Shattered (20 page)

The boy, whose hurry to get out of the room was pathetic, now stopped with a look of panic on his face. “Man, I can't stay here forever! I mean, my ride's leaving at the end of the week and what am I supposed to do for money? This sucks, man!”

Long said unsympathetically, “I guess you'd better call your parents then, huh?”

Donny gave the deputy one last angry, despairing look, and then moved quickly past him into the hall. Guy followed.

“Hey, Dennison, I need to talk to you!” Long called after him.

Guy ignored him.

Guy caught up with Donny as he rounded the corner. There were still more reporters than officers crowding the room, but they were too busy speculating with one another to notice the boy.

“That’s Deputy Renkin over there,” Guy said, pointing to a female deputy who was talking with a weeping young girl. He assumed the girl was the friend of the deceased and he knew he should interview her, but he wasn't sure he had the energy.

Donny shot him a grateful look. “Thanks, man. I mean, for getting me out of there, too.”

Guy shrugged. The motion sent a piercing pain through the back of his head. He said, “That necklace—when did she give it to you?”

He hesitated. “Well, that afternoon. Monday afternoon. She went shopping or something and when we hooked up again, she put it around my neck. Later she said something about some admirer, or some shit, giving it to her.” He looked embarrassed. “I remember thinking at the time that she probably copped it, but what did I care? Anyway...” Suddenly he slipped the thong over his head and thrust the necklace to Guy. “I don't want it. It creeps me out. Maybe, I don't know, maybe you could give it to her folks or something.”

Guy took the necklace. “Sure.”

“Thanks, man. You're an okay dude.”

That almost made Guy smile. “So I've been told.”

When he was gone, Guy looked down at the odd little pendant in his hand, turning it over, testing its weight, trying to remember what was so familiar about it. But the only thing that occurred to him was what a convenient weapon that sturdy leather thong would make for strangulation. And he hoped he had not just made a mistake.

~

Chapter Twenty-eight

K
en Carlton said he had just been calling to check on her, which Carol found rather sweet and a little embarrassing. The police had indeed talked to him last night, for which Carol apologized profusely. Ken brushed it aside.

“We're neighbors,” he reminded her. “Anything I can do to help.” Then, “Listen, I know you've got a lot on your mind right now, but I've been thinking about your sales pitch—about St.T. being the resort of the future and the perfect showplace for an innovative architect.”

“I'm glad to see you were paying attention.”

“Oh, I was. The trouble is, you weren't selling the right thing.”

“Oh?”

He chuckled. “All right, I confess. I've been taking advantage of your good nature when, as you've probably guessed, I'm far too tied up with this development deal to have any time left over for private investment.”

Figures, Carol thought dryly.

“But maybe it won't be a complete loss. I'll have to talk to the other partners, of course, but right now I'm inclined to offer you the exclusive listing on all our properties, and we expect to get underway within the year.”

Carol's heart skipped a beat. Jesus, she thought. A Ken Carlton exclusive listing. She felt like a child on Christmas morning, full of awe and disbelief, and wondering far back in a corner of her mind what she had done to deserve this. Exclusive. Jesus.

With all the self-discipline she possessed, she managed to keep her voice casual yet businesslike. “Where, exactly, is the development going to be?”

“Little Horse Island,” he responded promptly. “I couldn't tell you before because we hadn't closed on the property and you know how quickly a great deal can go sour once word gets out.”

“My goodness,” murmured Carol, stunned. Her heart was still racing. In the midst of all this horror, was it possible something this incredible could actually happen to her? And because she was all too familiar with the eccentricities of life's dark humor, the answer had to be yes. It was possible.

“I didn't even know it was for sale,” she added when she recovered her voice. “I don't think any of the realtors around here did. What a coup.”

“We bought it directly from the state of Florida. It pays to have partners in high places. At any rate, that’s what I'm doing here this summer, and I can tell you that I'm very excited about what we're going to be doing over there. I'd like to take you over and show you the plans.”

“Well, of course. Let me just find a time...”

“Couldn't you get away this afternoon?”

Damn
, she thought. And again,
Damn
. Of all days for her to be alone in the office. But she really had no choice.

“I'm really sorry, but my partner is out of the office and I don't know when she'll be back. I don't like to leave the office without an agent if I can help it.” She added hopefully, frantically flipping through her book, “How about Thursday?”

It was an instinctive technique—never appear too anxious—and she used it automatically. Only after the words were out did she stop to wonder whether, for a Ken Carlton listing, a little anxiety might not have been appropriate.

He hesitated a moment, as though checking his calendar ... or wondering why she was not displaying more enthusiasm for the opportunity he had just offered her. “Eleven o'clock?”

“I'll meet you at the marina,” she said quickly.

“See you then.”

Carol hung up the phone with a long suppressed sigh of relief, and she thought, Wait until Laura hears this. It would almost, if not quite, make up for all she had put her friend through the past couple of weeks.

Almost.

***

Guy studied the photograph on his desk then withdrew the necklace from his pocket. The snapshot was too small to see the details of the necklace Kelly was wearing, but he remembered it clearly now. The figurine of a bound and blindfolded girl. He had questioned Kelly when she first acquired it, which was less than a week, maybe only a few days, before she disappeared. He hadn't liked the symbolism, or the vaguely S&M nature of the pendant, and he'd been afraid Kelly was hanging out with the wrong kind of crowd. When he tried to discuss it with Carol, though, she'd gotten defensive and taken his concern as a threat to her parenting skills, accusing him of paying more attention to Kelly's needs now that they were divorced than he ever had when they were married. And the significance of the necklace, if ever there had been any at all, was lost beneath the fight that followed. Now, all these years later, a young girl gives her boyfriend a necklace just like it right before she's murdered.

