Southern Storm

by Terri Blackstock

  “After we see the car.” Blair got out of her Volvo and, with an air of authority, started toward the man and the other cops waiting for Joe at the edge of the woods.

  Joe grabbed her arm. “Blair, I don’t want to arrest the town librarian for interfering with an investigation.”

  Blair looked up at him. “Come on, Joe. Please let me go. I just want to see the car. I won’t get in the way.”

  “You’re already in the way!” He turned to the cops who had been the first responders and ordered them to tape off the area before anyone else went near the car. Turning back to Blair, he said, “Don’t you cross that tape, Blair Owens. There could be footprints or other evidence and we don’t want it trampled.”

  She didn’t answer, just waited until they had taped it off, then walked the perimeter until she could see the car.

  Harris James—the man who’d found it—stood under the shade of a pine tree in a wooded area. Blair had known him for years. He was a Cape Refuge native, and he and his family had owned the property on the southern tip of the island for generations.

  The red-haired man looked excited as he led them through the trees to the car that had been abandoned there. It was a gray four-wheel drive Passport.

  “I was just walking through the woods,” he said, “and I ran across this SUV with the driver’s door wide open. Look here, there’s blood and a gun on the seat. I figured I’d better call the police.”

  Blair wanted more than anything to duck under the yellow tape and examine the car for herself, but she hung back, listening.

  Joe radioed in the tag number, then checked the outside of the door and window for prints, took a few pictures. Blair could see that there was blood on the outer edge of the seat, and splattered on the door.

  But if it was suicide, wouldn’t he have shot himself in the head? Why would he put the gun to his abdomen? And if he wanted to die and had the energy to walk to the street, he could have just shot himself a second time.

  On the other hand, maybe someone had shot him and left him for dead. Maybe they hadn’t expected him to be able to go for help.

  Blair straightened and looked around, scanning the ground for footprints. The car had been here for two days, and the rain had washed any prints away.

  Joe opened the glove box and pulled out the registration. “Car’s owned by a William Clark.”

  William Clark. Where had she heard that before? Blair racked her brain, trying to think. William Clark, William Clark. The caller ID! She caught her breath and called out across the tape. “William Clark’s name came up on Cade’s caller ID this morning.”

  He pulled back out of the car and regarded her. “What do you mean, it came up?”

  She realized she had just incriminated herself, and shrank back. “Well, I sort of used his key. I know where he hides it.” Okay, it was a lie, she thought. Jonathan had been the one who knew where he had hidden it, but she didn’t want to drag him into this. “I just went in to make sure he wasn’t lying dead in the house, and I looked at his caller ID, and the one person I didn’t recognize was William Clark.”

  Joe came toward her. “Then someone from the dead man’s family must have called him. Only, Cade’s number is unlisted. How would they have gotten the number?” He looked back at the vehicle, then turned back to Blair. “What time was that call?”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t think to get the exact time. I didn’t realize the call was significant.”

  Joe went back to searching the car, and Blair watched. They dusted for prints, took pictures, bagged the floor mats, vacuumed for trace evidence, chalked the location of the gun, all before having a tow truck come get the car to take it to a secure location where they could examine it more thoroughly.

  As the tow truck took the vehicle away, Joe looked at Blair. “All right, I’ve got to go over to Cade’s house,” he said. “Blair, you come show me where the key is.”

  Blair was glad she had watched Jonathan put the key back. She followed him over to Cade’s house.

  Oswald, Cade’s cat, nuzzled up to her feet as soon as they got to the backyard, and Blair leaned down and stroked his back.

  She got the key out of the utility room, and Joe took them and went in. “Don’t touch anything, Blair. I don’t know if a crime’s even been committed, but just in case, we don’t need to disturb any evidence.”

  She realized with a pang of guilt that she had disturbed quite a bit that morning. So had Jonathan.

  She led him straight to the caller ID. He flipped through the callers and came to William Clark.

