was some sort of greeting.
Wall waited till the yacht had moved out of sight, then blew his horn again. At last the door cracked open and a gray-faced woman peered out at him with bleary eyes. Mrs. Rudd had told him that her daughter was the same age as Kyle Armstrong.
Twenty-six.
This woman looked to be at least forty.
“Ms. Rudd?” he called. “Ms. Audrey Rudd?”
“Yeah. Who’re you? Mama send you? You got somethin’ for me?”
As he got out of the car and started up the shallow wooden steps, she drew back and began to close the door. He quickly pulled out his badge. “Detective Wall, Ms. Rudd. I need to ask you some questions about your cousin. Kyle Armstrong.”
“Kyle? What about him?”
“Could I come in and talk to you a minute?”
She shook her head. “No, you don’ wanna come in here.”
From the odor of stale bourbon and general decay that met his nose, he was ready to agree with her. There was an overhang above the door. Too small to be called a proper porch roof, it did keep the worst of the rain off and he decided it was better to get a little wet than to have his clothes permeated with a smell it would take dry cleaning to get rid of.
“Can you tell me when you last saw your cousin, Ms. Rudd?”
She looked at him blankly. “He’s not here.”
“I know, but he was here this weekend, right?”
“Mama give you some money to give me?” With dirty fingernails she scratched at her scalp and her unbuttoned shirt fell open to reveal a chest so thin that every detail of her collarbone and upper rib cage could be seen above a pair of flaccid breasts. It could have been the chest of a starving refugee in Darfur.
“No, Ms. Rudd,” he said gently. Disgust mingled with pity. “But she told me she sent you some food and things when your cousin came a couple of days ago.”
“Oh, yeah… tha’s right. Kyle.”
“Did he talk to you about his job? About the restaurant?”
“Jonah’s. He’s a waiter at Jonah’s.”
Wall took a deep breath and willed himself to be patient. “That’s right, Ms. Rudd. He works at Jonah’s. Did he talk to you about it when he was here?”
“I gotta sit down,” she said and pushed past him to lower herself to the top step.
She seemed oblivious to the rain and he realized that she was probably too deep into her alcoholic haze to give him anything useful. Nevertheless…
“Where was he going when he left here, Audrey? Did he say?”
She lifted her face to the warm rain and smiled; and for a moment, he could almost see the young woman inside this physical wreck.
“What did he tell you, Audrey?”
After a long career on the force, he should not have been shocked by the string of profanities that spewed from her mouth, but he was. Equally unexpected was the way her face crumpled with grief.
“Tha’s what he said I was,” she wept. “Tha’s what he called me. And then he got in his car and said he was never coming back. Never—ever—
“Let me help you back in the house,” he said, taking her arm. “You’re getting soaked.”
She flinched away from him. “Go away!” she sobbed. “Leave me alone.”
She drew her skeletal legs up under her chin and buried her face in her arms. The rain beat against her bowed head and turned her unkempt hair into snakelike strands that seemed to writhe in the wind and wet.
With nothing to be gained by staying, Andy Wall got back in his car, turned it around, and drove out of the yard. Just before the tunnel of yaupon and live oaks closed in around him, he glanced back in his rearview mirror. Another big expensive boat was passing, but she hadn’t moved.
He gave a weary sigh, knowing that one of these days the Brunswick County sheriff’s office would get a call that buzzards were circling this trailer and “y’all really need to send somebody out here to take a look.”
CHAPTER
24
DETECTIVE GARY EDWARDS (TUESDAY AFTERNOON,
JUNE 17)
Between the rain and the tourists, it took Detective Edwards longer than usual to clear downtown traffic and get onto the MLK Parkway, the quickest route out to Wrightsville Beach. Once on it, he had just set the cruise control when the lanes ahead started to back up. Bad wreck or fender bender? He queried the dispatcher, but
