Speak No Evil (13 page)

Caroline got up to help.

“Chicken shit,” Josh said under his breath as Caroline hurried after Sadie. It was the first thing he had said to her all night, and though he’d said it jokingly, she knew there was an edge to his teasing.

Sadie slapped him lightly upside the head as she passed by. “She’s doing the best she can. You do your job and leave her be!”

Josh winced. “Yes, ma’am,” he replied, but once Sadie and Caroline were in the kitchen, the dining room exploded with peals of laughter.

At the sink, Sadie grabbed Caroline’s plate out of her hand. “Baby girl, don’t you let anyone tell you how to do your job, eah!” she advised. “Your mama put you in charge of that paper for a reason.”

Sadie couldn’t possibly understand the mess she’d made of everything, but until that instant, she hadn’t realized how much she needed to hear those words. For the second time today, tears threatened.

Sadie reached out, grabbing Caroline by the hand. “Listen to me, child. Your mama loved you! Maybe she didn’t know how to show it while she was alive and breathing, but this is how she’s showing you now.”

Sadie’s big black eyes were full of love and her smile was the same smile she had given them as children whenever they took a spill in the oyster gravel, skinning their knees.

Words caught in Caroline’s throat. “But Josh . . .”

“Don’t you worry a minute about my son! Right now, he’s concerned about nothing but himself and that’s not how I raised him! Truth is he’s probably already over it, but he’s not going to let you off the hook so easily, eah.”

Caroline mustered a smile, realizing Sadie was probably right. Josh liked to see people squirm.

Sadie patted her hand. “Listen, I can’t pretend to know why you did what you did, Caroline, but I’m sure you had your reasons, and I know in my heart you’ll always do what’s right. It’s in your blood!”

Caroline nodded, choking on her emotion.

Sadie let go of her hand and gave her a much-needed hug.

Caroline wiped her tears on her shoulder as she hugged Sadie back, and deep down she felt a twinge of guilt for being relieved it was her mother who was resting eternally in Magnolia Cemetery and not Sadie.

Sadie peeled away from her abruptly and went to the fridge, chortling softly to herself as she pulled out a key lime pie, unveiling it to Caroline. “Let’s see how long that boy keeps his mouth shut when he’s got to ask you for a piece of this!” She handed the pie over to Caroline and grabbed a serving knife from the counter, winking conspiratorially.

Caroline laughed. “You’re so devious!”

Sadie grabbed a stack of dessert plates. “Child, how the hell do you think I survived in this house so long?”

She and Caroline shared a crooked smile and then returned to the dining room together, where Josh held out approximately thirty seconds before he was all smiles and sweet-talking Caroline into giving him the first fat piece of key lime pie.

Sadie gave Caroline a smile that said simply I-told-you-so.

C
aroline walked into her office the next morning to find two things on her desk: a copy of the morning edition of the
Post
and Frank’s resignation letter.

Today’s front-page headline in the
Post
read:

Caroline focused on the photo of the man the police had taken in for questioning and her heart somersaulted into her throat.

She read the headline a second time with a sense of dawning horror. And then she grabbed her purse, snagged Frank’s letter and the newspaper and ran out of her office, stopping by the front desk long enough to give Pam instructions: call Amy Jones’s roommate, call CPD, verify the
Post
’s facts—even though she knew the
Post
’s reporting would be solid.

She had been so preoccupied with her own agenda, with telling a particular story, that she had completely missed the real news. The
Post
had scooped them, but that wasn’t the worst of it. She had been so preoccupied with hurt feelings and doling out key lime pie that she had endangered the people she most loved.

Obviously, Frank had already checked out and she would deal with him later, but right now, she had to talk to Jack, because the ex-priest—the one they were holding for questioning—was the same man who had tossed Augusta their mother’s shoe last night.

Why he should have had her mother’s shoe, she didn’t know. The particulars weren’t exactly working themselves out in her head, and none of it made a lick of sense, but she should have called the police. The one saving grace was that they had him in custody—no thanks to her or the
Tribune
! But she knew Jack would figure it out. He was good at his job. Unlike her, it seemed.

On her way out to the parking garage, Caroline called Jack first, but he wasn’t available, so she called Augusta and read the paper aloud to her sister from the car.

“Jesus, I was completely out to lunch!” she said, her head still reeling after reading it for the second time. “It says the victim called her roommate from Patterson’s cell phone! How could I have missed that? All it would have taken was for me to ask the right questions. Why didn’t I, Augie?”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Augusta countered. “I don’t believe that gorgeous man is a killer!”

