by Sandra Brown
Before Dawson could ask what that remark portended, Amelia rejoined them, expelling a breath as she sat down. “Be concise, Mr. Headly. Buzz Lightyear will pacify them for only so long. I promised them playtime after the movie.”
“Can’t blame them for wanting to play outside.”
“They want to play with Dawson.”
Headly turned and looked at him expectantly, obviously waiting for a comment. All he said was, “You’d better get started. You’re wasting valuable time.”
Headly snuffled as though to say that Dawson was dodging an issue, but that for the moment it had to wait. “Okay, here’s where we are. Bernie was conveyed to the mainland on the ferry late yesterday evening.”
“He said he was driving to Charleston.”
“Well, he didn’t. Not in that car, anyway. They found it parked in a public lot just a few blocks from the ferry pier. No sign of him. We’ll keep an eye on the car, but my guess is that he abandoned it.”
“Why do you think that?” Amelia asked. “He doesn’t know his true identity has been discovered.”
“The car’s license plate was bogus. It’s been a few years since Michigan used that design, but few people down here would notice. Carl did such a good job of altering the year of expiration that it was undetectable from a distance. Plus, the VIN number has been scratched out so that it’s unreadable. No prints inside the car. None on the door handles. He wiped it clean.”
“Is the parking lot attended?” Dawson asked.
“No. Only monitored by meter maids. You park, feed bills into a metal box or use a credit card. The box spits out a receipt you leave on the inside of your windshield. His was good for twenty-four hours, and, from the time stamp, we know he was back on the mainland for forty-seven minutes before our band of brothers launched our raid on this house last night. He got a good head start.”
“Security cameras?”
“Several on the pier. We have him driving off the ferry. That’s it. The bags and boxes you saw him loading into the trunk?” he said to Amelia. “All empty. They were for show.”
“The bad hips, too, in all likelihood,” Dawson remarked sourly. “Nice touch, though.” He hitched his chin in the direction of the house Bernie had occupied. “What about that?”
“Techies are still gathering evidence, but so far it hasn’t yielded anything substantive. Full of fingerprints, of course, but I doubt any of them will be Carl’s.”
“He didn’t walk around wearing rubber gloves.”
“I’d bet my left nut—excuse me, Amelia—that we don’t find a print that matches. Don’t forget, all we have is a print for the middle finger, left hand.”
“Hair in the shower drain?”
“Gathered. Skin cells off the linens. But we don’t have Carl’s DNA. Believe me, if he was easy to catch, I’d have caught him.”
“What about his house in Michigan?” Amelia asked.
“No such house number or street.”
She was amazed. “But I sent Christmas cards. They never came back.”
Headly raised a shoulder. “All I know is, the house address doesn’t exist and neither does the e-mail address he left with Miss DeMarco to give to you.”
Dawson said, “There must be a record of his leases for the house next door.”
“One would think. We got the manager of the rental office out of bed late last night to serve the search warrant. He was obstinate at first, didn’t want to divulge personal information on a repeat client. But after some arm twisting to the tune of ‘obstruction of justice,’ he told us that Bernie Clarkson always paid him with a money order.”
“Like you buy at Seven-Eleven?”
“Exactly like that. I asked the guy if that hadn’t seemed odd to him. His answer, ‘He was from Michigan.’ As if that explained why he didn’t pay with a credit card or check. Anyhow, the little old man from the Upper Peninsula didn’t leave a paper trail.”
He focused on Amelia. “Did he always come alone?”
“Yes. The first summer he spent here—”
“2009.”
“That’s right. Jeremy was overseas. Grant was just a baby. I stayed the whole summer out here. Dad came off and on, but I spent a lot of time with Bernie because we were both lonely. He was grieving the recent death of his wife.”
“That’s what he told you. Doesn’t mean that Flora’s dead. Did he ever show you a photograph of her?”
“No. Which, now that I think about it, was odd. He talked about her with affection.”
“Did Jeremy ever meet so-called Bernie?”