  Joe nodded, his forehead still pleated. “Okay, the call came at five-thirty yesterday morning.”

  “Five-thirty,” she whispered. “What a time to call somebody, especially if you don’t know them.”

  “And if they didn’t know him, how did they get his number? Cade’s not listed. Most cops aren’t.”

  “Maybe someone at the police station gave it to her.”

  “No way,” he said. “That would never happen. Besides, I checked on the drive over, and no one from that number called the station. In fact, we didn’t get any calls after 2:00 A.M. Not until 7:00 this morning.”

  “So it was someone who already had his number, then,” Blair said. “Someone who knows him socially, maybe?”

  Joe didn’t commit to an answer. “I’ve ordered a copy of William Clark’s driver’s license. That’ll have his picture. Once we have that, we can decide for sure if he’s the man Cade hit, and we can go from there.”

  She waited as Joe made a search of Cade’s home, then finally, he let her put the key back and headed back to the station. Blair followed him as if she belonged there, and when they arrived, Joe didn’t stop her. Preoccupied, he hurried into the small building and went straight to the fax machine. Blair stood at the door, waiting to see the DMV photo for herself.

  Joe jerked it out of the machine and started to nod. “That’s him, all right.”

  Blair looked at the picture and saw the similarities to the sketch that the artist had drawn. She looked up at Joe. “So what have we got? A man who was shot in his own car, someone from his house calling Cade, Cade disappearing with some woman in a PT Cruiser . . .”

  He rubbed his temple. “Maybe the woman in the Cruiser was the one who called Cade from Clark’s house.” He sighed. “Well, it won’t be hard to find out. I have to go there and notify the family.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  Joe looked at her like she was crazy. “Think again. Police business, Blair. You’re not a cop. Why do I have to keep reminding you of that?”

  “Show me in the police manual where it says that only officers can notify families of tragedies.”

  Joe shook his head. “Blair—”

  “You can’t, can you, Joe? You can’t because it’s not in there. Cade was going to let me go with him because he knew that I could relate to how this family felt getting this kind of news.”

  Again, a little white lie. Cade had never really committed to letting her go with him. But she knew she could have talked him into it.

  “You don’t know what’s in our manual. It sure doesn’t say to take the town librarian with us!”

  “Come on, Joe. You know you don’t want to go by yourself. Maybe if I come it’ll soften things up a little. Maybe I can give his wife a hug or help her in some way.”

  He almost laughed. “No offense, Blair, but that’s not your thing.”

  She threw her chin up. “It could be my thing,” she said. “I watched my parents and Morgan do it enough. I can hug, Joe. Come on, I want to see this woman. I want to see what she drives, and I want to see if she has big brown hair and is petite, and I want to ask her if she’s the one that came here yesterday to see Cade and if she knows what happened to him.”

  “And what if she’s not?” he yelled. “What if she’s just a woman who doesn’t know her husband is dead? And we go and tell her and break her heart? Are you prepared for that, Blair? You gonna interroga
te her then?”

  “I can handle it. Take me with you, Joe!”

  He sighed and got up, strolled to the window and looked out. Finally he turned back around. “All right, Blair, but only because I have the feeling I couldn’t get rid of you if I wanted to. And Cade thinks a lot of you and trusts your instincts. But you let me do the talking unless you have something worthwhile to add. And when I say it’s time to go, we’re going. Got that?”

  She almost hugged him just to prove she could. “Yep, I got it. You’re the boss.”

  “That’ll be the day,” he muttered as he started out of Cade’s office. “Blair Owens doesn’t have a boss.”

  CHAPTER 9

  They rode in silence to Savannah and found the address of the man who had died. The house was situated in one of the town squares set up by James Edward Oglethorpe when he’d laid out the city of Savannah in the eighteenth century. It was an old house across the street from Washington Park, though it looked as if attempts had been made to preserve and restore it. The Savannah Historical Society had declared the entire downtown area a historical landmark so that it couldn’t be bulldozed and made into parking lots. Some of the homes still needed transformation from eyesores to historical beauties.

