by Sandra Brown
“Mr. Ford?”
“He’s in Atlanta.” The first panicked thought that entered her mind was that there had been a plane crash. “His flight…?”
“No, this isn’t about a flight.”
“Then please tell me why you’re here.”
“Are you acquainted with Elaine Conner?”
She swallowed, nodded, and replied, “Very well. She’s a good friend of mine.”
“We gathered that, because your name showed up numerous times in her recent calls log.”
“You have Elaine’s phone?”
“We discovered it on her yacht.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand. What were you doing on Elaine’s yacht? Is she all right?” But even as she asked, she knew. Her eyes widened with alarm. “Has there been an accident?”
Locke extended his hand, but came short of actually touching her. “Mrs. Ford, the body of a woman was discovered on the beach tonight, washed ashore. We believe it’s Elaine Conner.”
Talia gaped at them with disbelief, then covered her mouth and backed into one of the straight chairs flanking the console table. She bumped against the leg of it, rocking a crystal vase so hard it would have fallen off if Menundez hadn’t reacted quickly enough to stabilize it.
Locke was still talking. Talia had to focus on each word in order to comprehend what he was saying. “…ask if you knew how to contact Mrs. Conner’s next of kin.”
Talia wanted to wake up from this awful dream before it became any worse, but try as she might to force herself awake, the scene remained real, palpable, harsh. Her feet were freezing. Her ears were buzzing. Two heralds of dreadful news were looking down on her, awaiting a response.
“She…” She stopped, drew in two quick breaths, and tried again. “Elaine doesn’t have any living relatives. No next of kin.”
“Then we may need to impose on you.”
“Impose on me?”
“To take a look at a sketch and verify that it’s her.”
Talia stared up at them, but was too benumbed to speak. This could not be happening.
Locke said, “The coroner will make a positive ID, but it would be helpful if you could identify her from a sketch. We should be receiving it shortly.” He motioned to the iPad his partner held at his side.
Shakily, Talia stood up. “I’m going to get my shoes.”
“I’ll get them for you,” Locke said. She got the impression it wasn’t an offer out of kindness.
“I left them in my study. The room behind the stairs. My phone is on the end table. Please bring that, too.”
He left her with Menundez, who was younger, stockier, and more all-business. He wasn’t merely looking at her. He was scrutinizing her. To break the strained silence she asked him if it was still raining.
“Off and on,” he said.
Locke returned with her requested phone. Awkwardly he passed her one shoe at a time. She put them on, then, feeling only slightly steadier, stood.
“Better?” Locke asked.
“I’m fine.”
She knew she should probably ask if they would like to move into the living room and sit while they waited for the expected email, but inviting them to do so would make this visit seem even more official, and she was resistant to doing that.
Speaking in a low voice one would use to calm an anxious animal, Locke told her the time the 911 call had come in and the approximate location of where the body had washed ashore.
“Where the pier is?” she said. “That’s near the marina where Elaine’s yacht is moored.”
“It left the marina a little after seven this evening.”
“She took it out alone?”
“Would that be unusual?”
“Yes. She was adept at piloting it, but conscientious and careful. It wouldn’t be like her to take it out on a night like tonight, especially by herself. Maybe she loaned it to someone. Or it could have been stolen.”
“Mrs. Conner was onboard. Investigators have talked to several people who corroborate having seen her on deck.”
“Investigators?” She looked at Menundez, whose expression remained disturbingly impassive, then came back to Locke. “Do you think the woman found on the beach was the victim of a crime?”
“We don’t know yet. Several agencies are looking into it. Isle of Palms PD called us in to assist. A Coast Guard patrol discovered the dinghy.”
“Dinghy?”
He told her that it had been found capsized.
“That makes no sense. Why in the world would Elaine get into the dinghy, after dark, in this weather?”
“Questions we’d like answered,” he said.
They seemed to expect her to provide the answers. “There must have been an emergency onboard. Did Elaine call in an SOS or send some kind of distress signal?”
“No, ma’am.”
“That yacht is equipped with state-of-the-art technology. She’s bragged to me about it. At the first sign of trouble, she would have sent out an alert.” Locke just looked back at her, saying nothing. With emphasis, she said, “There must be a mistake. It can’t be her. Who discovered the body?” Locke told her. “Oh. How awful for the little boy.”
“When his dad realized what it was, he made sure the kid didn’t see it.”
She tried to connect Elaine and her effervescent personality to a lifeless body washed ashore. It was impossible. “I don’t believe it’s Elaine.”
Locke gave her a nod that could have been interpreted any number of ways, but she interpreted it to mean that he disagreed.
They all heard the beep signaling that the email had come in. Menundez opened the cover on his iPad, accessed his email, then gave Locke a nod.
Locke turned to her. “Can you give it a look?”
Talia tried to distance herself from the surreal situation, to withdraw emotionally, to become an observer rather than a participant, believing that watching from outside herself was the only way she would get through this.
“Do I need to prepare myself for what I’m about to see?”
“Are you asking if the face is disfigured?”
“Yes, that’s what I’m asking.”
