by Anne McAneny
I did it for her. “I demand to know why Ms. DeVore is being arrested.”
Steely eyes bore into me from the tallest of the men. “Who are you?”
“Chloe Keyes from The Herald. Ms. DeVore has the right to know the charges against her.”
He narrowed his eyes and seemed to take pleasure in answering. “Conspiracy, mail and wire fraud, insider trading, violations of the Toxic Substances Control Act and the North-Stephens-Cooper Act. That enough to get you started on your exclusive, Chloe Keyes?”
“I’m not asking because of—”
“Look, reporter, I don’t care why you’re asking. Time for you to make yourself scarce. Your friend here is in a lot of trouble. Next time you talk to her, it’ll be through a different kind of glass.” He rapped his knuckles on her desktop, creating the only visible smudge on the whole surface.
They hauled Adeline DeVore away in cuffs and heels. I couldn’t bring myself to take a photo. A section of her hair had fallen in front of her face, and her mascara had begun to run. As they marched her across the office and shoved her through the door, she glanced back at me, forlorn.
My editor would kill me for not getting a picture.
Chapter 28
The elevator to the Devore Cosmetics lobby stopped three times to let on no-nonsense, silent agents carrying DeVore computers and files. I sneaked peeks, wondering what secrets the confiscated goods might hold, but inside, I was thankful my job didn’t involve combing through all that mundane information to find violations of Yuppie-named federal acts.
Still, I’d have to reference the raid in my article, so I took a shot, delivering a question to the elevator populace. “This the kind of thing that destroys a company? Or do the principals just end up with a slap on the wrist?”
A woman with stringy, pulled-back hair and a sour face glowered at me. “If you’re a loyal DeVore customer, you might want to look elsewhere for your lip gloss.”
“So this is a big deal, then.”
She sneered. “Uh, we don’t exactly form multi-agency task forces for a tube of mislabeled mascara.”
Her coworker nudged her to shut up. Whatever. I texted all I could to Larry before we hit the lobby. Told him to break the speed limit getting here if he wanted the scoop of his career.
The elevator doors opened. Puss-face did not offer me the courtesy of stepping off first, so by the time they removed all their boxes and computers, the doors were trying to close again. A perfectly manicured, male hand reached inside to keep them open. As I exited, the owner of the hand entered and we collided.
“Chad, what in the world are you doing here?”
He stepped back into the lobby with me. “Chloe, I was coming to find you.”
“Seems you’re doing a lot of that lately.”
“About that, I had no idea you’d be at that Rafe guy’s house last night.” Then his voice assumed a more acerbic tone. “I’m sure he was helpful in preparing for your interview this morning. That was what you said you needed to do last night, right?”
Ouch. He got me there. I took it like the lying sack of garbage I was.
“Listen,” I said. “I was just about to text you. I found a connection between Hoop Whitaker and Boyd. A possible motive for Boyd to have kidnapped him.”
Chad looked suddenly sad, like someone had just stuck a pin in his last balloon. Slowly, his eyes clouded over but no words came.
And then I knew.
“Oh no,” I said, crumbling from within even though I’d expected the news.
“Perfect match,” he said. “Between Hoop’s tooth and the blood and the hairs in the green flannel. Everything. There’s no question. Hoop was in that basement.”
I staggered to one of the four sofas that had the perverse DeVore logo etched into every cushion. My head sunk into my hands as Chad sat down next to me. I vaguely felt his hand holding my arm.
“He was down there, Chloe, but there’s still no proof he’s dead.”
