“Hello, Maggie.”
“Good morning, Mr. Boudreaux.”
Patty looked from one to the other of them, and Boudreaux seemed to wait for some explanation for Maggie’s presence. Patty seemed to hope she’d give one, too.
“I just stopped by to talk to you for a minute, if that’s okay,” Maggie said. “I’m sorry to bother you at work.”
Boudreaux nodded. “Yes, that’s fine. It’s good to see you.” He looked at Patty, who scurried back the way they’d come, and Boudreaux held the door open wider. “Would you like to see the new addition to the company?”
“Sure,” she answered, and stepped inside.
Several people, men and women, stood at two rows of stainless steel tables, scaling and fileting fish. Maggie could see clear plastic bins of redfish, sea trout, and snapper.
“We’ve expanded to include fish, as you can see,” Boudreaux said. “It’s good for business, of course, with the oyster and shrimp yields down, but it’s a handful of new jobs, as well. We’re selling fresh and frozen, to the supermarkets, to restaurants.”
Maggie looked at the far end of the room, where a tall, thin man at one of the tables was hosing down his station. The pinkish water slid across the floor, and swirled around and down one of several floor drains.
“Let’s head up there to the office,” Boudreaux said, pointing to a set of metal stairs that led to an office with a wall of windows.
“Okay,” Maggie said, and looked around as she followed Boudreaux across the room and up the stairs. The faint smell of some expensive cologne she didn’t recognize wafted down to her as she climbed the steps behind Boudreaux, and she thought, not for the first time, what an odd mix of blue collar and effortless class he was.
As she understood it, he’d worked on his father’s shrimp boats and oyster skiffs back in Louisiana, and here as well, when his father expanded to Apalach. Then he’d gone on to get a finance degree at Ole Miss, built his own businesses in Louisiana, and come here when his father had died. He’d taken the wholesale business and shrimp fleets his father had left and built a multi-million dollar business that included seafood processing, vacation rentals, vessel leasing and who knew what else.
If nothing else, she admired his work ethic and business sense. But there was something else she liked, as well, something she didn’t yet want to define very specifically.
Boudreaux opened the office door, and held a hand out to indicate she should sit in one of the vinyl armchairs. “Have a seat. Please.”
He closed the door as she sat down, then he took a seat behind the inexpensive oak desk that afforded a view of almost the entire room downstairs.
The office was spare and looked unlived in. There was a computer on the ell of the desk, a table with a potted plant, a brand new phone. No artwork, no rugs, no stacks of files or half-full coffee mugs.
Boudreaux watched her looking around as he leaned back in the brown leather desk chair. “This was supposed to be Gregory’s office,” he said.
Maggie glanced at him, then swallowed a tinge of nausea and occupied her eyes elsewhere for a moment. “Brandon Wilmette’s as well?”
“It would have been, yes.” He gently rubbed at one eyebrow with a slender finger. “Has our discussion yesterday been helpful?”
“I passed the information on to Wyatt. Thank you.” She looked at him. “For obvious reasons, I can’t actually have anything to do with the case.”
Boudreaux nodded. Then he waited for her to speak.
“We got a call from someone who saw Brandon Wilmette here the evening of Tuesday the 24th. The day before he disappeared.”
“Yes. As I told you, he came by here that evening.”
“Do you remember what time?”
“I told him to come any time after seven, but no, I don’t remember when he arrived.”
Maggie nodded. “Do you remember what time he left?”
Boudreaux rubbed his eyebrow again. It was a habit that Maggie had noted lately. He seemed to do it when he was thinking. “Not really, no. He left before I did. I had some paperwork to finish up. But I left around ten, I think.”
“You don’t have any idea how long you’d been here after he left?”
Boudreaux put his elbows on the desk and folded his hands. “An hour perhaps? Maybe a little bit longer.”
“So, kind of a long conversation, then.”
