Plunder: A Faye Longchamp Mystery #7 (Faye Longchamp Series) (28 page)

“You were just riding around with boys who had brand-new driver’s licenses, hoping to get hold of a fake ID that looked enough like you to fool bar bouncers. Maybe you might have been better off with possible murderers.”

“Exactly how is that observation supposed to help me sleep better at night?”

Benoit emitted a sharp noise that might have been a laugh, but sounded more like, “Heh.” Then he did it again, as if he were trying to convince himself that the situation was funny. “I told you that I have a baby sister about Amande’s age. I don’t sleep at night, no. Maybe one day I’ll get used to it.”

“You think you’ll get used to watching your sister grow up and start hanging around with men?”

“No. I’m thinking I might get used to not sleeping at night. But we were talking about Dane Sechrist. What do we know about him? We know that everything in his story is something we can check out. By the end of the day, we’ll know if he really did grow up in a nice home on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and we’ll know whether he did all that other stuff he told me. As I said before, Mr. Sechrist is the Boy Scout on our suspect list.”

“But now we also know that he talked to Amande a week or more ago, before Hebert died and before you or I even knew she was alive. And he didn’t tell you about that, now did he?” Her next thought was a new one, tying two pieces of information neatly together. “And we know for sure that he knew about the Spanish coins. Amande said she showed them to him, and she said that he was sorry to hear that they’d been stolen.”

“Praise God. My highly paid consultant has finally stopped trying to do my job for me, and she’s started talking about the archaeology stuff, which is what I hired her for. So Dane knew about the coins. That means what, exactly? He talked to a pretty girl who’s interested in the same things he is. He saw her in Manny’s bar, sitting with a couple of lowlifes, and he talked to her again. I’ll admit that it bothers me that she showed him the coins and now they’re gone, but maybe she tells a lot of people about those coins. She showed them to
you
, almost as soon as she met you.”

This time it was Faye’s turn to belch out a “Heh,” because she didn’t have a ready answer for him. Time to change the subject again. “So you think it’s a good idea for Amande to spend time with Dane Sechrist?”

“Did I say that? Hell, no, it’s not okay for a teenaged girl to spend time with a man that age. But I don’t say that because I think he’s more likely to be our killer than any of the other characters hanging around that marina. I just say that because he’s too old.”

On this point, Faye agreed with him.

“Have you gotten any more information on the time of death for either Hebert or Miranda?”

“In both cases, eyewitnesses are giving us better information than we can get from a forensics lab. Hebert was seen alive at a bar near the marina just a few hours before you found him.”

“I didn’t find him. Amande did. Poor kid.”

“Yeah, you’re right on all counts. You didn’t find him and she did. And that makes me want to say, ‘Poor kid,’ too. Anyway, other than Dane Sechrist and Manny, the poor kid was also the last person to see Miranda alive that we know about. The fact that both bodies were found in the water is a complicating factor.”

“Because it changes the rate at which they lose body heat?”

“You got it,” Benoit said. “You think like a scientist. The water temperature is way up in the seventies right now, so a dead body that started at ninety-eight-point-six doesn’t have far to go. A body immersed in seventy-five-degree water is going to get to seventy-five degrees fast, just because of convective heat transfer, and then it’s gonna stay there. We know that much. Also, we know that both victims were dead when they went in the water.”

“No water in the lungs?”

“Not much. So there’s no way to know whether Hebert’s body cooled off in a bar’s parking lot for hours, then got dumped in the gulf, or whether he went straight in the water and cooled off quickly there. The same thing’s true for Miranda. She could’ve died right after she left Manny’s place, or she could’ve died hours later, shortly before we found her. There are just too many variables, and the time frame is just too short.”

“What was Steve Daigle’s alibi?”

“It’s the same for the days of both murders. He’s staying in a motel a few miles from the marina. Steve claims he slept late both days—”

“Plausible. That’s what drunks do.”

