Niceville (18 page)

She looked up, now a little wary.

“Gwen Schwinner.”

Back to the typing, radiating dislike.

“Nice to meet you, Gwen,” he said to the top of her head. “Call me Nick. How about you go get Lacy right now, Gwen? Pretty please.”

Nick braced himself for a scathing look, but Gwen kept her head down, although she had stopped typing. Maybe she was working out what kind of scathing she was going to unleash on him. In the end, she sighed theatrically, got to her feet, and trudged wearily away from the counter—she had very nice hips as well as those truly fine thighs—and down the narrow plastered hallway to the closed door where Lacy Steinert was listening to a crack whore with lung cancer explain why it wasn’t her fault that she was a crack whore with lung cancer. She glared back up the hall at Nick, who waggled his fingers and smiled at her, and then she rapped on the wall, got a “come in,” and opened the door.

The crack whore, forty miles of bad road named LaReena Dawntay, was dabbing at her red-rimmed eyes and snotty nose with a crumpled wad of tissue. Her coffee-colored skin was coarse and pebbly and her legs looked like scabby twigs.

She glared up at Gwen and went back to sobbing. Gwen looked at Lacy, who looked back with an open friendly expression while handing a box of tissues across to LaReena.

“There’s a Detective Kavanaugh here.”

She said this in the same tone as you’d say “the toilets are backing up again.”

Lacy Steinert was a compact middle-aged black woman with jade green Chinese eyes and sharp Cherokee cheekbones. She had started out as a state highway patrol officer, got shot in the hip by the eight-year-old daughter of a guy she was trying to Breathalyze. The round nicked her sciatic nerve and guaranteed her a future of severe and chronic pain.

She invalided out to a liaison desk at Cap City HQ, which bored her to tears, so she got herself transferred to Cullen and Belfair County Probation and Corrections and now here she was at the Probe in Tin Town coping with crack whores named LaReena and fourteen-year-old gang bangers with the life expectancy—if not the smarts—of a mayfly.

“Thanks, Gwen. Can you do me a favor?”

“Yes, Miss Steinert.”

“Can you get a cab for Miss Dawntay here? She’s got to go to Lady Grace for an infusion. Give her a voucher out of the box and tell the driver to be sure he walks her inside. You’ll go inside, won’t you, LaReena? You really can’t miss these treatments. They can help you live a normal life.”

As if
.

But LaReena Dawntay nodded, staring down at her hands. Lacy considered her for a moment—
dead in six months
—and then looked back at Gwen.

“And then could you go next door to Wiggles and ask Mr. Featherlight to step across?”

Going to Wiggles for any reason other than to toss in a Molotov cocktail did not recommend itself to Gwen Schwinner, but she merely nodded and offered a hand to LaReena.

Lacy walked the two of them to the door and stood in the hall, watching as Gwen and LaReena went back up the hall, both women ignoring Nick Kavanaugh, who was leaning on the counter and grinning back at Lacy.

“Nick. Come on back.”

He pushed himself off the counter and came down the hall—not a big man but somehow filling it from side to side, a hard-edged man with cool gray eyes and good lines around them. He was wearing a crisp black dress shirt, open at the collar to show a section of tanned neck, charcoal slacks, well cut, and a pair of slim black wing tips. He had his bright gold CID badge clipped to his belt and a large stainless-steel Colt Python in a holster on his right side. He looked … 
fine
 … she thought. She leaned up to get a cheek kiss from Nick and inhaled his scent, which reminded her of tropical beaches and drinks with umbrellas in them.

His hands on her shoulders were strong and warm and having him up close like this was probably going to be the best part of her day.

They broke and she led him into her office, a bare-bones affair with a poster of a sailboat gliding across a teal blue lagoon to a palm island with clouds floating above it.

“Thanks for coming, Nick.”

“Always happy to see you, Lacy.”

“Me too. I was surprised when Kate told me you had some time. I figured you’d be all over this Gracie shooting.”

“No. Cap City Feds have it. We’re not wanted at the dance.”

“Boonie Hackendorff?”

“Boonie’s a good cop, Lacy, under that dipshit beard.”

“If you say so. Did you know any of the guys?”

He shook his head.

