He looked at her with those crystal blue eyes, cold as steel, but he didn’t say anything. She could tell from his look that he didn’t intend to.
She swallowed hard. “Who do you think killed him? And why?”
“If I knew who, do you think I’d be sitting in some bakery watching out after two women who should be home in bed?”
“Then answer the why.”
He shrugged.
It was all bluster. All speculation. He didn’t know any more than she did, and she was irritated as heck she’d let him upset her. For all she knew, the man was still unstable.
“How could you think Danny Buckner’s death has anything to do with Jimmy Mitchell’s disappearance?” She waited for a response. “I heard your song.”
“The title is ‘Don’t Forget.’ Isn’t it absolutely wonderful?” Leigh Ann gushed.
She knew she could count on Leigh Ann for an unbiased opinion.
“Why’d you send a copy to Sheena Buckner?” she asked when he still didn’t answer.
“It’s called promotion,” Gavin said.
“Sheena was head of the reunion com—” Leigh Ann began.
“It’s called baiting,” Jennifer stated, totally ignoring Leigh Ann.
Gavin’s mouth broke into a grudging smile. “Ya think?”
“It’s a dangerous game,” she reminded him.
“So, you want to play?”
She was actually in a staring contest, the kind that kids play in the third grade. Gavin had no intention of backing down, and she had no intention of letting him intimidate her.
“We’re on the same side,” she told him, searching his eyes. If Gavin had been afraid as a sixteen-year-old, he wasn’t any more. If only she could say the same for herself. She dropped her gaze. “I want to know why Danny got upset when he listened to it.”
“So do I.” Gavin suddenly seemed more interested in what she was saying.
“How do you know he heard it?” Leigh Ann asked.
“Sheena told me,” Jennifer said.
“This isn’t a good place to talk,” Gavin said. “You girls need to get home. It’s not safe to be out at night.”
“It never has been,” Jennifer pointed out much more courageously than she felt, and wondering how safe it was to be out with Gavin.
“Is that why you’re following Leigh Ann?” she demanded, suddenly realizing there was no way that Gavin could have just happened upon the place. It was a good distance from Leigh Ann’s apartment, and definitely not one of Macon’s hot spots. Which meant he had most likely tailed her to Monique’s and then come after them here. He was either obsessive, paranoid, dangerous, or all of the above. She didn’t expect him to answer her, and he didn’t.
Jennifer wrapped her bear claw in a napkin and stuffed it into her purse. Something told her she wouldn’t be interested in eating it for quite some time.
He shoved his hair out of his eyes and looked down at Leigh Ann, a soft look. “You ready?”
Leigh Ann moved over near him.
“Come on,” he told Leigh Ann, taking her hand.
Obediently, she slid out of the booth, taking a final sip of her coffee.
“Oh, no you don’t,” Jennifer almost shouted. “You don’t make accusations about people getting murdered and then just walk away.”
The woman behind the counter quit shelving doughnuts and turned to stare.
Gavin gave Jennifer a look that made her stop. “I’m not talkin’ to no hysterical female in no public place, so listen up. We’ll follow you home, and then come back for Leigh Ann’s car. That’s the safest way.” He didn’t wait for her to agree.
She didn’t particularly like Gavin or his attitude, but paranoia was an easily transmitted disease. She felt a shiver cross her shoulders. It was only a few blocks to her apartment building, and if he wanted to see her home—as long as Leigh Ann was with him—she didn’t see the harm.
Chapter 21
Thank God Sam was waiting at her door when she got home. She had no desire to go into her apartment—or anywhere else for that matter—alone. Muffy was a courageous mutt, but dogs were no match for determined human beings.
His arm felt good around her as they cuddled on the sofa. She burrowed closer against his chest, closed her eyes and snuggled his neck.
Sometimes Sam could make the world go away. She wanted Gavin, his song, and all thoughts of murder, suicide, and vanishing out of her mind.