“True. Then he says he ate an early lunch at the marina both days—which checks out with Manny—then spent both afternoons at some nearby bars.”

“Any witnesses at the bars?”

“Yeah, but they’re not real upstanding citizens. And the fact that he moved from one bar to another by himself shoots a big hole in his alibi. It gave him time alone to do both killings, easy.”

Faye tried to picture Steve as he started getting drunk at one establishment, then moved to another, and then another. “Why do you think he was moving around like that?”

“Looking for someone, I expect. Maybe Didi or somebody we don’t know about yet. Or maybe he just kept looking for bars with prettier women. We know he was with Didi when the sheriff finally found her and told her about her mother.”

“He let her come home alone, after news like that? What a gentleman.”

Who was she forgetting? There must have been others who might have killed Miranda, but who would want an old lady dead?

“What about Tebo?”

“Tebo is the least likely suspect among our three drunks. No, make that four drunks—Tebo, Steve, Didi, and Didi’s husband, Stan. On the day of Miranda’s death, he started making a spectacle of himself at a bar several miles from here about lunchtime. When the bartender had enjoyed quite enough of that, he had Tebo arrested—along with Didi’s husband Stan, who you don’t know enough about to wonder where he was. The two of them were within eyeshot of dozens of bleary eyes all afternoon, then they were in jail. I can’t account for their whereabouts all morning, but if somebody killed Miranda that morning, then both Dane and Manny are lying, which makes them better suspects than Tebo and Stan. I think it’s pretty unlikely either Tebo or Stan killed Miranda, but I’m still checking out their alibis for the day of Hebert’s death.”

Faye nodded abstractedly, because she was still trying to think of more suspects. As if she thought that the list of disagreeable people in her immediate vicinity was somehow too short.

Manny worked just a few steps away, so the fact that he was on the job from dawn till bedtime that day meant absolutely nothing. He could have walked away, killed Miranda or Hebert, as the case may be, then gone back to work. People would have just assumed he’d taken a bathroom break. But why would Manny have killed a woman who’d been renting a slip from him for years? And what did he—or anybody—have to gain from killing Hebert at all?

“Help me think through the people who would benefit from Miranda’s death,” she said.

“I can’t think of any motive other than her possessions. She may have been a voodoo mambo, but she didn’t seem to be active outside her own home, so I don’t think she was out in the world making enemies through her magic. People tend to be a little skittish about killing folks skilled in the dark arts, anyway. And I don’t think she was out there stealing somebody’s boyfriend or breaking some poor man’s heart, either. I think this is about greed. Either somebody wanted to steal her stuff—and they sure didn’t get much, if they did—or they wanted to inherit her stuff.”

“This is probably a question for a lawyer, but it’s my understanding that the only heirs are Steve, Didi, and Amande. You and Joe are Amande’s alibi.”

“Like she’s really a suspect?”

“I was just trying to be complete. Didi’s giving the same alcoholic alibi as Steve: She says she slept late on the day her mother was killed, and then she got up and went drinking, winding up with Steve at the end of the day. She claims to have been alone at the apartment she shared with Stan on the day Hebert died, and nobody has admitted to seeing her around these parts until a day later, so her story tracks. I don’t think that skinny girl stabbed her big ol’ stepbrother to death, nor that she slashed her mother’s throat. Something tells me that Miranda, even pushing seventy, could have taken on Didi, just out of sheer strength of will. But I absolutely believe that Didi could charm a man into doing murder for her.”

“So it’s possible that Steve and Didi are in cahoots?”

“Between the two of them, they will control way more than half of both the houseboat and the stock. As Amande’s guardian, Didi could also tap into Amande’s assets a lot easier than we’d hope, so she’s probably looking pretty good to Steve right now. If you were an uneducated alcoholic that didn’t like to work, wouldn’t a free place to live and a small monthly income sound really good to you? Especially if there was a good-looking woman living there who liked scumbags such as yourself?”

