by Tina Whittle
He said this with a pleased smirk, and I realized there was more to this young man than nervous blushes and goody-two-shoes smarts. He was a true rebel, one of the quiet unthreatening subversives that could topple entire empires. If the Confederacy had been composed of his ilk, America would have been whistling Dixie instead of the Star-Spangled Banner.
“Okay,” I said, “so you gave him this illegal download—”
“The download’s not illegal. It’s a proxy server, that’s all.”
“Kenny. In all manners technical, I am officially an old fogey. What’s a proxy server?”
His eyes brightened. “It’s how Tor maintains user anonymity. With this download, your computer can act as an intermediary for requests from other Tor users. Only nobody knows who got what, or where they got it, or which specific activities are associated with which IP addresses. But that wasn’t the problem.”
“What was?”
He hesitated. I put down my coffee and scooted knee to knee with him.
“Look at me, Kenny.”
He raised his eyes. He was startlingly obedient for such a rebel, but I knew why. He respected his elders—even though I winced at the term. It was the government he didn’t trust, something he’d no doubt learned at Richard’s knee.
“Kenny? If you know something, something that could help figure out who killed Lucius, and you don’t share that, then you can get in worse trouble than losing a scholarship. I’m talking jail trouble.”
He took a deep breath. “Lucius asked me if I knew anyone who bought relics.”
I cursed under my breath. I knew it, I’d known it all along.
“There’s collectors on the Darknet,” Kenny said. “Real rich ones. Anonymous. Lucius said he’d heard about them from other reenactment units, that they bought all kinds of things, even bones. For thousands, Miss Tai. Thousands.”
I kept my voice calm. “Did you ever…”
“No, ma’am! I would never desecrate the dead that way, especially not our men in gray. Never!”
“But you think Lucius did.”
He nodded. “Mr. Richard is real clear on the rules. If we find anything on the field, we report it to him and he takes care of it. But about a month before Lucius disappeared, he asked me I knew anything about the underground relic trade.”
“Did you tell him?”
“No, ma’am. I don’t mess with that. But he was asking.”
“You think that’s where the Amberdecker bones went?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you think one of these Darknet bad guys took the bones and killed Lucius instead of paying him?”
“I do now. Back then, I thought he’d just run off. And that’s the other reason I’m scared to death to be talking to you. It’s not that I don’t trust you—Mr. Richard says I can, and so I do—but there’s worse things than jail, Miss Tai, things like getting killed and stuffed in a coffin and—”
“Look at me.”
He did. He was scared and brave in equal measure, and my heart went out to him.
“I promise that I will do my best to keep you safe and sound and headed to Tech, you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I realized I’d stopped correcting him forever ago. I was a ma’am now, a grown-up.
“Good. If things get hinky, and the cops do come knocking, you ask for Detective Dan Garrity. But you have to tell me something first—when you said you showed Lucius how to cruise the Darknet, you used the word ‘them.’ Who else did you show?”
He looked nervous again. “I don’t know if I should say.”
“You should. Because believe me, if any one of them decides to save their own neck by throwing you under the bus, they will do it in a heartbeat. Especially Fishbone. That dude is looking for a scapegoat, and he’s probably going to need one, so out with it, Kenny.”
He looked utterly miserable, but he didn’t say anything.
“Kenny? Who are you protecting?”
He raised his eyes, and they were as moony as a calf’s. “Catherine Ann.”
“Who?”
“She’s Mr. Richard’s daughter. She’s a bartender now, and they don’t speak to each other anymore, not since she got in trouble with the law, which was all Lucius’ fault. She met him here, at this shop, and they dated for a little while, but she broke up with him right before he disappeared. She’s not like Lucius, Miss Tai. She’s real sweet and nice, and I don’t want to get her in any more trouble with Mr. Richard.”
I felt the connection coming together. One plus one was always two, and a rose by any other name…
“She doesn’t go by Catherine anymore, does she?”
“No, ma’am. She’s Cat now. And if Mr. Richard knew about her and Lucius, and about me being the one who helped him get her that pot…Lord have mercy, Miss Tai.”
I sat back in my chair. Based on what Cat had told me that night at Hog Wild, I was pretty sure Richard did know, about Lucius anyway. Trey had been right—he had been hiding something that night in the tent. Which meant that Richard was now at the top of the list of people who might have wanted to crack Lucius’ skull wide open and stuff him in a coffin.
Lord have mercy indeed.
Chapter Thirty-three
I dumped a stack of Union uniforms into a crate and shoved them into the closet, almost dropping the phone in the process. “I swear, Trey, it’s all I can do not to march myself back into those woods—”
“Promise me you won’t do that.”
I jammed another sucker in my mouth. I’d called Richard’s phone, but of course he wasn’t answering. He was still in his pretend officers’ tent, enforcing his “no technology” rule.
“How could he turn his own daughter out for a goofy teenage stunt like shoplifting! Or trying pot! That bass-akwards, holier-than-thou—”
“Tai.”
