Whispers at Midnight (49 page)

“Belong to anybody I know?” Matt was standing beside her with her bag slung over his shoulder.

Carly opened the wallet and looked at the driver’s license. An attractive red-haired woman stared back at her from the tiny photo.

“Marsha Mary Hughes,” she read.

The effect on Matt was immediate and electric.

“What?”
he said, and took the wallet from her, looking down at the driver’s license in its plastic case as if he couldn’t believe his eyes.

34

“I
’
VE GOT A COUPLE
of questions for you,” Matt said when Keith Kenan opened the door to his apartment in response to Matt’s knock. “Mind if I come in?”

Kenan looked less than happy, but he stepped back in silent acquiescence. It was a little after two
P.M.
on Monday, some six hours after Annie had refocused Matt’s attention on Marsha Hughes’s disappearance in a big way. At the moment, men and dogs were scouring the grounds around the Beadle Mansion for any trace of Marsha’s body. Carly was safe at his house in the care of Sammy Brooks. And Annie—well, Annie still had a role to play.

“I don’t know nothing about Marsha,” Kenan said, already belligerent as he closed the door behind Matt. The man was wearing long, baggy gym shorts and a black tee shirt with the sleeves ripped off, the better, Matt judged, to show off his pumped arms. A quick glance around showed Matt that the apartment was maybe a little dirtier than the last time he had visited, but essentially unchanged. The gold drapes were open this time, allowing daylight in. As far as he could tell, Kenan was alone.

“You haven’t heard from her?” Matt asked, keeping his tone conversational. Butting heads with Kenan at this point would be the worst thing he could do.

“Not a squeak since the night she left. Look, I gotta go in to work early today, and I’ve got stuff I gotta do first. Can you make this quick?”

“I’ll do my best.”

Kenan was approximately the right height, the right build, the right coloring. Matt focused on his eyes: pale blue; lashes blond like his hair and possibly difficult to see under certain lighting conditions—such as those in an old-fashioned bathroom. Could two of the letters on the handkerchief possibly have been KK?

“I thought you said you were going to find her. You were sending out flyers and shit.”

“We’ve been trying. She hasn’t touched a penny in her bank account, and she hasn’t used any of her credit cards. I have to tell you, things in that department aren’t looking good.” Matt crossed the room toward the table, which was clear of dishes but dusty.

Kenan tracked his progress, folding his arms over his chest and turning his head to keep Matt in sight. “So what do you want to ask me?”

“Why don’t you have a seat?”

Kenan’s lips compressed, but he pulled out one of the dining chairs and sat. Matt got a good look at both knees. No marks that he could see. The guy couldn’t have healed this fast. Had Carly been mistaken about the part of the anatomy she hit? A possibility.

“So,” Kenan asked.

“I want you to look at something for me. Mind if I put this down here?”
This
referred to the briefcase he was carrying. At Kenan’s gesture telling him to go ahead, Matt put the case on the table and opened it. Kenan frowned as he watched Matt lift out Marsha’s purse, which was carefully preserved in a Ziploc bag and destined to be exhaustively examined for forensic evidence after being delivered to the state crime lab later that day. Showing what was potentially a major piece of evidence to a subject of an investigation before sending it to the lab was slightly unorthodox, but Matt wanted to see what Kenan had to say about its discovery—and he wanted to watch Kenan’s eyes while he said it.

“Ever seen this before?” He held the purse up so that Kenan could get a good look at it.

Kenan looked and shrugged. “It’s a purse. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“It’s got Marsha’s identification in it.”

Kenan’s eyes widened. “Are you saying that’s Marsha’s purse?” He looked more closely, leaning in and peering through the clear plastic bag at the grimy black vinyl. “Yeah, I guess it could be. I guess it is.”

As a man himself, Matt didn’t find anything amiss in Kenan’s failure to recognize his former live-in lady’s purse. Purses were not part of the landscape most men saw. But Kenan’s failure to be alarmed at the discovery of the purse told him something: either Kenan was a heck of an actor, or he had no reason to worry because the purse had been found.

