What The Dead Know Part 14

"Oh, it was a.s.suredly an accident," said the inspector from the local fire department, a man named Wayne Tolliver, who met Infante for a cup of coffee at the end of his breakfast, just as Infante had timed it. He didn't like to conduct business while eating, and he was glad that he had given himself wholeheartedly to this particular meal, a satisfying spread of eggs, sausage, and grits. "She was in the front room, watching television, and he was in the bedroom, smoking and drinking. He fell asleep, knocked the ashtray on a little rug next to the bed, and the place"-he threw his hands open, as if tossing an invisible wad of confetti-"went up."

"What did she do?"

"The smoke alarms weren't working." Tolliver made a face. He was a round-faced man, pink-cheeked and kind-looking, probably not as old as his freckled bald head made him look. "People think we're overly concerned, telling them to change batteries when they change their clocks every six months, but it's better'n never. Anyway, it was Christmas Eve, cold for these parts, and she had a s.p.a.ce heater going where she was. The TV was in an old Florida room, didn't have any central heating. By the time she noticed the smoke, it was too late. She told us she went to the door but felt it first, like you're supposed to, and saw it was hot to the touch. She said she banged on it, screamed his name, then called 911. Windows were nailed shut-a violation on the landlord's part, to be sure, but the fellow probably never had a fighting chance, drunk as he was. My guess is that he was dead from smoke inhalation, or on his way there, before she even realized what was going on."

"And that was that."

Tolliver picked up the judgment in Infante's voice. "No accelerants. Only one point of origin, the rug. We looked at her. We looked at her real close. Here's the thing that sold me-she didn't take nary a thing out of that room. It went up with all her clothes, whatever jewelry she owned, and it's not like he had any money to leave her. Quite the opposite. He had an annuity that stopped with his death, so she lost whatever income he provided."

"An annuity?" The lawyer up in York had said that Stan Dunham purchased one after selling the farm, so that fit. But he also said the man didn't have any living relatives.

"A policy that paid him a monthly sum, for up to ten years. You know when ballplayers get those big salaries? They're underwritten by annuities. Bigger ones than this, of course. It wasn't a lot-judging by their lifestyle, it was just enough to get the two of them f.u.c.ked up, regular. They were partyers, those two. You think they'd have grown out of that behavior, at their ages-he was in his fifties-but some people never do."

There was a whiff of sorrow in that statement, as if Tolliver had some personal experience on this front, a loved one who had never grown up and caused him some heartache. But Infante wasn't here to talk about Tolliver.

"What else did you learn about the two of them?"

"It was a...familiar address to our brothers in blue. Noise complaints. Suspected domestic violence, but those calls came from the neighbors, not from her, and they said they were never sure who was getting the worst of it. She was a h.e.l.lcat, one of those hillbilly gals out of the hollows of North Carolina."

Everything was relative. If this guy was calling someone a hillbilly, she must have been really low-rent-rope belt, Daisy Dukes, the full Elly May Clampett.

"How long had she lived at the Reynolds Street address?"

"Not sure. She didn't appear on any of the official doc.u.ments-the lease, the utility bills. That was all in his name. He'd been there five years or so. He drove trucks, but not regular for any one company. The way the neighbors tell it, he met her on the road and brought her back. He wasn't much, but he always managed to have a woman around. She was the third one, the neighbors."

"Did you do a tox screen on him?"

Another insulted look. "Yes. And it was consistent with being dead drunk, with an Ambien behind it, and nothing more. Guy was like a lot of truckers-he relied on pills to stay awake, to make his days, and then he needed help to calm down when he was home. He had just come back from a job the day before."

"Still..."

"Look, I get where you're trying to go with this. But I know fires. Allow me that much? An upended ashtray on a cheap cotton rug. If she'da set that fire, do you know how calculating she'd have to be, how calm? Oh, it's easy enough to throw a lit cigarette on the rug, but she's got to be sure he won't wake up, right? She has to stand there, watch the fire get under way, wait until it's the inferno that she's going to call in. If it doesn't catch, she can't throw another one down, because we'll pick up on that. Right? She's got to hope the neighbors don't see anything-"

"It was Christmas Eve. How many were home?"