“Lucifer was the most beautiful of God’s creations! Focus with me here, Augie—I’m having a serious self-pity moment! I missed everything—my God, that girl’s murderer was standing right there, not fifty feet from us last night!”

“Alleged murderer,” Augusta corrected. “Use your investigative reporter head, Caroline. He’s not guilty until he’s proven guilty in a court of law.”

“My God—what if I don’t have a reporter head? What if I’m a fraud?”

“Caroline,” Augusta admonished, “you’re being ridiculous. You’ve got a more solid education than Mother ever had and you come from a newspaper family that goes back generations. You’re listening with your heart, not your head.”

Augusta had a point.

Her mother had been an expert at detaching herself from her emotions. Call it high-functioning multiple personality disorder if you will, but she had been able to step outside of her crippling depression to look at hard, cold facts—at least for the sake of her work. She had, in fact, been able to look beyond her own traumatic losses to be of service to her community. Caroline couldn’t even look beyond Karen Hutto’s tragedy!

She was letting her emotions color every decision she made, and she wasn’t looking at the big picture. “What if I can’t think with my head?”

“When did you stop?” Augusta countered, as though it were a perfectly ridiculous notion.

Caroline thought about that a moment and found a new headache spawning. In the corner of the garage, behind a column, she noticed movement, and looked more closely.

Was someone there?

It was just her imagination.

Patterson was in jail, she reminded herself.

She locked the door anyway, and leaned on the window, putting a hand to her forehead, staring at the paper so closely that her myopic view of it settled on two words: E
X
-P
RIEST
Q
UESTIONED. “
That man did not look like any priest to me,” Caroline said plaintively.

“He doesn’t look like a killer either,” Augie said with conviction.

“Well, I have to go,” Caroline said. “Let me call you in a while. Lock the doors!” she added fervently.

“Stop worrying,” Augusta countered. “The doors are already locked, Caroline.”

“And please make sure Savannah is home!”

“Really? We’re supposed to put our lives on hold and lock ourselves away because there’s a freak out there?”

Even here in the shadowy parking garage, people were coming and going, completely oblivious to any danger.

“Take a chill pill, Caroline. We’re big girls. We’ll be fine.”

“You’re right,” Caroline conceded, and hung up, intending to drive straight to the police department. Instead she found herself detouring and headed to the one place she never thought she’d return.

 

Tucked away near the banks of the Cooper River, Magnolia Cemetery was all but forgotten amid the ancient, drooping oaks. The remaining empty patches of earth belonged to those whose families could trace their heritage back to when news of Sherman’s March sent women to bed with the vapors. The cemetery now held some thirty-five thousand bodies, including two thousand Confederate soldiers, five governors and four U.S. senators—one being Senator Robert Samuel Aldridge II.

Reunited in death, her parents lay beside one another beneath the shade of an old live oak . . . peaceful . . . as they had never been in life.

The tree, which had certainly seen better days, was humpbacked now, with tired limbs that sank toward the ground as though yearning to rest alongside Magnolia’s inhabitants. On the south side, its branches were a little sparser. No doubt before there were laws in place to protect these deciduous mammoths, some of the vast network of roots had been mangled during the digging of nearby graves. Now, like scars that refused to heal, there were ligneous scabs where immense limbs had lived, withered and died. On the north side, Spanish moss clung to the thicker mass of boughs like hoary curtains, weighing the tree down much like a bent old woman straining under the weight of her striplings. It was on this side her mother had been laid to rest.

Caroline’s gaze dropped to the grave on the other side of her mother’s plot . . . an empty piece of land reserved for their baby brother.

It would never be filled.

Even after the authorities stopped searching for Sammy . . . long after there was even a remote chance he might be found alive . . . her mother had paid to have the shoreline dredged for miles.

His body was never found.

Caroline noticed there were flowers on his grave—baby’s breath and sun-bleached peach roses—recent enough that she could still tell what color the petals had been in life. Flo had never once mentioned her visits to Magnolia. Apparently, she had grieved here all alone until her dying day, sharing secrets with no one. Knowing that didn’t make Caroline feel any better.

Bright morning sun penetrated the thick mass of limbs above, shedding dappled light over the graves at her feet.