“With Sport, every conversation was a long one, no matter how brief it was.” He rested his chin on his hands. “First we talked about Gregory, or I listened to him talk about Gregory. Then he went into a long, but unconvincing pitch for some pop-up gourmet business back in Atlanta. I declined to invest.”
“And then you offered him a job?”
“Gregory’s job,” Boudreaux said, and she wondered if he mentioned Gregory’s name so frequently in order to get a reaction from her.
“Why?”
“He was a dumbass, please excuse the language, but he’d been a friend of the family for a long time. I also didn’t have anyone to fill the position right away. I still didn’t, up until last week. One of the shrimpers’ wives used to work for the Publix seafood department. She’ll be taking over for me Monday.”
“Did you and Wilmette discuss your nephew’s suicide? Did he have any thoughts as to why he might kill himself?”
“Not really, no. Sport didn’t get distracted much by other people’s feelings or mental states.” His eyes had taken on that speculative look he sometimes got, and she worked at not looking away. “You never met him, never saw him around town with Gregory?”
Maggie swallowed, tried to make it unnoticeable, but she saw that he noticed. “Your nephew wasn’t around much in recent years.”
“No, but when he was here, Sport joined him fairly often.” He was still staring, though not in a way meant to intimidate. It did, nonetheless.
Maggie pushed past it and decided to get a few things out in the open.
“How long had he been coming here?” She wanted an answer, but almost hoped he’d decline to give one.
“The first time he came down was when he and Gregory were freshman at Tulane. I think it was fall break.” He was still watching her.
“That would have been…?”
“Twenty-two years ago,” he said, like it had always been on the tip of his tongue.
Maggie looked down at the car keys in her hand for a second, just to break that gaze for a moment. Then she faced him again. She was trying to think of what to say next when he spoke.
“I suppose you would have been too young to have known them, really,” he said quietly.
“I was fifteen,” she said. “But I knew who your nephew was.”
“But you don’t recall meeting Sport?”
Hey, you want some?
“I don’t remember ever seeing him, no,” she answered, and she knew that they both knew they were now having a completely different conversation. She knew he was confirming for her, more directly this time, that Brandon Wilmette had been the other person in the woods that day. What she didn’t know was why he would do that. Why, after twenty-two years, would he care to impart that information?
She stood up, and he stood with her, looking a little surprised that she’d decided to leave. “Thank you. Mr. Boudreaux. I’ll let you get back to work.”
“Maggie?” She stopped and turned, one hand on the door knob. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said.
Maggie looked at him a moment. “For what?”
“Everything,” he said.
Maggie nodded and went out the door.
As she went back down the stairs to the processing room, she looked around at the stainless steel and the hoses and the drains. It was a place built specifically for messy work. A perfect place to chop up a body. As she came off the bottom step, she realized that she really didn’t want it to be.
Maggie spent the next few hours talking on the phone to people in Atlanta, trying to find some kind of motive, any kind of motive, for the murder
of Brandon Wilmette. Anything that did not involve Bennett Boudreaux. She came up empty. Wilmette was not liked by many, and he was even despised by a few, but there was nothing in his life that pointed to a motive for someone to follow him all the way to Apalach to kill him.
What she was left with was the same thing she’d had when she’d started, a near certainty in her gut that Wilmette had tried to blackmail Boudreaux with the fact that his nephew had once raped hometown girl and decorated Sheriff’s Lieutenant Maggie Redmond. How Wilmette planned to handle having his bluff called, when he would be at minimum an accessory, was beyond Maggie’s understanding, but she figured his bluff had been called, just in an unexpected way.
When the phone calls had been exhausted, Maggie drove around the marinas, walked downtown, visited Caroline’s and went back to the Bayview, hoping to find someone who had seen Wilmette after 10 p.m. on Tuesday the 24th. Again, she came up empty. A few people remembered seeing him beforehand, no one remembered seeing him after.
At close to six, she decided to call it a day, pick up Coco, and head home. She pulled into the gas station first, pulled up to one of the pumps, and set the pump to fill the tank while she went inside to grab a cold drink. She automatically reached for the RC, but stopped short, then grabbed a can of Dr. Pepper instead.
