by Neliza Drew
He turned up his hands like he thought I might know and want to tell him. “They couldn’t find a thing that didn’t belong to your sister, the mother, or the victim.”
“But, of course, you’re talking the big, obvious stuff. Hairs, fibers, all that takes time and money. If someone says this case is a slam dunk, none of that stuff gets processed.”
“This isn’t exactly CSI, but then, neither is Vegas.” He gave me a look that said I should know that.
I did.
“The state backlog is into years, so yeah, unless the prosecutor really wants it, it sits in storage.”
“The deputies showing up? That normal?”
He shrugged. “Normal enough. They cover some of the smaller towns Downeast. Beaufort’s got ten officers. They claimed to have been visiting friends in the apartments behind Maxway.”
“You sound like you don’t buy it.”
“Just saying it was a big coincidence.”
“And cops don’t tend to like those.” I grinned.
“What is it you said you do?”
“Paralegal. My closest friend used to be a sergeant down in Florida.”
He nodded. Taking it in. “Your friend, MacQuayde?”
“He tries to keep me out of trouble.”
He gave me a look that said he wasn’t sure Tom was trying hard enough.
“He has his work cut out for him. I know.” I tucked stray hair behind my ear and fought the urge to linger on the scar. “Do you think she did it? Really?”
He looked at the floor for a full minute. “Based on what I could dig up from other places you guys lived, she was a good kid for the most part. Until recently.”
“She was.”
“You, on the other hand… And while we’re being frank — or mostly frank — I’d have to guess from your record that you’d been sexually and/or physically abused. That juvenile warrant in Texas weren’t no joke. Arrested not a year later for prostitution?”
I suddenly felt naked, and not getting paid for it. I studied the knee of my jeans before answering. “Officially, it never happened. On paper, I’m just a bad seed.”
“My guess would be Lane never reported anything either.”
I bit the inside of my lower lip. “That doesn’t make her a killer.”
“You either.” He looked at me pointedly.
I set my cup on the table, stood. “Thanks for your help.”
“That girl’s scared of something and it’s not prison. Go talk to her Sunday.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Keep yourself out of trouble. I’ve seen too many people in the morgue thought they could take care of themselves.”
Chapter thirty-one
I had some time to kill before I had to meet Dick’s lawyer friend so I stopped at a chain restaurant on the west end of town. Too many years of eating irregularly had made my diet sparse, erratic, bouncing between nutritious and empty, cheap calories. While I waited for soup, I flipped through Lane’s address book. Most of the names had been crossed out. Several I remembered seeing in the newspaper. Lost children who’d died young.
Besides Amber, the next most promising number yielded a woman when I called.
“Kelly? No one’s asked for her in almost a year.” Her voice was old and tired. “She was a bit of a handful, but I’d hoped she’d turn out better than her mother.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Ain’t your fault. Mind if I ask who’s calling?”
“Oh, sorry. I’m Davis Groves, Lane’s sister. Kelly was in her address book.”
“I heard Lane’s been in a bit of trouble herself.”
“Yeah.” I tried not to sound as dejected as she had.
“They’ll break your heart. Kelly, she got pregnant at thirteen. Said it was her boyfriend’s. I hadn’t even known she had one. She was so quiet, so sweet. Lane started hanging out with Kelly at the alternative school. They’d go on trips together.”
“Trips?”
“Little road trips. Just the girls. I didn’t want to pry. Didn’t want to let her down. I learned my lesson with Kelly’s mom. Seemed like a fun bonding experience.” Something crashed in the background and a toddler cried. She put the phone down to soothe.
The waitress dropped off my soup and refilled my water. She looked vaguely familiar, but neither of us decided to figure out why.
“Sorry about that,” she said. Her voice sounded wistful. “Never thought I’d be playing mom again. Too old for this, you know. But, you do what you have to.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “We do.” I blew on a spoonful of soup.
“She came back after one of those trips all upset. I just thought it was the usual girl stuff. You know how girls can be.”