Guy hated coincidence.

Probably there were hundreds of little figurines like this, thousands. Probably it had some kind of special significance in the teen world, probably it was as popular today as ankhs and peace symbols had been in his time. Just because he didn't know about a trend didn't mean it didn't exist.

The Anderson girl's parents had released a photograph of their daughter—a graduation picture—smiling, happy, healthy, which the paper would run alongside the story of her murder tonight. She didn't really look like Kelly, Guy kept telling himself. Except for the long dark hair and the honey-colored skin and the dark lashes and the slim lithe figure and maybe a little in the smile. He had sent the photograph over to composing without looking at it more than once, perhaps twice.

He turned the little figurine over in his hand, frowning. He wondered what it meant, if anything, and why any young woman would be attracted to it. And why two young women, almost three years apart, had worn it and met with misfortune.

Coincidence. It was making his head throb with a blinding blue pain.

He looked up at a tap on his office door. Rachel came in with a file in her hand. “These were just faxed in for you. It's the information on that Little girl you wanted.”

Guy moved too fast to grab the file and the pain was explosive. He determinedly ignored it. “Rachel, you're a genius. May the sun shine on you forever.”

“Yeah, that's why they pay me the big bucks. Is that it for the day? Are you going home now?”

Guy waved her away absently. “Soon as I read this.”

He opened the file. The top fax was a copy of a newspaper article from the Panama City Herald, and Guy saw immediately why the name had sounded familiar to him. He hadn't covered the story, but he had followed it, just as everyone in the news business had. local girl found dead was the headline.

The mutilated body of a girl found in a cypress swamp Friday has been identified as eighteen-year-old Tanya Little, who has been missing from her Panama City home since last September. The girl had been dead less than a week, according to police.

The medical examiner reports that the girl had been sexually assaulted before her death by strangulation.

Guy stared at the words without reading them for several long moments. Then he drew in a breath and closed his eyes. “Shit,” he whispered.

It was a long time before he could finish reading.

~

Chapter Twenty-nine

G
uy smiled in the dark as he watched her come down the pier toward him. He shouldn't have smiled. She had no business running around after dark with all that was going on, and the marina was neither well lit nor well patrolled. Yet he wasn't surprised, and he wasn't angry. Carol had always done exactly as she pleased, and she could take care of herself as well as anybody he knew.

The night was mild and he was sitting on a lawn chair on the deck of his boat, trying to put things together in his head. The effort was made somewhat more difficult by the cooler of beer he had brought up with him, but his headache had in fact eased. It was quiet tonight; the sea lapped gently and the breeze was light and no one else was around. A yacht was docked at the other end of the pier, but the only sign of its presence was the occasional whiff of something tantalizing and expensive being prepared for dinner. Otherwise, he was alone.

Carol came aboard with only a slight assist of the guide rope for balance. She was carrying something in one hand.

“Chinese takeout, I hope,” he said.

“Chicken soup. Don't worry, I didn't make it. Your friend Sal from the Seafood Shack sent it.” She set the container on top of the beer cooler.

“He couldn't have sent fried clams?”

“I'll be sure to give him your complaints. How're you feeling?”

He tilted the beer bottle toward her. “Better.”

“You're probably not supposed to drink that in your condition.”

“Probably not,” he agreed, and drank.

She pulled a waterproof cushion from one of the storage bins and sat down on the deck at his feet. She was wearing loose-fitting jeans and a long-sleeved knit cotton shirt with tiny buttons down the front, and she looked about twenty years old. She drew up her knees and encircled them with her arms. “It's nice out here tonight.”

“Yeah. It will be for another couple of months, then the tourists start coming in and it's party central.”

They were quiet for a while, enjoying the night. Then Carol said, with very little change in tone, “That girl they found this morning—they think Saddler's involved, don't they?”

He glanced at her as he brought the bottle to his mouth. “What makes you say that?”

“Your article in the paper.”

“I didn't mention anything about—”

“I've been reading between the lines for over twenty years, Guy. I've always learned more from what you don't say than from what you do.”

There was something oddly comforting in that. He said, “They don't have any evidence. Naturally, Case is worried. The girl was sexually assaulted and a known rapist is on the loose.” He felt her tense, but her voice remained even. “So it was definitely him in the house yesterday.”

“One good thing about convicted felons: Their fingerprints are on file. And his matched the ones on the poker to a tee.”

“Careless of him.”

“Keeping his identity a secret was never a priority with him,” Guy reminded her.

“Too bad he doesn't feel the same way about where he's located.”

Guy dropped a hand to her neck, giving it a light reassuring caress. The muscles there were like cable wire. “He's on his way back to prison as we speak, sweetie. It's just a matter of time. And if they can link him to the Anderson girl's murder, it'll be a long time before he sees daylight again.”

Carol said, “She looked like Kelly a little, didn't she?”

Guy said, “No.” He finished off the beer and put the bottle aside.

Carol didn't comment.

After a moment, he reached into his pocket and drew out the thong pendant. “Have you ever seen this before?”

She took it from him and held it up to the faint yellow light that was coming from the cabin before she said, “It's Kelly's.” She turned a look on him that was half accusing, half afraid. “Guy, where—”