“You know about the other woman?”
He might have stopped breathing. “Other woman?”
“That’s what I thought,” Erin said. “Her name was Sara Daniels. She was a twenty-one-year-old bartender who went missing from Hampton, Virginia, in April 2008. Twenty miles from where John Huggins lived.”
“No,” he admitted, “there was nothing about a second woman.” Then he cocked his head, his gaze taking aim at her. “Why is that? Could it be her case has nothing to do with Jack Calloway?”
“John Huggins. His name is John Huggins,” she ground out, and stepped around him. She slammed her car door, not caring that he barely snatched his fingers out of the way. “Sara Daniels was just like Lauren McAllister. Lonely, lost. Vulnerable to a handsome older man with a little sex appeal and plenty of money for cocaine. Do you have any women like that here in Hopewell?” He winced and Erin knew she was getting to him. “Then maybe you shouldn’t be trying to keep me quiet. Maybe you should get a bullhorn and alert the newspaper reporters and TV anchors and help warn people, instead of protecting a man—”
“Who is
presumed innocent
.” His voice vibrated with anger. “Lady, I don’t know why you’re so sure Jack Calloway is a beast, but there’s one thing I do know: No one is gonna come in my town and destroy a man with no cause—”
“No cause?”
“No cause.”
His voice ricocheted off concrete like a bullet. Erin was actually tempted to cower.
But she didn’t. “My, my,” she said, with deliberate calm. “We do have anger issues, don’t we?”
He ground out an inventive curse. “Understand something,
Doctor
Sims: Jack and Margaret Calloway are a valued part of this town. They run a respectable business and art studio and have a nephew who needs them. If you try pulling that media shit around here that you pulled in those other places, I’ll throw your ass in jail without a second thought.
Then
where will your brother be?”
The threat hit its mark. Justin. Dear God, this sheriff was turning into one more like all the others. He’d already decided that Justin was rightly condemned.
“Dead,” she said, her voice like chipped ice. “If you do that, he’ll be dead.”
“Ah, Christ.” He blew out a breath. Turned, and started walking.
“So, you’ll to talk to Calloway?”
He unlocked the door to the sheriff’s office and gestured her inside. “Sure. I have a report due to the Florida Attorney General, anyway. With any luck, you can hand-carry it there.”
Just after sunrise, a deputy pushed his way through the Sunday morning crowd that had gathered outside the sheriff’s office. Jack Calloway was with him.
“Get in here,” Nick said. He held the door with one hand, ignoring the ill-mannered shouts of reporters. He was wiped out. He’d left Dr. Sims dozing on a vinyl sofa at the station two hours ago. He’d run by his mother’s house and stretched out on top of the covers next to a sluggish Hannah for twenty minutes, then scraped a razor over his face. After that, he hit the phones—the judge, the mayor, the county commissioner—and once back in the office, paused just long enough to skim a series of newspaper articles that had appeared over the weekend and turned LeeAnn’s possum into a world event. Something about wasting the county money answering “911 calls of nature.”
That fucking Roach.
But he’d deal with her later. Right now he had a Florida whistle-blower in the break room and a respected citizen needing armed escort to get through the reporters on his stoop.
Quentin Vaega was the armed escort. He banged the door shut behind them.
“Holy hell,” he said, shaking the rain from his jacket. Water splattered everything in a six-foot radius. Samoan by blood, Quentin weighed two-forty and had spent eight years as a Cleveland Browns’ defensive back. He wasn’t often seen ducking and hiding like a child. “I haven’t been tackled like that since I left the Dog Pound.”
“Valeria,” Nick said, crossing to a desk in an annex of the lobby, where the department receptionist sat working the phone. “If you start getting calls from the media, I want to know.”
“
Sì,
Sheriff.” She said “Sher-eef.” Nick suspected she worked hard at the accent; she was from Michigan. “Sheriff?”
“What?”
“I start getting calls from the media since I come in at six.”
Seex.
“Well, shit,” Nick said. Sims hadn’t even been here for twenty-four hours yet, and already the Leslie Roaches of the world were in his face like vultures.
Detective Mann, your father-in-law has accused you of having multiple affairs during your marriage…
Detective Mann, how do you answer the accusation that you hired Bertrand Yost to murder your wife?