“I know, I know. Their story, not mine. But now that I know he’s Cat’s father, I’m not trusting anything he told us last night, not about Lucius, not about the reburial, nothing. You were right—he really was hiding something.”
I grabbed another armful of reenactment wear and crammed it into my last empty box. What the hell, I’d just pile the rest of it in the storage room. What the ATF didn’t see…
Trey’s voice remained calm. “You need to explain what Kenny said after you cut the audio.” A pause. “Why did you cut the audio?”
“Because it sounded like he was about to confess something, which means you’d have had to call the cops and have them arrest him. And I understand. Laws are necessary sometimes—”
“Sometimes?”
I heard the bristle in his voice. “But sometimes laws need bending. I understand that you can’t, and that’s okay. Civilization needs people to work the lines. But I work the edges.”
He didn’t say anything at first. But I could hear him pondering.
“Did you find out anything useful?” he finally said.
I told him what Kenny had shared. He listened. I hoped he was taking notes, because once Trey got information into flowcharts or outlines, he started to see things. Patterns emerged, like a camouflaged lion stepping out of the high grass.
I grabbed a dust rag and can of furniture polish. “Kenny’s got a lot riding on staying out of trouble, and he’s a good kid.”
“How can you be sure?”
“A bad kid wouldn’t have come to me.” I hesitated. “Why? Do you see something different? Was he lying?”
“I don’t know. I can’t read people over video.”
“So we don’t know if he was telling the truth about any of it?”
“No, we don’t.” He paused. “What are we going to do about this?”
I couldn’t resist a tiny smile. “Uh oh, now you’re getting curious.”
“I’m simply concerned.”<
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I gathered up the photographs still lying on the counter and put them back into their box. “Don’t worry. I may have turned the audio off to keep Kenny out of trouble, but I kept the video on so that I would stay out too. I didn’t think he was a stone cold killer, but it was nice to know that if he’d tried something, you were watching.”
“From forty-five minutes away.”
“Still. It was a reassuring feeling.”
I hesitated before placing my one photo of Cat back in the box. Now that I knew, I could see Richard in her features—the dark hooded eyes, the prominent cheekbones. I tamped down another surge of anger. I knew I shouldn’t layer my story over this one, but I couldn’t help it. I seethed with it.
“The more I figure out, the more complicated things get. Now Kenny’s blaming the mafia too, just like Fishbone. As if the mob would be messing around with old bones.”
My doorbell jingled, and I turned around, almost dropping the phone. Rose Amberdecker stood in my shop. She looked out of place, like a lumberjack come to tea. Behind her I saw the outline of her truck, a four-wheel-drive pickup with mud-stained bumpers. From where I stood, I could see the gun rack and the three firearms that filled it—two slim rifles and a shotgun I recognized as the one she’d had in the woods, the twelve-gauge.
Trey saw her too. “Tai?”
“I know.”
“Promise you won’t turn off the audio-video feed this time.”
“You bet I won’t,” I said, keeping my eyes on Rose. “Guaranteed.”
I hung up. Trey didn’t have to worry about losing contact. I wanted his eyes and ears all over Rose Amberdecker.
She was dressed as if she’d come directly from the field—blue jeans, flannel-lined work jacket, hair in the ice-gray braid down her back. She stood right in front of the dedication portrait, looking down at it, not at me.
“Can I help you?” I said.
She didn’t reply, kept staring at her own image, and her daughters’. She’d donned no mourning then, and I remembered Evie’s story, how Braxton Amberdecker’s mother had refused to do the same. Mulish blood ran in the veins of Amberdecker women.
“I remember hearing of your uncle’s passing,” she said. “I only met him once, when this picture was taken, but Richard says he was a fine man.”
“He was.” I put a lid on the box of photographs. “Still no luck finding the remains?”
She shook her head. “Evie wanted to continue, but I told her it was no use. The land claims us all eventually.”
She appraised me with pale blue eyes. I’d been worried my adventure with Chelsea would come back to bite me, and now here was Mama Bear, teeth bared.
“You sell buckshot here?” she said. “Three and three quarters, double aught?”
I tried to keep the relief from showing on my face. So this wasn’t about Chelsea.
“I do,” I said, “but I’m technically not open right now. I’ve got an ATF inspection coming up this afternoon, and—”
“Agent Willoughby?”
“No. Thompkins.”
“Willoughby and I shoot together sometimes. Doves. Do you hunt?”
I shook my head. I remembered my one dove hunt with my uncle—the patient dogs, the bang of the shotguns, and then afterward, the gut buckets and smell of singed feathers. It was a sport for the keen of eye, and I knew from Richard that Rose had one. But Rose and I weren’t talking sport. She was feeling me out for some reason, and I was both curious and wary.
“I don’t hunt, but I do carry dove shot. When I’m open. Which I’m not right now.”
She ran her finger along the counter, tapped the hardwood. Her nails were cut short, a working woman’s manicure. “Is this all there is?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your shop. Is this everything?
