That should get the megalomaniac’s attention.
An interview with him wasn’t unprecedented. Carl had granted one once before. Dawson had heard about it through Headly. “In the mideighties, a reporter for the Washington Post wrote and published an article about Carl. A lot of the background information on him and his crimes came from me. The writer wanted to be fair, give Carl a chance to rebut what I’d said, set straight any misconceptions about him. In the article, he made it clear that he wished for an interview with him.
“Carl took him at his word. A few weeks after the article appeared, the reporter was kidnapped. Several days after his disappearance, he mailed in a handwritten transcript of a lengthy interview. The newspaper published it in its entirety, and the reporter was awarded a Pulitzer for it.”
Carl now had thirty more years to tell about than he had during that first interview. Dawson planned to ask him about the past seventeen specifically. Had he committed crimes that weren’t attributed to him, or had he semiretired as he appeared to have done? Had he urged Jeremy to follow in his footsteps, or had that been Jeremy’s decision alone? What about Flora?
There was much Dawson wanted to ask him.
But first, he had to find him.
The car he’d rented when he arrived in Savannah less than a week ago was still at the beach house, so he’d taken a taxi from the hospital to the airport, where he arrived at one of the car rental companies just as it was about to close for the night.
Avoiding I-95, he crossed into South Carolina on a dark, two-lane highway. It meandered through thick forests that had thus far escaped developers who sacrificed nature preserves to golf-based communities for retirees.
For miles, the only lights he’d seen were the twin beams of his headlights and a slender moon that was occasionally obscured by thin clouds. The air was soft and thick with humidity. Dotting the flat land were marshes and swamps of murky water.
You wouldn’t want to lose your way out here. But if you were looking to hide, the conditions were excellent.
He’d had Glenda searching out parcels of land in the region that had switched hands during the time Jeremy was stationed at Parris Island. It was a long shot, but Glenda came through with a solid possibility. She reported her finding when he called her from the hospital.
“Twenty acres, located between Beaufort and Charleston about a half mile inland. It changed ownership in 2006.”
“What snagged your attention about this particular transaction?”
“It was purchased by a corporation.”
“Not that unusual.”
“No, but the plot is in the middle of freakin’ nowhere, no channel connecting it to the ocean, not even a county road’s access. A third of it is marshland. What would a corporation want with it?” Before Dawson could form a reply, she said, “I checked to see what kind of business it did and—Hello!—the corporation isn’t registered in any of the fifty states. Looks phony.”
Dawson tried and failed to pat down his mounting optimism. “Corporations are dissolved. They change names.”
“They do. But property taxes were paid as recently as two months ago, automatic draw on an account.”
“Bearing the corporation’s name?”
“You got it.”
Holding a wrinkled piece of paper flat against the wall, he’d scribbled down the coordinates of the lot that had been mysteriously purchased the year that Jeremy Wesson met Amelia Nolan. “Glenda, you’re an angel.”
“You’re an asshole, but you saved that lady’s life today, so I guess that makes you okay.”
“Who said?”
“That you’re an asshole?”
“That I saved the lady’s life.”
“CNN.”
That was disturbing. He didn’t want to be alluded to as a hero. That would be the biggest lie of all. He wasn’t a hero.
The road he’d been on had become progressively narrower with each mile. Then the hardtop had given way to gravel until, now, he was bumping along a dirt track. It tapered to a dead end about ten yards away from a seemingly impenetrable field of cordgrass.
He killed the car’s engine and turned off the headlights. The darkness was unrelieved. Fumbling for his cell phone, he clicked it on and checked the GPS app that had brought him to this intersection of the property lines that formed the southeast corner of the twenty-acre plot. This spot also was nearest to the Atlantic and had the lowest elevation of the property.
Switching on his flashlight app, he got out of the car, walked toward the high grass, and sank to his ankles in viscous water.