“Real nasty business,” Sam whispered in her ear.
Her eyes popped open. Those were not the words she hoped to hear.
He leaned forward, pulling her with him, retrieved a bottle from the coffee table and took a swig of beer. He allowed himself no more than one a day, and then only if it’d been a particularly difficult day. His legs were propped on the table, and Muffy lay directly beneath them.
She looked at him. His tie was loose, his hair slicked back with a few dark strands brushing his eyebrow, just the way she liked it. He looked beat, almost as tired as April had earlier that night. He’d been working nonstop all weekend, and he was going to talk about it, about the body the police had found. It was on his mind and talking was his way of coping. The least she could do was listen, even if she’d had more of death than she cared for in the last few days.
“Could it have been an accident?” she suggested, pushing herself upright.
“Not unless the guy walked all the way out there, accidently shot himself square in the face, and then disposed of the gun. No car anywhere around, and he sure wasn’t living there. Kudzu had grown up all over one side of the bungalow. Floor had rotted through in several places. No running water, no electricity. He was dressed in a coat and tie. Most likely had been dead a day, two at the most. The body hadn’t deteriorated much.”
“You still don’t know who he is?”
“Nope. The gunshot to the face—which occurred postmortem, by the way—is going to make identification pretty difficult.”
“Why don’t they just run his fingerprints? You said he hadn’t been dead too long.”
“The fingertips were snipped.”
Surely she hadn’t heard him right. “As in cut off?”
He nodded.
“How in the world—”
“Most likely a bolt cutter.”
She felt sick to her stomach. “Why would anybody go to all that trouble to make sure the body wouldn’t be identified? This sounds like something I’d write, not something that happens in real life. I mean a killer is usually concerned with not getting caught, as opposed to keeping the victim’s identify a secret. Why would he do that?”
Sam shrugged. “You tell me. You’re the mystery writer.”
She punched his arm. “So you think he was killed there, in the house?” Better to talk about location. She was getting far too graphic an image of the body.
Sam shook his head. “No blood to indicate it. They suspect he was dumped. Guess whoever did it didn’t realize the place was scheduled to be torn down. The owner had gone over after church to give the place a look-see.”
Someone else, worried tonight, would soon be mourning, assuming the police were able to identify him. At least he’d been found. Jimmy Mitchell hadn’t been so lucky.
Why was she suddenly so sure that Mitchell was dead? Because Gavin Lawless said so? There was something about Gavin, something that seemed, well, sincere, for lack of a better word. He seemed so sane, so reasoned, so certain. At least when he didn’t seem illogical and totally off the wall. But how could he be so certain Mitchell was dead? Unless he were somehow involved.
But what if Mitchell wasn’t dead? Ben Underwood had called out to him at the reunion. Did he have reason to believe Jimmy was alive and in Macon?
What if someone had tried to kill Jimmy, only he didn’t die, and he was back from the grave, back to seek revenge? And it was he who had—
She needed to get a grip.
“Ever hear of a guy named Jimmy Mitchell?” she asked casually.
Sam took another swig of beer and then looked over at her. “Why?”
Darn. Couldn’t he, just once, answer a simple question?
“He disappeared about twelve years ago, might have been a runaway. He was sixteen.”
Sam was from North Carolina. He’d been working for the Telegraph for the past five years. It was unlikely he’d know anything about it.
He set his beer down and pierced her with those blue eyes of his. “You’re the third person who’s mentioned that name to me in the last three days.”
Snuggling had definitely lost all its appeal for the night.
“Who else?” she asked.
“One of the policemen out at that house. He said Mitchell disappeared around this time of year, on a night with a full moon, like the one we had Saturday. Weirds him out. He was just a kid when it happened, but Mitchell lived in his neighborhood. Said when he finds a body like that one, he half expects it to be ol’ Jimmy, popping up again like something out of an episode of The Twilight Zone, slipped back through some burp in time.”