Already, the soil over her mother’s plot was beginning to settle, the rich color of freshly turned dirt fading into the surrounding earth. She looked around, inspecting the rows of graves. Her brother’s and her mother’s were the only ones in plain sight that had fresh flowers. Other urns held washed-out plastic roses, but most had none at all. Even the next of kin of those buried here were likely dead, buried and forgotten. And once the flowers in her mother’s urn were gone, reduced to dust . . . along with those on Sammy’s grave, they would lie as bare and forgotten as her father’s plot.

She and her sisters weren’t the type to stroll in cemeteries.

Caroline didn’t believe in making appointments to visit regret and despair. She believed in moving forward, forging a better tomorrow . . . but here she was.

Why?

Did she think somehow she might forge a connection with her dead mother simply by standing at her grave? Find answers that eluded her by staring at a plot of earth? Why the hell would she hope for that when she and Flo had never even had a minuscule connection while Flo was still alive?

And yet, she admitted, she had never needed her mother more than she did at this moment . . . when it seemed she was most lost to her.

Taking a deep, shuddering breath, Caroline turned to walk back to the car, feeling a little foolish and a lot reckless. She’d come here completely on a whim, and even though Patterson was being held and questioned for the murder of Amy Jones, Augusta was right, until he was proven guilty beyond a shadow of doubt, an isolated graveyard where few people ventured was not the place to be alone.

She slid into her car, stabbed the key into the ignition and drove away, this time heading straight to the police station to report last night’s visit from a certain ex-priest. At some point, she intended to tell Jack about his ex-girlfriend’s visit, too, but at the moment, it was completely overshadowed by Patterson’s.

She made her way out of the cemetery, peering one last time into the rearview mirror . . . but she never saw the figure watching behind a nearby crypt.

I
an Patterson didn’t behave like a man who was concerned about a homicide conviction. He sat quietly in the interview room, answering questions without breaking a sweat. Nor did he lose his temper even with the most leading questions. In fact, he seemed, as far as Jack could tell, like a man who was genuinely willing to cooperate. His face practically turned green when Jack revealed the detailed photos of Amy Jones, postmortem lividity transforming her milky skin to bluish- and reddish-purple splotches where gravity pooled her blood into the lowest regions. Unless he was a damned good actor, he wasn’t their guy.

On the other hand, he didn’t look like a straitlaced priest either. Tall and lean, with scruffy hair, a Vandyke, dark Lennon sunglasses and a small hoop earring, he reminded Jack more of a pot-smoking drummer—a heartthrob in a star band.

Without blinking, he agreed to a polygraph, and in the end, they weren’t able to hold him, nor did they have probable cause to legally search his house since he had an alibi for the time of the Jones death. Apparently, he was watching a girlfriend’s band play a gig at the Windjammer.

They had phone records to tie him to the victim, witnesses who placed him at a nearby gas station with the victim at about eight
P.M.
—two and a half hours before the actual murder—and fingerprints on the back end of her car—near her gas tank, all consistent with his story. The evidence was purely circumstantial and the guy had zero motive as far as Jack could tell—if they were dealing with a single homicide.

Patterson claimed Jones had run out of gas. Apparently, he lived in the area and he was on his way out for the evening and found her walking down Fort Lamar Road in the dark so he gave her a ride to the station, bought her a can of gas and took her back to her car to empty the contents into her tank—pretty straightforward. The guy’s Good Samaritan story checked out one hundred percent. He even had receipts and credit card records to wrap up a nice little paper trail.

None of it added up.

After they released him, Jack put a tail on him and returned to the crime scene to do another walk-through. The crime scene team had already been over the dock and surrounding area with a fine-toothed comb, but he could think more clearly without an army of people underfoot.

His gut told him that no one who was about to cut the tongue out of a girl’s mouth and strangle the life out of her would lend her his cell phone—not once, but twice—with a follow-up call to the girl’s roommate, giving both girls his real name. In fact, it was the roommate who had given them Patterson’s number to begin with. Only an arrogant prick would take that sort of chance, and ultimately, arrogance was stupidity. Patterson didn’t strike Jack as stupid or arrogant.

No calls were made from the victim’s phone after seven o-five
P.M.
, which gave credence to the fact that her phone was dead. They found it sitting in the passenger floorboard of her abandoned car.