I put down my mug. “There’s a storage room, a closet or two. And the upstairs is my apartment. But yes, this is it.”
She nodded, her eyes roving every corner. She noted the piles of catalogs and identification manuals waiting to be returned to the shelves, my well-thumbed and dog-eared guides through the world of Civil War-era antiques.
“So your business is mainly relics?” she said.
“Most of my reenactment trade is in replicas. My clients do collect, though—guns, swords, buttons, even glass eyes and bone saws. They keep wish lists, so if I run across something they’d be interested in, I try to snag it for them.”
“And do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Snag things?”
She said it with a hefty dose of accusation. I kept my voice level.
“Sometimes people bring in things to sell, usually from their grandparents’ barn, and if I see something a client is looking for, I purchase it for them.”
She fingered the lock on my display case, empty still, waiting for the knives and swords piled on top to be returned to it. “I get them on my land, you know. Diggers, looters. The sheriff told me I’m not allowed to shoot them.” She smiled thinly. “But he said he’d understand if I mistook one for a deer.”
I remembered her eyes behind the twelve-gauge. She regarded weapons the same way Trey did, with a utilitarian eye, like she would a wrench or a hammer. Some of my clients were gun nuts, but some were like Rose. I wasn’t sure which I found more disturbing.
Her eyes hardened. “Thieves, all of them. Hordes of them, sneaking on from the park.”
“Can’t you prosecute them for trespassing?”
“I’d have to catch them first, but even then, they don’t go to jail. They pay the fine and come back the next morning. But the coyotes are bad along the park edge. One day those looters are gonna find more trouble than they can handle.” She ran a finger along the lines of a replica cavalry sword, shiny and new. “Your uncle ever do any digging?”
“You mean the illegal kind? Absolutely not.”
She kept her eyes on the sword. “Richard said he had a hard time after your aunt died. Lots of bills. Times like that can make a man see things differently.”
“Mrs. Amberdecker—”
“There’s shops like yours all over. I see the bullets and buttons for sale, claiming to be from the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. Claiming to be properly obtained.” She turned to face me. “You have any things like that here?”
I took a deep breath, held it for a count of three, then let it out. “Dexter believed in proper provenance, and I’ve continued that commitment.”
“Then you won’t mind showing me that paperwork.”
“Actually, I would.” I moved behind the counter. “I’ll be glad to answer any questions you have about my procedures here, which are Dexter’s procedures, but you can’t see my log book and you can’t see my sales registers and you can’t see my client list.”
Her fingers tightened into fists. “Cut the nonsense. Where are they?”
“Where are what?”
“My great-great-grandfather’s bones.”
So that was that.
I shook my head. “I don’t have them.”
“Don’t lie to me, girl. I know they weren’t in the coffin. The detectives told me that person was in there, and not a one of Evie’s students has found a thing despite looking for four days. Not a one. That’s because they’re not to be found. Now I don’t know if your uncle took them, or somebody else who worked here, but whoever has them came through this shop to sell them, so you’d best tell me, and fast. Where are those bones?”
So this wasn’t about Chelsea, who’d obviously kept her mouth shut about my little visit. I took another three-count breath.
“Mrs. Amberdecker, I have an AFT audit today. The Kennesaw Revitalization Commission is threatening to pull my business license unless I buy some sidewalks. Somebody keeps tripping my security system, and even my premises liability-agent boyfriend can’t fi
x the problem because my neighbor’s a bitch and I have detectives breathing down my neck because I found a skull on your property. And you think I have time to fool with even more bones?” I snorted. “I don’t even have time for this conversation.”
She fixed me with a stare as narrow and relentless as the barrel of a gun. “You’re not taking me seriously. But you should. You really should.”
She slammed the door on her way out. It made a friendly little tinkle behind her.
I looked up at the deer head. “Did you get that, boyfriend? Because I think I just got threatened by a woman who drives around with three long guns mounted in the back window of her truck.”
Chapter Thirty-four
Agent Cranky Pants was a husky man, with the barrel-like midriff of a former athlete and hair the brown of a good-natured spaniel. His eyes, however, remained locked in a perpetual squinch, his nostrils flared as if catching a whiff of something spoiled.
I sat behind my counter, in my purple slacks and jacket, my one piece of business attire. I wanted a sucker, wanted a piece of nicotine gum, wanted a cigarette. I wanted with bright flaring need as the inspector made a methodical examination of my shop.
“There have been complaints,” he said.
I kept my expression neutral. “About what?”
“Several things, actually.” He pulled out a piece of paper. “The Kennesaw Revitalization Commission reports that because of zoning violations, you may not be issued a business license for next year.”
I suppressed the seethe. “You mean Brenda next door, not the KRC. According to the KRC itself, I have six months to make the necessary upgrades or apply for an appeal.”
“There are also allegations that you have been making purchases for an individual without waiting for proper NICS verification, because you and this individual are romantically involved.”
“Excuse me?”
“You were heard making an agreement with this individual to trade handguns for…” He managed to look both embarrassed and offended. “Sexual favors.”