Tell Me (20 page)

“She’s telling the truth, at least the truth as she sees it, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t do it,” he said, eyeing the countryside as they drove along the interstate, through farmland and a few wooded tracts. The sun was fighting a losing battle as storm clouds gathered, the day growing gloomy.

“So a stranger comes in, around six feet, a hundred and eighty to two hundred ten pounds, Caucasian male, probably around thirty. She just described half the male population of the state of Georgia.”

Reed drew a breath just as his cell phone rang. Seeing it was a Phoenix number, he said, “Looks like it’s Acencio, Flint Beauregard’s partner.”

Morrisette sent him a pissy look. “I know,” she said, but by that time he was already answering and the farmland was giving way to subdivisions and tracts, the city of Savannah rising in the distance.

Reed and Jasper Acencio went through introductions and explanations before they got down to business, while Morrisette slid her sunglasses from her nose and snapped them into a strap on the windshield visor.

“She was the doer all right,” Acencio told Reed. “We couldn’t find anything to substantiate that someone else besides Blondell and her kids were there. No sightings of a tattooed stranger other than from Blondell. No fingerprints, no footprints, nothing. If there had been tire prints of another vehicle, they’d been destroyed with the storm. A real gully-washer that night. The cabin had been used by others previous to the crime, so we had to sort through the evidence, but there was nothing conclusive to put another person there at the time of Amity O’Henry’s homicide. Just the kid’s testimony.”

“He’s saying now that he was coerced into testifying.”

“Saw his statement on the news.”

“He says Beauregard pushed him into it.”

There was the slightest hesitation on Acencio’s part, then he said, “I wouldn’t go that far.”

“But Beauregard did put the pressure on?”

“He buddied up to the kid. Saw him in the hospital and then again after Niall was released. I got the feeling Blondell’s boy was a little at sea, confused, a little scared, you know. He’d been through hell, and he had a father who came from a military background. Didn’t believe in ‘sparing the rod,’ I think. Calvin O’Henry wasn’t the least bit warm and fuzzy, and that wife of his belonged to some splinter sect.”

“There aren’t any churches like that in Savannah. We’ve looked.”

“You haven’t looked far enough out. Get twenty or thirty miles out of town and things change, some of these weird religions get a toehold. The deal is that the O’Henry kids were raised with an iron fist and a worn family Bible. Hard on Niall, I’d say. On top of his mother going to jail for killing his sister and shooting both him and the little girl, he’s got a whacked-out religious nut for a stepmom.”

“Difficult.”

“An understatement, for sure. And I didn’t see any of his grandparents or aunts or uncles stepping up and coming to the kid’s rescue, so it’s no big surprise that he kinda turned to Beauregard. Flint let him.”

Reed felt his jaw clench. “So with a little coaxing, the boy testified.”

“Well, yeah. That’s what happened. I wasn’t completely comfortable with it, but I was the junior.”

“He coerce the kid?” Reed asked.

“Bribed him some with candy bars and Cheetos and that kind of junk food, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘coerce.’ The boy was impressionable and yeah, Beauregard used that to his advantage.”

Morrisette had turned off the freeway and was heading into the heart of the city, maneuvering around cars quickly, eliciting an angry beep from the driver of a racy little Mazda. “Oh, stuff it, a-hole,” she muttered under her breath.

Acencio was saying, “Flint was kind to the kid. He wasn’t getting a lot of that at home, so he was . . . malleable, for lack of a better word.”

“So Niall’s recanting isn’t a surprise to you?”

“Frankly, I’m kind of amazed it took this long.”

“You never said anything at the time.” Reed was having difficulty not coming down hard on the man.

“Look, all I can tell you is that Beauregard really had a hard-on for nailing Blondell O’Henry, and he had a reason for it. The DA was all over him, the press practically rabid, the public outcry so loud it was deafening.”

“Sounds like a witch hunt,” Reed observed as Morrisette slowed for a traffic light turning from amber to red.

“More like a vendetta.”

“Personal?”

“For Beauregard? Who knows? I don’t think so. But we all wanted to solve this one. Everyone working the case tried like hell to be professional and just do our jobs, but those poor kids. Jesus. Never seen anything like it.” He let out a long breath.

The light changed. They were rolling again.

“We all thought the mother was the doer, but we couldn’t prove it, not and make it stick.”

“So Niall had to testify that his mother shot him or you had no case,” Reed said, caught in his own thoughts, not noticing the familiar sights on Bay Street as it turned from West to East.