At nine-seventeen
P.M.
, Amy’s roommate called Jones, lost and searching for the address she’d been given, then again at nine-nineteen, ten twenty-four, and again at ten twenty-seven. All four calls had gone unanswered. Annoyed, the roommate went back to the station to wait, hoping Jones would call back. For about thirty minutes, she said she sat at the station, in her car, on the phone, arguing with her boyfriend, until their conversation ended at approximately eleven o-three
P.M.
—all verified by phone records—after which the roommate made one more attempt to find the house. This time, she spotted Amy’s car in a driveway, and about eleven-thirty
P.M.
, she ventured around back, but didn’t see Amy, so she returned to her car and called the police.

The initial responding officer showed at twelve-thirty
P.M.
—a full hour after the roommate called for assistance—not surprising considering some of the politics going on in James Island. Amy’s body was discovered at twelve forty-three
A.M.
The time of death placed at roughly ten-forty
P.M.
—very likely while the roommate had been busy arguing with her boyfriend at the station, which meant she’d barely missed the killer.

Lying in the temperate, shallow water, her body was still warm when Jack arrived on the scene around one-thirty in the morning. Rigor mortis had only begun to set in.

Now he stood on the deck, studying the scene critically, staring at the bright yellow police tape that was still intact, except for a small piece that flapped in the breeze near the established point of entry.

He stared down at the area beside the dock.

When Amy’s body was discovered, it was lying next to the dock, half concealed by the spartina grass and wrapped around a dock post. With her car parked out front, it was pretty certain she didn’t float to shore, but they found no body fluids on the dock and no signs of a scuffle above deck, which meant that any struggle would have taken place in the creek.

He made a mental note to check the tide charts and got down on his knees to peer under the dock, just to make sure they hadn’t missed anything—no scraps of clothing or snags of hair in the splintered wood.

He stared down at the water and stinking plough mud.

The odor, he knew, was a ripe brew—a result of warm water conditions, bacteria and decomposing organic matter in the muggy climate, but despite the life that teemed within the dark, dank, soft soil, it stank of death and decay. No matter that the crime scene team had taken care not to disturb anything, the gray muck never dried between tide changes and traces of the girl’s form had already eroded away. All that was left at this point was a slight depression where tiny shrimp waltzed. The only remaining footprints near the body were theirs. It had been impossible to get the body out without creating a few impressions, but the water was just deep enough that the constant movement had already eroded the impressions anyway. A little deeper in, the muck was so wet and boggy that it had been known to suck the boots off a man’s feet. Walking in it wasn’t easy and necessitated special gear or tight-fitting boots. It was a bit like quicksand . . . if you sank to your ankles and struggled, you might sink to your knees....

It seemed the killer had just laid her down gently . . . without too much of a fight . . . probably with the aid of the chloroform they’d found in her system. He’d stripped her naked, tied her feet and hands and positioned her precisely for a macabre show, and thanks to the techniques publicized by prime-time crime drama, he’d known enough to minimize the likelihood of evidence.

There were traces of blood on her body and hair, some in the creek bed and in her stomach. But not nearly enough, it seemed. The tongue was full of blood vessels so she would have bled profusely—if cut while she was still alive. Maybe not so much if he’d cut her tongue out after death. But the tape over her mouth didn’t seem like something he would do after death, and Jack couldn’t see him removing the tape and replacing it again. Her clothes might have soaked up some of the blood, but since they were missing, it was impossible to assess how much exactly. Anything that didn’t end up in her clothes could have ended up in the creek, washed away by the tide.

Had the killer cut the tongue out before or after she was drugged? Before or after he killed her? Why cut it out at all? Why the dye?

The guy needed to see her die, Jack realized—every stage of the process, from the instant she came to, realizing she couldn’t breathe, to the panic and pain she must have felt—he needed to experience everything . . . right up until the instant the blood vessels burst in her eyes.

Did he wait for her eyes to flutter open before pushing her down into the shallow water?

For some reason, the act reminded him of a sort of baptism.

Underwater, the killer wouldn’t be able to see her as clearly—especially at night. Even with a full moon, he would have needed to be close to see . . . maybe he was straddling her . . . hovering a breath away so he could feel her heartbeat flatline?

He rubbed his eyes. Some day, he needed to sleep.

He stood, brushing himself off, needing a smoke—was it any wonder? He was no longer trying to quit for Caroline, he told himself as he reached into his pocket, pulling out his last stick of gum. He was doing it for himself, because he hated the habit. He unwrapped the stick and popped it into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully.

