Ten Little Bloodhounds (32 page)

Jasmine praised him extravagantly with every sim-
ple exercise that he completed. He was pathetically grateful and quivered with gratitude for her kind words. She slipped him a lot of treats when Rudy wasn’t watching.

I didn’t rebound as well as he. I kept moving and working feverishly to finish my goals. I dropped twenty pounds. For the first time in my life I was fashionably thin, and I couldn’t care less. Rosie, Wayne’s mother, nipped and tucked and took up seams in all my clothes. Susan tried to entice me with shopping sprees. She insisted I looked like a displaced refugee. I finally convinced her I didn’t have time and that I might be wearing prison garb in the near future.

I tackled the stacks of reports on my six remaining suspects. After several days of reading and comparing the first reports and the most recent ones, I realized I was just making busywork for myself. The reports didn’t vary over an hour’s difference from the first to the last. Their distant locations and corroborated affidavits of sightings completely eliminated four of the six.

With a marker I boldly slashed through four names: Cathy’s husband, Larry Kingsley; Teri Cancannon Halbert; Teri’s husband, Phillip Halbert; and Sabrina Cancannon Wilder.

And then there were two.

Celia Cancannon, private secretary, and Rand Finch, helicopter pilot and
bastard extraordinaire.
Oh God, I wanted Rand to be the murderer so bad, I could taste it! I examined my conscience to see if I had let this fact sway my decision. No. I had picked these two way back while I still thought of him as a nice guy and Celia as a victim. Proximity to the crime and opportunity were
obvious from the beginning. When obvious is all you have left, it must be so, but I couldn’t prove it.

Something flickered across my mind like a falling star in a black sky and was gone just as quickly. I sat with my eyes closed and tried to make it reappear. Nothing came to mind. Damn! I sat down determined to read every line word by word. There had to be something.

The next morning when Jasmine came for coffee, she commented on my condition.

“You look terrible!”

“I read and studied these lousy reports until four this morning. My throat is sore, my head hurts, and my eyes feel like they’ve been scrubbed with sandpaper. What’s your schedule like for today?”

“You’re in luck, I don’t have a thing planned until my eight
P.M.
class. Want me to read something?”

I gave her the two files.

“Something’s not right. I’m missing something I’ve either heard or read. I can’t put my finger on it and it’s driving me nuts!”

“As if you didn’t have enough on your plate right now.” She shook her head in sadness. “I realize you have been under a terrible strain for these past several months and I’m worried about your health. You haven’t gained any of your weight back that you lost worrying about Bobby Lee. The body and mind can only take so much stress, Jo Beth. You should try running a few minutes each morning. It just might relieve some of the stress you’re under.”

I faked some chuckles.

“If I started to run south I wouldn’t stop until I hit
Key West. I don’t know what would halt my northern run, the North Pole?”

“Don’t even kid about running. Surely you aren’t thinking along those lines … are you?”

“I could get fifteen years, or more, and have to serve at least eighty-five percent of it. I’d be forty-six or older when released. I don’t know what I’m thinking about, except it would be too late for babies, and I can’t seem to generate any enthusiasm for romance near fifty.”

“Stop it,” Jasmine ordered. “You are not going to be convicted because you’re innocent! Quit talking like this. Hank and Wade will not let you be sent to prison.”

“Sure. Will you read the files for me?”

“I’ll take them upstairs now and study them. Will you be all right?”

“Right as rain,” I told her, and tried to look that way. “Where’s Bobby Lee?”

“He’s on the porch.”

“You could have brought him in, he’s over me now. He’s transferred his affection to you.”

“He … he didn’t want to come in.”

“Good.” I held back the tears and smiled at her. I watched from the window and didn’t weep until they were safely upstairs.

Jasmine came down at six with the files stuffed under her arm and carrying a crock pot with two pot holders wrapped around the handles to protect her hands. She kicked the screen door, and I ran to hold the door open for her.

“Irish stew, Southern style.”

“Yummy,” I said, not really caring, just thanking her for her effort. “Did you spot anything?”

