Whispers at Midnight (50 page)
He’d be willing to bet a year’s pay that the perp had some connection to that Home.
By the time they left the apartment, Matt had ascertained that as far as Kenan knew, Marsha had not kept in touch with anyone from the Home, had never been contacted by anyone who’d stayed at the Home, and had only received the occasional mass mailing from the Home itself as part of what sounded like a perpetual fund solicitation effort aimed at the general public.
He had also obtained permission to search Marsha’s computer after Kenan had mentioned in passing that Marsha had been spending more time than usual on it in the last few days before she had disappeared. Maybe somebody had been in touch with her by e-mail. Or maybe she’d been in touch with somebody. Maybe she’d visited a telltale site. Who knew?
“We’re
gonna search this computer?” Antonio asked skeptically,
holding the bulky, old model in his arms as they trudged down the stairs. After the air-conditioned apartment the concrete stairwell felt like a furnace. It smelled faintly musty, like mold was growing somewhere. The metal stair treads were almost slick beneath their feet, a result, Matt knew, of the prolonged humidity. He’d just about given up hope that they were going to see a break in the heat anytime soon.
“Yeah, we are,” Matt said, bearing his own twin burdens of Annie and the briefcase. The heat might not break, but the case was about to, he was almost sure, their combined departmental lack of computer expertise notwithstanding. “If worse comes to worst, that Andy kid Lissa dates is a computer freak. Antonio, the connection between Marsha Hughes and Carly is the County Home for the Innocents. They both were there as kids. The perp has to have some kind of connection to it. It’s the only link between them that I can see.”
“I saw you picking up on something in there that I wasn’t quite getting. So Carly was at the Home? I didn’t know that. I thought she grew up in well-off circumstances with her grandmother.”
“That was later. As a little girl she had it kind of rough.”
They reached the bottom of the stairs. A slim young blonde in a red halter top and shorts so tiny there wasn’t much point pulled open the door from the parking lot at about that time. She stepped inside and headed toward them, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the relative gloom of the hall, then all but stopped dead as she saw Matt and Antonio and took in the uniforms. It took her just an instant to collect herself again and keep on coming with a nervous little
hi
for them as she passed, but the damage had been done. If they’d been looking for an easy bust, Matt had little doubt they would have found it right there.
“Wonder where she’s got it stashed?” Antonio asked dryly as Matt pulled open the door and they stepped out into the blinding sunlight.
“The possibilities boggle the mind.” Squinting against the glare, hitching Annie higher up under his arm, Matt headed toward the cruiser which, thanks to some asphalt resurfacing being done up close to the building, was parked near the back of the lot.
Antonio kept pace beside him. “Carly doing okay? Sandra says
that a couple of times since they’ve been sharing a room she’s woken her up crying out from nightmares.”
“She has nightmares,” Matt said grimly. “But otherwise she’s okay. Well, as okay as about five foot two inches of nothing can be when she knows that there’s some man out there trying to kill her.”
“I really want to catch this creep,” Antonio said as they reached the car. “He sliced my woman up. That makes it personal.”
“Yeah,” Matt said, walking around to the driver’s side and meeting Antonio’s gaze over the top of the car. “That does kind of make it personal.”
W
HEN THE MAN
saw the men with dogs and the men with metal detectors and the men with long metal poles moving systematically over the grounds of the Beadle Mansion, he almost ran off the road. There were sheriff’s department vehicles parked along the front, too, and down by the road the old woman who lived across the street stood talking a mile a minute to one of the deputies.
That they were searching for something he had no doubt. The question was, what? But much as he hated to face it he had little doubt about the answer to that, too. They had to be searching for a body. Or bodies. The only question was, whose?
Marsha’s? Or Soraya’s? Or both?
How the hell had they found out?
Cool as a creek in summer, he drove right on past, even honked and waved at the old lady and the deputy as country people were wont to do. Then he turned at the next intersection and made his way back to town and got to The Corner Café at just about supper time.
He didn’t even have to ask. The place was abuzz with the news.
Forking down his meat loaf and mashed potatoes, he just kind of guided the conversation.
No, they hadn’t found a body yet. They were sure looking, though. The
sheriff had been out to the Beadle Mansion this morning with Carly Linton—it was her grandma’s house—and they’d found something that made them think that the cashier at the Winn-Dixie who’d gone missing a few weeks back might be buried up there. Marsha something. Marsha Hughes.
So they’d found something that would eventually lead them to Marsha. If they found Marsha, unless they were totally inept, they were going to find Soraya, too. If they found Soraya it shouldn’t take long to trace the connection with Carly, and once they did that it was only a matter of time before they came looking for him.
He started sweating at the thought. Carly knew who he was. She had been there that night, too.
She’d been a little girl, he didn’t know how old exactly, but almost certainly less than ten. Younger than the others. Maybe she hadn’t realized what was happening. Maybe she didn’t know, or didn’t remember, or at least didn’t know or remember enough to put it all together.
But maybe she did.