In the distance, Morris Island Lighthouse stood stranded . . . a lonesome sentinel, guarding the channel . . . like an unarmed soldier. Long ago decommissioned, it was slowly being devoured by the Atlantic.

The channel could be hairy. The inlet creeks were like spidery veins, both siphoning the life from the marshes and washing it back in. Even at low tide, the middle of the creek was deep enough to accommodate a good-sized boat . . . one that could easily handle Clark Sound or the winding rivers and estuaries around Morris Island. But you wouldn’t need a big boat to maneuver the salt marsh . . . if you knew where to go.

Supposedly, the victim was here taking photographs, but no camera was found. The only indication she had, in fact, been taking pictures was the camera bag in her backseat, filled with lenses and actual film. He didn’t even realize people still used that stuff in this digital age, but apparently, she was a talented film and photography student with artwork on display somewhere downtown. They’d scoured the entire area, hoping to find her camera but it was gone.

Jack studied the landscape.

The houses around here were surrounded by woodlands—high-dollar properties—not too close together. Backcreek Road, aptly named, was surrounded by water with a single entrance from Fort Lamar Road. Just behind Backcreek Road sat Fort Lamar—three acres of sequestered grounds owned by the city that included earthworks dating back to 1862 . . . lots of places to hide. And the streets . . . lined with massive, tangled trees, went pitch black after dark, smothering the moon from view.

The roommate didn’t recall seeing any boat docked behind the house that night . . . no cars came through on the isolated road.

The house itself had been searched, even though there was no sign of forced entry and nothing inside hinted at the violence that took place out back.

Could it be that Amy Jones’s murderer hadn’t meant to leave her body as he had, quite possibly interrupted by a twenty-year-old college student looking for her AWOL roommate? If so, how and where had he intended to move the body?

They sent choppers up to do an aerial of the salt marsh . . . but the surrounding landscape was undisturbed. For now, the salt marsh was keeping its secrets.

He stared at the boathouse in the distance with its tin steepled roof. Bright sunlight glinted off its surface.

The Aldridge dock was easily one of the longest in the area. It meandered across fifteen hundred feet of salt marsh. He could throw a stone in the direction of Caroline’s house and hit it. Its proximity to the crime scene made his stomach turn.

The attempted break-in at Oyster Point had occurred the following night—not much of a chance the killer was still in the area, but it left Jack a little desperate for answers....

As far as anyone else was concerned, this was not a race against time. Jack didn’t agree. He felt it down in his gut.

The attention to detail—the complete lack of evidence—told Jack this wasn’t the guy’s first kill, and the fact that there were no other bodies was merely a testament to the fact that the killer knew what he was doing.

The closest he’d come to a case like this was a spree killing a couple of years ago—nothing like Amy Jones’s murder. A true serial killer didn’t just hit three different gas stations and pop the attendants. He needed downtime . . . time to plan . . . time to make sure every move was orchestrated to perfection . . . so he wouldn’t get caught. But maybe after a while some of them thought they couldn’t be caught . . . maybe if this guy had been doing this a while, he was getting arrogant. Arrogant people took shortcuts, and people who took shortcuts made mistakes.

Caroline was right about one thing: playing by the rules was a luxury you didn’t have when lives were at stake.

Two could play at that game....

 

“I’m surprised you’re still here,” Caroline joked, though the minute it came out of her mouth, she realized how stupid the remark was. Frank Bonneau was the sort of man who did everything by the book. If he gave a two-week notice, he did his time, even if he had to swallow antacids every hour on the hour to do it.

He eyed her over bifocals that had been put on and removed so many times they were crooked beyond repair. Clearly unhappy with her awkward attempt at conversation, he went back to looking over the dummy, trying to determine where to place stories, ignoring her.

Caroline had had a full day—none of it spent at the office. She could only have done that with someone like Frank in place—someone who knew what he was doing—someone she trusted. “Can we talk?”

“I’m happy to listen,” he said. “I think I’ve said more than enough at this point.”

Clearly, he wasn’t happy with his outburst yesterday, justified though it may have been. While Caroline still believed she had acted in good faith, she had to admit she had behaved more like the boss’s daughter rather than the boss. “Have you talked to Daniel?”

“No,” he said, sounding nonplussed. “Why would I do that?”

That he hadn’t run to complain to their attorney both surprised and impressed her. It gave her all the more resolve to keep him onboard. “Good, because I don’t want you to resign.”

“You should have thought about that before you undermined me.”