Sam chuckled as if he thought such an idea was funny.
It wasn’t. The idea sent chills through her. She felt as though she’d slipped through some kind of time warp back at the reunion and into a reality right out of a teen horror flick. Her body might be thirty years old, but her emotional state was currently closer to eighteen. She was scared, irrationally and thoroughly scared. If the body wasn’t Mitchell’s, could it possibly be…
Sam took her hand, lightly drumming his fingers against her own, staring at the movement. He looked serious.
“Who else mentioned Mitchell?” she asked.
“One of the other reporters at the reunion. One of the guests said that some guy named Ben Underwood had shown up for the festivities.”
“Right. I saw him there.”
“When?”
“Early in the evening.”
Sam nodded. “He wasn’t around later when the police started questioning people.”
“I’m not surprised. I imagine Underwood’s had more to do with the police than he ever wanted to.”
“You know him, then.”
“Only by sight. He was Jimmy’s best friend. When Jimmy went out that night, the night he disappeared, he left with Ben.”
“So the police assumed that Underwood knew what happened to Mitchell.”
“Right.”
“Was he a suspect?”
Jennifer shook her head. “I don’t know. They never found any evidence of a crime. Ben stuck to the story that he dropped Jimmy off at the school that night.”
“How do you know all this?”
“The police questioned kids at school. Everybody knew what was going on.”
“One more thing,” he said. “I checked in on the status of Danny Buckner with the coroner. He’d been drugged, all right, before the carbon monoxide got to him. That’s not all that unusual with suicides. They take pills or alcohol and then slit their wrists or crank up the engine. Only...”
“Only what?”
“The drug they found in his system—it’s not the usual choice.”
“How so?”
“It was one of those date-rape drugs.”
“Whoa! Why in the world would he have that? And why would he take it? Those drugs render a person unconscious, unable to function, and usually create memory loss when the victim wakes up. If it’s what I think it is, it works really fast once it’s been ingested?”
“Right. Why do you know so much about it?”
“I was thinking about using it in my next novel. It’s common on college campuses. I’m amazed the toxicologist thought to look for it.”
“He didn’t, exactly. It’s in the same family as Valium, only much more powerful. Valium shows up in a lot of suicides. I guess something in the screening must have tipped him to it. Why would Danny have it?” he asked.
Jennifer stood and started pacing, suddenly more awake than she’d been since Gavin had dropped his bombshell on her at the bakery. “This is really weird. I can’t imagine anybody using something like that on himself.”
“That’s not all. The piece of plastic tubing that ran from the tail pipe to the window didn’t have any fingerprints on it.”
She stopped and stared at him. “Are you telling me—”
He shook his head. “Not necessarily. The D.A.’s office is still calling the death a suicide. Maybe the lack of fingerprints is simply a fluke. Who knows? There were fingerprints all over the car doors from the people who found him, but they didn’t find any of Buckner’s. Could be they were obscured—”
“Or could be the handles had been wiped, too,” she pointed out, sitting back down.
“Are you all right?” Sam touched her cheek.
She shook her head. “Are you going to print any of this in the paper?”
“Not yet. It’s wouldn’t be wise. The police don’t need the press giving away everything they know.”
“So what do the police think, the ones who are actually involved in the investigation?” She grabbed his face and forced him to look directly into her eyes. “Say the words,” she demanded. “Say it. Tell me what they think.”
He looked at her, a puzzled, worried expression on his face. “Why is this so important to you?”
What could she say when she didn’t even know herself? She shook her head. Finally, she managed, “I need to know.”
“They’re leaving open the possibility that Danny Buckner was murdered,” Sam said.
She let go of him and sank back into the couch. Sheena had said it. Gavin had said it. She’d said it. But not until Sam let the words pass his lips did it seem irrevocable. Someone had murdered Danny Buckner.
“What are the police doing about it?” Jennifer demanded, sitting back up.