  The Clark house was painted pink, with white lacy trim and wrought-iron railing, but parts of the house were in stages of decay and disrepair. As they pulled into the driveway of the modest structure, Blair had the feeling that William Clark may have been working on restoring the house completely but hadn’t quite finished.

  Something about that saddened her. She looked up at the front door, and wondered if someone was already grieving behind it, or if she and Joe would be breaking the news. She recalled sitting out in Cade’s police car the day her parents were murdered, trying to push through the shock. The worst news of her life had attacked her with no warning.

  Joe pulled far enough into the driveway to see that the garage attached to the back of the house was closed. Clearly, the update on the house had included the more modern garage than some in the area had.

  “I was hoping to see if there was a PT Cruiser here,” he said.

  Blair just looked at the garage. There was a window there, but she knew she couldn’t get away with going to look in it.

  Joe started to get out. “Now I’m telling you, I do the talking, you hear?”

  “Fine, sure.” Blair got out and looked up at the front porch. “Don’t worry about me.”

  They walked up to the front porch, and Blair hung back as Joe raised his hand to knock. “Now, Blair, I mean it,” he said in a low voice. “Nothing about Cade or her being in Cape Refuge, at least not until I’ve had the chance to break the news about her husband.”

  “And if she already knows?”

  His eyes pierced her. “Then you let me do the questioning. Got that?”

  She agreed, but only because she had no choice. He knocked again.

  She heard footsteps coming to the door, a fumbling with the lock as if it hadn’t been opened in some time, and then a woman peaked out from the darkness. She was a blonde instead of the brunette Blair had expected, but she did qualify as “petite.”

  “Yes? May I help you?” she asked.

  “Mrs. Clark?” Joe asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Are you the wife of William Clark?”

  “Yes.” She opened the door wider. “Do you know where my husband is?”

  He shot Blair a look. “Ma’am, I’m Joe McCormick with the Cape Refuge Police Department, and this is Blair Owens.”

  She half expected him to introduce her as the town librarian, as if that had any bearing at all on anything. But he left it at her name.

  “Could we come in for a moment and talk to you?”

  The woman studied his badge, then looked up at him with pleading eyes. “You have bad news, don’t you?”

  When he hesitated, she stepped back from the door and let them in, watching their faces with glistening eyes. Blair’s heart ached for the woman. She remembered Cade walking into the City Council meeting on the day of her parents’ murder, asking Morgan and her to come outside. She had known there was bad news, though she could never have imagined how bad it was.

  They stepped into the dark house that smelled of age. When the woman had closed the door, she turned back to them. “Has something happened to my husband?”

  “Ma’am, if we could just sit down for a moment.”

  The woman ushered them into a parlorlike room and turned on a light. Suddenly Blair was able to see her fully. Her eyes were a light green, and her skin was pale like porcelain, untouched by the sun.

  Blair took a seat on a sofa, and Joe sat down next to her.

  The woman remained standing. “Willie killed himself, didn’t he?”

  Joe looked up at her, stricken. “Why would you ask that?”

  “Because he said he was going to when he left here that day. We’d had an argument—a stupid, silly argument—and he said he was going to kill himself. He hasn’t been home in two days. . . .”

  Blair looked at Joe, waiting for him to go on. He set his elbows on his knees and looked down at his hands. “Your husband is dead, Mrs. Clark,” he said. “I’m so sorry to be the one to tell you.”

  She seemed to deflate with the news, and wilted into the chair across from them. Her face twisted as tears reddened her eyes. “I didn’t think he’d do it. He’d threatened it before, but he always came back home. We always made up.”

  Joe swallowed and went on. “Mrs. Clark, Sunday afternoon, during the storm, your husband walked out in front of a police car. He was struck. He died shortly after being taken to the hospital. But they discovered that before the accident he had been shot. We found his car today. The gun was still on the seat.”

