Deadline

by Sandra Brown

  “You were sneaking around my house in the middle of the night, and she didn’t think that was the least bit suspicious? She didn’t raise a hue and cry and ask what the hell you were doing?”

  “She was in no condition to do anything. She’d been drinking. Quite a lot. I had to help her from the car to the back door. She begged me not to tell you. Since I didn’t want you to know that I was staying in the house next door—”

  “Spying.”

  “—I promised that you would never hear it from me, in exchange for her promise never to drive again in that condition.”

  “You two formed a pact.”

  He wished he could deny it, but that was more or less the truth of it. “It was a nonissue.”

  “Was it? The authorities might disagree. Do they know about these secret meetings between you two?”

  “Yes. I told them.”

  That calmed her a little, but she was still looking at him with anger and suspicion. “Did you see her as an excellent source of insider information on me? Or as something else entirely?”

  “No to the first question. I don’t dare guess what ‘something else entirely’ implies.”

  “Come on, Dawson, don’t play dumb. She was a friendly, flirty girl, who also happened to be a head turner, especially in a bikini.”

  “She was. All that. She was also half my age. Near enough, at least.”

  “That didn’t matter to her. She said the guy she was seeing was older.”

  He reacted with a start. “Dirk is older?”

  “You know about him?”

  “The night she came in drunk, she mentioned him by name. ‘Dirk and I killed a bottle of Captain Morgan.’ The detectives want to question him, but they haven’t been able to track him down.”

  “That’s one reason I was asked to come in,” she said. “They want to know what I know about him.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “Not even his last name.”

  Dawson listened with mounting apprehension as she told him what little she knew about the elusive Dirk. “Did Stef tell you why she wasn’t keen on you two meeting?”

  “I gathered he wasn’t keen on it, either. He wouldn’t fit into ‘the family scene.’”

  “Did she describe him physically?”

  “Older than she, but she didn’t say by how much. Tattoos. A beard.”

  “Huh.”

  “Your brow is furrowed. What are you thinking?”

  “Dirk comes across as excessively secretive.”

  He got up and walked over to a bulletin board that was papered with Wanted posters, forming a collage of sinister faces. One poster stood out, however, because the wanted individual had the benign countenance of an angel framed by curly blond hair. Not yet thirty years old, she was wanted for armed robbery and murder. A twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward had been offered for information leading to her arrest. She was considered to be armed and dangerous.

  The criminal bent of one’s personality wasn’t always obvious.

  He turned back to Amelia. “I didn’t use Stef as a source of information on you. But maybe someone else did. Someone who wanted to keep track of you and your sons, who wanted to know where you were and who you were with. Someone having a great deal of personal interest in your activities, your daily routine, your comings and goings.”

  She took a deep, stuttering breath, indicating to Dawson that even though she didn’t respond, she understood all too well what he was leading up to.

  In a quiet voice, he said, “There’s the age factor.”

  “We don’t know how old this Dirk is.”

  “For the sake of argument, let’s say his age fits.”

  “Let’s not,” she said, coming to her feet. “The man Stef described to me sounds nothing like Jeremy.”

  “Tattoos are easily acquired. The beard might take a week or two. He’s been missing for fifteen months.”

  “You don’t think I’d recognize the man I was married to, even with a beard?”

  “You would, but the casual observer wouldn’t. Furthermore, nobody’s looking for Jeremy Wesson. The general consensus is that Willard Strong fed him to a pack of starving pit bulls.”

  She took a reflexive step away from him, but when the back of her knees touched the seat of the chair, she sat back down abruptly. He returned to his seat beside her. He wanted to caress her cheek, at the very least, take her hand. He refrained, largely because he feared a rebuff.

  “Something else has been nagging at me.”

  She shook her head as though to stave off whatever it was he was about to say, but he didn’t let it deter him. “I haven’t shared this with the detectives because I wanted to run it past you, first.” And Headly. Above anyone else, he would trust Gary Headly’s instincts on this.

  “When I ran into Stef in the general store, she was wearing a rain slicker. I teased her about the loud pattern. Red with bright-yellow-and-white daisies. She told me she’d taken it from the trunk of your car.”

  “It’s mine. Jeremy and I went to Charleston for a getaway weekend. The weather turned bad, and I needed a raincoat in a hurry. That was the first one I found. It’s not something I would typically choose, so I kept it at the beach house and never wore it except there on the island.”

  “Last I saw her, Stef was standing beside your car, wearing your slicker, with—”

  “No.”

  “—the hood up.”

  “Stop!”

  “Amelia—”

  “Don’t say anymore.”

  Just then the door adjacent to the reception window swung outward and Tucker and Wills walked through. “Well, Mr. Scott,” Tucker drawled. “Glad to see you’re still here. You saved us a trip.”

  “I ran into Ms. Nolan.”

  Tucker introduced his partner to her.

  “Thank you for coming in, Ms. Nolan,” Wills said. As tall and thin as Tucker was short and stout, he had the bearing and stooped posture of a tenured professor. He was also the more sensitive of the two, and noticed how shaken Amelia appeared. “Ma’am, are you all right?”

  “Yes, fine. It’s been a terrible day.”

