But the man seemed to run faster into a cluster of magnolias and cedars, disappearing in the brush. Cade drew his weapon and sprinted after him, as he called for backup on the radio clipped to his shoulder.
He shone his flashlight through the woods, listening for the sound of those retreating feet, but he heard nothing. He tried to think where the woods would take him. If he could get cars to the other side, maybe they would get him as he emerged. He radioed his orders to the other four cars on duty and shone the light back and forth across the trees. There were too many places to hide and too many directions to run.
Cade’s mind reeled with possibilities. Had Rick come back to linger outside Blair’s home, hoping to catch them unaware?
Was it Gus, hoping to finish the work he had started with Thelma and Wayne?
Or was it someone else—a dockworker, a tourist, a resident with a beef against the family?
Realizing that he wasn’t going to catch anyone with a head start in the black of night, he backtracked to his car. Already, two other officers had joined him on the street. Bruce Allen met him, his flashlight zigzagging its spotlight across the trees.
“See anything?” Cade asked him.
“No, Chief,” Bruce said. “Didn’t see a thing. You sure you saw somebody?”
“Positive.” He glanced back at Billy, who was out of breath with excitement. “You?”
“Not a thing, Chief.”
He radioed the other cars. No one had seen anyone emerging from the woods. Either he had gotten out before they arrived or he was still in there.
“All right,” he said. “Bruce, I want you to do me a favor and just hang around here tonight. I’m a little uneasy about Morgan and Blair being alone. Just keep an eye on things, will you?”
“Sure thing, Chief.”
Cade got back into his car, pulled back onto the street. Quickly, he drove the perimeter of the island to Hanover House.
No lights were on in the house, nor were any vehicles in the driveway, neither Gus Hampton’s truck nor Rick’s car.
He drove around town through parking lots of bars and past Goodfellow’s looking for either of the two vehicles. Finally, he found the truck parked at Barracuda’s, the town’s most popular bar. He put his hand on the hood to see if it was warm. It was, but that didn’t necessarily prove that Gus had driven it in the last few minutes.
He strode inside, where a live band played sixties tunes at an earsplitting volume. The air was heavy with the smell of liquor and cigarette smoke. His uniform called attention to him, and people turned and looked, whispered and pointed. He could feel the tension falling over the room as he searched the faces for Gus.
He saw him sitting at a table near the front, wearing jeans and a tight white T-shirt, and that trademark red bandana on his head. He smoked a cigarette as he tapped his feet to the music. Cade knew he would have noticed if the man running away from him tonight had been wearing a red bandana and a white shirt, but he supposed that Gus could have changed if he had really wanted to create an alibi. There was mud caked on the sides of his shoes, as if he could have been recently strolling through the woods or running away from someone who was after him. He was sweating, but so were many of those in the warm, stagnant air.
Cade went to the end of the bar, and motioned the bartender toward him.
“Hey, Cade. Don’t usually see you here.” The bartender was a short, heavyset man, with white-bleached hair.
“Sam, how long has Gus Hampton been here tonight?” he asked, pointing to the big Jamaican.
Sam looked across the room. “Didn’t even know he was here,” he said. “Might as well not be, for all I care, since all he drinks is water when he comes. Sits up there at the front of the room and listens to the bands, but doesn’t contribute one thing to the running of this bar.”
“So he just got here?”
“I’m not saying that,” Sam said. “Just that I hadn’t noticed him before now. Why? Is he involved in the murders? I heard you had Jonathan Cleary—”
Cade left him in the middle of his question and crossed the room to Gus. The song ended just as he reached him, and quiet settled over the room. He knew that everyone in the place had their eyes on him. He tapped on Gus’s shoulder. The big black man turned around and looked surprised.
“Yeah, mon?”
“I need to talk to you outside, Gus,” he said.
Gus looked around and saw that all eyes were on him. He put his cigarette out and got up.
“You got the curiosity up now,” Gus said. “Why you need to talk to me again?”
“Outside, I said.”
Gus acquiesced and started through the crowd to the door. He led Cade out of the bar and into the fresher air. “What is it, mon? Something else happen?”
Cade looked over his shoulder and saw that several of the bar’s patrons had come to the door and were peering out.
“We can’t talk here,” he said. “Just leave your truck and ride with me to the station.”
“Okay, mon. I got nothin’ to hide.”
Gus got willingly into the front passenger seat, as if to let anyone watching know that he wasn’t under arrest. Then he adjusted the red bandana on his head, as Cade drove to the station.
C H A P T E R
35
Cade made Gus wait in the interview room while he touched base with each of the cars prowling the island and waited for the court reporter to show up.
Melinda Jane arrived in her bathrobe, with rollers in her hair. Though he had asked her to hurry, he had expected her to get dressed first. He hoped he could conduct a serious interview with her sitting there like that, but he had no choice.
When he had finished the preliminaries, he dove right in. “Gus, tell me about the dirt on your shoes.”
“Dirt on my shoes?” Gus asked. He looked down at his feet. “What dirt?”
“There’s dirt on your shoes, Gus. It’s not on the path between Hanover House and where you work, and it’s not sand from the beach. Where did you go to get dirt on your shoes?”
