by Tina Whittle
My throat contracted, but my voice held steady. “Thank you.”
Richard poured whiskey in his coffee. “She’s got some questions about Lucius. You heard it was his bones we found, didn’t you, son?
“Yes, sir. But I didn’t know him that good.” His head bobbed in my direction. “Sorry, ma’am.”
“You don’t need to ma’am me. Tai will do.”
“Yes, ma’am. I mean, yes, Miss Tai.”
I held my coffee between my hands. “You were a part of the honor guard the night before the reburial?”
“Yes, ma’am. Midnight to three.”
“Did you see Lucius acting suspiciously?”
“No, ma’am.” His eyes flickered with anxiety, but all it took was a nod from Richard, and he continued. “Lucius came to relieve me at three, just like we’d planned. And then I went back to the campfire with Mr. Richard and Mr. Dexter.”
I held the coffee to my nose, thinking hard. Lucius had obviously stolen Dexter’s keys before that, including the one that would open the padlock to the chapel. He’d come with a plan to empty the coffin. Getting murdered had ground that plan to a halt. But where were Braxton’s bones and the burial goods? Somebody had to have them, and it hadn’t been Lucius.
“Did you see anybody else out here that night? Anybody you didn’t recognize?”
“No, ma’am. Just me and Lucius, Mr. Dexter, and Mr. Richard.”
“Do you know of anyone who would have wanted to kill Lucius?”
He shook his head, scuffed at the earth with his toe. “No, ma’am.”
“Did he and my uncle get along?”
“Mostly. Lucius liked to push things. He got in trouble the night of the reburial for wearing a NASCAR belt buckle. Mr. Dexter made him take it off, and he didn’t argue. He stuck it in his pocket. But he shouldn’t have worn it in the first place, and he knew it.”
Outside, another round of laughter erupted, and the first rounds of a ribald drinking song began. Richard looked annoyed.
“Kenny? Take some firewood out to the perimeter. And tell everybody I said lights out.”
“Yes, sir.” Kenny put his hat back on and left, the cold air rushing it after him.
I watched him go, then turned back to Richard. “You seem right fond of him.”
“He’s good people. His daddy left them three years ago, but his mama does her best, and I try to help out best I can.”
I slid a glance at Trey, whose expression never wavered. He could hear a story without forcing his own backstory into it, but I couldn’t. Everything felt like the same story to me, playing out over and over again, nobody ever getting it all right, just making fresh kinds of wrong.
Richard kept his eyes on the tent flap. “He’s got a scholarship to Georgia Tech for the fall. I may have been wrong about Lucius, but not Kenny.”
In the dark distance, a shot and a series of whoops rang out, and Trey’s head snapped around. The cold, the soldiers, the dark pressing wilderness were becoming too much for him. He needed to get back to the city, to the amber glow of streetlights, the buzz of electricity.
I stood. “Thanks for seeing me.”
“Sure thing.” Richard rose slowly, his hand pressed to the small of his back. “When you get back to civilization, go take a look at our website. I have some pictures of your uncle and me up, back in the glory days when we were the young-uns at the front instead of the old guys barking orders at the back.”
“Look at you, getting all techified.”
He made a rueful face. “Not me. Kenny. The boy’s a computer genius. Makes me glad he’s such a good kid. Otherwise he’d be off hacking into the White House or something.”
I threw Trey a look. He caught it. But he had something else on his mind.
He cocked his head, looked at Richard. “One more question.”
“Shoot.”
“Did you kill Lucius Dufrene?”
“You’re not seriously…” Richard stared at Trey, eyes flickering in the lamplight. “Of course not.”
“Do you know who did?”
“No, I don’t. But it sure as hell wasn’t anybody with me that night, especially not Dexter.” He said it flatly, then turned his face to me, his expression hard now. “It’s time for lights out. Be careful on your way back to the parking lot. You don’t want to get lost out here.”
Chapter Thirty-one
I was grateful to see my Camaro parked right where I’d left it, next to Richard’s black pickup. We climbed in quickly, and I cranked the engine, revved it a couple of times. “You just had to accuse Richard of killing Lucius, didn’t you?”
Trey sounded insulted. “I did not. I simply asked—”
“Yeah, I heard you. And then you accused him of covering for Dexter. And then he threw us out of the tent—”
“We were already leaving.”
“—and now he’s not going to be volunteering any more information because you pissed him off.”
Trey rubbed his gloved hands together in front of the heater. “Those were important points to establish, especially since—”
“Don’t say it.”
“—your uncle had means, motive, and opportunity, and Richard was with him almost the entire night when Lucius presumably died.”
“Dexter didn’t kill Lucius. And neither did Richard.”
“I was relieved to hear nothing that made me believe otherwise.”
He kept his eyes on the dashboard. Now that we were back in a vehicle, his shoulders weren’t quite so hunched, even if the furrow on his brow remained.
I cranked the heater up to full blast. “Did you catch the other part? That Kenny’s a computer genius?”
“I did.”
“Who didn’t know Lucius real well.”
Trey shook his head. “That part isn’t true.”
