When he stood up to clear his dishes off the table, Garret had something on his mind. “Now would be a good time to mention we need to make absolutely certain that we’ve pinpointed the right person responsible for killing Livvy and the kids. Dietrich may have ordered it, but someone, likely more than one, within the town, carried it out.”
“I thought we agreed that was Baskin,” Anniston pointed out.
Garret looked doubtful. “Baskin had a hand in it, as did Dandridge. No doubt about that. We know because Baskin’s car was spotted near the Vitamin Hut that night when the burglar alarm went off. We know Dandridge, or someone that looked like him, was pulled over in Livvy’s minivan on its way to the Tampa Bay Airport. But neither event equates to murdering a mother and her kids.”
“What are you saying?” Mitch asked. “That’s good enough for me, obviously it isn’t for you.”
“No, it isn’t. I think someone else got their hands dirty that night and we don’t know who that someone is...yet. It’s essential to figure out every single person who’s involved, narrow down exactly what role they playedthat includes Wendy Hollister, by the wayand then identify who actually tortured and beat to death Livvy and the kids.”
Mitch stared at his brother. “Do you know something we don’t?”
Garret and Anniston traded looks. “We think Livvy might’ve been raped that night. She’d had sex with someone. The lab put the DNA profile in the system.”
“And you’re just now sharing this nugget with the rest of us?” Mitch charged. “What else have you two been keeping to yourselves?”
Garret shrugged. “Just that. I got dibs on the bastard who did it.”
“And we’re sure it wasn’t Walker?” Jackson prompted.
Anniston shook her head. “Once the Coast Guard brought in Walker and Blake, the lab was able to rule Walker out as the contributor of the sperm.”
“Son of a bitch. Okay, so we’ll dig a little deeper and make sure we have the right man,” Mitch promised. “We owe it to Mom and Dad to find out the truth.”
Garret nodded. “Speaking of Mom, I called her, told her we’re headed home, but not to wait supper on us. You should know that after talking to her for fifteen minutes or so, I don’t think Dad intends to take Mom and leave town like we’d hoped.”
“Tessa’s been staying with them while I’m out here dealing with this. She doesn’t think they’ll leave either,” Jackson provided.
“Then I guess we’ll have to make certain we cage the rats in record time and keep them away from Mom and Dad.”
Chapter Six - Justice
They pulled into port a little after eight o’clock that evening.
Mitch followed Raine down the plank to the wharf, intent on seeing her home safely. When she noticed him tagging along, she stopped, pivoted to face him. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going home with you.”
“But I didn’t ask you to do that. I need to call my mom, tell her I’ve arrived back home.”
“I’ll wait while you do. Would you like me to take you over there, to stay with her?”
Raine’s eyes got wide. “You’re asking me if I want to stay with my mother and grandmother? Are you nuts?”
He chuckled. “I guess I am. Sorry.”
“I don’t like the idea of having a babysitter.”
“Don’t be stubborn. After what happened to you, I don’t think you should be alone. In fact, I won’t let you go into that house and stay there by yourself.”
“You won’t let me?” She opened her mouth to really put some meat into the argument, but had to admit he had a point. She really didn’t want to be alone tonight. She laced her arm through his. “Okay, but you should know I don’t plan to sleep with you right off, otherwise, we’ll just end up right where we started out and nothing will ever get resolved between us. If you won’t agree to that—”
He glanced toward the night sky. “It seems I’m destined to practice the art of abstinence while I’m here. I’m being punished for something. I just can’t figure out what it is.”
She patted his arm. “Don’t be so melodramatic. We spent our teen years sneaking off to have sex every chance we got. Surely you can be patient for…I don’t know…a few days until we reconnect.”
“Reconnect, huh?” He let out a breathy sigh, on purpose, maybe louder than it needed to be to make his point. “It’s a deal. As long as you understand where we’ll end up.”
“You’re that confident, are you?”
“Yeah. I am.”