  “Oh, Willie!” Her cry carried over the house, and she fell back with both hands over her face.

  “We would have notified you sooner, but we weren’t able to identify him until we found the car today.”

  Blair knew she had to do something to ease the woman’s anguish. She got up and went to her. Stooping on the floor in front of her, she pulled the woman into her arms, as Morgan would have done. The woman’s body shook with sobs. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I know this must be a shock.”

  “I’d been calling around,” she said through her sobs. “Looking everywhere. I even called the hospitals, but they didn’t have anyone by his name.” She drew in a breath. “Where . . . where is he?”

  “He’s at the Chatham County Morgue,” Joe said in a low voice. “We need for you to go identify the body.”

  Blair felt the pain of that finality racking through the woman’s bones. All her questions about Cade vanished from her mind as Blair felt her grief.

  Mrs. Clark pulled back. “I want to go now. I want to see him. Maybe it’s not really him.”

  Blair looked back at Joe.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll take you over there right now.”

  “No, I’ll drive my own car. I want to be alone.”

  “But are you sure you’re up to driving?” Blair asked gently.

  “Yes.” She got up and looked around helplessly. “My purse. I’ll get my purse.”

  “We’ll follow you over there,” Joe said. “I’ll go in with you. Be sure to bring some identification.”

  She looked off, her eyes fixed on a spot on the wall. “It was just a little fight. Nothing to kill yourself over. I thought he was just taking a breather, putting some space between us.” She pressed her hand over her mouth. “I’ll back my car out and you can follow me over.”

  Blair followed Joe out, feeling as helpless as she’d ever felt. When they got back into Joe’s car, she looked over at him. “Should I go in with her?”

  “No. You’ll need to wait in the car. I’ll go.”

  “But she may need some comfort. Some support.”

  “Blair, I really need for you to wait in the car.” He started the car and watched the garage door c
ome open. A white Buick Regal pulled out.

  “Not a PT Cruiser,” he said. “And she wasn’t a brunette.”

  Blair nodded. “But you still need to ask her if she was in Cape Refuge yesterday, or if she called Cade.”

  The woman pulled out, and Joe led her to the County Morgue.

  Joe had been inside the morgue for over half an hour, when Blair finally saw him coming back out. His face looked pale and grim. He got into the car, set his hands on the steering wheel, and stared down at the dashboard.

  “It was her husband, all right.”

  “Is she going to be okay?”

  “I guess so. I hope she has some kind of support system.”

  Blair looked toward the door. “Where is she?”

  “She’s filling out paperwork. She didn’t want me to stay with her.” He started his car, and pulled out into traffic.

  “So did you ask her about the phone call?”

  “Yep. She claims she didn’t call him and says she’s never been to Cape Refuge in her life.”

  Blair frowned. “Then how does she explain the phone call?”

  He shook his head. “She couldn’t. And I checked. No one else lives in that house, and there wasn’t anyone there besides her yesterday.”

  Blair leaned her head back on the headrest. “Weird. That just doesn’t add up.” She narrowed her eyes, trying to think. “I would have believed her about not being on Cape Refuge, since she doesn’t really fit the description, but to lie about the phone call.”

  “Yeah, it worries me too. She swears up and down that she didn’t know about her husband until we told her. That she wouldn’t have had any reason to call Cade.”

  Blair shook her head. “We need a picture of her. We need to show it to the ones who saw the woman yesterday. We have to find out if she was the one they saw with Cade. She could have changed her hair, or had on a wig or something.”

  “That should be easy enough,” Joe said. “I can get a copy of her driver’s license when we get back.”

  CHAPTER 10

  When they were back on Cape Refuge, Blair went into the station with Joe and waited as he ordered the license. While they waited for the picture to be faxed, she stepped into Cade’s office.