As she walked out of the station, she saw Patrick Boudreaux getting gas on the other side of her pump. He was leaning up against the side of his blue Audi, texting on his phone. He looked up as she approached, and seemed taken aback for just a split second, before he managed to locate his usual arrogant expression.
“Hello, Maggie.”
Maggie continued past him to her side of the pump. “Hello, Patrick.”
She popped her Dr. Pepper and waited for the last few gallons of gas to pump.
“I was sorry to hear about your ex-husband. Terrible thing.”
His statement carried so little sincerity that Maggie didn’t feel obligated to thank him. Normally, she tried to have a civil relationship with Patrick, since she depended on him to prosecute most of her cases. She did this despite the fact that she was sure his inconsistent results were due to inconsistencies in his ethics. For his part, Patrick had never treated her with anything other than polite, smirking disdain. Patrick didn’t seem to care for women in law enforcement.
Maggie looked back over at Patrick, who had returned to his texting. “Patrick, do you remember Myron Graham?”
For a moment, she’d thought he hadn’t heard her. But his thumbs had stopped moving. Finally, he looked up, his eyebrows clenched together in thought.
“Doesn’t ring a bell, I’m afraid,” he said. “Who is he?”
“A drug dealer. Pot. PD arrested him in 2009 for possession with intent. It was assigned to you.”
“I can’t say I recall. What about it?”
“He’s dead.”
Patrick looked back down at his phone. Maggie’s pump had stopped. So had Patrick’s.
“Well, I guess that’s one less dealer we need to worry about,” Patrick said to his phone.
“Well, he’s one less problem for somebody.” Maggie replaced the pump in its holder and grabbed her receipt. “They found him burned to a crisp in Gainesville.”
Patrick glanced up as though he’d just heard his pump stop. “No. I don’t care about Alachua County.”
He stuck his phone in his back pocket and pulled the pump from his tank.
“You don’t care much about Franklin County, either,” she said.
He turned around, jammed the pump into place. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It’s not self-explanatory?”
“Maybe you could explain it to my father,” he said, and tried for a snide smile.
“I don’t usually have to explain things to your father,” she said, and was more successful with her smile than he had been with his.
He put an elbow on top of the pump, and leaned over her. “Listen, I don’t care what kind of crap you’re playing with the old man. Maybe you think you have a real romance going or maybe you’re just pulling his chain. Maybe he’s pulling yours.”
“You think I’m sleeping with your father?” Maggie asked, incredulous. She couldn’t help but laugh just a little.
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Patrick said. “But don’t come at me with your sanctimonious BS, because I don’t buy it.”
“I’m not in a relationship with your father,” she said evenly. “But I’ll tell you what, he’s twice the man you are on his worst day.”
Patrick leaned in again. “You keep thinking that. But I’ll tell you this. Bennett Boudreaux never met anyone he didn’t think was disposable.”
Maggie picked up Coco and her things and went on home. She returned her guns to their normal locations, fed the chickens, fed Coco, and took a hot shower, then went out onto the deck with Coco and a glass of wine.
Dark clouds crept by, low to the ground, but it looked to Maggie like they were going to head out to sea before they finally broke. However, the attending light breeze was welcome.
Maggie’s cell rang, and she saw that it was Wyatt.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey. How are you?”
“I’m doing okay. Better,” she said. “Are you back?”
“No, I was calling to let you know that I’m still in Gainesville. Alachua County’s trying to help us track down Fain, but it’s like he’s vaporized.”
“Have you learned anything new?”
“Only that Myron Graham was stabbed to death prior to being roasted, and that Fain is suspected in another murder from a couple of years ago, some girl who used to deal for him.” Wyatt sighed. He sounded exhausted. “Dwight said you were in the office today.”
