by Кей Хупер
"That's true enough," Ben allowed. "And George had been separated from Sue for a long time, so you know the marriage had been in trouble — for whatever reason. Maybe it was just a midlife crisis, the way she kept saying, or maybe it was something else."
One of the few women in the cafe said, "I heard there was another woman, but if there was, he sure didn't show her off around here."
"Married," Ben guessed. "Either that or he didn't want to give Sue any ammunition to use in court."
Obviously speaking from bitter experience, another man said, "The judge does tend to award the wife a bigger settlement if the husband has been screwing around, especially if he's doing it so that everybody knows he's doing it."
Patiently, Nate said, "Yeah, but would cheating on a wife he'd already left and hadn't lived with for two or three years make George a target for this killer? Is that a big enough secret — or a big enough sin — to make this killer want to punish him?"
Ben grimaced. "Jesus, how many of us can say we don't have at least a little secret or two and a few minor sins laying around? If that's the yardstick this guy is using, then nobody is safe."
Trying not to sound as desperate as he felt, Nate said, "The police haven't found any other connection between the men except that they all had secrets?"
"We don't know about George yet," Ben reminded.
"Yeah, but the others?"
"According to the papers there's no other connection. Of course, we don't know that the police are making all their information public. Maybe Ethan and his people know something they aren't telling."
"I don't think they know squat," somebody else muttered loudly. "Running around chasing their own tails, if you ask me."
They were still pondering that when a tall man rose from a shadowed booth at the back and came to the front to pay his bill. He had a pleasant word with Emily when she emerged from the kitchen to take his money, then saluted the others with a cheerful, "Have a nice day, folks," as he left the cafe.
The bell on the door jingled, the waitress returned to the kitchen, and the customers were left staring at each other.
"Was he here the whole time?" someone asked uneasily.
"The whole time," Ben confirmed. "Didn't you see him back there?"
"No, Ben, I didn't see him back there. Jesus."
Somebody else muttered, "They ought to make them all wear uniforms, even the detectives."
"Guilty conscience?"
"Hell, no. But he shouldn't eavesdrop."
"Part of his job," Ben pointed out, obviously enjoying the chagrin all around him.
"Shit."
Nate McCurry looked out the window beside his table to watch Detective Justin Byers strolling away.
He was scared.
He was really scared.
CHAPTER EIGHT
"I think I can handle it," Shelby said.
"I know you can. But be careful, okay?"
"I will if you will."
Nell smiled. "I'll be careful."
"I'm glad to hear it. And, listen — you have a standing offer to come use my guest room, so don't hesitate. If nothing else, you just might want some company."
The words were barely out of her mouth when they both heard through the open kitchen window a sharp whistle from out back and Max's voice calling Nell's name.
"Or maybe that won't be a problem," Shelby murmured, amused.
Glancing down at the envelope holding a photograph that in addition to a threatening shadow also showed Max lurking and watching her very intently, Nell said, "I suppose it would be useless to pretend this is just a casual visit to offer a neighborly good morning."
"Entirely useless," Shelby responded with a grin as she got to her feet. "I'll be in touch if and when I have something. But for now, I'm going away. Don't bother showing me out, just tell Max I said hi, okay?"
Nell took Shelby at her word and didn't walk with her through to the front of the house. Instead, she put the envelope safely away in a drawer, then shrugged into the light jacket hanging ready by the back door. She went out to find Max, as she'd expected, riding his bay gelding and leading a saddled pinto.
"I thought we might as well get an early start," he said in lieu of a good morning.
"Shelby said hello," Nell responded in a wry voice.
They both heard Shelby's little car roar to life out front, then the cheerful tattoo of its horn as she headed back to town.
Max grimaced. "I should have called first."
Determinedly offhand, Nell said, "Like the mayor said, if people see us together, they'll likely focus on past history instead of making any connection to the murders. Shelby certainly did. I can stand it if you can."
He handed over the pinto's reins. "I'd put up with just about anything to find out who killed those men."
Nell decided not to examine that sharp remark too closely. She patted the horse, then paused before mounting to say, "For all you know, I might not have been near a horse in twelve years."
"If so, it'll come back to you quickly. Natural riders never lose their abilities."
Nell swung up easily and settled into the saddle. "Well, as a matter of fact, I still ride every chance I get."
"Are there many chances in D.C.?"
"A few. And I work quite a bit outside D.C., you know." She barely paused. "I gather you've decided to help and that you feel approaching at least some of the crime scenes by horseback is the way to go."
"Didn't I say so?"
She wasted a moment wondering how long he would carry the chip on his shoulder, then reminded herself that he wasn't likely to improve in temperament, at least as long as she continued to hold him at a distance.
It didn't help much, knowing that. In fact, it didn't help at all.
Pleasantly, she said, "Probably a good idea, at least for the first two murders. The bayou where Luke Ferrier drowned is closest, isn't it?"
"Yeah."
"Lead the way."
Silently, he turned the bay and set off through the woods.