“Did she take her purse with her the night she left?” Matt asked, restoring the bagged purse to the briefcase and closing it.

Kenan grimaced, looking as if he were trying to remember. “Yeah. Yeah, she did. She grabbed it and—”

“Ran like hell out of here,” Matt finished dryly when Kenan broke off with the air of a man who had just realized he was about to shoot himself in the foot. “We’ve already been over that part, remember?”

“I didn’t touch her,” Kenan said, running both hands over his head. “Not that night. If something’s happened to her it wasn’t me who done it. Sheriff, I swear—”

There was a knock on the door. Kenan frowned and glanced at it almost hesitantly. Matt wondered who Kenan was expecting that he didn’t want the law to see, or vice versa. Not that he particularly cared, at the moment. What he cared about was getting information about Marsha Hughes. If her purse was under Carly’s porch, then her body was very likely somewhere in the same vicinity. If her body was there, then the chances were high that it had been put there, and the chances that she had not died a natural death were even higher.

What they were dealing with in that case was a murderer operating on the grounds of the Beadle Mansion. And the odds that there were two separate killers—or, rather, a successful killer and a failed killer—both doing their thing on the same property within such a short span of time were so slim as to be practically nonexistent. Ergo, whoever had killed Marsha Hughes had tried to kill Carly.

What was the connection?

“That should be one of my deputies at the door,” Matt said when it seemed Kenan wasn’t going to answer the knock. He had wanted to wait to introduce this new line of questioning until after he had seen Kenan’s reaction to the purse. “You want to let him in?”

“If you found the purse,” Kenan said slowly, moving to the door, “does that mean you found Marsha?”

It had taken him a little while, but Kenan had finally heard the other shoe drop.

“Not yet,” Matt said.

Kenan opened the door. Antonio stood in the hall with Annie in his arms.

“Kenan,” Antonio said curtly in greeting, and then his gaze went past him to find Matt. Behind Kenan’s back, Matt gave a slight, negative shake of his head.

“You care if Deputy Johnson comes in?” Matt asked.

Kenan’s face tightened, but he stood back, and Antonio walked past him.

“Is that some kind of drug-sniffing dog?” Kenan asked suspiciously, staring at Annie. The little dog seemed to quail at the sound of his voice.

Matt now knew with almost one hundred percent certainty that Kenan was engaged in at least one type of illegal activity. The guy had, indeed, shot himself in the foot with his mouth. Obviously he was not the sharpest tack on the board. But at the moment Matt wasn’t interested in what kind of drugs Kenan was scoring.

Antonio stopped and put Annie down. Looking at her, Matt almost felt sorry for the poor little thing. She stood shivering and glancing around, looking nervous as hell.

“What’s with the dog?” Kenan asked, frowning down at Annie with no recognition that Matt could see. “It’s not getting ready to pee on my rug, is it?”

Annie seemed to shiver more than ever at the sound of his voice. Her head lowered, and her tail curled between her legs.

“You ever seen her before?”

Kenan frowned.

Matt continued with hard-won patience: “Last time I was here,
you said that the fight you and Marsha had was over her feeding baloney to a dog. Is this the dog?”

Kenan looked at Annie more closely. The dog cringed, pressing her belly to the rug.

“It might be. It was an ugly little black mutt, all right. Yeah, I think it is.”

Matt felt his stomach tighten. He was on the right track here. He’d known it from the time he’d seen the ID in the wallet.

“Here, Annie.” Now that the identification had been made, he couldn’t stand to see Carly’s dog looking so cowed. He bent, scooped her up and patted her. She trembled still in his hold, but wagged her tail feebly to show that she appreciated being picked up by someone she recognized as a friend. Matt looked at Kenan. “So Marsha fed your baloney to the dog. Where? Here in this apartment? Then what happened?”

