T hey showered together, then went for a walk on the beach. It was warm and breezy, and Daisy seemed to go berserk, running at top speed, disappearing into the dunes, then tearing across the beach and running into the surf. Jackson found a stick, and Daisy loved chasing it.
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“A small town in Georgia called Delano.”
“Where’s that?”
“About forty miles east of Columbus.”
“That’s funny, I was born in Columbus—or rather, at Fort Benning. I grew up on half a dozen military bases, from Fort Bragg to Mannheim, in Germany.”
“I grew up in Delano.”
“Your folks still there?”
“Both dead, Mom eight years ago, Dad six. He didn’t take much interest in living after she went.”
“My mom’s gone, too, but Ham had the army to keep him going.”
“Dad was a lawyer, but he didn’t love it enough for it to keep him going. A month after she died, he closed the office, and after that, he hardly left the house. Not even golf could keep him interested, and he had always been an enthusiastic golfer.”
“My dad, too. Just loves it. Barney Noble told me to bring him out to Palmetto Gardens to play sometime. Oh, I forgot to tell you, they knew each other in the army—they served in the same outfit in Vietnam.”
“Connections, connections,” Jackson said absently. “I belong to the Dunes Club; tell your dad I’ll take him there when he visits.” He looked at her. “You said you play?”
“Yeah, but it’s been almost a year.”
“You got clubs?”
“Yeah. Ham gave them to me for Christmas last year, I think hoping to get me out on the course more, but I was always working.”
“You want to play this afternoon?”
“Sure, why not? You know, this is the first day I haven’t worked since I got here.”
“You got a handle on the job yet?”
“Pretty much. Chet had the department superbly organized. What I have to do mostly is not screw it up. What I haven’t got a handle on is these shootings.”
“You sound discouraged.”
“I’m at a dead end. The department has done the job it was supposed to, but we just don’t have anything to go on.”
“You have no idea why somebody might want to kill Chet and Hank?”
She looked at him closely. “This doesn’t go any further.”
“Right.”
“When Chet hired me he intimated that he had a serious problem that he would brief me on when I arrived in town. Wouldn’t say more than that. Then, the evening I arrived, we talked on the phone, and he told me that he was meeting somebody, and he’d have a lot to tell me the following morning, when I reported for work.”
“He didn’t give you any idea what it was about?”
She shook her head. “Not much. Part of the problem was that there was somebody in the department who was working both sides of the street. He said he had an idea, but he didn’t tell me.”
“You have any idea now?”
“No, not really. It could be anybody.”