Deadline

As much to block out that erotic memory as to block the view, she quickly pulled down the shades.

She made it to the bottom of the stairs before realizing that she’d left her laptop on the desk in the room that she used as an office. Leaving her handbag, she quickly retraced her way back up to the second floor.

The sun was setting, shadows were deep, as she entered the room and went over to the desk. There she hesitated, and, before she could talk herself out of it, pulled out the chair, sat down, and booted up the computer. All the while trying to talk herself out of it, she accessed the Internet and ran a search for Carl Wingert.

In a matter of keystrokes, she was on a website for the FBI’s Most Wanted, looking into the face of the man who had been a fugitive from justice for decades, searching his glowering features for any resemblance to the man she had loved and married, then had grown to fear.

There wasn’t one. Between the photograph on the monitor and Jeremy, she didn’t detect a single similarity. But maybe she wasn’t seeing it because she didn’t want to. Was desperation making her blind to it?

She rejected the thought that Jeremy, the father of her children, was the son of criminals. Murderers. It simply couldn’t be.

Yet FBI Agent Headly, certainly no fool, was convinced, and had DNA evidence backing him up.

Jeremy had manifested a violent streak.

Burying her face in her heads, she expelled a long breath, carrying on it a fearful prayer, “Dear God, please no.”

* * *

Harriet was beside herself with excitement. “He fed them to dogs?”

“Willard claims his wife was dead when he found her.” Dawson, seated on the foot of the bed in his hotel room, pinched the bridge of his nose till it made his eyes water. Only by inflicting physical pain could he make the agony of this conversation tolerable by comparison. “She died of a close-range shotgun blast to the chest.”

“Willard’s shotgun. You said his fingerprints were the only ones on it.”

“Yeah, but he swore under oath that he didn’t shoot her.”

“What’s his version?”

“On the witness stand, he admitted that he’d been drinking all day while he searched in and around Savannah for the cheating lovers. Eventually he gave up and drove out to this place in the woods where he cages and trains his fighting pit bulls. He claims he was so drunk he couldn’t even get out of his pickup before passing out.

“When he came to, it was hours later, after midnight. He noticed immediately that his shotgun was missing from the cab of his truck. He climbed out, stumbled around in the dark, trying to figure out which end was up.

“He made it into the shack—his crash pad out there—and found a flashlight. He said the dogs were going nuts, and that’s a quote. So he staggered over to the pens, shined his light around, and inside one of cages was Darlene. What was left of her. His shotgun was propped up against the outside of the cage.”

“He expects the jury to believe that?”

“I don’t know what he expects. That’s what he testified. In doing so, he admitted to committing several felonies by participating in dogfights.”

“What did he have to say about Jeremy Wesson?”

“Doesn’t have a clue what happened to him. Evidence that he met the same fate as Darlene is inconclusive. A patch of hairy scalp in the stomach of one dog. Blood in the pen.”

“That’s not conclusive?”

“When the ME testified, that’s the word he used. The defense attorney picked up on it and made it his mantra.”

“Okay. Go on.”

“Willard saw Darlene’s remains, panicked, bolted. It took police a couple of days to track him down, and only then after they got an anonymous tip about his possible whereabouts. In that amount of time, the digestive

process—”

“Jeremy was doggie poop by then.”

Dawson was thinking why, if the dogs had made a meal of Jeremy, they would have been ravenous for Darlene. But he didn’t address that incongruity. Vampira was lapping up the grisly elements of the story.

He continued. “Willard swears he never saw Jeremy. His attorney tried to plant in the minds of the jurors that it was Jeremy who took the shotgun from Willard’s pickup while Willard was unconscious, killed Darlene, pushed her body into the dog pen, then hightailed it into the marsh, never to be seen again. Possibly it was he who called in the tip.”