“Not if you mean like friends. Darcy Beaumont was tight with Kate’s brother, Reed, and the Goodhew kid had helped us out once on a biker thing. But no, not like that. You?”

She shook her head.

“No, me neither.”

There was nothing else to say and it was damned depressing to think about it, so they didn’t.

“Anyway, where’s our guy?”

“He’s got a client next door at Wiggles. He’ll be here in a minute.”

“He’s still
dealing
, even now?”

Lacy lifted her shoulders, said, in a fake Spanish accent, “I know nothing. I am from Barcelona.”

“Manuel.
Fawlty Towers
.”

That got a big smile.

“I’m trying to find Lemon something better to do with his life.”

“Such as?”

“If he can beat this ecstasy bust, I think he might be willing to go into one of our Better Chance programs. He taught himself how to fix helicopters when he was with Recon in Iraq. A good aircraft mechanic can pull down more than you and me together.”

“You’re putting a lot of faith and effort into a hustler, Lacy.”

“Hope springs eternal.”

“It sure does in you.”

He liked her for that, among other things.

“So. You want to lay it out for me?”

She did. Lemon Featherlight’s status as a street source for the Niceville Drug Squad guys had apparently meant dick to the Cap City DEA unit, who set him up on an ecstasy sting for reasons which, it seemed to Lacy Steinert, arose chiefly out of sheer boredom.

Nick, who secretly felt that the DEA was an agency with no reason to live, was thinking about a reply when there were steps in the hall and then a tall tanned figure, blade-slim but broad at the shoulders, filled the doorway.

Nick got up and turned to face him as Lemon Featherlight paused at the threshold.

Featherlight was wearing well-cut navy blue trousers, some kind of Italian slippers in dark green leather, a white shirt open a couple of buttons to show a well-muscled chest. He had a fine-boned face with eyes as sea green as Lacy’s and the same Chinese eyes. It struck Nick that they could have been brother and sister.

Featherlight’s black hair, parted in the middle and combed straight back, was long and as shiny as a raven’s wing. He looked back at Nick with a direct but nonchallenging expression, and, after a moment, put out a tentative hand.

Nick took it, a firm dry hand, with a powerful grip, shook it once, looking back at Lemon Featherlight in that way he had, expressionless but searching, a cool light in his gray eyes.

“Detective Kavanaugh. Thanks for coming,” said Featherlight in a baritone whisper, a trace of that flat twangy South Florida accent. Lacy, aware that Nick had other things to do, got right to it.

“I’ve filled Nick in on your situation. He’s making no promises, but I think the best thing you can do is sit down and tell him what you know.”

Featherlight took a wooden chair, pushed it back against the wall to give himself some distance from Lacy and Nick, paused a moment.

“Where should I start?”

Nick, leaning on the wall next to the door, his arms folded across his shirt, said, “You were involved with the Teagues. Tell me how.”

Featherlight went quiet for a moment, seeming to gather himself, and then looked up at Nick.

“Thing is, she was a nice lady. People, they have their ways, Nick. This trio thing was theirs. The two of them. Mr. Teague, his thing was he liked to watch.”

“This was at the house in Garrison Hills?”

“Yes. Always at the house. Only safe place.”

“How’d they explain you to the neighbors?”

“They didn’t,” he said simply. “You know Garrison Hills, that big house of theirs. That wall of cedars and the drive goes way back from the street. Behind the house there’s that ravine and then the forest and then the bluffs going up to Tallulah’s Wall. It was a private place. They had no people, staff or gardeners. Miles always picked me up in the Benz—all that tinted glass—and he always drove me home. No cabs, ever. We’d talk, both ways, about life, or work, whatever came up, which sounds weird, but if he was okay with it, so was I. They paid cash, treated me well.”

“How’d you meet Sylvia in the first place?”

“The Pavilion. Couple years back. She was with some friends. One of the ladies knew me, called me over. We all had something to drink. I liked her right away. I could see she was in pain.”

“How?”

Featherlight flashed a tentative smile.

“In my line, you get to think like a doctor. Somebody comes to see you, they’re hurting, you don’t even have to ask for what. With Sylvia it was around her eyes. She left after a glass and her friend told me about the ovarian cancer, about her needing something for the pain.”

“Something her doctor wouldn’t give her?”

