“Sure. Just let me tell Hank in case my table wants their check while I’m gone.”
Out front, Jonah’s porch took a jog at the far end where azaleas were thickly planted. Rainwater ran off the porch roof and splashed onto a bike rack that was almost hidden among the wet bushes. Tethered to the rack by a chain and padlock was an older model all-terrain bike with wide tires and a shiny green frame.
“I noticed it when I got here this morning,” she said.
“I thought he didn’t come to work yesterday.”
“He didn’t.”
“But the bike—?”
“I figured he caught a ride home from work Sunday and just hasn’t had a chance to come back for it.”
“No. Hank Barlow said he drove Kyle and the bike both to his apartment Sunday because it had a leak in the tire. So Kyle must have ridden it back here sometime between Sunday evening and this morning.”
“Whatever,” the young woman said, evidently becoming bored with his speculation and heading back inside.
Edwards followed. “When did you last see him?” he asked.
“Friday maybe? When the shifts changed? He usually works the four-to-eleven dinner shift and I work the eleven-to-four lunch shift. Weekends can get a little crazy, y’know? Sam barks a lot but as long as everything’s covered and we keep up with our hours, he doesn’t really care if we switch off or double up. My girlfriend got married down in Southport this weekend, and Kyle and the others covered for me so that I could be off. He was supposed to work the dinner shift yesterday and he never showed. I thought maybe he’d gotten his time mixed up. Is he in trouble?”
“I’m afraid so. You and he friends?” She shrugged and her twin ponytails swayed back and forth. “I guess. As much as anybody here. He isn’t much of a people person, y’know? Besides, I’ve got a boyfriend and Kyle… ? I don’t think he’s into girls very much.”
“Gay?”
“I don’t know about gay. Just not very interested either way. He really, really wants to get into television. That’s pretty much all he talks about, but he’s not doing much to make it happen, y’know? Doesn’t take classes. Doesn’t try out for an internship. He does go on casting calls, and then he’ll spend the rest of the week griping because someone always beats him out.” She hesitated and her pretty little brow furrowed. “It’s weird, though.”
“What?” Edwards asked.
“He’s really fussy about this bike. Keeps the frame waxed and everything oiled so it won’t rust, y’know? It’s not like him to leave it out in the rain without a cover on it.”
Upon being asked, no one admitted seeing Kyle or his bike after Hank Barlow dropped him off in front of his apartment before coming back to work the Sunday evening shift.
When the final member of Saturday night’s waitstaff checked in shortly before four, she could add nothing to what had already been said.
In the end, Edwards was left with the picture of a fiercely closeted, narcissistic loner and not a single hint as to why he would have killed Judge Peter Jeffreys.
CHAPTER
23
DETECTIVE ANDY WALL (TUESDAY AFTERNOON, JUNE
17)
Using his car’s GPS system and the address Kyle Armstrong’s aunt had given him, Andy Wall navigated the narrow roads that branched away from River Road, deeper into a swampy area of Brunswick County, and turned at last into a rutted drive that curved through a tunnel of live oaks and yaupon made even darker by the rain clouds overhead. The branches scraped along the side of the car and made him wince for the paint job.
If the GPS had not sounded so sure of itself when it said “Arrive at destination on right,” he would have backed out and tried somewhere else. Eventually the tunnel opened up into sky and water and a grassy yard in bad need of mowing, and he caught his breath. This was exactly the sort of lot he hoped to buy when he retired next spring: isolated, no near neighbors, on the Intracoastal Waterway so that his boat would have easy access to the Atlantic, yet sheltered from the worst of hurricanes and high water by one of the barrier islands.
A single-wide house trailer sat squarely in the middle of the yard and was shaded by five or six live oaks. If this were his lot, though, his first act of ownership would be to tow that trailer to the nearest landfill. There was a burn barrel off to the side, but trash was everywhere—cans, plastic bottles, sodden cardboard boxes, fast-food cartons. Dozens of flimsy plastic bags had caught in the bushes around the edges of the yard, and the trailer itself had a forlorn dilapidated air of neglect. The storm door had either fallen or been torn off its hinges and now stood propped against the side, a couple of screens lay on the ground, and one broken window had been patched with duct tape.
No red Geo. No car of any kind and no sign of life.
He drove across the yard, following faint signs of car ruts right up to the door, where he rolled down his window and blew his horn.
No response, but at least he was on the leeward side of the wind so that rain did not beat in on him.
He blew the horn again and this time he leaned on it for a full thirty seconds. Out on the waterway, a hundred or so feet away, a huge white yacht sounded its own horn as it passed, evidently thinking the detective’s land blast