  “Of course. We realize what an imposition it is to ask you to come down here this time of night.”

  “Not at all. If I can help, I want to.”

  “We’ll be with you directly,” he told her.

  “Right now, it’s Mr. Scott we want to talk to.” Tucker hiked up his belt, or tried, and grinned at Dawson. “We were on our way to come find you.”

  “Here I am.” Despite his wisecrack, Dawson got a bad feeling about the detective’s smirk.

  “Do you know a guy named Ray Dale Huffman?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Are you sure?” Wills asked in a kinder tone.

  “Positive. Who is he?”

  “Repeat offender,” Tucker said. “We’ve got him in lockup. He heard through the jailhouse grapevine—it’s the damnedest thing how that works, truly. Anyhow, he got wind of us questioning you in connection to Miss DeMarco’s murder, and he offered to make a deal.”

  “What kind of deal?”

  Wills said, “We drop the charge against him in exchange for information about you.”

  “Sorry. You’ve been had. I don’t even know the guy.”

  Tucker’s grin turned even more smug. “Not what he said.”

  “I don’t give a shit what he said.”

  “Well, you should.” Tucker moved in close and leered up at him. “Because Ray Dale claims that one night last week, down on River Street, he sold you a whole bag full of drugs.”

  * * *

  They allowed him one phone call. He called Headly.

  “I can’t talk now. We’ve got friends over. The cabernet is breathing, steaks are on the grill, and Eva’s tossing the salad.”

  “Amelia Nolan’s nanny was murdered last night.”

  Dawson could practically hear the gears grinding inside Headly’s head. “Hold on.”

/>   While he went to notify Eva and their guests that dinner would be delayed, Dawson glanced over his shoulder. The two detectives were out of earshot but observing him closely. Tucker was stroking his jutting belly, which he used as other policemen did a billy club, to try and intimidate.

  Dawson didn’t know how long they would give him, so when Headly came back on the line, he said, “I’m in a time crunch, so listen and don’t interrupt.”

  According to the oversized wall clock, he talked for one hundred and twenty-eight seconds, summing up as concisely as possible the events of the past few days, filling in pertinent facts he’d deliberately left out of previous conversations.

  When he stopped, the first thing out of Headly’s mouth was, “Jesus.”

  “Yeah. The wristwatch thing freaked Amelia out because she’d sensed somebody had been watching her.”

  “You.”

  “Not me. I told you, she got the feeling before I ever arrived on the scene. Then there were the photographs.” He’d told Headly about them, too, ignoring grunts of disapproval for his having taken them in the first place. “We still don’t know what happened to them. The beach ball also remains unexplained.”

  “You said the girl, Stef, was driving Amelia’s car and wearing her rain slicker.”

  “A distinctive slicker. She had the hood up. It was dark. Cats-and-dogs rain. From the back, she could easily have been mistaken for Amelia.”

  “And Dirk’s gone underground.”

  Dawson expelled his breath. “That’s where we are. What do you make of it?”

  “You know before asking.”

  Yes, he did. “Amelia won’t admit it, but she’s afraid my hunch is right.”

  “We could be wrong,” Headly said, musing aloud. “Maybe the nanny got crosswise with somebody, and he or she whacked her.”

  “That’s a possibility, of course. But if Stef had an enemy, she didn’t show it. We know of none. And we know definitely that Amelia has one.”

  “Okay, if Jeremy’s alive, what would he gain by killing his ex-wife?”

  “His children.”

  “Shit,” Headly said. “I walked right into that one.”

  “He once told Amelia that nothing would keep him from his sons.”

  “By the way, I called the local newspaper in Wesson’s hometown, played the FBI ace, and asked that his parents’ obit be e-mailed to me. I laid it on thick. A matter of national security, and so on. Anyhow, I got it this afternoon. It included a picture of two pleasant-looking individuals on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. She was wearing a corsage of roses.”

  “Not Carl and Flora.”

  “Not even close.”

  “So even if Jeremy was their son by birth, he wasn’t reared by them.”

  “Looks like.”

  Before they could take that topic further, Tucker nudged Dawson’s shoulder and mouthed, “Sixty seconds.”

  “I gotta go,” he said into the phone.

  “No need to rush now. Eva’s already steamed. But she’ll get over it. She always does.” After a pause, he said, “Dirk needs to be found.”

  “Yeah, about that…I thought maybe you could come down.”

  “To Savannah?”

  “If Dirk is Jeremy, you’ll want to be in on the hunt and the capture. Right?”

  “Definitely. I’ll call Knutz first thing tomorrow morning. Have him start putting together a task force.”

  “Any chance you can get here tonight?”

  “Tonight?”

  “For a couple of urgent reasons. First and foremost, Amelia needs someone watching her back.”

  “I thought that was your detail. What’s the other urgency?”

  “I need you to bail me out.”

  * * *

  Even before thanking Headly for picking him up, as they walked from the jail, Dawson asked him if Amelia was safe.

  “Soon as our call ended last night, I talked to Knutz. He’s got people he occasionally uses for surveillance, sorta freelancers. He put somebody on Amelia. A gal actually, but she’s one of the best, he says.

