Page 106 of Deadline

“To spend the night in another man’s house.”

Headly’s words fell like bricks. Amelia lowered her gaze to the tabletop. Dawson sat there seething for a moment, then said, “Tucker must’ve gotten a real kick out of telling you.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t.”

“Nothing to tell. Amelia stayed that night only because of the power outage.”

“Yeah, Tucker said you hammered that home. About two dozen times.” He divided a look between them. “Look, you’re grown-ups. I don’t care. I’m only saying what it looked like to—”

“That asshole Tucker.”

“No, to Jeremy and Carl. But let’s leave that for a moment. We’ll come back to it.”

While Headly paused to take several sips of coffee, Dawson looked over at Amelia with apology. For all their protests to the contrary, they hadn’t fooled anybody into believing that their night together had been entirely chaste.

Headly resumed. “They found the CandyCane tied up at a public, out-of-the-way dock on a channel on Tybee Island. I haven’t been there, but I hear it’s perfect for Jeremy’s purposes. Boaters come and go. Nobody pays much attention. Easy for him to get over here to spy on Amelia or watch his kids play on the beach. L

ast time somebody noticed the boat being there was early Monday.”

“He may not have been the man on that boat,” Amelia said.

“Knutz has a couple of people working it. Here’s a giveaway. The craft has been scrubbed down with bleach inside and out. So either it was piloted by a stocky, bearded, law-abiding germophobe who’s made himself scarce, or Jeremy made certain that if the authorities somehow linked the boat to the murder on Saint Nelda’s, it couldn’t be linked to him.”

“It wasn’t that hard to find,” Dawson said. “Which tells me that he didn’t see much risk of it being connected to the crime.”

“Or maybe,” Headly said, “he knows he won’t need it anymore and abandoned it like Carl did his car.”

“Either way, Jeremy doesn’t realize that he’s been had.”

“For the time being,” Headly said. “And that’s good. The longer we can keep him and Carl in the dark, the better.”

Dawson didn’t like the way Headly was eyeing him as he tacked on that last part. “What?”

“It would be nice if we had a decoy. Somebody to feed to the media sharks like chum. A pseudosuspect to throw Carl and Jeremy off.”

Dawson pointed to his own chest. “Me? I?”

“I’m just saying.”

“Forget it. What about Dirk Arneson?”

“He’s off the hook for everything except using his employer’s yacht as a bachelor pad. His poker pals were located in New Orleans and questioned. They backed up his alibi. He was released with an apology.”

“Poor Tucker. Foiled again.”

“He doesn’t like you, either. And he’d write me off as a crackpot for accusing a dead man of killing that girl if not for that fingerprint. But there is the print. And there is Jeremy’s kinship with Carl Wingert, a notorious criminal at large. Tucker’s wading through Carl’s history now to familiarize himself, but in a way that’s working against us.”

“How so?” Amelia asked.

“He can’t quite reconcile that Carl the terrible could pass himself off for years as Bernie the tenderhearted. So far, we haven’t got anything forensic to prove that Bernie is Carl’s alter ego, and until some turns up, Tucker’s waffling.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me!” Dawson exclaimed.

“He says a lot of older people have missing fingers, because reattachment wasn’t always the option it is now, and he’s right. He also backed me into a corner until I admitted that I’ve never seen Bernie, so I can’t ID him as Carl, whom I’ve also never seen in the flesh.”

Amelia asked, “How do they explain his car being abandoned, all that?”

“They can’t, except to say that maybe he’s having senior moments and forgot where he left it.”