Orchid Beach (Holly Barker 1)

“And?”

“We went over a map of the place, while he showed me what he had done out there. The only really unusual thing was at the communications center.”

“What?”

“He put in a basement and a sub-basement, fully waterproofed and insulated.”

“A sub-basement? In Florida? It’s probably full of the Indian River by now.”

“He said it was fully waterproofed,” Bob said.

“Got any ideas what it’s for?”

“It’s all heavily reinforced, superdense concrete. I reckon it’s either a bomb shelter or a vault.”

“Now, that’s interesting,” Bob said. “Anybody else?”

Holly spoke up. “Well, I learned something from Cracker this morning that I didn’t expect to.”

“What’s that?”

“I think he killed Hank Doherty, maybe Chet Marley, too. Or, at least, he was one of the killers.”

“The dog?” Harry asked.

“Daisy.”

“She went nuts, didn’t she?”

“She sure did. Whoever killed Hank got him to lock Daisy in the kitchen first, but Daisy sure remembered him.”

CHAPTER

47

T he next morning, Holly was back at her desk. She and Harry Crisp had agreed that she should keep something like regular office hours so that, if anyone were keeping tabs on her, she would appear to be doing nothing out of the ordinary. She was working her way through the stack of personnel files when Hurd Wallace rapped at her door.

“Morning, Hurd,” Holly said. “Come in and have a seat.”

“Morning,” he said, sitting down.

“What’s up?”

“I feel sort of out of the loop,” Wallace said.

“What loop is that?”

“Well, I’m beginning to get the impression that you know something about Chet Marley’s murder that I don’t.”

“What makes you think that?”

“You seem to be doing a lot of investigative work these days that I’m cut out of,” Wallace said.

“Such as?”

“You’re making trips to the county planning office and looking up documents there; you’ve had Barney Noble in here, and he didn’t look happy; and then you interrogated that guy yesterday, the one whose picture you had up on the bulletin board a while back.”

“All that is true, I guess.”