“Did Mackenzie ever mention my name?”
Lottie thought for a few seconds before answering. “Not that I can recall.”
“Do you have a photograph of him?”
She stood up and walked lithely into the bedroom. Carver could see an unmade bed beyond the door. She walked around it, letting her long fingers drag along the bunched sheets at the foot of the mattress. There was something infinitely sensuous in the gesture. The women men sought and then left. What the hell was wrong with his gender? Carver wondered. What was Mackenzie doing in the swamp instead of here?
Lottie swayed back into the living room a minute later with a photograph of a thin, mustached blond man in his early fifties. He was grinning and touching the frames of his round-lensed glasses, as if he were about to peel them from his head in the manner of people who put on and remove reading glasses frequently. He was wearing a checked flannel shirt and there was a rock formation and some pine trees behind him.
“I took that shot in Colorado,” Lottie said, “and had it enlarged.”
Carver stared at the photograph. He was sure he’d never seen Raymond Mackenzie or his likeness before this moment.
“Did you try to find out exactly why he was going into the swamp this time?” Carver asked.
She put the photograph down, faceup on an end table. “At first I did. But he wouldn’t say. If things had been better between us just then, maybe he’d have told me. But we’d just come from the bank, where he tried to get a loan for a new Jeep. He made the mistake of taking me in with him. The loan officer wanted to know more about me, about us, than whether Ray could afford the payments. Too many of the questions were personal. I excused myself and left. It was no big deal compared to the kind of bigotry that goes on around this place, but Ray was mad at me for not telling off the loan officer. Things had piled up; this happened right after the Klan conversation. Ray and I had an argument. The next day he took the old Jeep and his camper trailer and left. He didn’t phone me when he got where he was going. And he never called anyone at the university, either. I kept on them over there, finally got them to get someone in Solarville to investigate. Then I learned that Ray had disappeared.”
“Has he ever dropped from sight like this for any length of time before?” Carver asked.
“He’s not the type just to up and disappear,” Lottie said. “Not even for a few days. He’s no adventurer except when it comes to saving whooping cranes or snail darters.”
Carver thanked her for answering his questions, assured her the Solarville police were still looking for Mackenzie, and limped toward the door.
“You’ll let me know right away if you find Ray, won’t you?” Lottie asked. Desperation drew her words taut.
He swiveled his body with the cane and nodded. “The tenants who threatened you and Ray,” he said, “do you think they’re really Klansmen?”
“Who knows?” she said, shrugging. “They wear hoods when they’re out in their white linen jammies. My impression, though, was that they were mostly talk.”
Carver wished her luck, and left the apartment.
As he walked toward where he’d left the Olds parked in the shade, he noticed half a dozen tenants lounging around the swimming pool, working on their tans.
CHAPTER 23
Carver was sitting on his porch the next morning, still wet from his swim, watching the sun climb slowly higher as if it needed to gain leverage to bear down and burn the low haze off the Atlantic. It was still too misty to see the wide swells off the coast, but he could sense the waves forming out there, water rising massively as it met the backwash from the shore. And he could hear them roar in with ponderous force to become visible through the mist, showing whitecaps like teeth, hungry for the beach.
The rhythmic, rushing sound of the surf relaxed Carver. He was still breathing a bit rapidly from his swim, and his eyes were half closed as he leaned back in the webbed aluminum chair in the shade of the porch roof.
Everything was under control, sort of. At least put in abeyance for a while. He’d aired out the cottage, watered the plants, and found it easier than he’d anticipated to get back into his therapeutic swimming routine. He’d talked to Desoto and Burr the day before, called Ernie Franks and told him there was nothing substantial to report, and left Edwina preoccupied with catching up on real-estate business. She’d told him there were contracts on two of the houses she had listed, and she was sure she had a client for a third. She hardly had time for Carver. He was pleased to see this healthy streak of greed in her.
There was a soft scuffing sound to Carver’s right.
He didn’t move as alarm erupted coldly in his mind. The arrangement of light and shadow on the porch changed subtly. His heart skipped and then picked up about twenty beats per minute.
He knew it was better to stay quiet for now, then move fast and surprise whoever was casting the unfamiliar shadow.
With seeming idleness, he closed his fingers around his cane, tensed his body for action. The taste of fear lay heavy and acidic on his tongue.
“You’re easy to sneak up on,” Alex Burr said.
Carver let out his breath and felt his flow of adrenaline slow. His heart stopped banging against his ribs.
He relaxed his grip on the cane, swiveled his body, scraping an aluminum chair leg on the porch’s plank floor.
Burr was standing about five feet from him, just off the edge of the porch. He was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt with a tie and had his suitcoat slung over his shoulder. Probably his idea of dressing down for the beach.
“I was just about to release my dogs on you,” Carver said.
For an instant Burr believed him; his single blue eye widened slightly and rolled side to side. Panic glittered there.
Then he smiled and stepped up on the porch. “Been swimming?” he asked.
“Yeah. I go just about every morning.”
“For the leg?”
Carver didn’t answer. His therapy was none of Burr’s business. He hadn’t asked Burr about his eye.
“You’ve got a well-developed upper body,” Burr said. “You look strong.”
“It got built up dragging around my lower body.”
Burr walked over and half sat, half leaned on the wooden porch rail in front of Carver. He folded the suit coat neatly with the lining turned out and draped it over an arm. It hung like expensive material. “Desoto says you were a good cop who made cases, that you’re the tenacious type that always finds the only way possible and then does it. He says it’s a flaw in your character.”
“He should know about character flaws.”
“I don’t consider tenacity a flaw.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“And shouldn’t,” Burr said. “Any leads on Willis Davis?”
“None. Other than the junk stashed in his apartment. But I don’t consider that a lead. It doesn’t move me any nearer to finding him.”
The breeze ruffled Burr’s straight blond hair and momentarily revealed the black straps of his eye patch. “It means Willis Davis was no stranger to narcotics.”
“Him and fifty million other people.”
“That coke you found in the coffee can was rich stuff. As high a quality as I’ve ever seen, and not cheap.”
Carver was getting tired of Burr, and he still resented being sneaked up on. “Nothing points to Willis being a coke snorter,” he said, “although the can pretty much confirms he’s a coffee drinker.”
“I wouldn’t worry about him if he were just a snorter, and I’m willing to look the other way from his caffeine habit. But maybe the stuff in his apartment was a sample. Part of what will be a bigger shipment.”
“It’s possible,” Carver admitted. The gun, the red-penciled map, the phony I.D.-none of it sat quite level for
