So, another dead end.
She finished the pizza and wiped her hands on a napkin. Arlo raised his head, as if hoping for the last scrap of pepperoni, but she’d eaten it all. Leaning back in her chair, she glanced out at the moonlit night; then her gaze landed on a map of Savannah and the surrounding area. On a whim, she brought a similar map up on her computer, one from the county, and enhanced it by adding in the victim’s houses, where each had been murdered.
It would have been easy enough to find Billy Huber alone. He had no friends or family nearby.
As for Jeanne LaRoux, she, too, was a loner.
Not so, though, Mavis Greenlee, who lived within the city limits of Savannah. Yes, her house had been protected from view from the street, and the neighbors, too, were at a distance, separated by thick foliage. But she didn’t live alone. At least not all the time. Archer might have had his lover tucked away on Tybee, but he ostensibly had lived with his wife, though, of course, who really knew?
The thing she did notice on the map was that Jeanne LaRoux’s property was not far from the acreage belonging to Billy Huber—it was just across the road, in fact—though Huber’s property was accessed by another road, parallel to the one that ran past the LaRoux acreage. The Huber farm was only buffered from the LaRoux place by a strip of land owned by Otis Childers, a piece that ran the width of the Hubers’ place and butted up against the Wheelan property.
Was that something?
She dug through the county records and discovered that, eight years earlier, Childers had bought the parcel from Huber, the reason having to do with water rights, as far as she could determine.
She thought about Otis Childers and his wife, Daria, and wondered if the sale of the property was before or after Billy had ogled the wife and Childers had come at him with his grandfather’s shotgun.
Did it matter?
Probably not. She was grasping at straws, and it was nearly midnight.
Aside from Arlo softly snoring, the house was quiet as she carried her plate and glass to the kitchen and left them in the sink. Passing by Pierce’s study near the bottom of the stairs, she heard the muted click of computer keys. She knocked softly on the door and poked her head inside.
His back was to her, but he said, “I’ll be up in a minute.”
“I just have a couple of questions.”
“Wife questions or reporter questions? No, wait, let me guess.”
“We haven’t discussed what happened to Jeanne LaRoux.”
His shoulders stiffened.
She reminded him, “We have a deal.”
He clicked off his computer and turned to face her. She thought he might argue with her, but his face relaxed. “Okay. But what I’ve got is strictly off the record.” His gaze met hers. Held. “Right?”
Holding up a hand as if she were taking an oath, she nodded. “Right.”
“Victim of homicide,” he said and went on to explain that LaRoux had been found by a would-be client and that she was hung from the crossbeam over a fire pit in her own sanctuary, clutching a polished stone with the number 1 carved into it. Like the others. Hebrew on one side, Arabic on the other. “The numbers are significant,” he told her. “We just need to find out why.”
“Did you know that the back of the Childers’s property abuts the road leading past the LaRoux place?”
“Granger told me,” he said, nodding, and then once more stated that everything they’d exchanged was off the record.
Nikki tried to learn more about Jeanne LaRoux’s death, but Pierce had limited answers.
“You’re holding out on me,” she charged when it was evident she was getting no more information.
“I’m telling you what we know for certain. No hypotheticals. No guessing.”
“You don’t trust me!”
His eyes narrowed a bit. “Put yourself in my position for a minute, would you? I know where you’re coming from. You’ve got a pushy editor to report to as well as an agent who seems to be salivating for your next book. That’s it. But I have protocol. And a chain of command to report to, as well as an investigation I can’t compromise.
“Now the Feds are involved. It’s looking very much like there’s a serial killer here in Savannah again. So the FBI is taking over.”
“But you’ll still be investigating.”