“That’s about the size of it. Amity was already dead, and little Blythe really didn’t see a whole lot that we could determine. Plus she was only five, hardly a credible witness. But that scared eight-year-old boy, who had to whisper his testimony because of what his own mother had done to him, he was a different story. Flint and the DA knew no jury on earth would let a mother get away with the cold-blooded murder of her child and unborn grandchild if her own injured son put the blame on her.”

“You had nothing else?”

“If we had, we would have used it. As it was, we had the son. Niall, he was a nice kid. Shy. Scared. Not some punk. So anyone on the jury would feel for him. Helluva case, y’know. I remember Beauregard saying to me, ‘The kid’s testimony is gonna take out that whole damned reasonable doubt clause.’ ”

“Therein lies the problem,” Reed pointed out.

“Just so we’re clear. Flint Beauregard was a helluva cop. Sometimes a bit . . . enthusiastic, and he occasionally bent the rules, but I trusted my life with him. He was one of the good guys.”

Reed wasn’t convinced, but having suffered the tarnishing of his own reputation, he wasn’t eager to go down that path with Beauregard, even though Flint was dead.

“Well, look, if there’s anything else I can do, just call,” Acencio said. “But that’s about all I know.”

“Thanks.”

Reed hung up as Morrisette turned the corner and the red bricks of the station house came into view. “Acencio throw any light onto the situation?” she asked, tapping the wheel impatiently, waiting for jaywalkers to hurry across the street.

“Just more about Beauregard’s ham-fisted technique.”

She lifted a hand and spread her fingers at the pedestrians in a “what gives?” gesture. “In front of the damned police station? They’re lucky I don’t write them up!”

As if they heard her, the couple hurried to the sidewalk.

“That’s right, move your lazy asses,” she muttered and pulled into the lot. “So did Acencio know what a jackass Beauregard was?”

“He used the terms ‘enthusiastic’ and ‘a helluva cop.’ ”

“There it is again, more boys’ club shit.” After pulling into a parking lot, she rammed the car into park. As she cut the engine, she added, “I’m telling you, Flint Beauregard was a rogue cop who did things his own way.”

“The same could be said of you.”

“What? I stay within the law.” She skewered him with a blistering glare. “And I don’t mess with scared kids’ heads to make my case.” Yanking the keys with one hand, she opened her door with the other. “If you ask me, Beauregard was too lazy to go at Blondell the right way. And now, you and me, bub, we get that little privilege!”

N
ikki parked on a side street three blocks over from her uncle’s house, then checked her phone. No return call. No responding text. So far, Reed wasn’t answering.

She wasn’t surprised. Of course, he couldn’t tell her anything about his interview with Blondell, but it didn’t mean she didn’t want to know. Beyond that, Reed had other cases as well and was inundated with work.

She placed another call to the elusive Holt Beauregard, but once again he didn’t pick up. She wanted to talk to him, but so far he’d ignored her messages. Well, too damned bad, she was getting just frustrated enough that she intended to show up at his office if he didn’t get back to her soon.

Checking the time, she made one more quick call to her aunt’s home. When no one had answered by the fourth ring, she hung up before their antiquated answering machine could pick up. Silently praying no one was home, she switched her cell to vibrate only for all incoming calls and texts. Ever since visiting Uncle Alex, she’d been bothered. He’d seemed lucid when he’d warned her away from Blondell and the investigation, but then again, he’d gone in and out of reality.

What was the danger he’d spoken of, if there was any?

The only way she knew to figure it out was to go over the defense attorney’s case and notes, try to learn what he knew.

Taking only her phone and a jump drive, she locked her car, then walked the three blocks to her uncle’s house, the same path she’d taken as a kid when she and Hollis had been sneaking in or out of the house. Overgrown, littered with some bits of trash, the trail wandered between the fence line of the neighboring lots and a green space designated as wetlands years before.

Shade trees canopied overhead, their branches, aside from the live oaks, bare and gnarled, rain beginning to drizzle from the gray sky.

“Lovely,” she murmured as she stepped around a small campfire pit where beer cans and cigarette butts had been left among the ash and charred bits of wood.

Rain was starting to fall as she slipped noiselessly through the back gate of the McBaine property. She felt a little bit like a criminal, a trespasser, but she knew that this was the only way to get the information from her uncle’s case files.

She’d considered calling her aunt and asking, but knew the answer before she’d dialed the phone. “Absolutely not, Nicole. Your uncle would never allow you or anyone else to violate his client’s privacy.” Of course, Aunty-Pen had a point, but Nikki didn’t care. If there was something in his notes that would help solve the case, all the better.

