, but he wasn’t. Something was wrong with the truck.”
“They did find whisky in the car,” I told her gently. “You were drinking so he may have seemed sober to you, but that doesn’t mean he was. The labs aren’t back yet, but the officer at the scene assumed he was intoxicated.”
Her eyes blazed. “He wasn’t. He was completely sober when he picked me up, and he was drinking water. Yeah, he might have had some alcohol in the car, but he wasn’t drinking it and he wasn’t drunk. Why won’t you believe me? Someone did something to his truck.”
How many times had a teenager, or even an adult, hid alcohol in a nondescript container? Spiked soda in the fast food cup. Vodka in a water bottle. I opened my mouth to tell her so, only to shut it with a snap. The deputy had said it was whisky in the car, not vodka. If Holt had poured a bunch of whisky in a clear water bottle, then Peony would certainly have noticed the weird non-water color.
“I really think you should wait until after the labs and the autopsy comes back before you go telling everyone that Holt’s death wasn’t an accident and that someone tampered with his vehicle.”
“I want to hire you to investigate his death. It wasn’t an accident,” she insisted.
I was beginning to think the hospital should have kept her more than two nights for observation. “Peony, why don’t you wait until the M.E. posts his findings before you go hiring J.T. to investigate?”
“I don’t want Pierson, I want you,” she argued. “You were the one who figured out the mayor killed that woman. Everyone says you’re smart. Madison says you’re the smartest woman she knows, that you can figure anything out. I know Holt was murdered and I don’t want to wait for an autopsy, I want to hire you to find his killer.”
Logic wasn’t getting me anywhere, but maybe if I humored her and talked through this as if it were one of J.T.’s cases, she’d see the folly in it. What would Gator do?
“Okay. We don’t know cause of death, so any investigation is going to be pure speculation until we do.”
“Someone tampered with the truck,” she insisted. “Or maybe someone was in the woods and shot the tire on the truck and we lost control. Something was wrong with that truck.”
This was devolving into the land of conspiracy theories. Some had their ‘grassy knoll’ theory, and Peony had her ‘shooter in the woods’ theory. There had been no gunshot, but I bit back the argument, not wanting to go down the rabbit hole of silencers or snipers from a mile away that could shoot out the tire of a speeding truck through five acres of woods. Play along. Help the girl feel like she was doing something to help her dead friend. Then get back to the office and the Creditcorp files.
“Step one is motive. What motive would someone have to kill Holt Dupree?” I asked. “He was our hometown hero.”
Then I remembered the fight at the concert, Matt’s comment about how Buck’s season had been ruined taking every hope of a college scholarship with it by an injury that some thought hadn’t been an accident. I thought of Judge Beck’s concern, and knew that there were probably plenty of fathers out there who were equally, or possibly more, worried about their daughters. Hadn’t Kendra jilted her boyfriend when she went off with Holt at the Persimmon
Bridge party?
What was I thinking? That Kendra’s boyfriend was jealous enough to become a sniper in the woods at two in the morning after the Fourth of July holiday?
“Buck Stanford or his father.” Peony ticked off the names on her hand. “They both blame Holt for that football accident in high school. Or Kendra Witt because he told her their little fling was ending the moment he left town. Or Kendra’s boyfriend. Or Maury Baggs. Or any of the zillion girls he wouldn’t sleep with. Ooo, or Ashley What’s-her-name’s father. He blames Holt for his daughter’s breakdown over those forwarded texts. Yeah, it’s been like five years, but maybe Holt being in town stirred up a bunch of old revenge feelings and stuff.”
For some reason I had my notepad and pen out. I’d bet the NFL contract did rub salt in the wound for Buck and his father, and Holt’s presence here in Locust Point might have driven either of them to do something foolish. But the others…I was pretty sure Kendra had known there was a slim-to-none chance of her fling with Holt lasting longer than the weekend, and as much of a stooge as her boyfriend must have felt, killing our local football star seemed an overkill revenge for getting dumped. Besides, I was pretty sure he would have been un-dumped once Holt left anyway. As for Ashley’s father, that one was a possibility, especially if Holt had done something while he was here to dredge all of that up again.
“Who is Maury Baggs?” I asked. Lord forbid this actually was a murder because the zillion disappointed, ego-bruised girls weren’t going to make for a quick investigation. Although if Holt Dupree were murdered, I wouldn’t be the one doing the investigation, the police would.
What was I doing? I needed to placate Peony and go back to work, because this wasn’t a murder and I wasn’t a private investigator.
“Maury Baggs was another neighbor of ours.” Peony turned her coffee cup then took a quick drink. “He was a big kid when we were young. Like big. Fat. Bowl full of pudge, fat. Holt was…well, he wasn’t nice to him. And he wasn’t nice to him in high school either.”