Truth be told, a free place to live and a small monthly income sounded pretty good to Faye right that minute, and she was a highly educated professional who was capable of getting tipsy on a beer and a half.

Benoit kept dissecting Didi’s and Steve’s motives. “I’m not surprised to see them strike up a romance—”

“Romance is such a…pretty…word for anything Steve and Didi might do.”

“Granted. Let’s say instead that I’m not surprised to see them hooking up, and that doesn’t bode well for Amande’s future. But I don’t see how they could have conspired to kill Hebert, if Didi truly wasn’t in town yet and hadn’t met Steve. Her mother? I devoutly hope Didi didn’t conspire with him to kill Miranda. That would be just too terrible.”

Faye agreed, but she wasn’t sure she’d put it past Didi.

“Absolutely nothing we’ve said about possible motives applies to Hebert,” she pointed out. “His killing didn’t affect the inheritance of Miranda’s boat and stock one bit. He was never an heir to anything, other than maybe a few of her fairly worthless personal possessions. He had nothing of his own, so nobody killed him for his stuff, either. He seems to have had no contact with any of his family members for years prior to his death. If he has any relationship to Dane or Steve or Manny or Stan, we don’t know about it. So why is the man dead? Is it possible that the deaths were unrelated? Was he really killed in a random bar brawl just three days before his mother was murdered? Or is it possible that we don’t understand the reasons for either killing?”

“Oh, we don’t understand the reasons, I know that for sure. But I don’t believe that their deaths were unrelated.”

“Because it’s just too unlikely that the murders happened so close together?”

“No. It’s not too unlikely, not at all. Stranger things have happened here in these swamps, believe it. No, ma’am, I say I think the murders are related, because I saw both bodies. The murder weapons were different, but they were both sharp implements, and violent people have clear preferences in the way they do their violence.”

Faye thought that made sense, in a twisted kind of way.

“The marks on the bodies weren’t exactly the same, but my gut tells me that it was the same person, using the motions that felt the most comfortable. Someone struck Hebert a death blow or three from behind, while he was still standing, which is about the only way to kill a man that size easily, when you’re using a knife. There were abrasions on his throat, from where the killer grabbed him for leverage, and there were marks on his side where somebody kicked him damn hard. But the first deep stab wound was the thing that immobilized him. By the time the third one struck, he was paralyzed and bleeding from his aorta. Dying didn’t take long.”

Faye really didn’t want to hear the answer, but she asked the next obvious question. “And Miranda?”

“Killing an old lady the size of a pelican ain’t hard. She had some broken fingers, probably because she’d hidden that basket tool in her pocket, then tried to use it to defend herself. We haven’t found it, and we don’t know where the killing happened, but there’s no blood in the house or anywhere around. We found the spot by the water where Hebert was stabbed, and there wasn’t a whole helluva lot of blood there, either. The killer was strong and fast. Hebert’s body was in the water before his heart stopped beating.”

“I laid awake last night wondering if Miranda suffered.”

“She did.” Benoit’s voice struck just the right note of solemnity. He wasn’t calloused to the death he dealt with every day, but his tone wasn’t cheesy and funereal, either. Faye realized that she liked him.

After a respectful pause, he continued describing Miranda’s murder. “Since there was no blood or evidence of a struggle, I think she was lured away or kidnapped, then killed elsewhere. Either way—lured or kidnapped—she knew something wasn’t right, because she took that cutting tool with her. When the time came to defend herself, he—and I think it was a man just because he was big enough to kill Hebert—took her weapon and broke three of her fingers doing it. There were some minor cuts on her hands and arms, like she was trying to get it back. There were bruises all the way around her body, like somebody big wrapped his left arm around her, trapping both her arms. And then there were the stab wounds. Three of them, made by a right-hander with a lot of upper-body power. Just like Hebert. Only they were made with the blade her killer had just taken from her. Then he slashed her across the throat, just for laughs.”