Once they reached the houseboat, the first thing Raine did was change out of his sweatpants and shirt and into a pair of blue shorts and white top.
After that, she set about cleaning up the mess she’d left behind. Mitch helped her by rummaging through her boxes slated for Goodwill drop-off.
When Raine saw what he was doing, she groaned. “The idea is to declutter, not rifle through my stuff.”
Among all the items, he eyeballed something familiar. He scooped up a raggedy, stuffed, very pink elephant with huge black bug eyes. “You’re giving away Dumbo?”
She snatched it back from him, waved it back and forth. “No doubt Dumbo served his purpose well over the years for a silly teenage girl. But now it’s time for him to go make someone else happy.” She inched back on her hard line approach. “You won him for me when you were fourteen at the carnival that breezed through here. Remember that?”
“The summer we started dating. Of course I do.”
“How much money did that thing end up costing you?”
Mitch laughed at the memory. “Almost my entire earnings that week from mowing lawns. All this time you kept it.”
Embarrassed by that, she threw her arms out wide at the stuff still on the floor that hadn’t made it into trash sacks. “Like I said, hoarding isn’t pretty. It’s past time to part with my junk from when I was a girl.”
Together, they began to box up the rest of the stuff and cart each bag and container down the street to the donation box until they had it all cleared out.
After tidying up, they rewarded themselves by sitting outside on the deck under the stars, kicking back in the Adirondack chairs and enjoying a beer.
Raine took a slug of beer. “Did you ever think we’d be this close to each other, talking like normal people do who used to be such close friends, instead of yelling and screaming at each other? You know, without ragging on each other about something?”
“I wasn’t sure it was possible.” He took a pull on the bottle he held. “But after you explained things about Baby Taylor, everything seems so clear to me now. Mistakes made. Miscommunication on both sides. Years lost between us.”
“Baby Taylor. I haven’t said that name aloud much. I didn’t think I was allowed to…feel for him.”
Mitch lifted his shoulders. “You can say it as often as you want. Baby Taylor deserves that much.”
She turned her head to study him. “At the risk of making you mad now and ending our détente, there’s something I need to know. Well, quite a few things.”
“Go ahead, now’s the time to air it out and ask me.”
“What do you do for a sex life?”
Since that was the last thing he expected her to say, he choked on his beer.
“Seriously, going from dive to dive like you do? Do you have a special person in your life? Where do you actually live when you aren’t on the boat? I happen to think they’re valid questions.”
He cut his brown eyes to hers. “I see that. A couple of years back I built a house on the leeward side of Cape Santa Maria, right on the beach. It sits vacant for long periods of time, but I have a caretaker I trust who keeps an eye on the place for me when I’m gone. As to your other question, I’m not a saint or a priest. I’ve had women come and go over the last twelve years. There’s no one special.” He paused, looked out over the water. “When you didn’t write me back all those years ago, I had to go on with my life, Raine. I told myself you’d moved on and
there was a reason you lost interest in me.”
“You wrote me letters?”
“Of course I did. I wrote every day and mailed a letter at least once a week, no matter where we were in the world. You didn’t answer a single one.”
Raine’s eyes grew wide. “That’s because I didn’t get any of them. I got one postcard from you around Thanksgiving and that’s it.”
They stared at each other. “Raine, I know I had the right address. I practically lived at your house before I shipped out. I sent letters full of stuff that might not have been interesting to you, but they were to me. I described all the places I’d been, the dives I worked, the ports where I ended up pulling in for supplies.”
“Hmm, that’s interesting. I wonder.”
“Wonder what?”
“If my mother intercepted those and got rid of them.”
“Marla? Why would she do that?”
Raine swallowed hard. “Because during those summer months she was really upset with you that you left me.”
He gaped at her. “You let your mother believe I knew about the baby…and just…took off anyway?”
She took a drink from her bottle of beer, chewed her bottom lip, squirming in the deck chair, stalling for time. “I may not have set the record entirely straight there. That’s on me.”