I pulled my arm away. “Let’s review, shall we?” My eyes turned moist and my words spit acid, but I didn’t care. “We can conclude that Hoop Whitaker was in that disgusting pig pen against his will, his mouth taped shut, his wrists handcuffed to a pole, his shirt ripped from his body, and his blood on the wall. Need I go on? Because I will. The last time anyone saw Hoop Whitaker—quite possibly me—was the same morning Macy was killed. He was seen pedaling his bike in what everyone assumed was the direction of the swamp, but if we extrapolate that route by half a mile, we can conclude that he was headed in the direction of Boyd’s General Store around the same time the store opened. How do I know this? Because I opened my front door as Hoop pedaled by, to let out our stupid cat who always woke me up at the same time—that cat was like a frickin’ Timex. Hoop waved. I waved back. But I was really waving good-bye, wasn’t I? Because he was never seen again, and that puts him at Boyd’s General right after it opened.” My eyes ripped into Chad. “You’d better have interrogated Boyd about this already.”
Chad sucked in a wheezy breath before swallowing hard. His Adam’s apple rose up and down like a carnival sledgehammer game, hitting the bell and then some. “Something I need to—”
“And I told you, we have motive now. According to Adeline DeVore, Hoop’s dad had a messy confrontation with Boyd shortly before Hoop disappeared. He must have been holding Hoop in order to—”
“Chloe, stop! Somebody posted Boyd’s bail this morning. He’s out.”
My world spun. “What? No! That’s insane! You’ve almost got him on murder now.”
Chad shook his head. “When his bail was set, all we had was possession of illegal substances with intent to distribute, and he had no priors. Sherilyn didn’t finish the DNA analysis until this morning, but even if she had, it would be grueling to prove murder with no body and no witnesses.”
“How could you let him go, knowing the test results were coming?”
“I didn’t, and neither did my dad. Boyd got out through some narrow slice of time when Abe was on duty.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Abe had just started his shift and no one told him about—”
“Who posted the bail?”
“Hold on a second. There’s more.”
“Jesus, Chad, how can there be more?”
“Last night, three guys came to the station to interrogate Boyd. One from the DEA, two from the FBI. They said Boyd had offered them information that would make the drug dealing look like jaywalking. He said if they gave him immunity and got him out, he’d spill his guts.”
“About what? How he murdered Hoop?”
“No, not a confession. Sounded like he had the goods on someone or something else.”
“Here in Beulah?” I wondered if it had something to do with the early-morning raid on Adeline DeVore, but it seemed unlikely that Boyd would know anything about the cosmetics industry.
Chad shrugged. “You know how these Fed-types are. Real tight-lipped. Wouldn’t even give us a hint. But they needed to clear the deal with their superiors. They were supposed to get back to Strike this morning.”
“So they posted his bail?”
“No. That’s the thing. Strike was at the high school and I had a mandatory county meeting. By the time we got to the station, Boyd was gone. I called the DEA agent and he was beyond pissed. Said neither he nor the FBI guys had anything to do with Boyd getting out.”
“Then my question stands. Who posted Boyd’s bail?”
Chad pulled out his notebook. “A guy named Clive Haverhill. Sent a courier with cash. I’ve got Annika checking out who he is, but I was worried about you, given as how you and Boyd didn’t part on the best of terms when he was arrested.”
Something detonated in my head. “Did you say Haverhill? Richie Quail was talking to a Mr. Haverhill when I interviewed him. Quail was planning to invest millions with him. Could it be the same person?”
Chad frowned. “Hard to imagine Quail posting bail for Boyd Sexton.”
&n
bsp; “Boyd got a nice chunk of change for selling the winning lottery ticket. Ten, twenty thousand, at least, right? Maybe he and Quail ended up using the same financial advisor.”
“It’s a stretch, but I guess it’s possible. Sad to think the lottery funded a drug operation.”
I shook my head, still in disbelief that Boyd was roaming around free. “Can you or your dad rearrest Boyd today on new charges? Or at least bring him back for questioning?”
Chad lowered his eyes and ran his fingers through his hair. “We don’t know where he is.”
My body began to quake with rage. “So you guys let a child-molesting murderer go free, and then you don’t even keep tabs—”
“Hey, we didn’t know about any of this in time. You need to step back.”
Chad was pissed, but I figured that was a good thing. Negativity tended to motivate him.
