Angie slowly lowered her sandwich to her plate. Her gaze locked with the server’s. “Was Porter Bates’s disappearance investigated by law enforcement?”
She gave a huff. “Oh yeah, for sure. Divers went down into that quarry water and everything, but I tell ya, it’s black as pitch down there, thick with debris and metal bars and old vehicles. No one knows just how deep that water is. The muck at the bottom is, like, meters thick. They never found his body. Hank Jacobi—he was the top cop back then—he dropped it. I figure Hank had plenty enough worrisome run-ins with Porter Bates to figure sometimes justice ain’t all black and white. Sometimes there is evil, and justice is done in strange ways, and whatever happened, Porter Bates got what was due.”
Angie stared, a cold thought unfurling in her brain as she recalled Wallace’s words.
That Jasmine Gulati was bad news. She needed a warning. If there were banjos out there, it would’ve been to teach Gulati and her friends that you don’t come badmouthing locals, I don’t care who you are.
“So,” she said, “Wallace and the twins wanted to teach Porter Bates a lesson, so they drowned him.”
Babs shrugged. “No proof. Just a story.”
Angie inhaled and calmly said, “What about Porter Bates’s two buddies? Were they questioned about what happened to Axel?”
“They denied everything. No one pushed further. If you ask me, no one wanted to put poor Axel through more shit by making the fact he was raped public. Poor guy. Wallace and everyone, the Tollet family, they didn’t want anyone to know he was buggered. He kinda went into himself after that. As a teen he started building himself a cabin out on Tollet land on the south side of the Nahamish, not far from where Budge lives now. He moved out there not that long after. Still lives there when not staying at the Sea-Tech accommodation while on shift for Wallace.”
Angie slid another photo toward the waitress. “Babs, do any of these guys own or play a banjo?”
“Not a musical bone in the Tollet or Carmanagh bodies. But him”—she pointed—“Tack McWhirther. He could play like a wizard. Guitar and piano, too.”
A bell tinkled as the diner door opened with a blast of cold sea air. A young couple entered. Babs got to her feet. “Need to go.”
“Wait.” Angie placed her hand on the woman’s arm. “Porter’s sister, Fallon—is she still around?”
“Yup, lives in a house off the airport road.”
“Thanks for your help.”
Angie chewed the rest of her food in silence as she watched Babs seat the couple and bring them menus. It stuck in her craw—if those men had indeed drowned a kid in high school, they were capable of drowning someone again. It spoke to MO. If they’d killed a boy in the past, they were bound to one another by old secrets worth killing for again.
After paying and thanking Barb for her meal, Angie slung her bag over her shoulder and ducked out of the diner. Salty brume off the sea swirled, making halos of light. She ran across the road and through the motel parking lot and stopped dead at the sight of her Mini Cooper.
Angie blinked into rain running down her face, trying to process what in the hell had happened to it. The windows, all of them, front, back, and sides, had been smeared thick with greasy brown muck. Feces?
Her back taillights had been smashed in. Pieces of red plastic glinted in the wet puddles on the pavement. Her heart started thumping. She scanned the lot, peering into the dense sea fog.
All was quiet apart from a soft rush of waves in the distance and the sound of rain dripping. She moved to the front of her car. The headlights and front windshield had been smashed, too. A rock had been placed on the dash with something under it. Angie reached into the side pocket of her bag and took out a pair of blue crime scene gloves—cop habits died hard.
She reached through the broken window and lifted the rock. A piece of wet paper lay folded underneath. She unfolded the paper and read the words scrawled in black capital letters.
GO HOME BITCH BEFORE SOMEONE GETS HURT
CHAPTER 29
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER21
Fury fired through Angie, and her hands were fisted on the wheel as she drove a new Subaru all-wheel drive model out of the auto rental lot in what passed for downtown Port Ferris.
She’d left her damaged Mini Cooper in the motel lot and scheduled a tow company to haul it to a repair shop once the police had taken a look at it. She now aimed straight for the RCMP detachment on the hunt for Constable Darnell Jacobi.
While waiting at the rental dealer, she’d gotten a call from the data tech at Coastal Investigations. Wallace Carmanagh had a record. Aggravated assault seventeen years ago. He’d done some time for it. The CI tech told Angie the assault occurred after a road rage incident. A female resident of a nearby First Nations reserve had cut off Wallace on the highway near Port Ferris. He’d honked and driven his truck up her rear in response. She’d flipped a bird at him and purposefully slowed, which had enraged Wallace. He’d followed the woman off the highway into a parking garage, where he’d struck her with a baseball bat taken from her car. He then took the bat to her sedan, breaking all the windows and the head- and taillights.
This put this sick SOB Wallace Carmanagh at the top of Angie’s list for vandalizing her vehicle and leaving that threat. He was also clearly capable of violent assault on a woman. And Jasmine, a woman, had made him mad. Like the driver of that car had made him mad.
According to the CI tech, Jim “Budge” Hargreaves also had a record. A drunk driving charge. He’d been facing additional charges for leaving the scene of a vehicle accident he’d caused while driving under the influence, but those charges had been dropped by then investigator Hank Jacobi, Darnell’s father. This was twenty-five years ago. Roughly one year before Rachel Hart had filmed Budge Hargreaves drinking in the Hook and Gaffe with then-rookie cop Darnell.
Hank Jacobi was also the cop who’d dropped the Porter Bates case.
Angie was not liking this nepotistic web of connections.
