Joey stepped into our darkened room, nodded at me, and joined the silent cop perched on the edge of the table to watch the conversation in the other room.
“Shore ‘nuff.” The excitable little raisin danced in his seat. “Can’t get ’em much anymore, seems. Too many folks digging, I reckon. Some college kids come out places, now. Some a’ them Cit’del boys.” He looked crestfallen.
“Yep.” Cas matched Dauber’s disappointment. “I wouldn’t mind having one of those Dispensary bottles myself. I hear one can bring a good month’s wage.”
“Let me tell you, that’d keep a fella like me for quite some time, what with my disability check. But nope, they’s hard to find.”
Cas nodded sympathetically. He casually reached for the watch the other officer had flung on the table in front of Dauber.
“Mr. Dothan, I’d appreciate knowing something about this watch. A nice young fella, a doctor, died out in the marsh Wednesday night. You show up with this watch and some creek-bank bottles at a pawn shop on Friday morning. I can’t help but think you could help us out.” He paused, turning the gold link watch in his hand.
“That kid didn’t deserve what happened to him. I’m sure you want to help. His family, they’re wondering, you know.”
Cas should have taken to the stage. He wrung every last ounce of pathos from his plea. I thought little Dauber Dothan, hunkered in Cas’s shadow, was going to cry.
He started shaking his head, biting his bottom Up. “They flung the watch away. And his wallet. Just flung ’em away.” Dauber Dothan sounded sad, disappointed by the flinging of the watch.
I didn’t know what Cas had expected to hear, but that wasn’t what I was listening for.
“Who, Mr. Dothan?”
“Two fellas. They come after he wrecked. I heard this loud noise. Then next thing I know’d, there’s car lights underwater, shinin’ under the water. Damnedest thing ever.” He shook his head in wonderment. “I thought they’d come to he’p him.” His voice clearly said they hadn’t.
What two men? I wanted to tap on the window and ask.
“Where’d they come from?” Cas asked.
“The road, I reckon. I didn’t hear a car, but then I’uz a ways away. That road’s right soft there, not paved or nothing. They’uz there on the bank.” He shivered and crossed his wiry brown arms over his chest, covering his faded Spoleto Festival T-shirt.
“The two men came down to the car?”
Dauber nodded and pulled on his bottom lip. He nodded again, as if watching something play out in his head, something he didn’t want to see again.
“Did they try to help him?”
Dauber took a breath. “That’s what I thought at first. One of ’em opened the door. I couldn’t see too clear. They’uz on the far side. But the inside light come on, and he’s slumped over the wheel.”
He fell silent again. I held my breath, afraid his reluctance to relive it would win out and he’d clam up.
“Then, I just don’t know. Somethin’ happened. I slipped in the water. Scared me bad and I fell and filled my waders. He was over him. Had his head. Then one of ’em flung somethin’ across the creek, and they left.”
His voice was sad. “The car lights went out.” He was silent a minute, watching the picture fade.
Dauber wasn’t squirming anymore, but he uncrossed his arms and fidgeted with his fingers.
Cas let him sit quiet before asking, “You found the wallet and the watch on the opposite bank?”
Dauber looked up at Cas. I couldn’t tell what was in his eyes. Alarm? Shame? Fear? All those reactions at once?
“Had to go that way to get to my scooter. I left it on that bank. Had to go that way. But I knew there wadn’t anything I could do for him. I looked. But there wadn’t. And I just picked up the watch. Didn’t think he’d mind. I left the wallet. So somebody’d know him. And I called. To tell ’em about the accident.”
At that, the two cops watching with me stirred and exchanged glances. Dauber must have explained an anonymous 911 call for them.
“That’s helpful, Mr. Dothan. And no, there wasn’t anything you could have done to help that young fellow. You shouldn’t have removed the watch, though.”
“Or the money,” muttered Joey, the cop who’d been in the room with them earlier.
The other cop, a young guy who barely looked old enough to shave, shook his head. “Think he’s telling the truth?”