Tolliver steamed past that. "I've met the woman. She didn't have the wiles to pull that off. Firefighters had to hold her back from going into the house."

But she had the presence of mind not to go into the bedroom when the door was hot to the touch.

Again Tolliver picked up on what Infante didn't say. "People can be real calm and composed in an emergency. Self-protection kicks in. She saved herself, but when she realized he was in there, that he was really gone, she went crazy. I've listened to the 911 call. She was scared." Skeered. And people made fun of Infante's alleged New York accent, which was actually pretty mild, a shadow of the real thing.

"Where is she now?"

"I don't know. House is condemned, so she's not living there. Could be in town, could have left. She can do what she pleases. She's free, white, and twenty-one."

If Infante had ever heard that phrase in his life, it would have been in a movie or a television show, and not a recent one. Said in today's workplace, this was the kind of careless sentiment that resulted in meetings with human-resources facilitators. Yet Tolliver didn't seem to realize that the comment was off in any way. And, to be fair, Infante's own father and uncles had let loose with far worse, much more consciously.

Leaving the Waffle House, he wondered what had brought Tony Dunham south, why he'd ended up making his home here. The weather could be reason enough. And as a long-haul trucker, it wasn't like the guy was burning with ambition. Born in the early 1950s, Dunham would have been just old enough that college was still optional. Even a high school dropout could make a living back in the sixties, if he got in with a good union. Nancy's record check indicated that Tony Dunham wasn't a veteran, but it wasn't clear if he'd been living at home during the years that the alleged Heather Bethany claimed to live there. She hadn't mentioned anyone else in the house. Then again, she hadn't provided much beyond the address and Stan Dunham's name. Had she wanted them to find the link to Tony or not? And where did Penelope Jackson fit into this?

Photos didn't lie: The woman in Baltimore wasn't Penelope, not the Penelope in the driver's-license photo. But who was she? What if Penelope was Heather Bethany and this woman had stolen her life story along with her car? Then where was Penelope? He could only hope that folks on Reynolds Street might recognize his mystery woman, be able to explain her relationship to these people.

SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY WAS notably lacking when Infante returned to Reynolds Street and began asking questions about Penelope Jackson and Tony Dunham. Granted, the first man he encountered may have wanted to be helpful, but he spoke more Spanish than English, and the mere sight of Infante's official ID shut him down. Still, he nodded at the photocopy of Penelope Jackson's North Carolina driver's license, saying, "Si, si, is Miss Penelope," then shrugged at the photo of the other woman, showing no sign of recognition. The neighbor to the east, a heavyset black woman who seemed to have five or six children, sighed as if to suggest that she had seen so much that she didn't have time to see anything else. "I minded my business and they minded theirs," she said when asked if she knew where Penelope Jackson might be.

On the other side of the charred blue house, an older man was pulling a bamboo rake over the yellow-green lawn, loosening winter debris. Cold and curt at first, he became friendlier when he realized he was dealing with someone official.

"I hate to say it, but I'd rather have the place a burnt-out sh.e.l.l than have those two back," said the man, Aaron Parrish. "Unkind of me-and I wouldn't have wished such a tragedy on them. But they were awful people. Oh, the fights and the yelling. Plus-" He lowered his voice as if about to speak of something truly shameful. "Plus, he parked his pickup on the front lawn. I complained to the landlord, but he said they kept up on their rent, unlike the Mexicans. But I find the Mexicans to be better neighbors, once you explain a few things about America to them."

"Fights, yelling-between the two of them?"

"Frequently."

"Did you call the cops?"

A nervous look around, as if someone might be listening. "Anonymously. A few times. My wife even tried to talk to Penelope about it, but she said it was none of our business, only she didn't say it quite so nicely."

"This her?"

Parrish peered at the driver's-license photo, enlarged and printed out by Nancy. "Appears so. Although she was prettier in person. Pet.i.te, but with a lovely figure, like a little doll."

"This woman look familiar?" He had a photo of quoteHeather Bethanyunquote, taken with a digital camera during their second interview.

"No, never seen her. My, they look a little bit alike, don't they?"

