“You got a paper around?” he called to the waitress. “Something to read, anything?”
She reached beneath the cash register, came up with a handful of newsprint, brought him the Register. He snapped it open. A page-one headline read, MOBILE DE — TECTIVE MISSING, BELIEVED DROWNED.
Nautilus pushed the paper away like it was on fire, threw a twenty on the table, ran out the door.
My forehead turned cold and I opened my eyes. My guts felt like they’d been removed, beaten with jellyfish tentacles, stuck back inside. Miss Gracie was wiping my head with a cool, damp cloth. It felt wonderful.
“You feelin’ all right?” she asked, looking into my eyes.
“No.”
She wrung water from the towel, refreshed it from a bowl of ice water on the bedside table.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
Miss Gracie patted the towel against my forehead, then folded it and left it laying.
“Used to be they’d send people here to test us. Fakes. If we told them things we wasn’t supposed to, it could be real bad. If you were fake he wouldn’t have done that to you. I can’t do much, but I can at least give you a clean head.”
“Where am I? And please, don’t tell me-”
“You’re in a story. An’ I think it may be ending. Least the way it is now, the way it’s become.”
“Story?”
“I’ll come back later. Maybe you should know a few parts of the story. Sleep now.”
I closed my eyes beneath the cool towel and drifted off. The next time I awakened, my pain had subsided and my vision was clear. I was still in bed, but someone had pushed me into a different room. Smaller. There was a steel door, closed, a slat at eye-height, also closed. The walls were covered in a thick, coarse-woven fabric, like old-time mats in high school gyms. A light was recessed into the ceiling, crisscrossed with bars.
I was in a padded cell.
Footsteps outside the door, slow and careful. No more electricity, I thought. Not now. Leave me alone.
The slat slid open and eyes searched the room, found me on the bed. I saw a sock puppet beside the eyes and sighed with relief.
“What are you doing, Carson?”
“I’m resting, Freddy.”
“You shouldn’t be in there, Carson,” he chided.
“Why’s that?”
“That’s Lucas’s room.”
I heard a sound of hard-sole footsteps and Freddy scampered away. The door squeaked open. Crandell stepped into the room, his face bright with false bonhomie.
“Whoa there, Ryder. You look like you been out partying all night long. You got to crank it back now and then, boy.”
I mumbled curses his way. It made his smile brighter.
“You was yelling some things while we were playing. Trying to make like you had it all figured out. It was fun to hear.”
“I’m pulling some pieces together, Crandell. Like why you’re here. And what you’re protecting.”
He walked to the side of the bed, raised a questioning eyebrow. “And just what is it I’m protecting, Ryder?”
“The family’s reputation.”
“Interesting theory. Make it go somewhere.”
“Lucas was falling apart, decompensating. I’m talking four years back, when he was eighteen, when these sorts of problems usually present. The family knew about it, knew Lucas got the bad seed. He had a crazy uncle, Tree-house Boy or whatever. Insanity repeating in the family. But intervening in Lucas’s madness would mean…what? Committing him? Embarrassment? Bringing up sordid bits of Maylene’s history and humiliating her all over again?”
The breadth of Crandell’s smile was unsettling. “Hang on a sec, Ryder…” he said, jogging from the room, returning seconds later with a chair. He sat it in reverse, arms crossed on the chair back.
“I got to sit, Ryder. Listening to your theories is better than a movie. OK, keep going.”
I glared at him and continued. “Then one day Lucas does the big wig-out. Kills Frederika Holtkamp. She was Freddy’s teacher. Freddy mentioned her name the other day.”
Crandell nodded. “She was Fred’s teacher for years. Brought that boy a long way, I hear.”
“The Kincannons knew Lucas was about to flip out, knew the signs well enough to stay on Lucas’s trail. They were too late, finding him under the microwave tower, covered with Holtkamp’s blood.” I lifted my head from the pillow. “Was that when they called you in for the dirty work, Crandell? To co-opt Barlow? It was your idea to pull Pettigrew to Montgomery, get him off the case, right?”
“What’d make this movie perfect,” Crandell chuckled, “was if I had me some Milk Duds.”
His grin was maddening. I said, “I know about Rudolnick, Crandell.”
“Oh my. Do tell.”
“I figure Mama K thought her boy could be brought back from the brink of madness. Rudolnick’s drug problem was probably known in a small circle. You found out, set him up for a fake bust. From that point on, he belonged to the Kincannons. Rudolnick consulted at Mobile Regional Hospital, right? The Kincannons give big bucks to MRH. Carrot and stick. One hand has money, the other can slip an arrest report into the system. Easy when you own cops like Shuttles, right?”
Crandell clapped his hands. Stomped his feet on the floor. “You ever think of renting out as an entertainment center, Ryder? You’re amazing.”
“Rudolnick wanted out, conscience maybe. But that couldn’t happen, could it? Leland Harwood handles the disposal. He takes the fall, but a paid-off group of witnesses sends him on a light flight. He gets promised big compensation when he gets out. But he’s a loose end, a talker. You drop Tommy the Bomb on him.”
Crandell shook his head, sighed. “I wish you hadn’t been at the prison that day, Ryder. This could all have been avoided.”
“We would have dug you up, Crandell. Just from a different direction. Answer me one thing: Why did Lucas kill Taneesha Franklin? Miss Gracie keeps the music on during the day when no one’s here. WTSJ. Did Lucas form a bond by listening to her?”
Crandell stood, picked up the chair. He was leaving.
“Come on, Crandell,” I yelled. “Give me something.”
He turned, a big smile on his face.
“You got a couple things right, Ryder. But you ain’t near the core.”
“What’s the core?”
He winked. “This whole shitaree ain’t nothing more than a little family business. That’s all.” He checked his watch. “Business calls. Enjoy breathing, Ryder. You got less than a day of it left.”
CHAPTER 41
Nautilus started to put music on, sorting through a stack of recently played CDs, nothing feeling right. He knelt to a shelf of vinyls, flicked through the titles, the musicians: Armstrong, Bechet, Beiderbecke, Coltrane, Johnson, Monk, Parker, Rainey, Spanier, Teagarden…a century of jazz and blues. Nothing sounded right. For the first time he could ever remember, there was nothing he wanted to hear. He fell into the couch and willed his head to stop thinking. Wait on the call from Hembree.
An hour later his phone rang. He checked the incoming number: Forensics.
“What you got, Bree?”
“You don’t live too far, do you, Harry?”
“I’ll be right there.”
Hembree was alone with the kayak when Nautilus arrived, the skinny Forensics expert standing with his hand on its surface. Hembree looked up, saw Nautilus.
“We spoke with the kayak’s manufacturers, Harry, WaveDesign out in San Diego. They’re big on engineering, their niche in the market. They do impact tests, strength tests. Drop the things from cars going sixty miles an hour, slam them with big boats, little boats, jet skis. They float them in front of oil tankers to see what pops up in the wake. They’ve even devised a torsion test where they-”
“Bree…”
“Sorry. We e-mailed WaveDesign photos of the kayak, close-ups, full-lengths, micros. They called back with more questions, wanting additional photos from other angles. MacCready talked their lingo, made it easier. The WaveDesign folks were fascinated by the problem.”
“And?”