Joey shrugged and slid his butt off the table. “They’re always lyin’ about something, thieving old rummy.” Joey left and reappeared almost instantly in the room next door.
Cas was winding down the interview and asked Dauber if he’d repeat his statement for Officer Joey Bayler. No one mentioned that Joey hadn’t brought any coffee.
Cas joined me. “Want a Co’Cola or something?”
I must have held every muscle tense during the interview, because I had a hard time loosening up to follow him down the hall. After last night, my body kept warning me it was tired of abuse.
We parked ourselves at a wobbly little table in the break room. Cas still carried the gold watch in his hand. He laid it on the table and popped the top on his soft-drink can. “What did you think?” He eyed me as he took a loud gulp.
I picked up the watch, gently turning it over. The engraving read: To Mark, with love, Mom and Dad.
I looked at him and shrugged. “You think he was telling the truth?”
“I asked first.”
I fingered the heavy metal watchband. The watch kept good time. Finally, I nodded. “I think he was. He seemed—I don’t know, embarrassed, maybe. About taking the watch. Or scared, for some reason, about what he saw. But I think he was telling the truth.”
Cas rolled his Coke can between his palms and nodded thoughtfully.
“What happened out there? What did he see?”
Cas looked at me, studying my expression in an odd way. Then he said calmly, “Someone broke Mark Tilman’s neck.”
16
SATURDAY AFTERNOON
My stomach lurched at Cas’s words. Good thing I don’t vomit easily.
Broke his neck echoed in my head, but I couldn’t get a sound out.
“The autopsy prelim indicates he died of a broken neck. His nose was bloodied and broken, probably when his car crashed. We questioned whether hitting his nose on the steering wheel could have snapped his neck. The medical examiner thought it possible, but unlikely. He won’t say more until everything’s complete. That could be weeks.”
“But from what Mr.—Dothan said, you think—” Bile ate at the back of my throat.
“Sure sounds suspicious. His account was a bit disjointed, but something went wrong out there. Something got him rattled.”
I nodded, solemn. That’s what had struck me about Dauber Dothan’s story. He’d chatted easily until he got to what happened after the car crash. The mental pictures he replayed frightened him: his own actions, letting his greed overcome his common decency—and what he’d witnessed, what the men who’d appeared had done.
“So you think Mark was—murdered.” I said it aloud to see if the word, said and heard, would make it easier to accept.
“It fits what we know so far.”
I crossed my arms tightly. “But who would—why?”
Cas shrugged. “Sometimes we never know for sure. Something usually turns up.” He looked at me with his flat blue eyes. “We thought you could help.”
Now we came to the real reason he’d invited me to hear Dauber Dothan. I rocked back and forth in my chair, as if to keep warm in a room cool enough for cops in wool pants. Too much information crowded into my brain, trying to reprocess itself. The most important bits had to do with last night and what to tell Cas and how to tell him without sounding melodramatic.
My story started spilling out before things sorted themselves for me. Maybe I just needed to hear the story out loud before I could begin to believe its absurdities myself.
I told him about my drive last
night looking for Tunisia, my headache, the accident. And, finally, about the two men I’d only heard but not seen.
“Would you recognize either of them again? Can you describe them?”
I shook my head, clutching my elbows in a death grip, remembering how desperately I’d wanted to sink into the cold mud, to disappear, to keep from seeing or being seen.
“I’d recognize their voices.” I strained to remember the voices, knowing that time and fickle memory would take the voices further away. I also knew it would take more time and distance to forget the fear that washed over me again, fresh and sharp as the saw grass.
“Do you—you don’t think it could be the same guys, do you?” I had to ask.
An expression moved across his face. It didn’t stay. “Seems a bit too much of a coincidence. Did you see what they were driving?”
“No. But I think they bumped me from behind.”
He clicked the tab on his drink can several times before he spoke. “You said you had a headache last night. The blood work showed you weren’t drinking. Do you think you could have been dragged?”
“Huh?”