I did, but not in the way she thought.
“Not long after, Kelly died — killed herself, the cops told me. There was a hose in the tailpipe, but I saw her before I called them. Her head was bloody.”
My chest tightened. I knew about carbon monoxide poisoning. Charley had tried once, but we’d come home earlier than she’d expected. Found her drunk on the front seat of a rusty hatchback, garden hose not quite long enough, limp on the ground under the tailpipe. Equally drunk john or “date” passed out in front of daytime soaps on the couch.
I snapped back to the present. “Blood?”
“Exactly. I had a great cousin accidentally killed hisself with a generator after Floyd. He didn’t end up bloody. Sure as hell smelled ripe after a couple days in the heat. Underside of him downright nasty when his mama found him, but he weren’t bloody.”
“Someone hit her?”
“That’s what I always thought. Cop told me I was just crazy. Hysterical, he said.” She snorted. “I ain’t lived all this long, seen all this much, go crazy over that. Sad, yes. Crazy, no.”
“Mind if I ask who the cop was?”
“Stockley Lamar. Always hanging out with that Murphy character down to Harker’s Island like a couple of knuckleheads.”
“And you’re sure she didn’t do it alone?”
“Honey, I ain’t stupid.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Ain’t your fault. Hope things work out with your sister.” She hung up as the toddler wailed again.
The waitress reappeared with my check. “Now I remember you. Used to go to West Carteret. My boyfriend back then worked at Cherry Point. Saw you at the titty club in Havelock.”
“You still with him?”
She snorted. “Caught him banging one of them titty girls.”
I left her some cash and called Tom on my way out.
“You need me to come up there?” he asked after I gave him the rundown.
I wanted more than anything for someone else to help. And I knew I couldn’t have that. “I’ll be fine.”
“Uh huh.” He didn’t believe me either.
Chapter thirty-two
Dick’s friend was in New Bern. Why I had to go all the way to New Bern for a lawyer, I wasn’t sure, but when I tried calling Dick to find out he sent back a text that simply said: DON’T ASK.
New Bern was about a boring half hour’s drive west on Highway 70, which ended up taking me northish through Croatan National Forest and Havelock, an apparent monument to seventies strip malls. Most of the traffic I left Morehead with stuck with me, except for the vehicles heading to Cherry Point MCAS, and given the time of day, there weren’t many of those.
Robert Lawson’s office was tucked into a second-floor corner overlooking an alley near the river in an area that might have been gentrifying or falling into disrepair. The elevator looked broken, but I preferred stairs anyway. The flakey, industrial green paint had a certain charm that reminded me of an old middle school I’d attended in a humid part of the deep South where dank was the county smell.
His name on the door was too modern — the font too sans-serif, the color too black — for the building or the door. Beyond the door, his receptionist desk sat empty and his office door was flung open.
“
Come on in.”
I crossed the entry room and leaned around the doorframe. “You’re Robert Lawson?”
“Rob, if it’s the same to you.” He got up to shake my hand. Jeans on the bottom, white dress shirt and navy blazer on top. Converse sneakers when he came around from behind the desk.
“Are you even old enough to practice law?”
He grinned. “You must be Dick’s friend. Come on in.”
“Coworker.” I studied the walls, his degrees, the lack of pictures. “Why New Bern?”
“Parents live up here. They’re getting older. Wanted to be able to spend some time with them before the inevitable. You know.” He gestured at his guest chairs and plopped back into his own.
“No, I don’t.” I handed over the guardianship papers Dick had drawn up. “Why’d you agree to do this?”
“Dick kind of insisted. Not really my thing, actually. Mostly focused on tax law, but I know enough. Little like doctors, you know. Have to know how all the systems work even if we generally spend our time with one.”
“That’s not exactly reassuring.”
“I already looked into this a little. Dick told me I was doing it.”
I slipped my phone out of my pocket and replied to Dick’s text: What the hell?