Featherlight shrugged.

“She wanted not to have to ask him all the time. She wanted her own. It was a control thing.”

“So it was just sex and painkillers?” said Nick, with an edge.

“No. At first it was just the Demerol and the OxyContin. We met a few times, talked some. The other thing, she brought that up. I think her friend said I was available. Next week we had drinks with Miles—with her husband. We all got along. It moved on from there.”

“Were you still involved with them when the boy was taken?”

“Yeah, but it stopped the day Rainey was taken. I never heard from them again. They were both dead within two weeks. That whole thing … the security tape at Uncle Moochie’s … the barrow … you guys never worked it out, did you?”

“No. Maybe we should have looked at you. Tony Branko told me you were going to see Rainey in the hospital.”

“Yes. I tried to go every couple of weeks. He was a good kid. Sometimes I got the idea he could even hear me talking to him.”

“So what was it? Guilt? Maybe you had something to do with the disappearance and now you’re feeling a little sleazy about it?”

Featherlight flared up at that, but kept it under control. He looked straight at Nick, a flat, challenging glare, and then shook his head once.

“No. That could
never
be me. I
liked
that kid. He was really into football. Before the Corps I was a walk-on for the Gators. We used to talk about how Saint Mary’s was going to do this year. He wanted to play linebacker for Saint Mary’s and then maybe go on to state. Nobody who knew him could hurt that kid. And if anybody had tried around me, I’d have killed them.”

He spoke with heat and a tightness in his throat that was convincing.

“And I asked around, Nick, when it happened. I don’t think anybody on the street had anything to do with it. I talked to a lot of people—about Uncle Moochie, if anybody on the street had ever heard anything—I got nothing but that he was a pretty good fence. I looked up that Alf Pennington guy from the Book Nook, figured maybe he had done something back in Vermont and that was why he was down here—”

“You didn’t figure we had already done all that?”

“I wanted to find him myself, if I could … but nobody knew anything.
Not even the short eyes and the bicycle seat sniffers. I sweated a few of them, but no, whatever it was, it came from … outside.”

Nick thought
outside
was an interesting word to use in this connection. He had used it himself, when trying to work it all out.

Outside
.

“Any thoughts on who did it?”

He looked up at Nick.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“How long did it take you to get Rainey out of that grave?”

“About an hour. I was only in at the end.”

“Why so long?”

“The grating was rusted shut and the barrow was mostly buried in the earth.”

“And the bricks?”

“Hadn’t been touched in over a hundred years. The mound was almost completely grassed over.”

“I heard it took a couple of firemen to open it up, and they had to use sledges.”

Nick could still hear the steely clank of iron on stone, and the faint shrieks from inside the tomb as each hammer blow slammed into the barrow.

“Yes. The tomb was sealed shut. No sign that it had been opened since they put the coffin inside it.”

“But Rainey was trapped inside it, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah. He was.”

“You ever figure
that
out, Nick? How he got inside without the grave being touched? I mean, that’s just … 
wrong
, isn’t it?”

Nick waited, saying nothing, thinking exactly the same thing. The whole thing had been
wrong
from the get-go.

But Nick didn’t believe that there really was an
outside
. One day he’d get an explanation for all of it, someone would figure out the trick and then the trick would lead them to the trickster.

“Well, whatever … it scared the shit out of me,” said Featherlight. “There’s something really strange about it. You think so too, don’t you?”

“Why am I here, Lemon?”

Featherlight looked at his hands.

“I should have talked to you about this a year ago. But I didn’t want you looking at me and thinking … maybe him. You understand?”

“Tell me why I’m here.”

Featherlight went back inside for a time.

“You ever hear of a thing called Ancestry dot com? A website where you can research your family? You pay a fee; it has access to county records, census and military lists, Mormon files, parish hall stuff?”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“Before Rainey disappeared, like maybe two days before, I was at the house, we were all just sitting around the pool and talking. Rainey was playing in the pool, Miles gets a call, he has to go back to the office. He asks me if I want to leave, I look at Sylvia, she says she’d like me to stay for supper. This is okay with Miles and he leaves. After Rainey goes to bed, she’s a bit looped from the wine, she asks me how much I know about my people. My tribe.”