  “Anyway, she followed Amelia when she left the sheriff’s office. She went straight to her apartment, spent the night there without incident. She left it this morning at eight o’clock.” He checked his wristwatch. “About ten minutes ago.”

  “So she’s okay?”

  “Didn’t I indicate that?”

  “What about the boys?”

  “They weren’t with her.”

  “She must have left them with the museum guy and his wife. She said she might. It was probably for the best. But somebody should be guarding that house, too. They—” He caught Headly looking at him curiously. “What?”

  “For a jailbird, you’re awfully concerned about the welfare of a widow and her two kids.”

  “If something happens to them, it’ll be on your head for not telling the locals about the possibility of Jeremy’s resurrection.”

  Querulously, Headly said, “Another one of Knutz’s freelancers is watching the museum guy’s house. Okay?”

  “Why didn’t you just say so?”

  “Well, I’ve been a little busy lately getting your ass out of jail.”

  “Thanks, by the way.”

  Headly merely snorted.

  Dawson said, “I wasn’t worried about being formally charged.” He’d spent an uncomfortable night in jail—fortunately not in the same cell with Ray Dale Huffman, whom, had he gotten close to, he might have strangled. “It was only a matter of time before they had to let me go.”

  Headly motioned him toward the rental car he’d picked up at the Savannah airport.

  “How do you figure?”

  “They didn’t have any evidence.”

  Headly used the remote key to unlock the car doors. They got in on opposite sides, and Headly started the engine immediately. “Of illegal drug possession or homicide?”

  “Certainly no evidence tying me to Stef’s murder.”

  Headly just sat there with his hand on the gearshift, looking at him, silently asking about the other possible criminal charge.

  “All right, I’d bought some pills from Ray Dale. Yesterday, a rookie deputy was sent upstairs with me while I changed clothes. He was green, easily distracted with jabber. I snatched the bottle of them off my nightstand, and when he allowed me to go to the john, I flushed them.”

  “Clever you.” Headly backed out of the parking slot, muttering angrily under his breath.

  “Will you relax?” Dawson said. “They were—”

  “I know what they were. I found your stash in your apartment.”

  “Excuse me? You broke into my apartment?”

  “Don’t go all righteously indignant on me. I’m not the drug addict.”

  “I’m hardly an addict.”

  “No? Then why are your hands shaking?”

  He’d hoped no one would notice. “Look, I only needed something to take the edge off.”

  “Off what?”

  Dawson clammed up, then said, “I wasn’t taking anything you can’t get from a doctor.”

  “Then why aren’t you getting them from one, instead of buying them off guys on the street with names like Ray Dale? God only knows what they’re laced with.”

  Dawson was about to argue that, but truth be told, he couldn’t vouch for the pharmaceutical integrity of the pills he’d been taking. His only criterion for quality control had been that they worked. Their numbing effect was swift and short-term, but even a moment away from the nightmare was worth the risk of taking compounds of dubious origin.

  “I was careful,” he mumbled.

  “Buying only from reliable, upstanding illegal drug dealers.”

  Dawson didn’t address his godfather’s sarcasm, knowing it was justified. His recklessness was indefensible, so he didn’t even attempt to excuse it. “Take the next right, then the hotel is up one block on the left.”

  When he’d relocated to Saint Nelda’s, he’d taken only what he thought
he would need at the beach and hadn’t checked out of the hotel, a decision he was glad of now. He left Headly in the lobby while he went upstairs to shower and change clothes. He was back down in five minutes. In less than ten more, they were entering the courthouse.

  Chapter 14

  Court convened shortly after nine o’clock. The judge said she hoped everyone had enjoyed the holiday weekend, then asked Willard Strong’s defense attorney if he was ready to cross-examine the witness.

  Mike Gleason stood. “Ready, Your Honor.”

  Amelia was escorted in. As she took her seat in the witness box, she was reminded that she was still under oath.

  Sitting beside Dawson in the gallery, Headly harrumphed. “What did you notice first, her intelligence, her modesty, or her self-control?”

  Dawson didn’t answer. Mike Gleason had already fired the first volley by asking Amelia if she had formed an opinion of Willard Strong even before meeting him.

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “What I mean is this, Ms. Nolan. Your husband returns from war. He’s obviously suffering from PTSD. What do you do? Encourage him? Nurture him? Exercise patient, loving kindness? No. You leave him and rob him of his sons.”

  Jackson was on his feet immediately. “Objection.”

  “In fact, Ms. Nolan, isn’t it true that your first reaction to anything that diverted your husband’s attention away from you, including and especially his friendship with Mr. Strong, was—”

  “Your Honor—”

  “Spiteful jealousy?”

  The judge banged her gavel several times and sustained Jackson’s objection.

  Many more were to come. Despite them, Gleason tried his hardest to chisel away at Amelia’s loyalty and integrity. Merciless and selfish were words he used to describe her efforts to get out of the marriage.

  He grilled her about the two times she’d been with the defendant, at Hunter’s birthday party, and then the day he had come to the townhouse looking for Jeremy. He tried to discredit her accounts of these incidents, to put a spin on them that would make her out to be a woman prone to either hysterics or malice.