“No. Even after he mustered out, he rarely came here. He couldn’t take time away from work. On one rare occasion when he did spend a few days, I invited Bernie to join us for dinner, but he excused himself, saying he didn’t want to intrude on our family time.”
“He declined because they were afraid you’d notice a resemblance.”
“I doubt I would have,” she said. “I see nothing of Jeremy in the Wanted-poster photograph of Carl.”
“I wasn’t struck by a similarity, either,” Dawson said. “I was totally taken in by Bernie.”
“Don’t beat yourself up,” Headly said. “That’s a lousy picture on the Wanted poster and it’s over forty years old. Carl was just launching his criminal career then. He must look a lot different now.”
“Like a septuagenarian,” Dawson said. “Wrinkled, age spots. His hair has thinned considerably and it’s completely white. The limp could be faked. But maybe not.” He thought of something else. “The night of the storm, when he answered my knock, his eyes were red and he was rubbing them. I thought I’d woken him up. Now I think he must wear contacts to change his eye color. I’d caught him without them.”
Addressing Amelia, Headly said, “Bernie and Jeremy never let you see them side by side because you might’ve detected something. If not alike in looks, in mannerisms.”
“You’re still of the opinion that Jeremy knew who his father was, and that they were—”
“In cahoots? Absolutely. Bernie entered your life around the time your marriage started deteriorating. That wasn’t coincidental. He came here to keep an eye on you while Jeremy was in Afghanistan.”
“I was alone year-round. Bernie lived next door only during the summer months.”
“But when you’re in Savannah, your schedule is more structured,” Dawson said, picking up on Headly’s thread. “You stick to a routine built around your work, the boys’ schooling. You see the same people, go to the same places, do the same things. Basically, your life is under constant scrutiny.”
“That’s right,” Headly said. “You aren’t as free in town as you are at the beach.”
“Free?” She asked with a light laugh. “To do what?”
“To spend the night in another man’s house.”
Headly’s words fell like bricks. Amelia lowered her gaze to the tabletop. Dawson sat there seething for a moment, then said, “Tucker must’ve gotten a real kick out of telling you.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t.”
“Nothing to tell. Amelia stayed that night only because of the power outage.”
“Yeah, Tucker said you hammered that home. About two dozen times.” He divided a look between them. “Look, you’re grown-ups. I don’t care. I’m only saying what it looked like to—”
“That asshole Tucker.”
“No, to Jeremy and Carl. But let’s leave that for a moment. We’ll come back to it.”
While Headly paused to take several sips of coffee, Dawson looked over at Amelia with apology. For all their protests to the contrary, they hadn’t fooled anybody into believing that their night together had been entirely chaste.
Headly resumed. “They found the CandyCane tied up at a public, out-of-the-way dock on a channel on Tybee Island. I haven’t been there, but I hear it’s perfect for Jeremy’s purposes. Boaters come and go. Nobody pays much attention. Easy for him to get over here to spy on Amelia or watch his kids play on the beach. L
ast time somebody noticed the boat being there was early Monday.”
“He may not have been the man on that boat,” Amelia said.
“Knutz has a couple of people working it. Here’s a giveaway. The craft has been scrubbed down with bleach inside and out. So either it was piloted by a stocky, bearded, law-abiding germophobe who’s made himself scarce, or Jeremy made certain that if the authorities somehow linked the boat to the murder on Saint Nelda’s, it couldn’t be linked to him.”
“It wasn’t that hard to find,” Dawson said. “Which tells me that he didn’t see much risk of it being connected to the crime.”
“Or maybe,” Headly said, “he knows he won’t need it anymore and abandoned it like Carl did his car.”
“Either way, Jeremy doesn’t realize that he’s been had.”
“For the time being,” Headly said. “And that’s good. The longer we can keep him and Carl in the dark, the better.”
Dawson didn’t like the way Headly was eyeing him as he tacked on that last part. “What?”