Did they? Infante looked at the two photos, but he saw only the most superficial resemblance-hair, eyes, maybe build. Much as he disliked and disbelieved Heather Bethany, he saw a frailty there that Penelope Jackson didn't have. Jackson looked like one tough customer.

"Did she tell you anything about herself? Penelope Jackson, I mean. Where she was from? Where Tony was from? How they met?"

"She wasn't one who was inclined to chat. I know she worked over on St. Simons, at a place called Mullet Bay. Tony did work on the island, too, sometimes, when he couldn't find long-haul work. He picked up jobs with a landscaping service. But of course they couldn't live there."

"Why not?"

Aaron Parrish laughed at Infante's naivete. "Prices, son. Almost none of the folks who work on the island can afford to live there. This house"-he waved at the charred remains of the three-bedroom rancher with blue siding-"that would be a quarter of a million, as is, if you could just pick it up and airlift it five miles east. St. Simons is for millionaires, Sea Island dearer still."

Infante thanked Mr. Parrish and let himself into the unlocked house, which still held the smell of the fire. He didn't see why the structure had to be condemned; the damage had been largely contained to the bedroom. The landlord probably stood to make more money on the insurance claim that way.

The door to the bedroom was swollen and stuck, but he managed to open it by throwing his full weight behind his shoulder. Tolliver had said that Tony Dunham had been dead before he burned, killed by smoke inhalation, but it was hard to forget that his flesh had sizzled and popped like barbecue for a time. That smell remained, too. Infante stood in the doorway, trying to imagine it. You would have to have some big b.a.l.l.s to try killing someone this way-tossing the ashtray on the rug, waiting for the fire to engage. As Tolliver said, you couldn't throw a second cigarette down if it didn't get going. And if the guy woke up, you'd better be able to persuade him that it was an accident and you just walked in, a nervy chance to take if he was already smacking you regular. You also needed the discipline not to reach for a single cherished possession, to let it all go. You had to stand there until you were almost choking from the smoke, then close the door, wash your face to clear it of the watery tears caused by the fire, then go back and wait until you were sure that no one could save the man on the other side.

The woman up in Baltimore, whatever her name was-she could do that, he was sure of it. But he also was convinced that she wasn't Penelope Jackson. It was the only real fact he had. I don't know Penelope Jackson, she had said. But wouldn't a true stranger have modified the name? I don't know a Penelope Jackson, I don't know any Penelope Jackson. Then how the f.u.c.k did you come to have her car? She had managed to avoid answering that question by offering them the solution to an infamous crime, then setting up a police officer as the perp. She had thrown a lot of things at them-to what end? What didn't she want them to see?

He left the house, left Reynolds Street. It was a sad house, even before the fire. A house where two unhappy people had coexisted with frustration and disappointment. A house of quarrels and insults. He could tell because he had lived in such a house, twice. Well-once, his second marriage. His first marriage had been okay, until it wasn't. Tabby had been a sweet girl. If he met her now...But he could never meet her again, not the Tabby he had first glimpsed in the Wharf Rat twelve years ago. She was lost to him, replaced by a woman who knew Kevin Infante as a cheat and a runaround. He ran into Tabby sometimes-Baltimore was small that way-and she was always polite, civil, as was he. Friendly, even, laughing about their marriage as if it were nothing more than an accident-plagued road trip, a merry misadventure. A decade out, they could be generous to their younger selves.

Yet there was a film in her eyes that would never quite disappear, a sheen of disappointment. He would give anything to see Tabby one more time as she had regarded him that first night in the Wharf Rat, when he was still someone she could admire and respect.

ONE OF THE PAMPHLETS from the Best Western lobby said there was some sort of fort over on St. Simons Island, and he decided to kill time there until Mullet Bay, the restaurant-bar where Penelope Jackson had worked, began prepping for the dinner rush. He was used to historical disappointments-he had seen the Alamo when he was just ten years old-but there was no structure at all where Fort Frederica once stood. He was staring at a sea of weeds known as the b.l.o.o.d.y Marsh when his cell rang.

"Hey, Nancy."

"Hey, Infante." He knew that tone. He was more attuned to Nancy's tones than he had been to either wife's. She was going to drop some bad news on him.

"Out with it, Nancy."

"Our gal has decided she wants to talk. Today."

"I'm back tonight. Can't it wait?"