He lifted his head to the sky, took in the canopy of stars above, the full moon hidden behind a swath of patchy clouds. “With so much working against us, no wonder we were destined to fail. We didn’t stand much of a chance.”
“I never considered my mother would do something like that. I’ll have to ask her about it.”
“Wonder why she didn’t mention how angry she was with me to my mother? If Marla was so upset with me, I’m surprised she kept that to herself and didn’t run straight to my mom with all that fury, calling me every nasty name in the book.”
“I don’t know the answer to that. But I intend to find out. After the miscarriage she did make me promise I wouldn’t tell anyone about what had happened. I wasn’t really allowed to mention the baby at all. That was fine by me. It hurt too much to talk to anyone about it, except maybe Livvy. It was like your sister figured it out on her own, though.”
He squeezed her hand. “If it’s possible, we need to put all the hurt and anger behind us. Now there’s something I have to ask you. It’s none of my business, but…did you sleep with doughboy?”
She let out a laugh from deep in the belly. “Carson? Of course not.”
Relief moved through him. “That’s something, I guess. Are you hungry?”
“As a matter of fact my appetite’s slowly coming back. I have leftover vegetable soup in the fridge.”
“As tasty as that sounds, I was thinking you need something more substantial than soup. You had that on the boat. How about I order us a pepperoni pizza? You used to love pepperoni.”
“Not for me. But I will take a medium veggie.”
He looked at her funny. “Since when did you become a vegetarian?”
“Since I work around taco meat all day. You try handling beef, pork, and chicken, cooking and smelling that stuff from ten in the morning to seven at night and see how your taste buds change.”
“Wanna know something? My taste for you has never changed. That’s the truth of it.”
“I truly missed you, Mitch. With all my heart. The day you left it was like part of me wasn’t here anymore. I don’t think anything has ever been the same for me since.”
He stood up, pulled her out of the chair and against him. “I want you, Raine. I’ve never stopped wanting you.”
“Then we should probably make it like old times.”
“Trust me, I can do better than a horny eighteen-year-old this time around.”
She recognized her own weakness, her own willingness to give in while his hands roamed down to her hips and his mouth took hers.
“Hey guys,” Sebastian called out from the pier.
“Go away!” Mitch bellowed. “Now’s not a good time.”
“Sure. Okay. Sorry. I don’t mean to interrupt. But you said you wanted to know who kidnapped Raine.”
That got Mitch’s full attention. He rested his chin on the top of her head. “I really need to know who abducted you.”
She nibbled at his earlobe and came out of her sex-starved daze long enough to send a wave toward Sebastian. “Come on up. Want a beer?”
“I won’t take up much of your time. I can see with my own eyes you two have definitely made other plans already. I wanted you to know though that your neighbor Deidra is a go-to wonder in a clutch. I knocked on her door about forty minutes ago and looked at her video from last night. It was Sinclair who took you, Raine. Bold as brass. He’s the one who gave you that shot and then dragged you into his police cruiser. Deidra’s camera captured it all.”
“That son of a bitch!” Raine said. “That’s a helluva strange way for my own chief of police to protect and serve. I pay his damn salary.”
“We’ll get him for that,” Mitch charged. “Sinclair just made a huge mistake.”
“He did,” Sebastian chimed in. “Because I’m taking the tape up to Paul Briggs in Tallahassee myself after I make a stopover in Port Saint Lucie to talk to Hartman’s daughter. By tomorrow night, I’ll have delivered the video to Briggs personally. There’s no way the department will be able to ignore that kind of evidence. If that doesn’t shake this case to the core, nothing will.”
A skeptical Mitch still wasn’t convinced. “What if you’re delivering it to the wrong person, though?”
“I’m making copies, leaving one with Anniston and sending one to my dad in Miami. Sinclair won’t get out of this, Mitch. He won’t. Not this time.”
“I hope you’re right.”
