Page 27 of The Bane Witch

27

Life Vest

Reyes wasn’t sure what he was looking for. He combed the docks, searching. He’d been on his way to get Will, arrest warrant for Henry Davenport in hand, when he made an abrupt change in course, swinging back toward the shoreline, his sister’s words buzzing in his ear like a gnat: The only way to get an asshole like that off your back is if they think you’re dead. What if she was right and by some miracle Piers Davenport was still alive? It was absurd, and yet he couldn’t let it go. He didn’t know what he expected to find, if anything. And maybe that was why he’d really come, to prove Lucia’s words weren’t true, however much he might hope they were.

They’d been over the shore multiple times along the river. There was still no sign of a body, and his eyes scanned the watery horizon knowing she had to be out there somewhere, at the bottom of the Atlantic, like an old ship. But the marina kept calling him, with its crowded nearby resort and unparalleled view of the bridge. All those pretty boats undulating in their slips on the water. Maybe this wouldn’t be a wasted trip. If someone had seen something, maybe they could confirm the husband’s presence on the bridge with her. Maybe they could even identify him. Didn’t yachters usually keep binoculars on board? It was a long shot, but he wasn’t opposed to searching a few haystacks for the occasional prize needle.

A young man sauntered over, his polarized sunglasses obscuring his eyes. “Can I help you?”

Reyes gave him a friendly smile, flashed his badge and ID card. “I’m looking into a missing persons case,” he told the boy. “We think she might be a jumper.” His eyes went to the bridge spanning the water and the boy’s head followed.

Reyes held out the cell phone with the image of Henry and his wife on the home screen. “Do you recall ever seeing this woman?”

The boy removed his sunglasses, staring at it. “No,” he said, but he hesitated, and it gave Reyes hope.

“You sure? It would have been a couple of weeks ago. August fifteenth to be exact. Early morning hours, around dawn.” He held the phone up for one more look. “Were you here that morning?”

“I’m not usually scheduled that early, but I was helping a guy prep his boat to take it out. It was quiet, though. The water was like glass. I saw a manatee.”

Reyes squinted. “A manatee?”

The young man ran his fingers through his hair. “Well, that’s what Tom—Mr. Young—called it. But it was so fast, who really knows what it was.”

“Sure,” Reyes agreed with a slow nod. “And how would I get a hold of this Tom Young? If I wanted to ask him a few questions?”

Suddenly, the boy looked scared. “We’re not in any trouble, are we?”

Reyes inwardly kicked himself. He should have brought Will along. “Not at all. We’re just asking anyone in the vicinity who may have witnessed something. Really, even the smallest detail that seems unrelated can make a difference, so…”

The boy nodded. “Oh, okay. Well, in that case. I’ll give you his number, but you’ll have to follow me to the dock office.”

“No problem,” Reyes said. “Lead the way.”

As they neared the bright red roof and clean taupe siding of the dock office, the boy added, “We did find something that day you might be interested in. I mean, it’s probably nothing. But you said, any small detail.”

Reyes raised his brows, a striking sensation running along the length of his back. “Oh?”

The boy flashed him a smile. “It’s just a life vest, but it was left sitting on one of the docks last month and no one has claimed it. I can look up the exact date inside.”

He opened the office door, and they stepped in. At the desk, he quickly jotted the name and number of the man he’d mentioned and passed it over.

Reyes smiled. “Mind if I take a look at that life vest?”

“Sure.” The kid brightened. Reaching into a lost and found cabinet, he pulled it out. “It’s a woman’s fit, that’s for sure.”

Reyes reached for it slowly. It was covered in a pale green nylon across the front with black buckles. But it was the familiar purple-red stain near a bottom corner that had his hand trembling ever so slightly.

“It’s a shame, too,” the boy said with a twist of his mouth. “Looks brand-new.”

Reyes gripped the life vest, disbelieving, and met the boy’s eyes.

“You know,” the kid told him now, “come to think of it, it might have been a woman that morning instead of a manatee.”

R EYES CARRIED T HE vest back to his car and sat for a long while, sun beaming through his windshield, staring at the tiny stain smaller than a dime. He had to take it to the station, clip the fabric for testing, but he was too stunned to move. Had his sister been right when she claimed the woman had just run away? Did Mr. Davenport suspect as much? Reyes glanced out at the bridge, hazy in the distance. Could she survive that jump? Did she intend to?

His eyes focused on the unmistakable stain against the cool wintergreen color of the vest, certainty washing over him.

He couldn’t imagine that kind of courage, what it took to stand up there and risk it all. But after witnessing what happened to his mother and his sister, he could imagine that level of desperation.