"I thought so, but Lenhardt says we gotta humor her. He's going to send me in there with her. I think he's worried about media, once her mom gets here. No one expected her to get out of Mexico so fast, with so little notice, and...well, we can't control the mom as easily. We've got no charge hanging over her head. She can talk to whoever she wants to."

Free, white, and twenty-one, as Tolliver might say.

"Yeah, it could be a cl.u.s.terf.u.c.k." It was amazing that they had flown beneath the radar as long as they had, their only bit of luck. "f.u.c.k, though. When does the mom get in?"

"Ten P.M., right behind you. That's another thing..."

"Aw, c'mon. I've got to pick her up? Did I get demoted in the last twenty-four hours?"

"Sarge thought it would be nice if someone met her, and we don't know how long this thing will go. Nice and...well, prudent. We want to keep her in our sights, you know?"

"Yeah."

Infante snapped his phone shut in disgust and returned to staring at the marsh. The battle hadn't apparently been all that b.l.o.o.d.y. British troops had repelled a Spanish invasion during something called the War of Jenkins' Ear. What a small-stakes name for a war, but then he was fighting his own meaningless battle, wasn't he, wandering around Georgia while his former partner vaulted into the lead position, conducted an interview that should have been his. The War of Infante's Left t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e. It was worse, in a way, knowing that Nancy hadn't backstabbed him or maneuvered this. She had never been the scheming type. He wondered if maybe-Heather knew he had gone to Georgia and that's why she was suddenly keen to tell all.

f.u.c.k, he hated Brunswick.

CHAPTER 28.

"The thing is, we could really use your help."

Willoughby heard the words, made sense of them, yet couldn't quite process his way to an answer. He was too taken with the speaker, enthralled and delighted by her mere presence. An old-fashioned girl. Willoughby knew he was being s.e.xist, but he couldn't help thinking of the young detective that way. She was so curvy, a nineteenth-century body type here in the early days of the twenty-first, with such pretty red cheeks and slippery blond hair falling out of a careless topknot. There had been women in the department when he was there. By the late 1980s, some had even made homicide. But they sure hadn't looked like this one.

"I was up until almost four A.M.," the detective, Nancy, was saying earnestly, "going over what's filtered out about the case and what was kept in the file. But it's so much to take in at once, I thought you could help me focus on the key details."

She pushed two printouts toward him. Not just typed but color-coded, red and blue. Red for what was known publicly, blue for what had been kept back. It seemed a little girly to him, but maybe all police did such things now that they had computers. Certainly he would never have dared using a system like this in his day, given how his coworkers were always on the alert for any sign of weakness or softness in him. Effeteness was the precise word, but if he had ever uttered it aloud, his colleagues would have seized upon it as evidence that he was, in fact, effete.

"Four A.M.?" he murmured. "And here it is only noon. You must be exhausted."

"I have a six-month-old son. Exhausted is my natural state. Actually, I got four straight hours, so I feel relatively well rested."

Willoughby pretended to study the papers in front of him, but he didn't want to focus, didn't want to surrender to those red and blue sirens. There was a whirlpool beneath this placid a.s.sortment of old facts. He had no desire to get sucked into this again, to think about all the ways he had failed. Not that anyone had ever rebuked him or suggested he was at fault in any way. His superiors, much as they had wanted a resolution in the Bethany matter-and that was the word they had come to use over time, matter-understood that it was bad luck, one of those rare cases that could have come straight from The Twilight Zone. Not even Dave, in the end, had faulted him. And by the time Willoughby left the department, he had in many ways carved out the image he'd wanted. One of the guys. Tough. Dogged. Never soft, much less effete.

Yet it had long gnawed at him that he'd never made significant inroads into learning what happened to the Bethany girls. And now here was this young woman-gosh, she was pretty, and a new mother, too, imagine that-telling him that a police had been accused, one of their own. One of his own, practically a contemporary. He didn't remember Stan Dunham, and this Nancy girl said he had retired from the theft division in 1974, but still: This would be so embarra.s.sing. He knew how it would look, if the Jane Doe girl-the woman-was telling the truth. Right under their own noses, all these years. There might be suggestions of a cover-up, a conspiracy. People loved conspiracies.