“It would be nice if we had a decoy. Somebody to feed to the media sharks like chum. A pseudosuspect to throw Carl and Jeremy off.”
Dawson pointed to his own chest. “Me? I?”
“I’m just saying.”
“Forget it. What about Dirk Arneson?”
“He’s off the hook for everything except using his employer’s yacht as a bachelor pad. His poker pals were located in New Orleans and questioned. They backed up his alibi. He was released with an apology.”
“Poor Tucker. Foiled again.”
“He doesn’t like you, either. And he’d write me off as a crackpot for accusing a dead man of killing that girl if not for that fingerprint. But there is the print. And there is Jeremy’s kinship with Carl Wingert, a notorious criminal at large. Tucker’s wading through Carl’s history now to familiarize himself, but in a way that’s working against us.”
“How so?” Amelia asked.
“He can’t quite reconcile that Carl the terrible could pass himself off for years as Bernie the tenderhearted. So far, we haven’t got anything forensic to prove that Bernie is Carl’s alter ego, and until some turns up, Tucker’s waffling.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding me!” Dawson exclaimed.
“He says a lot of older people have missing fingers, because reattachment wasn’t always the option it is now, and he’s right. He also backed me into a corner until I admitted that I’ve never seen Bernie, so I can’t ID him as Carl, whom I’ve also never seen in the flesh.”
Amelia asked, “How do they explain his car being abandoned, all that?”
“They can’t, except to say that maybe he’s having senior moments and forgot where he left it.”
“The phony addresses, the absence of public records?” Dawson said.
“All suspicious, but not a smoking gun.” Headly turned to Amelia. “I don’t suppose you have a picture of Bernie.”
“No.”
“Figured that. Carl wouldn’t have let himself be photographed. The SO is going to have one of those computer programs age the picture from Carl’s Wanted poster, see if it resembles your seventy-something neighbor, but for right now, they’re soft on him. Additionally—”
“Jesus. There’s an additionally?” Dawson left his chair and made an aimless circuit of the kitchen.
“Additionally, Tucker’s wrestling with Jeremy’s motive for killing Miss DeMarco. And if you believe that he wielded the murder weapon thinking he was killing her, then I allow that there’s a problem with it.”
“But he didn’t think he was killing Stef. He thought it was Amelia.”
“Tucker’s not sold on that, and he’s got some strong arguments.”
“Like what?” Dawson asked.
“Like how Jeremy could have planned it. How would he have known that Amelia would be in the village that night?”
“He couldn’t have known,” she said.
“Right. That’s the hangup. Even Knutz, who’s on my side, winces when I assert that it was a crime of opportunity. My take? Jeremy tied up at Saint Nelda’s dock to ride out the storm. He saw Miss DeMarco, mistook her for you, and seized the opportunity.”
Wryly Dawson said, “It was a dark and stormy night.”
“To them my theory sounds just that clichéd. Homicide detectives deal in facts and hard evidence. We’re short on those.”
“Except for the fingerprint,” Amelia said.
“If it’s a recent print—which is being argued—it places Jeremy there.”
“Then what’s the problem?” Dawson asked.
“I say again, motive. Murder is quite a leap from spooking Amelia with a busted beach ball. If Jeremy is only trying to mess with her mind, when he spotted her running through the rain, why didn’t he just jump out of the bushes and shout boo?”
“Tucker didn’t actually say that, did he?”
“It was almost that inane. But here’s their refrain,” Headly said, going back to Amelia. “Why would Jeremy want to kill you? Now, to me, his motive is obvious.”
“The children,” she replied.
“Ultimately. Hear me out,” he said, holding up both hands before she could say more. “What I think, Jeremy and Carl were too cautious to act before Willard Strong’s trial ended. They’d been impatiently biding their time until Willard was residing on death row and the dust had settled. They were almost there, days away from completion, the end was in sight when…a strapping, good-looking lad appears on the scene.”
He tilted his head toward Dawson, who realized they’d come back to the disconcerting topic of him and Amelia.