He looked up from his can and let out a deep breath. “I have a confession to make. Officer Brewton from over in Mt. Pleasant called me this morning. Checking up on you.” He gave a half smile. “Frankly, you’re lucky the Highway Patrol didn’t work that accident. They’d have hauled your ass to jail.”
I would’ve spluttered with indignation, but he’d hit too close to home. “They asked plenty of questions about that last night. Worst thing I did yesterday was have coffee with a couple of doctors. I get hungry and get a headache. Maybe I ate something I’m allergic to in some chicken bog—the food additive MSG can give me a headache. I always get headaches.” I tried to gather my self-righteous indignation about me, but had trouble holding it tight. I changed the subject. “So who were the guys Dauber saw at Mark’s car? Did they kill him?”
Cas studied me. “You have any ideas? After all, the way some might look at it, your invitation lured him out there, knowing he would have to drive out over the dike.”
He was trying to needle me, but I didn’t need to hear that. This was the part that hadn’t completely reordered itself in my head. “The only things Mark and I might have in common are our hometown and whatever he wanted to talk to me about. Nothing ever happens in Da-cus.” I shrugged. “So it has to be something here.”
“You don’t know what that was.”
“Well—” I drawled it out. He wasn’t going to like any of it—probably wouldn’t believe any of it, so what did it matter? “I’ve got a bit more idea than I had the first time we talked. He mailed his girlfriend a notebook.”
Cas latched on to the wrong thing. “You’ve talked to the girlfriend?”
I nodded and tried to push the conversation back where I thought it should be. “A research journal of some sort. I think he wanted to talk about something involving research he was doing at Barnard Medical.”
“Is this girlfriend here in town?” Cas pulled out his little flip-top notebook. “Any indication they were having any problems?”
“No. For Pete’s sake.”
His eyebrows lifted at my tone, but he kept scribbling.
“It’s the hospital, Cas. Not anything to do with his girlfriend. It’s something at the hospital, with his research.”
“Sure it is. Those were two neurosurgeons Dauber Dothan saw in the tidal creek, operating on Mark Tilman’s neck. And a couple of orthopods came looking for you in the swamp last night. I’m surprised Dauber didn’t notice their nice white lab coats and their Mercedes. Funny he didn’t mention that.”
Exasperated, I spelled Sanda MacKay’s name for him. “I have Mark’s research journal, the one she called me about. I’ve deciphered most of the abbreviations and scribbles; if you’re interested, I can finish translating for you.” He nodded absently as he made notes beside Sanda’s name.
I changed the subject. “Do you know somebody named T-Bone who—”
His head snapped up. “You need to back away from him. He’s serious trouble.” His sharp tone said that was an order, not a request.
“Who is T-Bone?”
“None of your business, if you are smart. He’s a—pimp, to put it politely. A very dangerous little psycho. How’d you run across him?”
I shrugged, “Someone just mentioned him—”
“Cas.” The kid cop from the interrogation room came to the door and jerked his head, indicating he needed Cas down the hall.
“Can you wait here a minute?”
I nodded and Cas swung around the comer, moving quickly for such a large man.
T-Bone, a pimp. Sadly, Tunisia Johnson looked like a dead end in more than one way. As to Mark, I had to admit to myself, now that I wasn’t looking at Cas Kirkland’s questioning smirk, that the vision of lab-coated thugs with M.D. license plates was a bit ludicrous.
What could Mark have wanted to talk to me about? Why had we both had such oddly similar accidents? Thanks to a snake, mine had a better ending than Mark’s. The two men last night hadn’t really threatened me. The whiner speculated maybe I’d float out to sea—not exactly a Good Samaritan, but not a threat, either. Were they the same men Dauber had seen? Did the rear bumper of Mark’s car have a dent from a rear end nudge, like mine did?
I’ve seen enough simple mistakes, serious shenanigans, and overblown egos around Barnard Medical that I could believe just about anything. But Cas was right; no doctor or administrator would be hip-deep in water moccasins and leeches, breaking some medical resident’s neck. Sure, plenty of them might want to snap a lawyer’s neck, but they never follow through on the urge.