“Yeah. I made some calls to Atlanta, but nobody had anything to say that would point to a motive for murder. I also canvassed the marina and downtown, but no one remembers seeing Wilmette after Tuesday evening.”
“So nothing new on the foot.”
“Well, I talked to a shrimper who saw Wilmette go into Sea-Fair Tuesday night, but we already knew he’d been there.”
Maggie felt a pang of guilt at neglecting to mention her conversation with Boudreaux, but going too much into Boudreaux meant going into Gregory as well, and she didn’t know how to do that. A small voice in her head mentioned that her reasons for staying silent were selfish and unethical, but she shut it out.
Just then, Stoopid, so known mainly due to his lack of ability to tell time, let out one of his odd half-crows from under the deck.
“Is that Stoopid?” Wyatt asked.
“Yeah.”
“Are all of your chickens in my yard?”
“No, I’m at home.”
“Why? Why the hell do you think I gave you the code to my security system?”
“So I could lock up.”
“And so you could come back,” he snapped. “Even if I’m not home yet, my house is a better place for you at the moment than yours.”
“I had to feed my chickens, anyway, Wyatt,” Maggie said. “Besides, the threat might be serious enough to get my kids out of town, but it’s not enough to warrant any real worry for me.”
“I don’t know that I agree or disagree, but it’s still not a good idea for you to be out in the middle of nowhere by yourself.”
“I’m usually out in the middle of nowhere by myself.”
“This isn’t usually,” Wyatt said quietly. “You need to take precautions, and by taking precautions I mean not be an idiot.”
Maggie sighed. “I’m fine, Wyatt. Are you coming back tonight?”
“At some point. We’ll probably leave it to Alachua in a couple hours, if none of these leads on Fain’s whereabouts pan out. Do you want me to come by?”
“No, I’ll probably be asleep.”
“Then I’ll call.”
Maggie couldn’t help smiling. “All right,” she said.
“If you need me, call.”
“I will,�
�� Maggie said.
“I almost believe you,” Wyatt said.
Maggie’s face was pressed hard into the dirt and three inches of musty autumn leaves. Sticks and at least one rock cut into her left cheek.
The ground, and the weight on her back, made it hard for her to breathe. She was sure that her heart was pounding too hard to let her live, and her chest was on fire. Everything was on fire and yet she was so cold.
“Tell me you love me!” he said, his hot breath blowing like a dragon’s on her right ear.
She kept her lips tightly shut, her nostrils flaring as she tried to get enough air without opening her mouth. She could see her fishing rod a few feet away where she’d dropped it, the one Daddy had given her for getting straight A’s last semester. He didn’t know where she was, didn’t know she needed him, and she closed her eyes as hot tears flooded them again.
“Tell me you love me!” he insisted again. She felt another sharp pain and her mouth flew open. She intended to tell him what he wanted to hear, but suddenly her throat felt like someone had scraped it with a nail file. She didn’t hear, didn’t even realize she was screaming, until the weight came off of her and she heard him yell “Shut up!”
He flipped her over roughly and she felt herself getting ready to scream again, against her own will. The sight of him stopped her. His shirt was hanging open, his pants around his thighs, and he was holding a rock the size of a basketball over his head.
She was fifteen and nobody knew she was way back in the woods. She was going to die in the dirt and the moldy leaves, and Daddy’s heart was going to break.
She clamped a hand over her own mouth and willed herself not to scream anymore.
Gregory Boudreaux slammed the rock down right next to her head and laughed. Then he leaned down to kiss her neck.
She clamped her hand so tightly over her mouth that she could feel the outline of every one of her upper teeth on her lip. In her left hand, she squeezed a clump of rocks and twigs.
She couldn’t seem to breathe fast or deeply enough and the air whistled out of her nostrils with every exhale.
He was kissing her neck sloppily as he crushed her spine into the dirt and rocks, and she kept herself from retching by staring up at the treetops. It was dark down there on the ground, but the late afternoon autumn sky was brilliant blue and cloudless, as though everything was alright everywhere else.
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