Page 75 of Secrets Along the Shore (Beach Read Thrillers #1)

CHAPTER

EIGHTEEN

“I’m lookin’ for a Detective Sophie Walsh.” Reggie Banks’s voice comes over my phone, the timbre giving away his youth. I imagine a man who hasn’t yet hit thirty, with tired eyes and jittery hands. “She’s been leavin’ me messages. You her?”

“Yes, I’m Sophie Walsh. I’m an investigator with the Mitchell County Sheriff’s Department, looking into the disappearance of Kamden Avery. I?—”

“So somebody’s finally doing somethin’. ’Cause nobody’d listen to me before now and I been tryin’ to get somebody to hear me and now she’s dead.”

“You’ve seen the news.” After the coroner’s results came back this morning, positively identifying the remains of the fourth victim as Kamden Avery, Sheriff Vickers issued a press release which got picked up and aired by several news outlets.

“No, but one of my boys told me.” There is silence for a couple of beats.

“I knew it!” His yell pierces my unsuspecting eardrum like a knife, and I yank the phone back from my head.

“I knew she was in trouble! I knew he was coming for her!” Reggie proceeds to unleash an imaginative litany of curses directed at a nameless man he suspects had it out for Kamden.

He goes on for nearly thirty seconds before I’m able to squeeze a word in.

“Hey, whoa, Reggie, hold up. I need?— ”

“You need to get the…” Reggie launches into more cursing and some very specific, descriptive threats about what he’s going to do to the man he believes is responsible for Kamden’s death.

“Hey,” I shout, matching his volume. That makes him pause, and I jump in. “Believe me, I want to get the person responsible. I need your help to do that, but you’re gonna have to calm down first.”

“The person responsible is L.A. Haynes and you will get him. Or I’ll get him myself.”

I groan internally. The last thing I need is some vigilante drug dealer shooting up some guy who might be connected to Kamden’s murder.

“Reggie, do not take care of this yourself. We can handle it, but I do need to meet with you and have you tell me about Kamden and this L.A. Haynes. You up for that?”

“Oh, yeah, I’m up for that. I’m up for that right now.”

When Reggie agrees to meet me that afternoon, I jump in my car and haul it to Birmingham.

Could I have had the conversation on the phone?

Sure. But it wouldn’t be the same as seeing him face to face.

It wouldn’t be the same as looking into his eyes and gauging whether he’s being honest or not, whether he’s hiding something, or whether he’s got an ulterior motive.

Whether he might be Kamden’s killer.

An hour and a half later—speed limits are really just strong suggestions, right?

—I’m weaving through a neighborhood in northwest Birmingham following Google Maps to the address Reggie gave me.

The route takes me through a sea of run-down homes in various states of disrepair.

Some have nearly collapsed. I’m guessing this area has seen better days, probably sometime in the ’40s or ’50s.

What little landscaping exists is scrubby and mismatched, a fair amount of litter is peppered around, and a parade of chain link fences holds back barking dogs.

When I reach 202 West Debra Street, two men in jeans and T-shirts with logos I don’t recognize are in the driveway, leaning against a glossy red Chevy Impala with a suspension elevated to a physics- defying height.

A steady bass booms from the car, which displays a bumper decal that reads “You See Me Now.”

I whip to the curb. The two men push off the Impala, move several feet toward me, then take a guarded stance.

Praying for protection and common sense to prevail, I step out. “Hi. I’m here to see Reggie.” They say nothing, their silent, intense stares continuing to bore through me. “He asked me to come. Is he home?”

“This ain’t Reggie’s home,” one of the men says, crossing his arms across his chest as the other slips his hand behind his back.

I do not like that.

Suddenly, I am much more aware of the gun in my shoulder holster. “Would it be okay if I just check that?—”

“Yo! She good!” A young man, who looks exactly as I pictured Reggie during our phone call, pushes through the front screen door. He steps onto the dilapidated porch, occupied by a sole, weathered rattan rocker.

“Reggie?” I ask.

He nods, jerks his head toward the house, then disappears inside. Taking this as an invitation, I follow.

My first thought when I step into the living room is that a lot is going on here. Voices drift into the room from somewhere farther back in the house. A child is crying upstairs, and a loud clatter of pots and pans sounds in what I think is the kitchen, one room over.

Reggie drops into a dingy floral couch, and I ease into a worn brown suede recliner opposite him. The leg rest is already extended, so I sit diagonally in the seat so I don’t have to try to lower it.

“Reggie, thank you for talking to me. I’m hoping you can shed some light on what happened to Kamden.”

“I told you, I know exactly what happened to her.”

“You said this ‘L.A.’ is responsible? Tell me about him. Does he have a first name other than L.A.?”

“Leonard Haynes.”

“Why is he called L.A.?” I ask.

Reggie eyes me like I’ve never done this before. “’Cause he’s always talkin’ ’bout movin’ out there when he makes his big score. What difference does that make? That doesn’t have nothin’ to do with Kamden.”

“I’m just trying to get a full picture of him. I need that if I’m going to find him.”