“Here’s how I see it: You’ve got a teenager killing a guy about the age of a boyfriend. It’s not related to Wright’s. Not really. But the place employs a good number of people on that end of the county. And the guy used to be a commissioner. Don’t discount small town politics.”
“What the hell does the one thing have to do with the other?”
“You got a lotta lawyers see themselves in politics eventually. Maybe they never do anything about it.”
“And you?”
He snorted. “Look, I ain’t Dick. I’m doing this ’cause I’m horrible at math and my parents were the ‘doctor or lawyer’ types.”
“Didn’t you just say you do tax law?”
“Tax law’s easy. I mean the kind of math you have to do to get into med school. This? This is ninety percent plugging income into software for the three and a half months leading up to April fifteenth, creating shell companies, and reading legislation that’ll cause a coma right fast.”
“I’m gonna kill Dick.” I stood.
“No, wait, look, I told you. I looked into this. I can do this.”
“Oh, well, that instills confidence.”
“Just sit a minute. Jeez. I got this.”
I sat. “She did it. I don’t know why, but Lane shot Billy Guthrie.”
“Oh.” His expression fell and he leaned back. “Dick said that might be the case, but, whoa.”
“Your parents paid for law school, didn’t they?”
“Well, yeah.”
“And they set you up in this office with the understanding that you’d sit here and do people’s taxes and not do anything to embarrass them, right?”
He looked left at his UM coffee mug.
“And this stunt is your way of suddenly deciding you’re going to be your own person and do what you want. Am I warm? That Dick called you because he knew this is what you wanted to do and knew your parents didn’t want you doing it and it’d be the perfect chance to thumb your not-quite-Princeton nose at them.” I rubbed my temples.
“Look, look. It’s not like that. Well, it’s kind of like that. My mom thinks criminal law is dangerous.” He gave me a look that was supposed to engender sympathy.
It didn’t.
“My father thinks it’s slumming unless you’re angling for a judgeship, and he assured me I don’t have the kind of face he can put on a billboard.”
I wanted to ask what the hell was wrong with his face. Seemed like a perfectly white-bread, well-moneyed face to me. Thin lips, lotta freckles, pudgy cheeks, but still… About thirty and no sign of real strife or struggle. No deformed features or weird growths. Not even a broken nose.
Instead, I held out my hand. “It’s been nice meeting you and all, but I need a real attorney. I don’t come from the kind of family that gets a good life handed to it.”
He held onto my hand too long. “Please. Don’t go. I can do this. I swear.”
I didn’t yank my hand free, but I didn’t encourage him either.
“This is my little sister’s life. Not some game you’re playing with your parents.”
“I know. Look, I hate taxes. I really did look into this. Those two deputies who showed up. They were off duty. And they didn’t show up together. Lamar and Murphy. Only Murphy was still there when BPD got there. The ballistics? Not done yet. Everyone assumes it was the gun at the scene that shot the victim, but they haven’t proven it, yet.”
I disentangled my digits and sat.
“And the initial fingerprints? He loaded the gun that killed him. Not the shooter.”
“Where’d you hear all this?”
He looked back and forth like a spy might be hiding in his potted plastic rubber plant and opened his desk. He studied my face and pulled out a photo. “That’s my father.”
I looked at the picture. A white-haired man shaking hands with a salt-and-pepper-haired man. White Hair wore a suit. Salt-and-Pepper wore judge’s robes.
“He doesn’t want me following in his footsteps because he thinks I’m a screwup. He’s grooming my brother. That doesn’t mean I can’t get access to information. It doesn’t mean I can’t read between the lines. I passed law school. I passed the bar in three states. I just didn’t go to Harvard like my brother and I didn’t get a perfect MCAT score like my sister.”
“I’m not exactly the family angel either.”
“But you’ve never killed anyone.”
“Not yet. Doesn’t mean I never wanted to. Doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have.”