Even though doctors have the disposable income to hire their dirty work done, good hit men are hard to find. In a state where Pee Wee Gaskins is our most famous mass murderer, what caliber of hit man could anybody expect to find? Assume you find a hit man. How do you get rid of him? Anybody with enough money to pay a hit man has enough money to pay blackmail. I had to agree, reluctantly, with Cas. A hospital could certainly supply the motive for murder, but could it supply the means?
Maybe Mark had walked in on some high-level mob confab in a patient’s room. Right. South Carolina overrun with hit men and mobsters. And Carl Hiaasen writes for the Frogmore Daily Gazette. The most likely explanation was robbery. Mark’s wallet was empty and Dauber Dothan hadn’t admitted taking the money. Maybe that’s why they tried to get into my car—to rob me.
Cas returned, his face solemn. His stare, with his lash-less eyes, was too direct. He looked like he was trying to make up his mind about something.
“What?”
“Just got a call. A body turned up. A young black female.”
I could tell from his expression he knew who it was.
“What happened?” My question was almost a whisper.
“They’re still working the scene. In an abandoned building, not far from here. It’s—odd. The detective who picked it up called. He recognized her. I’m heading over there.”
“Can I come?” I stood, gathering my satchel, too intent on my search for Tunisia to doubt that he’d take me along.
“No.” He shook his head. “This isn’t—”
“I’ll stay out of the way. I just need—to see. I met her family this morning. Her little girl. It’s—personal. I’ll be quiet. Invisible.” I stood next to him in the doorway, my satchel over my arm.
“No. You wouldn’t be allowed into the scene anyway.”
The disappointment on my face must have softened his response, but it didn’t change his mind. “I’ll call you later. Okay?”
I nodded, reluctantly. Of course they wouldn’t let me on an active crime scene, and what could I hope to accomplish?
That didn’t stop me from waiting in the parking lot and discreetly following Cas’s unmarked car the few blocks to the scene.
My tailing job wasn’t discreet enough. He parked behind a line of official vehicles and waited on the
sidewalk for me to pass, giving me a “scram” sign. I waved and nodded, slowly driving on down the narrow street crowded with cop cars and gawkers.
Dear Lord. This area looked worse than the shambles I’d seen on DeBard Street. The only improvement here was no hookers or clientele. If they operated as openly—which I doubted, given the backwater desolation of the place—they were long gone. Not good for business, cop cars and gawkers.
Crime scene tape roped off a three-story standard Charleston single house, added on to over the years. The paint had peeled off years ago, and the dry, gray stracture seemed to lean in upon itself, hopeless and tired.
I turned around down the block and eased back by, but couldn’t really see anything except several cops, including Cas, gathered outside the crime scene tape on the backside of the house. Cas’s arms were crossed over his barrel chest, his white hair glowing almost pink in the sun. He concentrated on the ground at his feet, oblivious to my drive-by as he listened to a younger uniformed officer.
I drove toward Jake’s. That grape-flavored little girl. Dear Lord, Tunisia had made it out. Why go back? I wanted to sob.
As I crept down upscale King Street, crowded with shops and shoppers, my cell phone buzzed.
“Avery, gahdammit. Where the hell are you? This case is going down the shitter and my so-called staff is blown to the four effin’ winds.”
I sat with my mouth hanging open for a second. Rather than come out fighting—my initial response—I just said, “I’m a few blocks from the office, Jake. I’ll be there—”
“I said twelve effin’ noon. It’s now—”
I punched the off button. In a few seconds, the phone buzzed again. I dropped it in my bag. It stopped, then started again as I walked into Jake’s office a few minutes later.
He saw me, slammed down the receiver he was holding, and spun to confront me. I got to him first.
“Don’t you cuss me, you sonofabitch.”
Something in my face made him back up a step.
“Is that clear?”
“Avery.” He held his hands up in surrender, looking as if somebody had let the air out of his balloon. “I’m sorry, Avery. Dammit. My dick’s in a ringer.” His tone was apologetic. I gave him points for that, but he wasn’t going to take his frustration out on me.
DONE GONE WRONG Page 13