“Oh, I can find him. He’s always back and forth from here to the ATL.”

“Atlanta?”

Again with the condescending look. “Is that where he is now?”

Reggie shrugs. “I asked around and nobody’s sure where he is, at the moment .”

“Okay. So why do you think he has something to do with Kamden Avery’s disappearance?”

Reggie inhales a deep breath through his nostrils like he’s storing up for several minutes underwater. “I got a business, right? And sometimes my business and L.A.’s business, they overlap. We don’t see eye-to-eye when that happens. You feel me?”

I nod.

“Last year, a few times he came out on the wrong side of things when I was involved and he still got smoke with me over that. He was lookin’ for a way to get under my skin, and when he realized me and Kam got chemistry, he decided to move in.”

“You and Kamden were together?”

His left cheek twitches. “Not together, together, but…we did business together. I was her…product supplier.”

If he’s hoping to make it sound like he was stocking Kamden with essential oils instead of drugs, he’s not fooling anyone.

“We did have a vibe, you know? Coulda been somethin’ if we had time. But L.A., he saw that and started payin’ her a whole lot of attention. Stepped in and offered her a discount on—” Reggie cuts himself off, pausing before continuing, “—products.”

The kind of supplies you sniff, snort, or swallow. “He was willing to undercut himself just to get in good with her?”

Reggie nods. “We’re at Keepin’ Score—the bar a coupla’ blocks over—and he’s offerin’.

Only, Kam knows what he’s about and she ain’t havin’ it ’cause she loyal to me.

L.A. must have been outta his mind, ’cause even after that, he decides to shoot his shot with her.

She shuts him down hard, right in front of everybody.

Slaps him too,” Reggie says, with a smirk on his face.

“L.A. lost it. Went for her, and two guys from his crew had to hold him back. He starts spoutin’ how she gonna be sorry, I’m gonna be sorry, everybody gonna be sorry.

Now Kam’s dead, so you tell me who did it. ”

I fold my hands and lean forward, my elbows on my knees. “Okay. But, here’s the thing, Reggie. How did Kamden end up in Mitchell County, almost two hours north of here? If it happened like you think it did, of all the places L.A. could’ve left her, why up there?”

“Easy,” Reggie says, looking like he’s got the answers to every question ever posed about the universe.

“’Cause we all knew about them women killed by that lunatic up there, whoever was doin’ it.

We been talkin’ about it before in Keepin’ Score and L.A.

was right there with us. So he knew about it.

You tell me, would it be better for him to dump her up there where nobody knew her or him, or down here where he’d be reco’nized in a second and be the first one to get a finger pointed at him? ”

I know which answer I’m going with.

I spend another fifteen minutes pulling everything I can about L.A.

out of Reggie. He won’t let me record him, so I take old school notes as fast as I can.

In the end, he even texts me a photo of Leonard “L.A.” Haynes.

Between that and the rest of what he’s given me, I’m hopeful we’ll locate L.A. pretty quickly.

If L.A. Haynes did kill Kamden, that means there isn’t another serial killer running around Mitchell County, Kamden and Teresa both being in tarps was merely a coincidence, and we were right all along about Fogerty killing Teresa.

Me rooting for a drug dealer to have killed a woman out of spite was not on my bingo card for this year.

To cover all my bases, I show Reggie a photo of Kurt Fogerty. He doesn’t recognize him, and has never seen him with Kamden or heard Kamden talk about him. He doesn’t recognize the location of Kamden’s last Instagram photo either, and has no clue where it might be.

We’re about forty minutes in when Reggie starts fidgeting, pacing, and cutting his gaze to the windows.

I’m getting the distinct impression I’ve outlasted my welcome.

I don’t know what’s made him so jumpy, but I don’t want to find out.

Confident I’ve learned everything I’m going to, or at least everything I need at the moment, I make a quick exit, promising Reggie I’ll keep him posted.

Outside, one of the two guys has taken to leaning against my Jeep. I toss him a slight nod, and he eyes me with contempt as he steps off. I climb in and speed away before anyone decides to stop me from doing it.

The brilliant honey-colored sun is setting in the west as I head for home.

I touch base with MCSD dispatch and request a BOLO for Leonard “L.A.” Haynes.

It’ll be shared with other law enforcement agencies in the state and Georgia, hopefully resulting in a location for him.

The charcoal pavement disappears beneath me as I let my thoughts coalesce while listening to the audiobook version of Pride and Prejudice.

It’s not the typical book one might think of when imagining soundtracks to solving a murder, but I know it so well it lets my mind wander.

Just as Darcy tells Bingley that Elizabeth is “tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt” him, my phone rings.

It’s the Mitchell County Sheriff’s Department. I hit the answer button.

“Sophie Walsh.”

“Hey, Sophie, Deputy Carlisle here.” I know him, though not well. I’ve only talked to him a couple of times.

“Hey, Deputy. What can I do for you?”

“Sheriff wanted me to call. Said to drop whatever you’re doing and head to Huntsville. There’s something you’re gonna want to handle.”