Rationalizing her way around her aunt’s shrubbery, she edged along the greenery flanking the fence, hoping no one would see her. As she sneaked around the perimeter, she thought of Reed and what he was doing. Surely he was out of his interview with Blondell O’Henry by now. She was desperate to talk to him, just to see how his face-to-face had gone.

At the side of the garage, she paused. Then, mentally crossing her fingers, she looked up to the space between the gutter and the eave and spied the extra key Hollis had kept hidden just out of eyesight. She had to stand on a decorative rock to reach it, but by stretching up her hand she was able to retrieve the key.

Of course, there was always the chance her aunt and uncle had installed a security system in the years since they’d lost their children, but Nikki hadn’t seen it when she’d stopped by the other day.

She unlocked the door to the garage. Her aunt’s older Mercedes was missing from its spot in the garage; the concrete, stained from years of tires and oil leaks, was all that met her eyes.

She skirted past Uncle Alex’s pickup and sleek Jaguar, both of which he’d driven until he’d given up his license over the last couple of years. Tucked into a deep bay behind the Jag was a draped vehicle she knew was Elton’s old Porsche, a vehicle her aunt hadn’t been able to part with. The Porsche wasn’t alone, as Aunty-Pen had never wanted to give up anything owned by her children.

Though Nikki really didn’t have a lot of time, she lifted the drape and remembered riding in Elton’s car and how her own mother had said her cousin was “over-indulged,” that giving a sixteen-year-old boy such an iconic and still speedy car was “just asking for trouble.” How ironic that he and Hollis had died not in the Porsche but in his father’s SUV.

She let the cover drop, and feeling as if she were tiptoeing through an automotive cemetery, one haunted by the ghosts of people she’d once known, she headed through the door leading into the utility room, closing it softly behind her. The dryer was still spinning, its digital display indicating there were still thirty-seven minutes on the cycle. So her aunt, or someone else, hadn’t been gone long.

Nonetheless, she had to work fast so as not to get caught and have to explain to Aunty-Pen why she’d parked her car three long suburban blocks away and come in through the back gate that she’d used as a child.

She was uneasy walking through the quiet house where the only sounds, other than some metal fastener rhythmically clicking against the dryer’s revolving drum, were the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen and the soft rumble of the furnace as it blew air through the house, causing the drapes to wave gently. The billowing sheers reminded Nikki of ghosts dancing and she had to give herself a quick mental shake to keep her fears at bay.

Getting a grip on her over-active imagination, Nikki made her way to the den, a room near the front of the house that had an entrance from the foyer and another that Uncle Alex had jokingly claimed was his “escape route”—a long hallway, used for storage, that led back to the garage.

A large bay window looked onto the front yard, and its blinds were open, so Nikki decided against lights, but she did snap the blinds shut, just so some nosy neighbor didn’t happen to see her going through her uncle’s computer files. Aside from the desk, with its massive executive chair, there was a long credenza with pictures of the family spread across it, above which were displayed all his diplomas, including a law degree from the University of Mississippi’s School of Law, and a few framed pictures of Uncle Alex with various local politicians.

The file cabinet was locked, but surely he’d converted all his paper documents to digital files, even old cases. His desk computer was turned off, so she sat in the executive-style chair and booted up the hard drive. When was the last time he’d sat on these leather cushions and checked his monitor? Six months earlier? A year? Three? As a teenager, she’d seen him working here often, although at the time it was evening, after-hours work, as he’d had an office downtown.

The computer monitor glowed, program icons beginning to appear on the screen, and there, in the upper-left-hand corner, was a shortcut labeled simply “legal cases.”

“Okay, so let’s see what we have,” she said aloud, her fingers on the keyboard, her nerves strung tight. She clicked on the icon and the screen changed to “Alexander McBaine, Attorney at Law” and then requested a user name and password.

Refusing to be stymied, she tried every combination she could think of, using family dates and names, and knowing it would be impossible. A computer hacker she wasn’t.

She looked around the desk, in the drawer, searching for any clues. Her uncle had been slowly losing his memory for years, so he would have needed some reminder in order to get into his own files.

Sweat began to bead over her forehead as she found a set of keys in the desk that opened the long, sweeping credenza situated behind his chair. The second key worked, and she flipped through files, mostly financial reports, health records, bills, receipts, and tax files.

Nothing about his cases, and no hint about his name and password.

She closed the credenza and relocked it. All the while she was aware of time ticking by, seconds and minutes wasted; Aunty-Pen could be back at any minute. She looked in the obvious places—in the drawer below the computer, on the underside of the keyboard, on the CPU cabinet—and found nothing.