Nell followed, trying to focus completely on familiarizing herself with the pinto's smooth gait, with enjoying the mild warmth of the morning and the clean scents of spring. She wanted her mind occupied with trivialities rather than open and receptive; her restless night had left her feeling raw and unsettled, a state not helped at all by Shelby's eerie photograph — or by Max and his silent insistence that she answer questions she was not yet ready to face.
It was hardly the best condition in which to go looking for evidence — psychic or physical. In fact, it was the worst possible condition. Not for the first time, she wondered if she was being unprofessional in not telling Bishop she was too close to this situation to do her job effectively. But the answer she arrived at was the same one she had reached every time she had asked herself the question before: Doing that would only confirm that she was a coward, so afraid of facing her past she was willing to allow it to ruin her present and her future.
She couldn't do that, could she?
Could she?
No. She had to deal with this, no matter what it cost her. It was impossible to move forward until she stopped looking back, she knew that only too well. And she needed to move forward. For Max's sake as well as her own.
She fixed her gaze on the uncommunicative expanse of his leather jacket and stifled a sigh that only the pinto's turned-back ear could have caught.
Why did everything have to be so goddamned hard?
Max stopped at a fork in the trail they were following and turned in the saddle to look back at her and say briefly, "I guess they told you about your grandmother's house?"
"Yeah, they told me." Nell stopped her own horse, gazing along the south trail that all during her childhood had led her to an old house at the edge of a plowed field where her grandmother had chosen to live alone. "It burned down."
"It had been standing empty since she died," Max reported. "I rode out this way pretty regularly and never saw anybody around or any sign of vand
alism. Far as I could tell, your father and Hailey never went there once they'd cleared the place out, and nobody from town would have — except maybe some kid on a dare."
Well aware that her grandmother's house had long been considered by the local children to be a spooky, haunted place to be approached only when proving one's bravery, Nell merely nodded in understanding.
"It must have been a couple of years later that it caught fire and burned to the ground before anybody could get to it. The fire chief figured it was a lightning strike."
Dryly, Nell said, "And nobody was much surprised, right? That God finally struck down the wicked?"
He grimaced. "I did hear one or two people calling it a judgment. She went out of her way to make people afraid of her, Nell, you know that."
"She was an eccentric old woman who kept to herself because the visions she lived with terrified her." Surprised at her own ferocity, Nell made an effort to hold her voice even. "Some people never adjust. She didn't. She saw tragedies she couldn't change and tried to hide from them. It's not her fault that other people didn't understand."
After a long moment, Max said, "You're right. I'm sorry. Look, this path is the shortest way to the bayou, but if you'd rather ride out past your grandmother's place first —"
"No, thanks. I'd just as soon go directly to the bayou."
"Okay. This way, then."
Nell followed him as he took the alternate trail, sparing the other one only a brief glance. Sooner or later, she'd have to go there, of course, force herself to stand and look at that burned-out shell of a place. And remember. But she preferred to do that alone.
She had to do it alone.
"Did he have what?" Sue Caldwell stared at Justin with bewildered eyes. "A secret place?"
"Well, did he have a place he liked to keep just to… store things he didn't want to show other people, let's say." Justin made his voice even, soothing.
Her pale face flushing suddenly, Sue said, "If you mean did he have some horrible little hiding place like Peter Lynch had, the answer is no. My husband did not have any dirty secrets, Detective Byers."
Highly conscious of the little black notebook he was still carrying around with him, Justin nevertheless quickly assured her that he'd intended to imply no such thing. "But even the best of men have things they don't want to be… public knowledge. A stash of old magazines, maybe — something like that."
Stiffly now, Sue said, "I wouldn't know about that, Detective. He certainly never had that sort of thing when he lived here with me."
Since he knew they stood a snowball's chance of getting a warrant to search the house George Caldwell had moved out of nearly three years before his death, Justin hadn't even bothered to ask. Plus, he figured any man with a secret blackmail game going would have made damned sure he had his evidence close by — not hidden away in a house with his estranged wife.
And after having spent more than half an hour talking to her, Justin was also convinced that Sue Caldwell hadn't known her husband at all. She struck him as one of those unimaginative people who took everything at face value, a discarded wife still honestly bewildered as to why her husband would have left her and virtually certain he would have come home eventually.
Blunt now, Justin said, "Forgive me, but is it true that your marriage broke up over another woman?"
"No, it is not," she said flatly, eyes bright with indignation. "George was having a midlife crisis, that's all. He bought that little red car, started taking trips all over the place and wearing flashy clothes, just the sort of thing you'd expect. He was about to turn forty and he couldn't stand the thought of losing his youth. But there was no other woman. I would have known if there had been."
Justin wondered, but didn't challenge her assertion. "I see. And you can't think of any enemies he might have made either during your marriage or after he moved out?"
"Certainly not. George was a fine man, everyone said so." She sniffed suddenly. "A fine man. It had to be that maniac everybody's talking about, the one who killed those other men. Because there was no reason, just no reason, to kill George."