Jackson and Tessa walked up. “We’re headed out to Nathan’s family crypt. We thought you guys might want to come with us.”
“Even though that sounds…uh, fascinating, I’ll have to pass,” Sebastian said. “I’m headed out of town and need to pack. I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone.” He slapped Jackson on the back. “I’ll let Mitch get you up to speed on the latest.”
“Let us know what Briggs says about the evidence,” Mitch called out to him as Sebastian took off down the wharf.
“What was that all about? What evidence?” Jackson wanted to know.
“Sinclair’s the one who abducted Raine,” Mitch recounted. “I knew that old man was dirty, but that’s a new low even for him. I want them all to go down, Jackson. Duarte obviously made a call to…somebody here in town and Sinclair showed up as the lackey who carried out the orders.”
“Which makes Duarte higher up on the chain than we first thought. That might explain why he killed Dietrich outright. We’re getting closer, Mitch. Now we just have to keep at it. Which is one more reason we need to get into that vault as soon as possible before someone else beats us to it.”
“You’re right.” Turning to Raine, Mitch said, “We really should go see if those documents are in Nathan’s hiding place. Are you ready to skulk around a graveyard?”
Raine didn’t want to admit that’s the very last place she wanted to be tonight, but she also didn’t want to be left alone. “Sure. I guess.”
She looked over at Tessa and Jackson. “You guys aren’t wasting any time with all this.”
“We can’t afford to waste time.” Tessa looked at Raine with a certain amount of sympathy. “I wanted to bypass your place and just go, but Jackson had this idea that we should all do this together as a team.”
Raine eyed the disappointment on Mitch’s face about having to wait, patted his cheek and whispered, “There’s always later for us to…get together. You are staying the night, right?”
“Damn straight I am, but I’ve waited years for later.” He sighed. “I guess a couple more hours won’t hurt. Come on, we might as well go see what’s in the vault and get this done with.”
Chapter Seven - Justice
Nightfall offered up a crisp
, clear moonlit evening for a walk through the town’s cemetery. The breezy twilight and its rustling leaves were a reminder they were almost to the end of October, a time of year with its own ghostly right to celebrate.
The eighty or so acres of graveyard had rows of marble mausoleums peppered with tombstones throughout and too many cherub angel statues to count. A lovely pond in the center, complete with trickling waterfall, was a gathering place for gulls and herons and ducks. Several concrete-slab benches provided a place to sit and contemplate, or to rest after saying a final goodbye to friends and family members.
In the daytime, the setting was like a picture postcard, an opportunity for a photo shoot full of nature. At night, it held a different vibe altogether.
There was nothing scenic about it to Raine as she sat in the back seat of the SUV and gripped Mitch’s hand before they even reached the iron gates.
“We should’ve brought more flashlights,” he suggested from the crowded back seat, shoving an elbow into Jackson’s side to get him to move over.
“There’s one in the glove box,” Anniston said to Garret, who was riding shotgun in the front. “Don’t tell me you’re the one tasked to break into a crypt tonight,” she groaned as she tapped the brake outside the front entrance.
“He won’t need to,” Jackson explained. “I remembered where there was a key. Unless Nathan changed the lock, we shouldn’t have a problem.”
“You’re kidding? You have a key? How did that happen?” Mitch asked, clearly surprised as he threw open the car door and stuck a foot onto the pavement, grateful to have more wiggle room. He took hold of Raine’s hand and drew her out into the parking lot.
Jackson did the same on the opposite side as he grabbed Tessa’s hand to help her out. “I went through boxes of stuff in the carport until I came across my old tin box, the one where I kept what I thought at that time were priceless treasures, at least they were to a little kid.”
“More like a stoner, who needed to keep his pot hidden from Mom and Dad,” Garret suggested, as he walked up to the gate, shined his flashlight into the first rows of vaults. “And you had the nerve to give me a hard time.”
The Indigo Brothers Trilogy Boxed Set Page 71