“I suspected not. But I’m glad you verified it.” Despite the heater, my breath still made puffs of fog. “What about the rest of what Kenny said?”
“He was telling the truth when he said he relieved Lucius at the chapel at three, and that that was the last he saw of him. But he was lying when he said that Lucius wasn’t acting suspiciously.”
“Uh huh. And Richard?”
Trey considered. “Mostly telling the truth.”
“Technically true but deliberately evasive?”
“Yes, that. Somewhat. But not exactly. He seemed to be…I can’t explain. But he wasn’t lying.”
I checked my phone. No messages. No service either, not surprisingly. I stuck it back in my pocket.
“You know what I think? I think Lucius filched Dexter’s keys so he could get into the chapel. I think he took the bones and burial goods and delivered them to someone else—”
“Who?”
“I don’t know yet, but everybody I’ve interviewed so far—Cat, Chelsea, Fishbone—they’ve all said the same thing, that Lucius had been working with a new partner, somebody he met online. And I bet that partner was up there that night, to take the loot off Lucius’ hands. Because Lucius himself never left the chapel. He died in there. And I bet this secret partner is the one who killed him.”
“But how would this partner get on the property?”
“There’s a million ways—you saw that as we came in. Duck through someone’s backyard, park in a commercial lot and sneak in.”
“But your uncle was also there, and—”
“Jeez, Trey, whose side are you on?”
“I’m simply trying—”
“I know, I know. I’m sorry.” I tilted my head back against the seat. “I’m tired and frustrated and it’s like the answer is hovering two inches out of reach.”
Trey fastened his seatbelt. “So what do we do now?”
“Now we go home. We’ll figure it out in the morning.”
Trey l
ooked relieved. He was an urban creature, accustomed to the cycles of rush hour, at home in the steel canyons of Buckhead. Atlanta was by most standards a green city—I’d seen it from the air, coming down into Hartsfield, the dense emerald canopy of Piedmont and Centennial and a hundred smaller parks. But it was a tame green, civilized and domesticated.
Not like the mountain woodlands, with a night sky so deep black it had texture, and stars so bright they seemed cut from crystallized light. The wild wasn’t a metaphor out here. It was real, and close. I could feel it pressing against me, and while it wasn’t the salt-rimmed wild of the Lowcountry, I knew it nonetheless. Like an old lover in a new bed.
I took the car into a three-point turn and headed back to the park entrance, driving slowly, letting the tires feel their way down the dirt path. Trey was exhausted, in desperate need of the order and discipline of his black-and-white apartment, his safe space, his recovery zone. He kept his eyes on the windshield as if he couldn’t wait for Atlanta to appear in the headlights.
I flicked on the high beams, and a long low shape hurtled across the road. I slammed the brakes just in time to avoid a collision. A coyote. It froze at the edge of the road, facing us head-on, yellow eyes gleaming. Trey locked his door, then reached across me and locked mine with a hard slap, like we were confronting a carjacker.
I shot him a look. “Seriously?”
He huddled in his seat, double-checked his seatbelt. “Keep moving. There’s probably more of them.”
“And not a single one has thumbs.”
He ignored me. I honked, and the coyote loped into the underbrush without a backward glance.
***
Once we got back to the shop, Trey said goodnight at the door. “Call me tomorrow. I’ll be presenting the resiliency design paper at two, so call before that.”
“I will.” I reached up and tucked his scarf tighter around his neck. “Thank you for coming with me tonight. And this afternoon. I had a good time.”
And I had, even when I’d been holding the trash can for Chelsea or pursuing Fishbone across the park or tromping after a faux Confederate in the woods. And I hadn’t felt a single pang of panic. Not one. And Trey had managed to keep his gun in his holster the entire time.
“It was…interesting,” he said.
“Come on, it was more than that.” I adjusted his collar, his skin warm beneath the wool. “Your head may want things calm and boring, boyfriend, but your heart is a tricky beast. It has completely different wants.” I patted his chest. “And it does want.”
He didn’t drop his eyes. “I know that.”
“Because every time I call you with a problem—snake problem, surveillance problem, uncooperative witness problem—you show up. And you stomp around and scowl and lecture me incessantly. But you show up.”
“I do not stomp around.”
“Come on, Trey. You’re a former SWAT team leader, a Red Dog roughhouser. You’re not gonna convince me that you’re happy sitting behind a desk pushing paper. You come alive out there, in the wild.” I moved closer, close enough to feel the heat of him. “With me.”
His eyes dipped to my throat, then further down, and it was as if he could see inside the ivory armor of my ribcage, right into my shivering red heart. And the only thing between us was a threshold. I stood on one side of it in the warm low-lit shop, and he stood on the other in the cold, still night.
And all he had to do was reach for me—one finger, one word, one step—and I would drag him upstairs into my brand new bed and not let him out until we were both sated and spent. But he stood unmoving, his expression sheared clean on the surface, a layer of ice on a frozen river with whitewater roaring underneath. His raised his eyes to mine again, and the yearning in them was so fierce I caught my breath.
“Trey?”
His voice was rough. “Yes?”
“It’s the wanting that’s hard, isn’t it? Because it’s all tangled up together—who you are, who you were, when to act, when to hold back.”