"This," he said, pointing his finger at a line in blue ink, a line that had been capitalized and highlighted. "You got it. This is what you want. Only a very few people could talk about this in any detail-me, Miriam, Dave, the young cop who was with us that night, whoever had access to the evidence room."

"That's not a small number of people. Plus, the accused is a police, someone who might have had sources inside the department."

"You're thinking she's not who she says she is, but that Stan still might be involved."

"Everything's in play right now. Information, it's-" She paused, gathering her thoughts. "It's alive, in its own way. It grows, it changes. Since I started working cold cases and spending more and more time with case files and computers, I think about information differently. It's like a Lego set, you know? There are different ways to put it together, but some pieces will never join, no matter how you pound on them."

The tea on the table between them had grown cold, but he took a sip anyway. He had insisted on making the tea, injecting a lot of ceremony into two mugs and two bags of Lipton, and she had indulged him in his wish, probably thinking he was lonely and wanted to draw out the visit. He wasn't lonely, far from it, and he didn't want her to stay one minute longer than necessary. His eyes slid toward his wife's old desk and he heard a bird's mournful coo somewhere in the eaves of Edenwald. Too late. Too late.

"The thing about this," Willoughby said, "is that the person who took the girls doesn't necessarily know about it and almost certainly doesn't remember it. It wouldn't have mattered to him. But a girl-a girl would remember it. You would, wouldn't you? At that age?"

"Well, I was more of a tomboy, as you might guess, but yeah, I would remember."

"So work your way to that. Get her good and drunk on her own words. That's all you need to do. But you know that, right? You say you were in homicide, before your maternity leave." He found himself blushing, as if it were impolite to remind this woman that she had bodily functions, that she had reproduced. "You know your way around an interrogation. In fact, I bet you're darn good at it."

It was her turn to drink cold tea, to stall a little. When he was younger, he might not have been drawn to her. In his twenties he had liked the women of his cla.s.s, as his own sn.o.bbish mother might have said, the thin-to-the-point-of-brittle women, Katharine Hepburn types, with those pelvis-forward walks and hips that could cut you. Evelyn had been such a woman, elegant at every angle. But softness had its virtues, and this Nancy Porter had such a doll-like face, with those red cheeks and pale blue eyes. Peasant stock, his mother would have said, but his family tree could have used some st.u.r.dier genes.

"We thought-they thought-Sergeant Lenhardt, who supervises Infante, and the commissioner himself-we thought you should be present."

"Watching, you mean?"

"Maybe even...talking."

"Is that legal?"

"Sometimes retired police still work for the department. Sort of a noncommissioned, consultancy gig. We could make that happen."

"Dear-"

"Nancy."

"I wasn't being a s.e.xist-I lost your name for a second and was trying to cover up. That's how it works, don't you see? I'm in my sixties. I forget things. I'm not as sharp as I was. I don't remember every detail. Right now you know this case better than I do. I have nothing to contribute."

"Just your presence might make her think twice about trying to fake us out. With Infante in Georgia and the mother due to arrive tonight-"

"Miriam is coming? You found Miriam?"

"In Mexico, just as you said. She kept a bank account in Texas, and we got the contact info from them. Lenhardt found her last night, but we never thought she'd get here so fast. He tried to talk her out of coming at all. She'll have to travel all day, but once she's here, I don't see how we can keep her away. It wasn't our idea to sit down today, but my boss says it may be an opportunity, after all."

"You mean, if she's a fake, she may fool Miriam and begin gleaning information from her, almost without her knowing." He shook his head. "She won't fool Miriam. No one could fool Miriam about anything."

"We're not too worried about that. If it comes to it, we'll always have epithelial cells. But if we could eliminate her definitively, trip her up on the facts, that wouldn't be a bad thing."

"Epi...?"

"DNA. I'm just being fancy using a scientific term, and not even accurately."

"DNA. Of course. The policeman's new best friend." He took another sip of cold tea. So Miriam hadn't told them, and they hadn't asked. She a.s.sumed and they a.s.sumed, and why wouldn't they? Things had gone unsaid, inferences had been made. His fault, he supposed, and he had considered undoing it so many times over the years. But he had owed Dave that much.