“He shows up out of nowhere,” Headly said, “and you start spending time with him. The children also seem gaga, which wouldn’t have set well with their father. To Jeremy, the new man in your life was a catalytic event.”
She looked at Dawson uneasily. “He’s hardly in my life.”
“And they wouldn’t want him to be.”
“But we’d just met.”
“Sometimes that’s all it takes.” After a short but awkward silence, he continued. “A romance between you two at least appeared to be blossoming. Jeremy had to stop it.”
“This means that Stef died because of me.” Shooting a glance at Dawson, she added, “Because of us.”
“No.” Headly propped his elbow on the table and shook his index finger at her. “Listen to me. Your perceived attraction to Dawson was only an excuse for Jeremy to act sooner rather than later. Eventually, no matter what, whether or not you’d ever met Dawson, he would have killed you. If not Jeremy, then his father would have. Because—and make no mistake about this, Amelia—the man is evil.
“Sweet, lovable Bernie is a sham. In truth, he never existed. It was Carl Wingert all along, and he duped you well. Because, behind the limp and age spots, he’s a terrorist who believes that you deserve to die. I’m as certain of that as I am that it’s gravity holding me onto the planet.”
“Why would he want me dead?”
“Punishment for leaving Jeremy.”
“Jeremy was the one who destroyed our marriage. I wasn’t the one having an affair.”
“This isn’t about morality. Do you think Carl cares who slept with whom? No. It’s about loyalty. He has strong feelings about it. But—and here’s the kicker—it’s one-sided. It’s loyalty to him that he’s a fanatic about.
“Conversely, he doesn’t blink over leaving someone behind. He saves his own skin first. He’s done it time and again. At Golden Branch, he sacrificed one of his men so he could escape, and, frankly, I’m amazed that he took Jeremy and Flora, straight out of childbed, with him when he ran.
“Once, during a standoff, one of his gang members tried to surrender. He walked out of a motel room with his hands raised. He was killed on the spot, but not by police. Carl, from inside the motel room, shot him in the back of the head and then escaped during the confusion that ensued.”
Headly was laying it on thick, perhaps for shock value
, but Dawson was glad he wasn’t sparing Amelia the cold reality of the kind of man her father-in-law was. Jeremy had the same bloodline.
Headly continued. “Carl Wingert is unconscionable. He believes his actions, no matter how detestable, are justified. He’ll vanquish anyone he considers disloyal, and you, Amelia, were disloyal.
“I’m sure Jeremy’s mind has been poisoned against you. But even if he still worships the ground you walk on, even if he is madly in love with you and entertaining a fantasy about reuniting with you and his sons, Carl will never allow it. He’ll kill you.”
“Then why didn’t he yesterday when I was alone at the beach house?”
“Because he’s too smart to have followed up Jeremy’s mistake with another. He couldn’t kill you and then disappear. That would have been too obvious. It probably galled him, but he had to continue playing Bernie until he was safely off the island. Now he has time to plan something else.”
“What am I supposed to do in the meantime? While he’s planning. The boys and I can’t remain under lock and key indefinitely.”
“It won’t be indefinite.”
Dawson stopped prowling around the room and looked sharply at Headly, whose expression was as grim as he’d ever seen it. “What does that mean?”
“Everything I’ve told you up till now?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s the good news.”
Chapter 20
Is this Harriet Plummer?”
“Isn’t that who you asked for? Who’s this?”
“My name is Bernie Clarkson. I’m calling you from Saint Nelda’s Island.”
“Where?”
“Offshore from Savannah. I hate to bother you, Ms. Plummer, but he wrote your name on the back of his business card.”
“Who did? Dawson?”
“Uh…let’s see, I had it right here…Yes, Dawson Scott. Tall, long hair?”
“Why did he give you my name?”
“So you do know him? He does write for the magazine?”
“Yes.”
“Good. That makes me feel better.”
“About what?”
“About what he’s up to.”
“Look, if you’re a reporter—”