Kenan hesitated.

Matt had to work to curb his impatience. “Look, for what it’s worth, I don’t think you had anything to do with Marsha’s disappearance. But I think you have information that can help us find her—and if we find her and you had nothing to do with it, we leave you alone, so there’s a benefit in this for you, too. Just tell me what happened, and I’ll ignore anything that doesn’t relate to the big picture, okay? Stuff like you threatening her, or chasing her, that kind of thing.”

Kenan looked from him to Antonio—who, thank God, managed to look relatively benign standing there with an impassive expression on his face and his arms crossed over his chest—and grimaced.

“Start with the dog,” Matt said.

“She had it here in the apartment when I came home from work. She was always picking up strays, and I was getting sick of it. Anyway, I told her we couldn’t keep it, then went into the kitchen to grab something to eat. What I wanted was a baloney sandwich, but the baloney was gone. I knew right then that she’d fed it to the damned dog. So I said something to her, and by the time I came out of the kitchen she was heading out the apartment door.”

“Did she have the dog with her?”

“She was carrying it.”

“What about her purse?”

“Yeah, she would have had to have her purse. She always kept her keys in it, and she got in her car and drove off.”

“Okay, let’s back up a little. She ran out of here with the dog and her purse, and you chased her down to the parking lot, is that right?”

Kenan looked uncomfortable.

“Like I said the last time we were here,” Antonio said, his stare intimidating now, “we
know.
”

“Okay,” Kenan said, wetting his lips and looking from one to the other of them. “I chased her into the parking lot. I was mad, okay? But I didn’t hurt her. I didn’t catch her. She hopped in her car and peeled rubber right past me and drove out of the parking lot. That’s the last time I ever saw her. I swear.”

“Did she have the dog with her in the car?” Matt asked.

“Yeah, she did. I could see the stupid little mutt in the passenger seat as she drove past.”

Yes. Bingo. The dog was in the car. That meant the dog was probably with Marsha when she was killed. The dog had been at the Beadle Mansion the night Carly had arrived. The dog had dragged out the purse.

The dog was the key.

“Marsha have any enemies? Anyone who’d want to hurt her?”

“You asked me that before, and I answered before. No. Not that I know of.” Kenan was starting to sound agitated. He paced toward the window, casting a quick, surreptitious glance at the clock as he passed it. “Can you hurry this up? I got things to do.”

“You can talk to us here, or we can take you in and you can talk to us there,” Antonio said.

Kenan shot him a quick, resentful look.

“We’re almost done here,” Matt said in his role of good cop. “Can you fill me in on Marsha’s background a little? I’ve been trying to get in touch with her sister and her ex-husbands, but so far I’m not having any luck.”

Kenan snorted. “The husbands are a pair of losers, and Marsha never saw the sister. They didn’t grow up together. Their mom was a
druggie, and they spent most of their time in foster homes. Different foster homes. Marsha said some of the places were pretty bad.”

Matt thought about that, about what happened to a child when the parents were missing or irresponsible and the impact it had on the child’s life. Carly, abandoned by her mother as a little girl, had been rescued by her grandmother before any real damage could be done to her, but the experience had left her scrappy, feisty—and also a little unsure of herself inside. She still had nightmares… .

Matt felt as if a lightbulb had suddenly been turned on in his head. He looked at Kenan with dawning excitement.

“Did Marsha ever mention anything about the County Home for Innocents? Do you know if she ever stayed there?”

“Yeah, she did,” Keith said. “I remember her telling me about some donkey they had. I told you, she liked animals. She never said much else about it, though, except that it was kind of a weird place.”

There it was: the connection. He’d known there had to be one. Marsha and Carly had both stayed at the Home as children. Marsha was dead, somebody wanted Carly dead, and all these years later Carly still had nightmares about the brief time she’d spent there. If he had learned anything in his years in law enforcement, it was this: in criminal investigations, there was no such thing as coincidence.