“I like walkin’, mon.”
“How long have you been at Barracuda’s tonight?”
Gus shrugged. “Hour or so. Friend o’ mine be playin’ the bongos.”
Cade had already sent an officer back to the bar to find someone who knew how long Gus had been there.
“Where were you before that?”
“At Hanover House. Why, mon? What’s happened?”
“Were you, at any time tonight, in the woods near the library?”
“No,” Gus said. “Why I be walkin’ around in the woods at night?” He sat straighter. “That be near Blair’s house. Nothin’ happened to her did it, mon?”
“No, she’s fine.”
“You know it ain’t me you need, mon,” Gus told him, leaning his big elbows on the table. “I got nothin’ to hide. But Rick . . . he got the secrets.”
Cade stood back against the wall, frowning down at the man, and remembered what Blair had said about Gus watching her that morning. He had so many reasons to suspect him, yet no evidence, and you couldn’t arrest a person for watching someone in a public place, or even for having dirt on his shoes.
There was a knock on the door, and McCormick stuck his head in. “Chief, can I speak to you a minute?”
“Sure,” Cade said. He started to the door, but Melinda Jane jumped up.
“I’m coming too,” she said.
He gave her a questioning look as he closed the door.
“Well, you didn’t think I was going to stay in that room with a potential killer while you and Joe huddle, did you?”
McCormick looked down at her robe and hair rollers. “What in the world—”
“I was in bed,” she announced, thrusting out her chin. “Cade said he needed me right away, so here I came.”
McCormick grinned and turned back to Cade. “Mrs. Hern says that Gus had been with her at the House until just an hour or so ago. And the band members are friends of Gus, a
nd they confirmed that he had been there an hour.”
“Any word on Rick?”
“Still haven’t been able to run him down,” McCormick said.
“Well, now that’s odd,” Melinda Jane said, patting her rollers. “Don’t you think that’s odd?”
Cade shot her a look. “What’s odd?”
“That he’s missing,” she said. “Looks to me like he must be guilty if he’d run off like that.”
Cade couldn’t believe a woman dressed for bed was advising him.
“Melinda Jane, leave the police business to us.”
He went back into the room, and Melinda Jane took her seat. “I’m going to let you go, Gus,” Cade said, “but I don’t want you to leave town. I might need to ask you some more questions.”
Gus opened his palms. “No problem, mon. I got no place to go.”
Cade got one of the officers to drive Gus back to the bar. Cade went to his office and leaned back in his chair, wishing he could go home and catch a few hours of sleep. But he couldn’t leave until Rick had been found.
He spent the evening on the phone and his computer, working to get information on Richard Dugan. There were no arrests, no convictions in the man’s past. His fingerprints hadn’t even been registered. For all he could tell, Rick had been a devoted father and husband until the day a drunk driver changed everything. He had even managed to find a picture of Rick Dugan from a newspaper article about the deaths of the wife and daughter. It matched the man who was staying at Hanover House.
But if he was who he said he was and had no ill motives in visiting Blair—then who had been in the woods?
It was midnight when they finally found Rick, pulling back into the driveway of Hanover House. They had brought him in, and Cade had gotten Melinda Jane to come back. This time she had taken the time to get dressed, but she still had a head full of rollers.
Cade was in no mood to beat around the bush as he faced the man who had disrupted his night. “I want to know where you went when you left Blair’s house tonight,” he said.
“I drove to Savannah and caught a movie,” he said. He pulled the torn ticket stub out of his pocket. “Here’s proof. Why? Did something happen? Are Blair and Morgan all right?”
“They’re fine,” Cade said. Rick’s shoes were clean, and he was still wearing the clothes he had been wearing earlier. He looked down at the ticket’s showtime, and mentally calculated the time it would have taken to go straight from Blair’s to the theater. They didn’t normally sell tickets much after the show had begun.
“Tell me about your name,” he said.
Rick looked down at his hands. “I imagine Blair has already told you. That’s what this is really all about.”
“I want to hear it from you.”
“All right. I’m not really Rick Morrison. My name is Rick Dugan. Rick Morrison is dead.”
Melinda Jane gasped and began coughing. The rollers in her hair wobbled.
Cade waited until she could breathe again. “Why did you feel the need to go to Blair to explain that tonight? Why didn’t you come to me?”
“Because I’m not stupid. I didn’t want to get into any kind of trouble for stealing someone’s identity. But I knew Blair knew, so I wanted to explain. I knew I’d have to account for it someday, but I was hoping to put that off as long as possible.”
“I find it hard to believe that Thelma and Wayne would have covered for you, knowing you were breaking the law.”
“I didn’t use it to get credit or money or anything. I just used his social security number to get a job. If I hadn’t, my creditors probably would have found me and garnished my wages.”
“Why didn’t you file bankruptcy?”
“Because that would have involved getting a lawyer, paperwork, money. I didn’t have the presence of mind or the energy to do any of that. I didn’t care if I dropped dead, so why would I care if my credit was ruined? I just wanted to be someone else.” He closed his eyes and rubbed his face hard. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about Thelma and Wayne. They kept a close eye on things to make sure I didn’t use that name for any personal gain. They wanted me to tell my boss what I’d done, but they didn’t force it. They just waited for me to do the right thing.”