He bit his lip. “That’s not bad, actually. There’s more than one reason to kill a guy. Especially one you thought was a friend.” He tapped his chin.
“Tell a convincing enough story, you might persuade a jury of reasonable doubt. Trouble is, you’re not in South Florida anymore. Reasonable doubt in the Bible Belt is a different animal.”
He smiled. “Luckily, I grew up in these parts. I know all about the word of God and how to spin a good ol’ Southern yarn.”
I pulled a piece of paper and scribbled Tom’s contact information on it. “This is an investigator friend of mine. He has friends and connections of his own. If you need something, call him.”
“He’s in Broward?”
“He’s the best I know of. He also probably knows as much about your new client’s family as anyone outside of it, so he’s a good resource if you start thinking Lane’s a product of her environment.”
“You seem sad. You were angry before.” He tilted his head. “You said she did it. Why?”
I gave him a sly smile. “You have some paperwork you need me to sign?”
The outer door of the office opened as I stood.
Lawson looked startled. I took that to mean he wasn’t expecting anyone. When the kid walked in, gun in his right hand, I was already beside the doorframe. I grabbed his wrist with my left and elbowed him in the throat with my right, twisted the gun away and put it to his temple.
“Who are you?”
The teen delinquent pissed himself. “Bu-bu-bu Buddy.”
“Sit.”
“I don’t want that on my upholstery!”
“Then I’ll buy you a new chair, Lawson. I don’t want him standing.” I grabbed the kid’s collar and dragged him to the chair. He fell into it heavily before he realized what had happened.
Lawson sighed and sat back in his own chair. “What the hell?”
I stuck the kid’s gun in my purse. “I was thinking of asking you the same thing.”
He held up his hands like he wasn’t sure what had happened and wasn’t sure what to make of it.
I folded my arms across my chest and looked at the kid with the wet spot. Chubby, with limp hair and a line of greasy acne running from his chin to his forehead li
ke a mountain range. He looked like a kid I’d known when I was thirteen. That one had paid me a hundred dollars of saved-up allowance and summer mowing money to lose his virginity. Told me he had been saving up for a car, but I was cheaper.
“What the hell, kid?”
He shook his head.
“Really? You show up with a gun and you can’t explain why?”
“I wasn’t gonna shoot anyone.” He stuck his bottom lip out slightly, so I couldn’t tell if it was a pout or just his resting face. “I was supposed to follow you.”
“I’ve been here,” I glanced at my watch, “fifteen minutes.”
Buddy hung his head. “I couldn’t find parking.”
Oh, right, because that made sense. “How’d you get here?”
Sheepish. His chest rattled like he might cry. “I borrowed my dad’s truck.”
“He know you borrowed it?”
He stared at his crotch. “No.”
“So, you stole it? Classmates put you up to this? Some sort of punk-the-ugly-kid thing?”
A couple of tears joined the urine on the front of his pants. “No.”
“Then what the ever-loving hell?”
Lawson picked up his phone. “I’m calling the cops.”
“No!” The kid raised his head, panicky and snorting mucus.
I motioned for Lawson to put the receiver down.
He didn’t look happy about it.
“You. Can’t. My dad’ll kill me.”
I leaned closer and tried not to take deep breaths. “Who put you up to this?”
He swiveled his head between us, eyes wide and puffy. “I can’t tell. You won’t understand.”
“Try me.” My expression was maybe harder than it should’ve been. No one’s ever accused me of being good with kids. That was always Nik’s thing.
“Mr. Jackson. Tanner.”
“Who the hell is Tanner Jackson?”
Lawson answered by shoving a folder my way. I stared at the legalese until I figured out why he’d handed it to me. “You mean Rayford Jackson?”
Buddy blinked at me.
“This guy a lawyer?”
He nodded, then shook his head.
“Tanner’s the son,” Lawson said. “Rayford’s the lawyer who handles all Wright’s Seafood business. He’s made a pretty fair penny off that operation, especially considering the seafood market these days.”