He realized that he was faced with a choice. He could cut his losses and walk away, leave her alone and trust to luck that they wouldn’t somehow goad her into remembering, that either she really hadn’t seen or she’d been too young and didn’t understand or that she had somehow repressed the memory as he’d heard trauma sometimes caused people to do. Or that she’d be too afraid to say anything if she did remember.
He’d chosen that last route before, and almost gotten burned.
Or he could go for it, go for the gold, for the score, for the slam dunk that won the game. Without Carly, who was the only one left alive to tell, he didn’t think there was any way that anyone would ever find out the truth of what had happened, much less manage to link it to him. They might find Marsha and Soraya, they might even manage to link them back to the County Home and to Carly, but there were no records of him there, no records of what had happened, nothing at all to fill in the dots for them.
Except Carly.
As he thought about it, he realized that he really didn’t have much choice after all. Once they found those bodies—and they would
eventually, if they were that close—it was all going to come out if Carly had any memory of what had happened. With the wisdom of hindsight, he realized that it had been boneheaded of him to have concealed them on her property. But of course he couldn’t know how things would go down, or even that she had any plan to return to her childhood home. It was one of those things that had seemed like a good idea at the time. He’d been doing his homework on his three victims-to-be, finding out where they lived and watching them, when he had gone by Carly’s childhood home and discovered that it was deserted. Empty. No one lived there. All that acreage on top of that hill well away from neighbors, well away from the road—who could ask for a better killing ground? Or burying ground.
Of course, if he’d known Carly was going to come back like that and take up residence there again he wouldn’t have used it as he had, but he hadn’t known. You make the best choices you can at the time, and you live with them.
Which was what he was doing now. Making the best choice he could. And it wasn’t even a difficult one. To keep himself safe, he had to get rid of her.
The fact that Carly was now under the sheriff’s protective wing, living in his house with what seemed to be most of the population of the county, trailing a deputy behind her everywhere she went, made things harder.
But not impossible. If he thought about it, if he watched and waited and stayed nearby, luck would hand him an opportunity.
Luck was going against him right now, but it would turn his way again. It always did.
And when it did, just like he had promised her after she had stabbed him in the leg in her house, Carly Linton was dead.
B
Y MIDNIGHT
W
EDNESDAY,
Carly was starting to get just a tad annoyed. Not angry, mind you. Just the teeniest little bit bent out of shape. After professing his love and vowing that his kiss-and-run deal was a thing of the past, Matt had once again done just that. She had not seen him since he had brought her home on Monday morning, walked her into the house, dropped a quick, hard but unmistakably preoccupied kiss on her lips, and vanished back out the door.
He was working flat-out, she knew, following up on hot leads meant to link the body he was sure was buried somewhere on her property, even though it had not yet been found, to the monster who had attacked her. Doing that would somehow identify the attacker—both Sammy and Mike, who had also pulled baby-sitting detail and were the sources of her information, were unsure as to precisely how—so that was a good thing for her.
Except she really, really missed Matt.
The only thing that made her feel any better was that Sandra was similarly bereft. Even Lissa’s Andy had basically disappeared for two days, having been roped in to help out with a computer that had somehow become part of the investigation. During that time period Carly had endured endless teasing over the night she had spent with Matt, done what work she could in connection with her bed-and-breakfast—comparing
insurance rates, going over ads that were due to start running in September, when they were scheduled to be open for business, arranging for regular deliveries of the premium foodstuffs they would need if Sandra’s genius was to be allowed full rein—and had helped out as much as she could with the hundred and one last-minute things that needed to be done to get ready for Erin’s wedding on Saturday. It was to be a small, intimate affair (this was Lissa’s description) for approximately three hundred guests, so there were lots of small but important chores.
Good thing the wedding presents were being stored at Erin’s new house, Lissa said. Otherwise they’d all have to move out.
When Matt unexpectedly walked in the front door followed by Antonio, Carly had given up all hope of seeing him that night. She was in the living room along with Sandra, Lissa, Erin, Dani and Mike, who was on guard duty, and Annie, on the floor, and Hugo, stretched out in Matt’s empty recliner. At Erin’s request, the women were tying birdseed up in little white tulle bags for throwing at the new couple on Saturday. Mike, having declined the chore, was leaning back on the couch in the midst of the chaos, watching TV with his arms crossed over his chest and a disgruntled expression on his face that told Carly at least that he was not being as successful at ignoring the activity going on around him as he pretended.
Considering that Erin was being almost too cheerfully vivacious, Carly could not help but think that getting under Mike’s skin was the primary point of the activity.
“What is this, party central?” Matt asked as he stopped just inside the door to survey the scene. Dressed in cutoffs and a tee shirt, Carly was sitting cross-legged on the floor with a length of curling silver ribbon between her teeth. He looked tired and a little irritable, and her heart leaped at the sight of him. She had to finish off her bow before she could smile at him. By the time she did, he had exchanged greetings with everybody else and was standing over her, looking down with the smallest of smiles.
“I’m starving,” he said. “Want to come out in the kitchen with me while I grab something to eat?”