“No. No blood, nothing like that.”
She took a deep breath, then nodded, and Menundez held the tablet out to where she could see the screen.
The face as captured by the sketch artist showed no signs of trauma. But it was definitely a rendition of Elaine’s face without her vitality and animation.
The detectives must have known from her reaction what the answer was, but Locke asked quietly, “Is that Elaine Conner?”
Talia nodded, spoke a raspy yes, then said, “Excuse me, please.” She didn’t wait for permission.
She went into the powder room, the nearest bathroom, and bent over the toilet. She retched. Hard. Repeatedly. But she hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so nothing came up. The bout left her feeling wrung out and trembly.
She cupped water from the faucet with her hand and rinsed her mouth out, then used a guest towel to bathe her face with cold water. She raked back her hair with her fingers, then rejoined the detectives.
Locke said, “Can we get you something, Mrs. Ford? A drink of water?”
She understood then that their business with her wasn’t finished. They weren’t offering condolences and bowing out with an apology for having ruined her night. They had come to her with questions that needed answers.
She wanted to cover her head and weep over the loss of her friend with the infectious laugh and joie de vivre. Instead, she wearily offered the detectives coffee.
“Coffee would be good,” Locke said.
“Coffee, thanks,” Menundez said.
She led them into the kitchen, then stood before the elaborate coffeemaker and stared at it, dazed, as though it were the control panel on a NASA spaceship. She couldn’t remember which buttons to push or in what sequence.
Noticing, Menundez stepped in. “I have one like it. Allow me?”
“Thank
you.” He took over for her. Maybe he wasn’t an automaton after all.
She put a kettle on the stove to boil water for tea for herself, then sent Jasper a text asking him to call her as soon as possible. When she saw Locke looking at her quizzically, she said, “I texted Jasper.”
“Have you heard from him?”
“No, but I didn’t expect to. We had a late dinner reservation.”
Simultaneously she and the detective looked at the clock on the microwave. It was almost eleven-thirty. “If he doesn’t call soon, I’ll try to reach him through the hotel switchboard. He’ll be very upset. Elaine was his friend, too.”
“Yes, mutual friends told us that they had drinks together yesterday at the country club.”
“And stayed for dinner.” Although she had voiced her suspicion of an affair to Jasper, she felt a need now to set the record straight: Their date yesterday hadn’t been behind her back. “I didn’t feel well last evening. Rather than join them, I stayed in and slept through dinner.”
Locke nodded thanks to his partner, who had passed him a cup of coffee. He blew across the top of it. “Why didn’t you go to Atlanta? Was it a business trip for Mr. Ford?”
“No. He’s retired.” Becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the tenor of his questions, she turned her back to him, opened a cabinet, and took down a box of chamomile tea. “The trip was to have been a getaway. I made it as far as the airport, then began feeling queasy. I begged off but insisted that Jasper go ahead without me. It’s a new hotel. Jasper is a gourmet. He looked forward to trying out the chef.”
“What new hotel?”
“The Lotus.”
Menundez left his freshly brewed cup of coffee on the counter, stepped out of the kitchen into the dining room, and got on his cell phone.
“Did you get over it?”
Talia had watched the other detective leave and could now hear him speaking quietly into his phone. She turned back to Locke. “Pardon?”
“The queasiness.”
“It comes and goes.”
“Nothing serious, I hope.”
She shook her head. “I had some dental work done yesterday morning. The prescribed pain pills must not have agreed with me.”
“You were sleeping them off last night while your husband and Mrs. Conner were at the country club.”
“I thought I had slept them off. I guess I didn’t. The upset recurred today.”
Locke set his unfinished coffee on the table. “Do you have an explanation for the house alarm going off this afternoon?”
She followed the direction of his gaze to the control box on the wall next to the back door. “The alarm went off?”
“Not the siren. It was shut off during the warning beeps with time to spare. Strange, because no one was at home.”
She shook her head in confusion. “When was this?”
Menundez returned in time to hear her question. “Five oh-seven,” he said. “Patrolmen were dispatched. Saw no sign of a break-in.”
“A glitch in the system, you think?” Locke asked.
Menundez said, “Or else someone who knew the code was here.”
If they’d been speaking in a foreign language, Talia couldn’t be more confounded. “Like who?”
“We hoped you could tell us,” Menundez said.
“I’m sorry. I know nothing about the alarm going off, so I can’t explain why it did.”
“Quite a coincidence that cops have come to your house twice in one day,” Locke remarked.
Disquieted by the way the two were regarding her, she folded her arms over her middle, even knowing how defensive it looked. “Why are you asking me all these questions?”
“We have to eliminate every possibility.”
“Possibility of what?”
She had addressed the question to Locke, but Menundez answered. “The possibility that Mrs. Conner’s death wasn’t an accident caused by misjudgment on her part. The possibility that foul play was involved.”
Before Talia could process that, Locke asked, “Did you walk your husband into the airport, see him off?”
It took several seconds for his seemingly unrelated inquiry to sink in. “No. No, we said our goodbyes in the parking garage. Why?”