“Was there some kind of confrontation over it? An ultimatum?”
“No, not really.”
“They didn’t tell you to confess what you’d done or else?”
“Look, if you’re trying to use this to pin their deaths on me, you’re crazy. I didn’t kill them.”
Melinda Jane’s fingers tapped wildly on the keys of her stenotype machine.
“But I’ll do whatever I can to help you find who did. That is, if you don’t lock me up.”
Cade tried to think. Fatigue set its claws into his brain. Rick’s story sounded convincing, but he couldn’t ignore the fact that he had broken the law. He wasn’t ready to let Rick go back out on the street until he had at least checked a few more things.
“I’m going to have to arrest you for identity theft,” Cade said.
“What? But I didn’t hurt anyone.”
“It’s against the law,” he said.
“So you’re putting me in jail?”
“Yes. You have the right to remain silent . . .”
Rick moaned as Cade read him his rights, then opted to call a lawyer. Even as he locked Rick into the cell next to Jonathan, he knew that the judge would probably set bail the next day. He couldn’t prove that Rick was guilty of any kind of violent crime, so he couldn’t hold him longer.
But at least the man was off the streets tonight.
C H A P T E R
36
Sadie’s hopes for the next day were shot down when the manager of Goodfellow’s had told her that she needn’t come back asking for a job. He wasn’t going to hire her. He hadn’t given a reason, but she knew it had to do with the dirty clothes she was still wearing, the broken arm, and the bruises. She looked a little too rough, despite her efforts not to.
And though she had applied at every establishment along the four-mile stretch of beach, no one else had offered a job either. As a result, she hadn’t eaten all day. She scraped together just enough for a stale sandwich at a convenience store, which she scarfed down on the way back to the boathouse.
She had left the boathouse door unlocked so she could come back in without getting wet. She went in, took off her shoes, sat on the floor at the open end of the structure, and hung her feet in the water. She zipped open the backpack and pulled out her picture of little Caleb, so small and trusting, and she prayed that he was all right. She should have waited until she could take him with her, she thought. She should never have left him.
She wiped the tears on her face, and wondered if she should go back for him. Maybe Jack’s wrath was worth it.
Her body was heavy with exhaustion, so she got into the boat. Lying down on the cushioned bench seat at the back of the boat, she fell into a deep sleep.
Morgan’s despair loomed heavy, like a fog from which she could not escape. Her visit with Jonathan had simply tangled her in more frustration, grief, and loneliness. There was no pastor to counsel with, no clergy from her church who could minister to her in this dark time. Her father was the pastor, her mother the most attentive counselor. And they were both gone.
She longed to sit in the warehouse church that meant so much to her parents, but their blood still stained the floor, and the police had sealed it off. She longed to stare up at the pulpit where her father used to stand, Christ’s ambassador to the lost and wounded who wandered here from the jails or the sea or the highways leading to this place.
She didn’t want to go to Hanover House, where Mrs. Hern would need gentle attention. She didn’t have it to give right now. And she didn’t want to answer all the questions about why Rick had been arrested last night.
And she didn’t want to be around Blair right now. She needed quiet, a few moments alone with God.
So she drove to
the boathouse down the road from Hanover House. As she pulled onto the dirt road, she saw the building standing idle and alone among the trees and bushes at the edge of the river. The perfect place to sit and pray, the perfect place to get her bearings.
She went in and stood for a moment in the place where they had found Gus after the murders. The air was damp and muggy, and a fish scent blew in from the water. She breathed in the scent of cedar that reminded her of her father and tried to picture him stooped over his tackle box, puttering before going out to fish.
She wiped the tears on her face and stepped further inside. If she could just sit down here for a moment, soak in the scent and the familiar air of her father’s life, maybe he would come back to her. But as she stepped across the floor, something in the boat caught her eye.
Morgan screamed.
The teenage girl in the boat sprang up. “I’m sorry!” she shouted.
Morgan grabbed a paddle hanging on the wall and held it like a weapon. “Who are you?”
“Sadie,” the girl said. She stood up, and Morgan saw her casted arm and the bruises on her face. “I was just sleeping. I didn’t have any place to go.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I found it a couple of days ago,” she said. “I’ve been trying to get a job, but no one will hire me, and the police won’t let me sleep on the beach. It was the first boathouse I saw that wasn’t next to a house. I just needed a place for a couple of days.”
Morgan slowly lowered the paddle.
“Please don’t call the police,” Sadie said.
“Why would you sleep here?” Morgan asked, her heart still racing. “Where’d you come from?”
“West,” the girl evaded.
“You a runaway?”
“No,” the girl said too quickly. “I’m eighteen. I came here because it seemed like a wonderful place. Just the name—Cape Refuge. I thought it would be a nice place to live. But I can’t find a job, and I don’t have any money.”
Morgan knew the girl was lying, that she couldn’t be a day over fifteen, sixteen at the most. “How’d you get here?”