Detective Mann, is it true that you now stand to inherit a large fortune?
Nick shook off it off and herded Calloway to the largest interview room. He looked as if he hadn’t had much sleep, either. “You holding up?” Nick asked.
“I thought this was over,” Jack said. “Why is that woman doing this to me?”
“She thinks her brother’s about to die in your place.”
Jack slumped. He was a good-looking man in middle age, six feet tall and still basically fit, a little gray at the temples. If you looked hard enough, you’d notice that one iris was blue and the other green.
“You know what she’s done to me, right?” Jack asked. “You understand why I changed our names and moved here?”
“Listen, Jack,” Nick said, “this is probably all bullshit, but I can’t let an accusation like this hang over the town without looking at it. Besides which, I have a State Attorney General’s order to fulfill.”
“To do what?”
“To see if the Jack Calloway in my town is really John Huggins.”
“Why does that matter?”
It was a good question. The only reason Nick could think of was that if the Virginia case wound up holding water, the AG wanted to know where Huggins was in a hurry. “I’m guessing the Florida AG is just lining up ducks and locating the players.”
Jack narrowed his eyes: He knew better. “Should I call Dorian?”
Dorian Reinhardt was the type of lawyer who would revel in a case like this. Murder, a senator, multiple states, the death penalty. Christ, Nick was surprised Dorian hadn’t shown up yet for the photo op.
The prick.
“You don’t need him yet,” Nick said. “But he was at Hilltop last night, wasn’t he?”
“I called him when I saw Sims. He thinks she’ll blow this up big.”
And if she doesn’t, Dorian will
.
“We need to give something to the press, Nick,” Quent said. He’d been looking out the window.
“Give them the truth.” Not that the truth ever mattered to news-makers. “Tell them a local citizen is being questioned in a Florida case and say the Sheriff’s office is doing everything it can to cooperate with Federal officials, ya-da ya-da.”
“What about the name change?” Jack asked. “Won’t it make me look as if I had something to hide?”
“People are fond of you, Jack; you won’t be tarred and feathered for looking for a new start in life. But,” he said, “I’m going to ask you point-blank, man-to-man: Did you kill Lauren McAllister?”
“No.”
“But you knew her?”
“I’d met her.” Jack’s eyes flicked down and left.
Lie,
Nick thought, and a coil of doubt began to twist in his gut. “She was in one of Margaret’s sculpture classes. I saw her around.”
“And?”
“And, nothing. I saw her around.”
“What about Sara Daniels?”
Jack blinked, and Nick had to admit the bewilderment looked real.
“In Virginia. She was a bartender who disappeared in 2008, while you and Margaret lived in Lawrenceville.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Apparently, the court’s looking into that, too.”
Bewilderment turned to shock. Jack shook his head. “I can’t believe this—”
“Sheriff?” Valeria stuck her head in the door. “The commissioner is on the phone.”
“Tell him to go fuck himself.”
“
Sì,
sir,” she said, and ducked out.
Quentin looked at Nick. “Better stop her, man. She’ll do it.”
Christ. Nick looked at Jack: He had to ask. “Where were you on Friday night?”
Jack frowned at him. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“Is this about that Sitton girl?” he asked, getting angry now. “Erin Sims comes to town and suddenly I’m a suspect for every—”
“Where were you, Jack?”
His Adam’s apple bobbed. “At Hilltop. Playing cards with the McCormicks until twelve-thirty or so. After that I was in bed, like any normal person.”
Nick nodded. The ME had put Carrie’s death between 12:00 and 2:00. But then, this wasn’t about Carrie. Her case was for the Carroll County sheriff and the Cleveland guys.
He turned to Quent. “Get the newsmakers off my front stoop, and take a formal statement from Jack. Jack, go home.”
“What about Sims?”
A new voice. They all turned to see Dorian Reinhardt standing in the doorway.
“Sheriff, are you talking to my client without his attorney present?” He strutted in wearing a gray silk suit with a pink Volare necktie, which he petted and twisted so everyone could see the designer tag on the back.
Prick.
“Since Jack isn’t charged with anything,” Nick said, “an attorney seemed irrelevant.”
Dorian puffed up. “I just talked to Judge Watkins. We’re filing a new restraining order. He wants to see Sims in chambers.”
“This morning? It’s Sunday.”