“They pulled Underwood in for questioning. He was still there when I left,” he looked at his watch, “maybe forty-five minutes ago.”
“Why? Do they think he killed Danny?”
“They’re just talking to him.”
“They have to have a reason.”
“They say he showed up at the reunion acting drunk.”
“That’s right. I saw him. He was calling out to Jimmy.”
“Right. A security guard took a flask off of him.”
“So what are they going to charge him with? Public drunkenness?”
“Not likely. That flask was full of tea.”
“You mean—”
“That’s right. Underwood wasn’t drunk.”
Chapter 22
Jennifer squinted at the early morning sun glinting off her windshield and tried hard to focus on her mission. It was time someone had a talk with Ben Underwood. Someone besides the police.
Last night she’d sent Sam home with an assignment: find every article about Jimmy Mitchell’s disappearance that the Telegraph had ever printed. That paper stuck to the facts, at least as they knew them, unlike the Atlanta Eye. How Mitchell and Danny and Underwood could all be connected was anybody’s guess, but she was beginning to think the old adage that there was no such thing as coincidence might just hold true.
Jennifer pulled her car, the dew still in the shadows, into the lot at the Best Western on Riverside Drive. It’d only taken her a few minutes going down the listings on the Internet to find him. She thought it best to surprise Underwood early just in case he was thinking about cutting out of town.
Sheena pulled her Cherokee into the parking space right beside Jennifer’s Bug, and confronted her as soon as they were both out of their cars. “What the heck is going on that you had to drag me out of bed before six o’clock in the morning?” The woman was a paragon of manners.
“Good Morning to you, too. We’re looking for Room 106,” Jennifer told her, wishing she didn’t have to bring Sheena along, but knowing she couldn’t very well come by herself. Old fears died hard, especially hers. Sam would have a fit if he knew what she was up to.
She didn’t know how Underwood fit into all this
, only that he did. Gavin’s rule—suspect everybody—seemed incredibly sensible at the moment.
“Why are we here?” Sheena demanded.
Jennifer shushed her. She had a voice that could wake, if not the dead, certainly the sleeping. “For once, trust me and don’t ask questions. Let me do the talking.”
Grumbling, Sheena followed her down the row of doors. The room was the next to the last on the left. Just as Jennifer raised her hand to knock, the door swung inward and Ben Underwood stopped in front of her.
“What the—” he started.
“—hell?” Sheena finished.
Jennifer swallowed hard. This had seemed like a much better idea only seconds before. Underwood, ramrod straight, looked lean and tough, not to mention mean.
“Mr. Underwood, I’m Jennifer Marsh, and this is Sheena Buckner. We all went to high school together.”
He stared at them, the muscles of his chest straining against the thin cotton of his olive green T-shirt. “I think I remember her,” he told Jennifer, “but you don’t look familiar. Buckner. You related to that fellow that killed himself?”
Sheena nodded and Jennifer put a hand on her arm.
“I was sorry to hear about that,” he said, bending to retrieve the morning newspaper.
Jennifer peered past him, into the room. He hadn’t packed. Items were strewn here and there. He obviously didn’t plan to go anywhere anytime soon. So the police hadn’t scared him off. Or had told him to stay put.
“Actually, Sheena’s husband Danny was murdered.” Jennifer watched for a reaction. If he was surprised, he didn’t show it.
“You don’t say.” For a moment he looked even meaner. He tapped the newspaper against his palm. “Is that what it says in here?”
She shook her head.
“You shouldn’t forget that an attack of conscience can get to a man.”
“That’s not what happened,” Jennifer insisted.
“Assuming you’re right, do you two know what you’re messin’ with?” he asked.
At least he said “what” and not “who.”
“We’re not here to convince you that Danny was murdered,” Jennifer told him, ignoring his question. “We simply need some information. You came back to Macon for a reason. I’m assuming you want to set the record straight about your involvement with Jimmy Mitchell’s disappearance.”
Dying to Remember Page 10