“Let me plug this in.” She disappeared into the kitchen. I waited three minutes and moved to the kitchen table. Jasmine was washing salad greens at the sink.

“Don’t keep me in suspense. Did you see anything I missed?”

“I’m afraid not. There doesn’t seem to be anything to find.” Her back was to me.

I slumped in the chair and closed my eyes.

I heard her pull out a chair and sit across from me. I raised my head in time to see her pull the files in front of her. She tapped Celia’s.

“This niece, the secretary, never really had a life of her own. For years, she only took one day a month off. The agents reported the mileage was almost the same for every trip in the rental cars she hired, a total of two hundred miles, but they couldn’t find out where she went. She stopped these excursions over seventeen years ago.”

“She must have lived vicariously through her Aunt Alyce’s travels, who was always going someplace different and exciting. Why didn’t Aunt Alyce ever take her secretary-niece with her?”

“Rand was always into something in his youth, chasing some job or dream, but he too stayed near the island after he landed the job of ferrying all the family around by helicopter. It must have been a requirement to always be available, but Rand should have gotten tired of the short hops back and forth to the mainland long ago. I think—”

I slapped the table.

“That’s it, that’s it!” My heart was pounding and this
was the most animated and alive I had felt since the bond hearing. “Where’s the phone, what time is it?”

I ran to my office, grabbed the cellular and my address book, and hurried back and dropped them on the table.

I looked up the number, and held up a hand while I was dialing the number with the other. “Just a second, and I’ll tell you.”

I listened to the recorded message and waited impatiently for the beep.

“This is Jo Beth Sidden. If anyone is there, please pick up the phone, now! This is an emergency!”

I listened for ten long seconds and disconnected.

“Clock-watchers!” I muttered as I flipped my address book to the A’s. I dialed Chester Adams’s home phone number. He was my contact at the detective agency in Washington. I hadn’t called him or vice versa in over two months. After I got
his
answering machine, I left him a nasty message.

“This is Jo Beth Sidden. I hope to Christ that you have this phone connected to your beeper, or I’ll boil you in oil! I need you. Get back to me ASAP!”

I gave Jasmine a genuine smile of pleasure, the first in ages.

“I have this theory …”

I
t was a cool, bleak day when Captain Evan Danglish, USAF, and I penetrated the depths of the Okefenokee for the fourth time. The search for his crash site had proved just as elusive as I had anticipated.

The huge dead cypress still loomed over our heads as a friendly beacon and landmark, but the plane could have disappeared in the water and muck anywhere from one hundred feet away to a formidable one-thousand-foot distance in any direction.

Not counting the first disastrous probe that Mr. Gator had ended, this was our third trip here. I had promised Evan I would give him a week. Since we returned home each night, it gave us only about five hours to actually search. I chose to go out five hundred feet in one direction, move over approximately one hundred feet, and return to the tree. It was a pitiful
amount of ground to cover compared to the projected area where the plane could be resting.

I had called a halt shortly before noon to check Marjorie’s paws. We were traveling through and around large clusters of blackthorn vines. She stood patiently waiting while I inspected each pad and felt between her claws. She’s my favorite drug sniffer. If she can find drugs sealed in steel drums, I figured that the pungent odor of jet fuel and greasy metal would be a snap, even if it were several feet below the surface.

I was off-balance, leaning over a hind leg, when Marjorie suddenly jerked loose from my grasp and strained forward at the limit of her short lead.

“It better not be a possum!” I admonished as I took a couple of quick steps to keep from falling. Marjorie has broken training before, going off on an exciting scent and acting victorious when she treed a coon.

I let her pull me forward, and I could hear Evan crashing and lumbering through the underbrush behind me. Marjorie headed toward a large shallow-looking slough. She would have entered the water without slowing down if I hadn’t been pulling her back and yelling the command to stay.

She raised her head and gave a full-throated celebrative bay. My heart pounded against my ribs, and I raised my free arm to the heavens with a clinched fist and yelled, “Yes, yes, yes!”