“Because some of the people we’ve talked to who saw the Laney Belle leave the marina said that a man was steering her, not Mrs. Conner.”
Talia hugged her middle a little tighter.
Locke continued. “We were also told that Mrs. Conner often allowed your husband to pilot the boat.”
“That’s true,” Talia said, “but it couldn’t have been Jasper this evening.”
“Had Mrs. Conner ever invited anyone else to take the wheel?”
“Not to my knowledge, but that doesn’t mean that she didn’t.”
“You two were close friends.”
“Yes.”
“Were you acquainted with all her other friends?”
“Many of them.”
“Male friends?”
“Some.”
“If she had a new man in her life, would she have told you?”
“More than likely,” she said huskily.
“Has she taken a romantic interest in someone recently?”
Willing herself not to glance toward the apartment across the way, she gave her head a brisk shake.
“She wasn’t seeing anyone?”
“In the way you’re implying, I don’t believe so.”
The two detectives looked at each other, then back at her. Menundez said, “Mrs. Ford, is it possible that your husband changed his mind about going to Atlanta at the last minute?”
“He would have notified me. He would have been home hours ago.”
“Unless he was onboard the Laney Belle with Elaine Conner,” Locke said.
“That’s an offensive implication, Detective Locke.”
“The implications to you are more dire than marital unfaithfulness. If your husband was on the yacht, and there was an emergency, an accident, he could have suffered an injury. As we speak, search-and-rescue teams are out looking for him, or his—”
The kettle screeched. Talia nearly jumped out of her skin. She turned quickly and lifted it off the burner. In the process she sloshed some of the boiling water onto her hand. She cried out. The detectives lurched forward, ready to lend assistance, but she warded them off.
“I’m fine. It’s fine.” She tucked her scalded hand into her opposite armpit. “You believe that Jasper is either in need of rescue or already dead? Is that what you’re saying?”
Their grim expressions confirmed it.
“You’re wrong. If he were going out on the water with Elaine tonight, he would have told me.”
“Did they take the yacht out together often?”
“Not often. But there have been occasions.” She wet her lips. “Were you given a description of the man who was with her?”
“Not a very good one. No one actually saw him board the yacht. It was a gloomy dusk. The mist limited visibility. One witness said the man he saw in the wheelhouse was wearing a baseball cap. Other than that—”
“Baseball cap?”
At her startled reaction, Locke and his partner came to attention. Locke said, “That’s been confirmed. A baseball cap was found on the yacht.”
Talia wilted against the edge of the countertop. “Orange, with a white capital letter T?”
“University of Tennessee,” Locke said.
She covered her face with her hands.
“Does your husband own a cap like that?”
She shook her head, said no into her moist palms, then lowered her hands. Her throat seized. She had to swallow several times. “No. But our neighbor does.”
“Next door?”
“He rents the garage apartment behind the house next door.”
Menundez said to Locke, “The patrolmen who responded to the call about the alarm talked to that guy.”
Locke asked Talia, “Was he acquainted with Mrs. Conner?”
“Jasper and I introduced them.”
“What’s his name?”
Menundez was hurriedly swiping the screen of his phone. “I’ve got it here.”
“My name is Drex Easton.”
Startled, the three of them turned as one. He was standing in the open doorway between the screened porch and kitchen. How had he opened it without their hearing him? He was wearing the same dark suit he’d worn the night he escorted Elaine and her to dinner. The same shirt and tie.
But an altogether different countenance.
His right hand was raised and open to show a small leather wallet with a clear plastic window and a gold badge. His eyes zeroed in on Talia’s. “FBI Special Agent Drex Easton.”
Chapter 21
Rudkowski was sprawled on his hotel room bed, watching without much interest the dirty movie on the room’s flat screen, nursing his third scotch, and wondering how a man who weighed almost three fifty could vanish into thin air. It had been some trick, but Mike Mallory had managed it, and Rudkowski was made to look like a fool. Again.
His cell phone rang. He spilled half his whiskey in his haste to mute the bump-and-grind sound track and answer his phone. “Rudkowski.”
“It’s Deputy Gray.”
“Who?”
“In Key West. We talked a few days ago.”
“Oh, yeah, yeah.” Rudkowski sank back onto his pillow. “Make this quick, please. I’ve got a situation here.”
“I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m trying to reach Agent Easton, and, like the time before, he didn’t leave me his number this morning. It was my oversight. I should have made sure—”
“Hold it. This morning? You talked to Easton this morning?”
“Well, yesterday morning, officially.”
While Rudkowski had been licking his wounds and swilling cheap scotch, midnight had slipped past him. “Okay. Yesterday morning. Did he say where he was calling from?”
“Well, no, sir, but he can’t on account of him being—”
“Undercover.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why was he calling you?”
“Same as before. The Marian Harris case.”
“Specifically?”
“He asked if a Talia Shafer had been questioned during the investigation into Harris’s disappearance.”
Rudkowski rolled over and picked up the notepad and pen on the nightstand. “Spell the names, please. And who is she?”