it.”
“What’s your ex-partner’s name?”
“Elwood Mosely, a.k.a. ‘Cracker.’ I never heard him called anything else.”
“Description?”
“Six-two, two-twenty-five, bright red hair, pale complexion.” He thought for a moment. “Ugly.”
“You think he could be around here?”
“Who knows? After last night, maybe.”
“I could pull his photograph out of the system and have a watch put out for him.”
“That’s just the sort of thing that could backfire on you with the council—doing favors for a…what am I to you?”
“A lover.”
“That’s the word I was looking for.”
“You’re a citizen. Write me a letter on your law firm letterhead saying that you’ve had previous difficulties with the guy, and you’ve heard he may be in town, and could we keep an eye out for him.”
“Okay, I can do that.”
“Can I use your phone? I usually call my dad on Saturday mornings. I’ll use a credit card.”
“Sure, and don’t worry about the charges; I’ve got the ten-cents-a-minute deal.”
Jackson cleared the table while Holly sat on the living-room sofa and used the phone on the coffee table. She dialed Ham’s number and waited. It rang and rang, but there was no answer.
Jackson came and sat down beside her. “Nobody home?”
“Apparently not, but it’s strange—Ham has an answering machine that picks up on the third ring, but it didn’t pick up.”
“Probably he’s out somewhere and his machine is broken.”
“I guess so,” she said. “I’ll try him again later.”
Jackson kissed her on the ear. “How about burning a few calories?” he breathed, loosening the tie on her robe and finding a breast.
She turned toward him and let the robe fall open. “You’re a regular maniac for exercise, aren’t you?”
“You betcha,” he said, pulling her down on the sofa.
CHAPTER
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“A small town in Georgia called Delano.”
“Where’s that?”
“About forty miles east of Columbus.”
“That’s funny, I was born in Columbus—or rather, at Fort Benning. I grew up on half a dozen military bases, from Fort Bragg to Mannheim, in Germany.”
“I grew up in Delano.”
“Your folks still there?”
“Both dead, Mom eight years ago, Dad six. He didn’t take much interest in living after she went.”
“My mom’s gone, too, but Ham had the army to keep him going.”
“Dad was a lawyer, but he didn’t love it enough for it to keep him going. A month after she died, he closed the office, and after that, he hardly left the house. Not even golf could keep him interested, and he had always been an enthusiastic golfer.”
“My dad, too. Just loves it. Barney Noble told me to bring him out to Palmetto Gardens to play sometime. Oh, I forgot to tell you, they knew each other in the army—they served in the same outfit in Vietnam.”
“Connections, connections,” Jackson said absently. “I belong to the Dunes Club; tell your dad I’ll take him there when he visits.” He looked at her. “You said you play?”
“Yeah, but it’s been almost a year.”
“You got clubs?”
“Yeah. Ham gave them to me for Christmas last year, I think hoping to get me out on the course more, but I was always working.”
“You want to play this afternoon?”
“Sure, why not? You know, this is the first day I haven’t worked since I got here.”
“You got a handle on the job yet?”
“Pretty much. Chet had the department superbly organized. What I have to do mostly is not screw it up. What I haven’t got a handle on is these shootings.”
“You sound discouraged.”
“I’m at a dead end. The department has done the job it was supposed to, but we just don’t have anything to go on.”
“You have no idea why somebody might want to kill Chet and Hank?”
She looked at him closely. “This doesn’t go any further.”
“Right.”
“When Chet hired me he intimated that he had a serious problem that he would brief me on when I arrived in town. Wouldn’t say more than that. Then, the evening I arrived, we talked on the phone, and he told me that he was meeting somebody, and he’d have a lot to tell me the following morning, when I reported for work.”
“He didn’t give you any idea what it was about?”
She shook her head. “Not much. Part of the problem was that there was somebody in the department who was working both sides of the street. He said he had an idea, but he didn’t tell me.”
“You have any idea now?”
“No, not really. It could be anybody.”
“Have you told anybody on the force—anybody at all in Orchid—about this?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“I’m afraid I’ll tell the wrong person. I’ve been all through Chet’s office, looking for some notes or something, but there was nothing.” She looked at Jackson. “I wonder if he could have left something with his lawyer, just in case.”
“He didn’t do that,” Jackson replied.
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m his lawyer.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
“It didn’t come up. Mind you, all I’ve ever done for him was to close the sale of his house a couple of years ago, and draw up his will.”
“When did he make the will?”
“He signed it about ten days before he was shot.”
“You think he thought his life was in danger?”
“He didn’t give any indication of that, but who knows? It was pretty simple and straightforward. He left everything…” Jackson stopped. “I’m sorry. That, of course, is a client-attorney confidence.”
“Did Chet have any family you know of? I haven’t been able to discover any.”
