“Well, then, how about some blueberry tea?” he asked, raising his cup. I’d been wrong; the dark circles painted on the cup weren’t grapes, they were blueberries.
Sweet Jesus O’Keefe.
“Was it a woman’s body?” I asked.
He sipped from the dainty cup. “Still don’t know.”
“How much damned time do you need?” I asked, this time loud enough to be heard in the hall.
“The coroner is backed up; two kids in a motorcycle crash. Tell me everything you know about that woman on 12.”
I hurried through the Louise and Carolina version of the story, beginning with Aggert, ending with my trip to Windward Island.
“You’re thinking Carolina Dare might not be her real name, either?” he asked when I was done.
“I don’t know. The body was under the car?” I still couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it.
He studied me for a long, maddening minute, then nodded. “Jammed right under.”
I wanted to grab his teacup, smash it on the tile floor. “When will you know if it was a woman’s?”
“Got some photos from a Sergeant Patterson in Cedar Ridge, Iowa. A couple of brothers named Kovacs.”
“I already e-mailed Patterson that neither was passing himself off as the John Reynolds I met up here.”
“We’ll tack them up on the board anyway. Maybe somebody will remember seeing them.”
“How about calling the coroner, find out if it was a woman under that house?”
He paused at the door before going out. “You should try the blueberry tea. It soothes the nerves.”
Measured by the number of times the ants crawling in my gut multiplied, Dillard was gone a long time. According to my watch, though, he was gone only twenty minutes before he came back, carrying a green file folder and a cup of coffee, black, for me.
“The coroner said it was a man’s body.”
Some of the air came back into the room. It was too warm and stale with my sweat, and it disappeared too quickly into the sticky smell of the tea, but it was easier breathing. I drank the coffee while he opened the folder. He took out computer-printed photographs of two men and slid them across the table.
“The Kovacs brothers,” I said. “I told you, neither was the one posing as John Reynolds.”
“Your Cedar Ridge friend, Sergeant Patterson, said these ne’er-do-wells, Eddie and Lance, never went beyond petty crime. The only thing that ties them to the bank is timing; they disappeared at the same time an Officer Severs-your suspect for killing his daughter-was found dead in his police unit.”
“Severs is not just a guess. The letters to Carolina Dare point to him.”
“Patterson faxed me the letters, too,” Dillard said, nodding agreement. “We best be sure before we start pointing fingers at a cop.”
“A dead cop,” I said, “and likely a dead, dirty cop.” I pushed the photos on the table back toward him. “You could show these to the Woodton postmaster. Perhaps it was one of the Kovacs brothers who tried to get at Carolina’s mail.”
“And who was then found as toast underneath a car on County Road 12?”
“It could have been a Kovacs,” I agreed.
“So who killed him?”
“Same person who then torched the place: John Reynolds.”
“Close.” Dillard smiled. “My first guess is that Reynolds is a private investigator who got wind of the money trail. That doesn’t make him a killer. My second guess is he was one of the bank robbers. That does. Either way, I don’t see Reynolds as the primary suspect for the corpse under the car.”
I sipped coffee.
“Patterson is transmitting the Kovacs dental records right now. We’ll know soon enough.” He set down his dainty cup. “What aren’t you saying?”
Even with the door open, the air in Dillard’s office was still too tight. I shrugged.
“You aren’t saying, Elstrom, who is the likeliest suspect for the murder of the man under the car.”
I supposed he was looking for a couple of names. Maris’s, for sure. Probably my own. I stood up.
“I’ll be across the street from the Wal-Mart,” I said.
Thirty-one
I’d already had my Wal-Doughnut and coffee when Dillard called at nine the next morning. Since there was nobody on the streets in West Haven, I got to the sheriff’s building in ten minutes.
Dillard’s office was almost misting with the smell of newly brewed blueberries. He’d set up a telephone on the middle of his desk, for a speaker call. After a sip of tea, he punched in a number, and a phone rang through the speaker.
“Lieutenant Dillard, Mr. Elstrom,” Patterson greeted, from the other side of the Mississippi River.
“It’s John Doe’s teeth inside the charred skull lying on our medical examiner’s table,” Dillard said to the phone.
“Damn.” Patterson said it with no conviction, and no surprise. I realized that he and Dillard had already talked and were making a show of going through things again so Dillard could watch my reactions and describe them later to Patterson.
“What was the cause of death?” I asked Dillard.
“Did you hear that, Sergeant?” Dillard asked the phone. “Elstrom here asked what was the cause of death.”
“Good point for me?” I said, extra loud, for the phone. “Because not asking would imply I already knew?”
“Now, now, Mr. Elstrom,” Patterson’s voice said.
“You must admit, you didn’t think to ask about cause yesterday.” Dillard smiled across the table.
“I’m asking now: What is the cause of death?”
“Gunshots to the skull, exacerbated by fire.”
“Popular cause of death, isn’t it?” I asked the phone. “Gunshots followed by torching?”
The phone in the center of the desk was silent.
“Like what happened to your Officer Severs?” I went on.
Patterson cleared his throat. “Officer Severs was badly burned.”
“Bad enough to require dental verification?”
“He was very badly burned, Mr. Elstrom,” Patterson said.
“You hear back from the Windward Island police about those Kovacs photos? Did either the hostess at the Scupper or the woman at the Gulf Watcher identify either brother as the man who came around asking about Carolina Dare?”
From the phone came the sound of a chair scraping on a floor. There was no answer.
“Tell us, Sergeant Patterson, do you think Lieutenant Dillard here ought to take the Kovacs photos to Woodton, show them to the postmaster to see if it was one of the brothers who tried to get at Carolina’s mail?”
“Why not?” Patterson asked.
“For openers, because you’re finally getting around to thinking it might be somebody else.”
“Come on, Elstrom,” Patterson said.
“What bothers you the most about Officer Severs’s death, Sergeant?”
“I suppose the fact that there was no motive for anyone-”
I cut him off. “Tell us again: How badly burned was Officer Severs’s body?”
Dillard sipped tea, but his eyes, too, were on the phone at the center of the desk.
“Sergeant Patterson?” I asked.
“Very badly burned.” Patterson’s voice was faint.
The silence that followed got to Dillard after a minute. He turned to me. “What’s going on here?”
I shrugged.
“Elstrom’s shrugging,” Dillard said to the phone.
“Sergeant Patterson knows he has to look beyond the Kovacs brothers,” I said.
Dillard leaned toward the phone, as if it were hard of hearing. “Elstrom says you’re going-”
“Damn it, Lieutenant,” Patterson’s voice cut in, stopping the parody.
“What game are you two playing?” Dillard snapped, glaring at me. “Neither of you is asking about Carolina Dare. She lived in that cottage. She could have killed the man, then torched the house to destroy the evidence.”