What to do. She tapped her fingers on the desktop. The code had to be close by . . .

Her gaze landed on his wireless mouse. On a whim, she turned it over and there, taped away from the roller, was a typed scrap of paper.

AGMAAL was written above 8JDOM3.

He’d used his initials and occupation as his user name, no big surprise there:
Alexander Gregory McBaine, Attorney at Law
and the password . . . She didn’t really have time to figure it out, so she just entered the information into his computer and waited. Still, as she put in the information and was allowed into his private legal files, she wondered why those numbers and those letters. No one in the family was born in August, the eighth month, nor March, the third.

Of course not, it has something to do with his profession. An address, or some significant date . . . oh, crap.
As she waited for the file folder to open, she looked at his wall of awards, to the law degree she’d just read, his Juris Doctor degree. He’d laughed about it with her, she recalled, claimed he was a JD, just like some of Elton’s friends, which caused Hollis to roll her eyes and Elton to remind his father that none of the kids he hung out with were juvenile delinquents.

She looked at the degree. The eight and three were split, but he’d graduated from law school in 1983. From Ole Miss, hence the OM. “Got it, Uncle,” she said under her breath, though she didn’t understand why she was whispering or why her ears were straining; she was certain no one else was in the house.

The documents finally loaded, and she was in. “Here we go,” she murmured, scrolling first the years and then the names. Spying “O’Henry, B.” she started to click on it.

An alarm sounded.

She froze. What the hell had she tripped?

Had her uncle booby-trapped his file and . . .

Her heart nearly stopped.

No, the sound wasn’t coming from the computer.

Ears straining, she barely dared breathe. Had her aunt returned and . . . ?

“Oh, for the love of God,” she whispered in relief as she realized the alarm was just the dryer’s end-of-cycle signal. She’d been inside the house exactly thirty-seven minutes.

Already too long.

Aunty-Pen could arrive home at any moment, and what then? She really could be trapped up here. “No way.”

Removing the jump drive from her pocket, she wondered how many laws she was breaking. Probably half a dozen, but she kept at it, downloading all the information pertaining to Blondell O’Henry onto her portable drive. “Come on, come on,” she whispered, as time seemed to stretch and . . . Oh, no! The sound of the garage door rolling upward reached her ears.

Panicked, Nikki stared at the screen. Her file was still loading . . .
sixty-five percent, sixty-eight percent.

She heard a car pull into the garage.

A car’s engine purred loudly, the smooth rumble audible through the walls.
Aunty-Pen’s Mercedes.

“Oh, please.”

The engine died.

A car door slammed shut with a solid thud.

Oh, God!

Nikki was sweating now, her palms and fingers damp.

The back door opened and footsteps sounded.

On automatic, Nikki pulled the jump drive out of the CPU, crammed it into her pocket, and shut down the computer as footsteps clicked across the hardwood floor of the kitchen and Nikki heard a rustle of paper—grocery bags?—as she climbed out of her uncle’s desk chair, slid it into place, and tiptoed to the door of Alexander McBaine’s escape route. It was her only way out because the front door was visible through the foyer to the kitchen.

Her throat as dry as sand, she tried the door.

Locked.

But she still had the keys she’d found in his desk in her pocket. Maybe . . .
Oh, please!
With fumbling fingers she extracted the ring and put the first key into the lock.
No go!
The metal clinked softly. Another key into the lock. It too wouldn’t turn. Surely one of these opened the door. If not . . .

She slid in the third and then the fourth key as the computer’s shutdown music played.

Oh, no!

“Hello?” her aunt called from the kitchen.

Nikki, mentally making up excuses for when she had to face her, tried the fifth key just as she heard footsteps against the marble in the foyer.

The lock sprang.

Quickly, she opened the door and slid through and, as it shut softly, heard, “What the devil? I was
sure
I opened these!”

The blinds. Nikki had forgotten to reopen them. Praying not to catch her aunt’s attention, she slowly turned the lock on the inside of the door and tried to ignore the fact that she was in a tight, closed space. Yes, the hallway ran behind her, but she couldn’t move yet, couldn’t take a chance that her footsteps would be heard, so she had to fight the feeling that, in the darkness, the walls seemed to be closing in on her and she was having trouble getting enough air.

“What’s going on here?” Penelope McBaine asked, and Nikki prayed it was a rhetorical question that wasn’t aimed at her, hiding as she was, one six-panel door separating her from her aunt.