When he finally found the wherewithal to start the car, it wasn’t the station he drove to. It was to the man, Henry.

He pulled into the drive, catching Mr. Davenport home on his lunch break, blocking his rental car as he was attempting to leave. A Toyota Corolla, Reyes noted with a smile, utterly ordinary.

Reyes climbed out of the patrol car, leaving the door open, and strode toward Henry, who was tossing a briefcase into the passenger seat of his own vehicle.

“What are you doing here?” Henry barked at him, a contemptuous curl to his upper lip. “Are you going to impound this one, too?”

Reyes resisted the urge to gloat. “No, sir. Though we appreciate your cooperation in the matter.”

Henry practically snarled. “Well, I’m done cooperating, I assure you. You can speak to my attorney if you have any further questions.”

“Just one,” Reyes told him. “It won’t take long.” Before Henry could protest, he pulled the life vest, bagged in clear plastic, from where he’d been holding it behind his back. “Have you seen this item before?”

The effect was immediate. Henry’s body went rigid, his chin drew back like a snake ready to strike. His eyes, so pale already the irises were barely visible, turned white with rage, the pupils retracting into themselves. He stepped forward once, a man entranced, then twice. “May I?” he asked cordially, as if he wanted a closer look at a prize jewel.

Reyes shrugged and handed the vest to him.

Henry took it in his hands, fingers tensing around the sculpted plastic foam, and turned it over as if it was a thing of beauty, perhaps the most admirable thing he had ever beheld. “Where did you find this?” he asked quietly, voice rapt with awe.

“The Charleston Harbor Marina,” Reyes told him. “Are you familiar with it?”

Like Reyes had, Henry zeroed in on the small stain near the bottom. His thumb rubbed over it ruefully, as if it might be a magic lamp and grant him the wish of his wife’s return from a watery grave. “I know of it, yes.”

“Do you have a boat there, Mr. Davenport?”

Henry looked at him, truly seeing him for the first time. “No.”

Reyes nodded. “Perhaps you or your wife frequented the marina? Is she friends with someone who keeps a boat there?”

He clutched the life vest, unwilling to part with it. “No.”

“You mean, not to your knowledge?” Reyes clarified.

“I mean no, ” Henry said plainly.

Reyes took a breath. “Mr. Davenport, is this your wife’s life vest? Because if it is, this could mean she survived her fall. Do you understand? She could still be alive.”

Henry looked down one last time, his expression nostalgic, before holding it out for him to take. “No, Officer,” he said, shifting to the all-business persona Reyes was already so familiar with. “I’ve never seen it before in my life.”

R EYES PINCHED THE bridge of his nose as Will examined the life vest. “That color is unmistakable,” Will told him with a sigh. “We’ll see what the lab has to say, but if you ask me, this belonged to our girl. I mean, what are the odds? This vest is found within plain view of the bridge the very day she jumped with a stain that matches those poisonous berries?”

Reyes shook his head. “I just don’t understand it. Why would she take that risk—the jump, the berries? Either could have killed her. I’ve heard of people faking their own deaths before, but not like this. Not by actually committing lethal acts. We saw her vomit on that CCTV footage. She ingested those berries without question. And we saw her jump. We have the hoodie from Davenport’s car and the man on tape. What did we see if not a man forcing his wife over that bridge? Would they have a reason to be in on it together?”

Will shrugged. “You never know with these types. Insurance money, maybe? Who can say. The bottom line is, until we get results back on this vest, all we have is the evidence against the husband. I know this changes things. If she’s alive, it can’t be a homicide. But we need to take him into custody until we know for sure. The arrest warrant still stands.”

He paced before Will’s cubicle, hitching his pants up, a nervous gesture. He blew a long and steady exhale up into the air, stalling.

“Emil,” Will insisted.

“I’m thinking.” He rounded on his partner. “Where would she go? She ate a mouthful of toxins and jumped into a river. Where do you go after that? We need to check the local hospitals, emergency clinics, anywhere she might have turned up. She had to have been sick, possibly injured.”

Will rolled his eyes. “Emil, none of that is here or there right now. Let’s get the results on the vest first. Then, if they prove something, we’ll go after her. In the meantime, we need to go get this guy.”

Reyes didn’t tell Will that he’d already confronted Henry with the life vest. His partner would scold him. It was sloppy police work. He fully expected Davenport to confirm that the vest belonged to his missing wife. Reyes’d thought that would wrap it up, shift them from homicide into missing person, perhaps even tampering with evidence for the planted hoodie. But Davenport had looked him straight in the eye and denied it, leaving himself squarely on the hook for the murder of his own wife. It made no sense.

“Fine,” he told his partner, caving. “Let’s go get him.”

