Page 74 of Deadline

He reacted with a start. “Dirk is older?”

“You know about him?”

“The night she came in drunk, she mentioned him by name. ‘Dirk and I killed a bottle of Captain Morgan.’ The detectives want to question him, but they haven’t been able to track him down.”

“That’s one reason I was asked to come in,” she said. “They want to know what I know about him.”

“What do you know about him?”

“Not even his last name.”

Dawson listened with mounting apprehension as she told him what little she knew about the elusive Dirk. “Did Stef tell you why she wasn’t keen on you two meeting?”

“I gathered he wasn’t keen on it, either. He wouldn’t fit into ‘the family scene.’”

“Did she describe him physically?”

“Older than she, but she didn’t say by how much. Tattoos. A beard.”

“Huh.”

“Your brow is furrowed. What are you thinking?”

“Dirk comes across as excessively secretive.”

He got up and walked over to a bulletin board that was papered with Wanted posters, forming a collage of sinister faces. One poster stood out, however, because the wanted individual had the benign countenance of an angel framed by curly blond hair. Not yet thirty years old, she was wanted for armed robbery and murder. A twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward had been offered for information leading to her arrest. She was considered to be armed and dangerous.

The criminal bent of one’s personality wasn’t always obvious.

He turned back to Amelia. “I didn’t use Stef as a source of information on you. But maybe someone else did. Someone who wanted to keep track of you and your sons, who wanted to know where you were and who you were with. Someone having a great deal of personal interest in your activities, your daily routine, your comings and goings.”

She took a deep, stuttering breath, indicating to Dawson that even though she didn’t respond, she understood all too well what he was leading up to.

In a quiet voice, he said, “There’s the age factor.”

“We don’t know how old this Dirk is.”

“For the sake of argument, let’s say his age fits.”

“Let’s not,” she said, coming to her feet. “The man Stef described to me sounds nothing like Jeremy.”

“Tattoos are easily acquired. The beard might take a week or two. He’s been missing for fifteen months.”

“You don’t think I’d recognize the man I was married to, even with a beard?”

“You would, but the casual observer wouldn’t. Furthermore, nobody’s looking for Jeremy Wesson. The general consensus is that Willard Strong fed him to a pack of starving pit bulls.”

She took a reflexive step away from him, but when the back of her knees touched the seat of the chair, she sat back down abruptly. He returned to his seat beside her. He wanted to caress her cheek, at the very least, take her hand. He refrained, largely because he feared a rebuff.

“Something else has been nagging at me.”

She shook her head as though to stave off whatever it was he was about to say, but he didn’t let it deter him. “I haven’t shared this with the detectives because I wanted to run it past you, first.” And Headly. Above anyone else, he would trust Gary Headly’s instincts on this.

“When I ran into Stef in the general store, she was wearing a rain slicker. I teased her about the loud pattern. Red with bright-yellow-and-white daisies. She told me she’d taken it from the trunk of your car.”

“It’s mine. Jeremy and I went to Charleston for a getaway weekend. The weather turned bad, and I needed a raincoat in a hurry. That was the first one I found. It’s not something I would typically choose, so I kept it at the beach house and never wore it except there on the island.”

“Last I saw her, Stef was standing beside your car, wearing your slicker, with—”