“Yes, but…” He shook his head. “I don’t understand why I can’t…I’m trying, please believe me. But I have to figure it out before I can change it. Do you understand?”
I thought of the words that still trembled behind my tongue, the words that no act of will could force to the surface, no matter how hard I pushed.
“Yes,” I said. “I understand. With all my heart.”
Chapter Thirty-two
The dream was a mosaic of sensation untethered from any real memory. No beginning, no context, only Trey, his hands and mouth, and I knew the wild hammering of his heart for what it really was—fear—even as he buried it in the animal burn of desire. And something was pulling me away from him, and I tried to hold on, but he was smoke between my fingers, and then a sound, rhythmic and insistent…
My eyes flew open. I listened harder, heard only pre-dawn shop sounds. I fumbled for my cell phone and checked the time. Barely six a.m. Surely nobody was…
And then I heard it again, this time louder. Knock, knock, knock.
I clambered to the side of the bed and squinted out the bedroom window. There was somebody in the back lot down below, somebody standing at my door. I opened the bedside table and got my .38, thumbing open the cylinder to reveal five rounds. I snapped it shut just as I heard another series of knocks.
I frowned. No-goodniks didn’t usually knock. So I put on my robe, and—with silent apologies to Trey, who had been trying to break me of bad concealed carry habits—shoved the revolver into the front pocket and went downstairs to the back door.
“Who is it?” I called.
“Miss Tai?”
I unlocked the door and cracked it an inch. “Kenny! What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“At six in the morning?”
“I’ve got school in an hour, and I couldn’t tell you last night, not with Mr. Richard around.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s about Lucius.” He stared at me with his wide eyes. “Please?”
I opened the door all the way. “Get in. And make it fast before I change my mind.”
***
He accepted a mug of coffee, taking one polite sip and then holding it between his shaking white hands.
I sat opposite him. “You weren’t entirely truthful last night, were you? You did know Lucius pretty well. And he was acting suspiciously the night of the reburial.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He ducked his head. “I didn’t want to say anything, but…there’s something the police need to know.”
“So tell them.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll get in big trouble. And then I’ll lose my scholarship, and if I lose that, I can’t go to college.” He looked up at me, fiercely agitated. “But I didn’t do anything wrong! I didn’t mean…”
He bit his lip, breathing hard. I glanced up at my deer head. The red light behind its eyes glimmered, recording every word. Trey was listening, probably with his finger poised to dial 911.
“Hang on a sec,” I said.
I turned off my cell phone and went to the deer head. I looked it right in its glassy eyes, breathed a sotto voce “sorry” into its mangy ear, then reached behind the left antler and switched off the audio feed. I kept the video—a small placation, so that Trey wouldn’t drive his ass over and yell at me, which he would do if he suddenly couldn’t see me—but I knew that if he heard something incriminating, he would be required by that merciless left brain of his to turn Kenny in. And I couldn’t have that. Not until I’d heard what he had to say.
I turned back to Kenny. “I can’t promise to keep the police out of this. But I can try, I can promise you that. And I’m big on keeping my promises.”
He looked at the deer head, looked at me.
“Okay,” he said.
I made him hot chocolate first. This he actually drank, the cocoa foam staining his baby mustache. He suddenly looked about eight years old.
“Do you know what the Darknet is?” he said.
“One of those role-playing games? Like Dungeons and Dragons?”
This earned me a tiny flicker of a smile. “No, ma’am. It’s like the Internet, only without the safeguards. Like the frontier. And it’s a dangerous place if you don’t know what you’re doing.”
“But you do.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He leaned forward, suddenly surer of himself. “You need connections, go-betweens to vouch for you. And if you break the rules, bad things happen.”
“Bad like what?”
“Bad like your life gets hacked. They can send Trojan horse viruses into your computer that’ll fry everything on there—no more programs, no more documents, just slash-and-burn code. There’s sick people on the Darknet. Kiddie porn rings, hit men. But worst of all is the RBC.”
“The RBC?”
He dropped his voice. “Russian business community. You don’t mess with the RBC, not even accidentally. And they rule the Darknet, ma’am.”
“You mean the mafia?”
“Worse than the mafia. The RBC started back in the Gulag prisons, the baddest of the bad. Now they have entire IT teams working the Darknet. They had connections on the Silk Road—”
“The what?”
He made a patient face. “The drug site the FBI busted last year. It was like Amazon, only instead of books and stuff, you could buy crystal meth and crack and pot.”
I stared at him. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“No, ma’am. “ He looked down at his hot cocoa. “That’s where this all started. Before Silk Road went down, Lucius asked me if I could help them get on it to get some pot. I told them I could, but that I wasn’t going to do it on my computer. So I went to this skate shop—”
“Grindshop. In Stone Mountain.”
“Yes, ma’am. I downloaded Tor on his computer, showed him—”
“Wait, wait, slow down. What’s Tor?”
“It’s an onion router. You know, multi-layered. It encrypts data by bouncing it through a random selection of arrays. All those Wikileaks guys? That’s what they used. Turned the government’s own weapon against it.”