Only, it wasn’t so simple. When Reyes checked with Johanna, Henry Davenport’s administrative assistant, she said he hadn’t been back to the office since that morning. He hadn’t even called, which was wholly unlike him.

Deciding to try the house, Reyes and Will pulled up to find the same rented Corolla parked in the drive. When he arrived earlier, Henry had been about to leave. Had he changed his mind? They got out and started toward the front door.

Reyes peeked in the Corolla windows. The briefcase he’d seen Henry put inside was no longer there.

On the porch, his partner Will was already ringing the bell, pounding his fist against the wooden door. “Hello?” Will called. “Mr. Davenport? Are you in there?” He turned to frown at Reyes.

“Force entry,” Reyes said, joining him on the porch. “We have the warrant.”

Will pursed his lips. “We should call for backup first.”

“Move aside,” Reyes told him. He was tired of playing the Davenports’ games. Reyes didn’t like being made a fool of, having someone play on his emotions. Not that he believed she would really do that, the woman who’d saved his life. Or that they could have known about his past, his history with domestic abusers. His head was hot right now, the exact opposite of where it should be for this, but he didn’t care. He wanted answers. With a deft, powerful kick, he blasted the front door from its hinges as Will pulled his Glock from its holster and unlocked the safety. But the house only echoed the bang of the door, and all the lights appeared to be off.

Will entered first and Reyes followed, but he didn’t draw his weapon. The house was empty. They moved slowly around the first floor of the residence, looking for anything that might allude to where either of its owners had gone.

A biting chill began to steal over Reyes, the harbinger of dread. His confidence was sinking with every step they took, even as his certainty grew. He’d fucked up—royally. And now she would pay for his mistake. Unless he could find a way to protect her. He owed her that much.

“He’s not here,” Will said at last, putting his gun away.

“He fled,” Reyes said, defeated.

Will turned on him. “Why, Emil? How would he know we were coming for him?”

He hung his head. “I might have come by before the station, questioned him about the life vest.”

His partner groaned. “Goddamnit, Emil. We’ve talked about this. You can’t go off half-cocked like that. It’s not professional.”

His little, unannounced visit earlier had tipped the husband off. Henry Davenport now believed his wife to be alive, and he’d gone in search of her.

Reyes mounted the stairs. He had no defense for his actions. His hunger to know what had happened to Mrs. Davenport, to find her alive, had clouded his judgment. In his rush to save her, he’d put her in harm’s way. He wandered through the second story, guilt and duty riding him. When he entered the master bedroom, he found both closet doors open, clothes strewn across the floor, a suitcase on the bed that Henry must have decided against taking. He entered the wife’s closet where the destruction was far worse. Shattered wooden shelves littered the floor. Blouses had been ripped from their hangers and torn apart then cast aside. Jewelry speckled the carpet in sparkles.

Reyes sighed. The man had not gone after his wife because he loved her. He wasn’t out to save his marriage. He’d gone after the woman who betrayed him, duped him, and tried to frame him for her murder. He wasn’t out for reconciliation. He was out for revenge.

And Reyes was the source that tipped him off. Piers Davenport would not be safe, wherever she was. Her crime, however illegal, was not to serve an injustice but to right a wrong. To imprison the man who had hurt her and would do so again if given the chance. To protect herself and every other woman besides.

Wouldn’t he have done the same to the tall man if given the chance?

He owed it to her to find Henry and stop him for good. But could he get to him in time? The only way to find him was by finding her, but how?

Looking down, he spotted a plastic toy, a skull with little feet that walked when it was wound up, making a chattering noise. He stooped to pick it up and saw the carpet, the corner where it had been pulled back. Beneath it lay a small wrapper, white with a gold seal and Chinese lettering, curling at the corners where it had been wrapped around something. Reyes picked it up and turned to find Will standing in the doorway.

“I need to show you something,” Will said.

“What is it?”

He sighed, turning a laptop around in his arms. On the screen, an article flared to life, the image of a body lying next to a field crop. The headline read, Man Found Dead from Poisonous Pokeweed Berries. The opening line continued, Don Rodgers had been traveling for work, his wife confirmed, when he turned up dead along this secluded road in Virginia from an ingestion of pokeweed berries. Authorities are puzzled as to where he got the berries or why he consumed them. Suicide has been written off due to theft of his motor vehicle along with other valuable items. His wife verifies his last point of contact was a call from his hotel room in Charleston before leaving, more than forty-eight hours prior to the discovery of his body.

Reyes met Will’s eyes. “We need to get the name of that hotel and find that car.”

“You were right,” Will said. “She’s alive, and she’s on the move.”