“Now what?” I said.
“Strike’s off searching for Boyd, and the Feds are beating the bushes, too. They’ll find him. In the meantime, we’ll build our case, but you’ve got to keep your expectations in check. It’s going to be a tough case to prove, especially if the Feds give him leniency in exchange for information.”
I sat back and smacked the sofa with my hands. Chad was right. Even without the Feds involved, the case against Boyd was circumstantial at best.
“There is one possibility,” Chad said, but the hesitation in his voice told me I wouldn’t want to hear it. “I’ve got an excavation team coming over from Newbury. They’re bringing dogs and the whole bit. I’ve asked them to dig up Boyd’s basement.”
I sucked in a gulp of air but only used it to suppress my nausea. “Jesus, Chad . . . do you really think . . .?” My hand flew to my mouth. “I’m going to be sick.”
“No one’s asking you to watch, but you were right. No one ever saw Hoop again after that morning, and no one saw Boyd carry out a body—or bury one. It makes sense. If he was holding Hoop down there, and something happened, he might have just . . .” Chad gulped a breath of courage. “You saw that floor. It was dirt. It’s what I would’ve done.”
I went numb.
“Meanwhile,” he continued, “you need to stay away from your house today. Boyd knows where you live, and while I think he’s probably making himself scarce, he might have it in his mind to come after you.”
“I hope he does.”
Chad rolled his eyes, perhaps wishing he hadn’t shared the information with me. But my energy surged as thoughts dinged frantically around my head. I wanted to plunge neck-deep into this case, dig up bodies, find weapons, and uncover lost video footage, but there was little I could do. Chad was right. In his mellow, pessimistic way, he was right. Without a body, Boyd would never be brought up on anything but drug charges, and maybe not even those.
Then suddenly, a memory flooded in from the back of my mind: a ride in a canoe, a trek into the woods, a secret place.
My energy had just found an outlet, and I had a new mission: find Boyd Sexton. If anyone was going to hear his secrets, it was going to be me—before he made some deal with the Feds.
“Don’t worry, Chad,” I said. “I’ll be all right. Touch base this afternoon?”
“Definitely,” he said. “Sooner if the excavators find anything.”
Our eyes hung together in some dismal purgatory, both of us regretting what he’d just said, neither of us sure what to hope for.
Chapter 29
I ignored Chad’s advice and headed straight home. God help Boyd if he was waiting there for me. Lucky for him, he wasn’t. A few minutes later, I was buttoning up my camouflage shirt and reaching into my nightstand. I pulled out the knife my father had given me and clipped it to my belt. As a butcher, my father believed every problem met its match at the end of a blade—a theory that hadn’t helped him much in New York, but one he clung to nonetheless. My mom had not been the least bit pleased with my father’s gift to me, but she’d held her tongue.
Next, I pulled out my 9mm Glock 26. Despite my dad’s philosophy, I tended to believe that a bullet kept you farther from a problem than a blade. The Glock was too heavy for my morning runs, but where I was headed, it would prove more intimidating. After all, Boyd might not be feeling too chatty.
I snapped the gun in its holster, slipped my cell phone in my pocket, donned a jacket, and headed to my canoe. I rowed deep into the swamp, following the same route Hoop and I had used years ago. First thing I passed was Black Swamp’s welcome sign—a gum tree with a huge, heart-shaped hole. It had formed long ago when the bark split and rejoined, working its way around a detour and ending up all the stronger for it. Macy and I used to ping rocks toward the heart’s center with our slingshots. She once said it should remind us to be patient with love because it had taken so long for that heart to form its solid message. Would she be disappointed that I only felt solid emptiness where my heart-shaped hole used to be?
I continued rowing through the swamp’s wonderful illusions, thinking how Rafe would love it out here. Maybe I could take him along this route someday and change his perspective on things.