Justin knew denial when he heard it; no way was Sue Caldwell willing or even able to believe her husband might have had a nasty little secret that could have gotten him killed. She could lump his death in with those of the other men only because some "maniac" was doing the killing, murdering without rhyme or reason, and the fact that the other victims had led secret lives did not, of course, mean that George had as well.
Figuring he wasn't going to get anything else from the widow Caldwell, Justin made soothing noises once again and began to take his leave.
Fifteen minutes later, he pulled his car into the parking lot of the apartment building where Caldwell had lived, and sat there for a few moments, brooding. They had searched the apartment. Questioned the neighbors. Gone over his little red sports car with a fine-tooth comb. Searched his office at the bank, the lockbox he'd kept there.
Nothing.
But if George Caldwell had been a blackmailer, then somewhere there had to be the evidence of it. He had to have kept some kind of proof against his victims, whatever it was he had held over their heads to induce them to pay him.
Justin was still uncertain as to whether he believed the killer himself had sent the notebook to him. It seemed most likely. Which would logically mean, he thought, that the killer was not among the blackmail victims; why provide the police with evidence that would furnish a motive for murder?
Then again, it might be a dandy little diversion. With several blackmail victims to choose from, the killer might have decided he'd be lost in the crowd and draw no more attention from the police than any of the others. A hide-in-plain-sight choice. That made a certain amount of sense.
Of course, it could also be true that exposing Caldwell's sins might have been more important to him than protecting his own ass, and sending the notebook to one of the cops was the only way he could accomplish that. Which certainly argued an obsession amounting to mania,
Justin pulled the little black notebook from an inner pocket and thumbed through it slowly. There had been, of course, no fingerprints whatsoever. He'd used his own latent kit to dust every goddamned page, without getting so much as a smudge. Which certainly screamed "planted evidence." Or else a man who was very, very careful.
He wasn't absolutely positive the handwriting was George Caldwell's, so that was still a question mark. And since he had to consider the whole blackmail scheme a possibility rather than a probability, the only way he could justify continuing to explore the theory was by telling himself that knowing why George Caldwell died would tell him more than the death of any of the other victims had.
He really believed that. So he kept pushing onward and kept studying the damned notebook.
Now that he'd had time to consider, he could name at least two possible matches for nearly every set of initials and sometimes three or four, but the only way to be certain who had been blackmailed — assuming anyone had — was to find the evidence Caldwell would have had to use against his victims.
And Justin had to search carefully, because he didn't dare risk Sheriff Cole finding out what he was looking for; so far, Ethan Cole was the only match Justin had been able to come up with for the initials E.C. Which meant he couldn't tell the sheriff about this little black book. Not yet, anyway, not until he was able to rule out Cole as a possible blackmail victim.
And a possible murderer.
He looked up again to study the apartment building where George Caldwell had lived, then flipped a mental coin, sighed, and got out of his car. If Caldwell had been a blackmailer, somewhere there would be evidence of it. There had to be.
If Justin could only find it.
"It was last September," Max reminded Nell as they stood some yards from one of the few bayous in the immediate area, studying very faint marks on a patch of sandy ground. "To their credit, the cops pulled the car out on the other side and tried to be careful not to disturb any possible evide
nce here, but I'm surprised you can still see anything after all this time."
She knelt down and traced the sharp edge of one tire track with her finger. "This is what's left of the tracks? No other vehicle has been here?"
"I doubt it, given how hard it is to get a vehicle in here, but there's no way to be absolutely positive. For what it's worth, I came out here the next day, and as far as I can tell these are the original tire tracks from Luke Ferrier's car."
"According to the report, the initial conclusion was suicide, right?"
"Right."
"Then later it was decided that Ferrier might have been drugged and the car deliberately pointed at the water."
"Yeah."
Nell half closed her eyes, trying to bring what she was feeling into focus. She expected it to be difficult with Max so near, and it was, but even so there was something… off. It felt strange, different from what she was accustomed to, from what it should have been. Almost as though she were trying to sense through a veil. Whatever lay on the other side was so dim and vague it was like the whisper of an echo, and groping toward it tentatively was frustrating.
"Nell?"
"Wait. There's something…" She concentrated for what felt like hours, then finally rose with a sigh. "Dammit."
"What?"
"It's too vague to get hold of. Whatever happened out here happened fast, too fast to leave much of an energy signature." She frowned down at the tire track. "But that track tells me he was probably trying to stop the car before it went into the water, otherwise the marks wouldn't have lasted this long or been this deep."
"Then it wasn't suicide — and he wasn't unconscious when the car went in."
"That idea always bothered me a bit, that the killer made sure Ferrier was out cold before he killed him," Nell confessed. "Doesn't really match up with the other three victims. In fact, if you assume Caldwell saw his killer and knew he was about to be shot, then you can argue that all four suffered either physically or emotionally just before they died."
"You're not including your father in the group?"