Evan was staring with open-mouthed astonishment and looking as if he thought we had both lost our minds. At that moment I completely forgot killing Bubba, the trial I had to face, and what the consequences could mean. I was alive and doing what I did best. Marjorie had found the plane, God was in His
heaven, and all was right in the world!

Evan couldn’t make himself hope. He couldn’t see the plane, couldn’t smell it or touch it, so therefore he didn’t believe it was under the shallow water and mud.

“Evan, never doubt a miracle. It happened today, right here in front of your eyes. If the crash wasn’t pilot error, your flying future is assured. With your luck, you will have a lustrous career, a wife and children who adore you, and a long and happy life!”

His thanks didn’t sound completely sincere until the plane was raised from the swamp. The FAA eventually completed its investigation, citing mechanical failure and absolving him of any blame.

Hank called me late in the evening, a few minutes after I retired.

“Were you asleep?”

“Yes, Hank, you woke me up.” Stretching straight beneath the quilt, I fought the urge to yawn. “What’s up?”

“I didn’t want you reading about it while you were alone. I’m sorry, Jo Beth. It’s bad news. I knew she was your friend and that you had tried to help her.”

I sat up straight clutching the phone. I was fully awake in a heartbeat.

“Who?” I choked the word out dreading to hear her name.

“Alice Mae Petrie.”

“Oh God, the bastard attacked her? Tom raped her, didn’t he? Is she in the hospital? I’ll have to call her mother, is she at the hospital now?”

“She’s dead, Jo Beth.”

“Dead?” I echoed.

“When she didn’t come home from work, her mother called me. I drove her route home, and found her car
abandoned and immediately put out an APB on Tom, since she had a current restraining order on him. Two deputies worked the area where her car was left and found three eyewitnesses to her abduction. They thought it was a lover’s quarrel, unfortunately, an all too common reaction when people see a man dragging a protesting woman away. We had him in custody by seven
P.M.
It took only thirty minutes before he confessed and told us where he had hidden her body.

“She didn’t suffer long, Jo Beth. He strangled her within fifteen minutes of picking her up. She wasn’t molested. He said if she wouldn’t have him, she didn’t deserve to live. He’s flaky, but I bet my badge he’s sane and will be tried.”

“Another woman lost because he has to rape or kill her before the law can act.” I was bitter but calm.

“I know how you feel, kiddo, just don’t let this get you down any more than you already are. Promise?”

“Sure, Hank, you’re right. I need all my strength to face a murder trial because I protected my life and refused to be a victim!”

“If it makes you feel any better, go ahead and scream and rant and rave at me, but you know I couldn’t do anything to him without provocation.”

“I know, Hank. I’m just remembering that small, slim girl who played with me on the monkey bars during recess in the first grade. I know it wasn’t your fault, but who do you blame?”

“Congress? Fate? Weak and ineffective laws? Beats me, kid.”

“Thanks for calling, Hank.”

It was close to dawn before I could sleep.

T
he rented helicopter’s pilot and I were flying over the Okefenokee Swamp on the way to the island to visit Rand and Celia. It had seemed to take forever, but in reality it took only forty-eight hours to get the answers I needed from Chester Adams. I have to admit that I was sure it would take longer, because the files I wanted were thirty-five years old.

Chester had a formidable machine of agents, which easily uncovered the proof that I needed when told where to look. He apologized for missing the information the first time around. I forgave him and wished him well. I told him to send in the final bill, I had found the murderer. He was dying to know how I had arrived at the solution, but he had too much class to ask.

The pilot set the plane down in the clearing in front of the Cancannon mansion, and the rotors went silent.

“What’s that awful smell in here?” I complained. “My eyes are stinging!” He had introduced himself when he lifted me off my grass and took me aloft, but I had forgotten his name.

“Insecticide residue, probably,” he remarked cheerfully. “I spray crops most days in the spring.”

“I’ll probably come down with respiratory problems,” I grumbled.

“If you’ve never smoked, there’s no danger.”

“That’s reassuring!”