The best sources of illusion were the cypress knees—the colorful, cone-shaped knobs that projected upward from the cypress trees’ submerged roots. The roots were mostly orangey but contained a magical fluorescence whose source I didn’t want to know. They poked out of the water like so many delicious lollipops. While suburban kids grew up looking at clouds and turning them into dinosaurs, birds, and fire-breathing dragons, we in Beulah had our cypress knees. Imagination transformed them into anything from a big mother beaver hovering over her babies to the profile of an angry goblin, or even a whole family of meerkats leaping out of the water, all scrambling to return a volleyball over a net.
Cypress knees weren’t the only springboard for the mind’s eye. There were baby turtles with patterns on their undersides prettier than anything found in a kaleidoscope, and moss that grew on trees like a velvet curtain. Forget Scarlett O’Hara’s dress of green drapes; I’d take a rich layer of moss any day.
My vessel floated past desiccated bark and sand that uncannily mimicked rows of alligator scales. Hoop used to say that nature was as consistent and methodical as it was violent and unpredictable. He harbored no doubts that it always knew exactly what it was doing. I rowed past a bale of turtles sunning themselves. They were brave enough to mingle with a gator on the same log and clever enough to have ensured the gator’s satiety as they all chilled out and warmed up together. As for the turtles that weren’t as clever, well, they learned soon enough. If the swamp was anything, it was Darwinian in its pronouncements.
My favorite game on canoe rides involved pareidolia—that human tendency to see faces and familiar shapes in everything. I’d point out a grumpy old man high above us on a tree knot, insisting it was a spirit warning us to turn back, and Hoop would say, “There you go, Clover, paradoling again.” But even a formal label couldn’t stop me from spotting smiling angels in the vines or scary demons in root outcroppings. The swamp was full of faces, and the sooner you learned to smile back or run, the longer you survived.
The near-mile journey proved tranquil, the antithesis of what might follow. I tied up on the same tree where Hoop and I had secured Mr. Swanson’s canoe years ago. After all, I had the same destination in mind: the place where Boyd might be hiding.
#
A Month Before the Thump
“What’s this big secret, Hoop?”
“Not that big a deal, Clover, but it’s pretty cool and I’m only showing people I trust. Can you keep a secret?”
“Does a gator like to lie in the sun?”
“All right, then,” he said with a nod. “Found it the other day when I was out exploring. So far, I’ve only told Macy and Ronnie, and you’re the first one I’m actually showing.”
“Cool. Thanks.”
“Figured a few of us might have a party here sometime—and you never know when you might need to hide out for a few days.”
We tramped through
the thick underbrush, pushing away the Spanish moss that hung from the oaks like the hair of a banshee—old and gray, a little crazy and wild. “My mom used to make voodoo dolls from Spanish moss,” Hoop said, grabbing a few locks.
“Of who?” I asked with concern.
“Can’t recall, but she would hand me a pin and tell me to poke it. Then she’d have herself a good laugh.”
“I love the moss,” I said. “Makes it seem like Halloween year-round.”
Having forgotten bug spray, we suffered a hundred mosquito bites between us before reaching our destination, but it was worth it.
“We’re here,” Hoop announced with a wide grin.
I peered around, saw nothing. Even when I looked up, I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. “Um, the woods?”
“Honestly, Clover, you’d think you were raised in a city or something. First of all, these ain’t just woods. These woods, as you call them, are home to several champion trees of North America.”
“What’s a champion tree?”
He rolled his eyes but in a patient way. “The largest documented specimen of its type. We got a record cherry oak bark, a loblolly pine, and a sweetgum. Hasn’t your dad ever taken you on a tree tour?”
“Like that’s a thing.”
“Did it with my dad when I was seven.”
“Well, my dad’s only here because he’s in some kind of witness protection program, but without being a witness and without protection. Only champions he cares about are the Yankees and I’m not real sure they’ve been champions much lately.”
Hoop laughed. “Well, I’ll take you on a tree tour someday. But what you’re looking at here is one of the best-camouflaged tree forts ever.”