“You’re the one who called him back from his hunting trip.”
Not exactly, Nick thought, but closed his eyes, realizing that he wasn’t going to be able to head this thing off at the pass. Hopewell was about to be on the morning news; Jack would be under a microscope. And it was going to take more than a restraining order and a warning from an old judge to blow Erin Sims out of town.
Nick turned to Jack. “Like I said. Go home. Don’t talk to anybody but Margaret and Rodney. Let me clean this mess up.”
Dorian’s lip curled. “Already done, Sheriff,” he said, picking up his briefcase. “Be sure to get Sims to the courthouse at nine.”
J
ACK PUSHED THROUGH
the reporters with Dorian saying, “He’s innocent, he’s innocent…” and heard Deputy Vaega offer to answer questions behind him. He got into his truck and headed toward Hilltop House, grateful when the reporters stayed behind to hear Vaega.
Damn Erin Sims. Just when life had evened out. The inn was thriving, Margaret’s notoriety as a sculptor was growing. She was happy. Even their nephew Rodney had settled in—he had his own place and made an honest living working at Hilltop House. With Justin Sims’s prison term close to an end, Jack had finally begun to believe the horror of Lauren McAllister’s death was behind them.
Not anymore.
The weather was cold and abysmal, but Jack was sweating by the time he got home. A reporter had camped out in the parking lot and he waved her away, walking through the inn and outside to the barn. When he’d bought the place, he’d turned the barn into a studio for Margaret—a huge space filled with tables and counters, all piled with clays and glazes and sculptures and tools. At the far end, an enclosed porch held two medium-sized
kilns, and at the back, Jack had built an additional vented room for an industrial-model kiln she used for her largest sculptures. She’d since gotten rid of that beast and now focused on smaller pieces like her masks.
“Maggie?” he called, and stopped short. Something moved behind a table.
He looked and let out a breath. “Calvin,” he said. “I didn’t know you were there.”
Calvin rose from the floor, a collection of lean gangly limbs and scraggly facial hair. He and his mother, who worked for Margaret as a breakfast cook and maid, lived in an apartment in the second story of the barn. He shook his head at brain-rattling speed.
“Broke, broke, broke,” he said. “Pieces.”
Jack looked down. Shards of clay lay scattered on the floor. He bent down to pick them up. Calvin was capable but would obsess over the clean-up. He was autistic and little things could send his mind in circles. He was also a savant. He sometimes spoke in times and temperatures and dates—a strange quirk of neurology that allowed him to recite accurate dates and temperatures from weeks or even years ago.
“Where’s Margaret?” Jack asked.
Calvin nodded to the porch. “Nine-hundred-and-fifty degrees Fahrenheit, eight-twenty-six a.m., November eleventh, two-thousand-twelve. Nine-hundred-and-fifty degrees Fahrenheit, eight-twenty-six…”
He started repeating himself, but Jack understood: It was 8:26 on November 11th, and Margaret was on the porch firing pottery. At 950 degrees.
“You better get going,” Jack said. “Your mom will want you in church.”
“Pieces, pieces, pieces…” Calvin hauled his backpack
over his shoulder and left in a string of repeated words, and Jack went into the back room. Margaret was stacking the cones at a kiln, the digital temperature display reading 950°F and flashing the word
HOLD
. A set of unfired vases choked with clay vines sat on the counter, awaiting their turn in the fire.
“Maggie.”
She turned, her skirt swirling around her calves and her eyes meeting his. Sometimes his heart still stuttered when he looked at her. She was beyond beautiful—dark, soulful eyes and soft lashes, porcelain skin that had only gained character with the fine creases of age, delicate cheekbones and a soft, slender jaw. Indeed, there had been only one other woman in the world who matched her in physical beauty: her twin, Rodney’s mother.
“You haven’t called me that in a long time,” she said, her voice low.
John sighed. No, he hadn’t. “We need to talk.”
“I heard. Lauren McAllister, again.”
“And there’s more,” Jack said. “A woman disappeared from Virginia a few years ago.”
“Sara Daniels.”
He flinched, then shook his head. Of course, the news was out already.
“We were there, John,” she said, her eyes dark with shadows. “We lived only forty minutes away.”
Jack stared. “For God’s sake, Maggie. You can’t think I killed Sara Daniels.”