The Shop

to let down completely and start shaking.

But her bigger problem was the guy on the ground. Jolie didn’t want him dying on her watch.

Inside the office, the shouting continued, riddled with expletives. Jolie worried that whoever had the gun might shoot someone else. But there was nothing she could do about that. All she could do was maintain the status quo.

Ten-one-thousand, eleven-one-thousand.

Jolie kept her eyes on the man by the U-Haul. It was as if he’d been preserved in amber. His hand remained on top of his head, and Jolie saw no weakness there. He’d probably be all right. He wore cargo shorts, a surfer’s shirt, and boat shoes. In the yellow light, his face was stamped with his heritage along with his pain. Pakistani or Indian. Even sitting down he was amazingly tall. A beanpole.

The yelling turned up a notch. “I can’t believe this. You sneak off with your boyfriend, and I get left behind to deal with the cops?”

The yelling man must have moved closer to the window, because now she heard whole sentences. The voice was familiar.

She heard a woman’s voice but couldn’t make out the words.

“How do you know?” the man demanded.

The female mumbled something unintelligible.

“How do you know? They aren’t dumb. One thing’s for sure—I’m not going down for this. I didn’t do anything!”

The woman spoke, her voice barely there. If cringing was a tone of voice, this was it. “…be all right. You just… ”

“So what happened? The three of you got together and said, ‘Let’s get Royce in on this, string him along, and let him take the fall’?”

Royce Brady. The owner of the Starliner Motel.

“…wasn’t like…”

“Screw the old guy, huh? Like you really had the hots for me. How could I be so stupid? You guys having a threesome? Is that it? Are you and your boyfriend meeting that lying bitch somewhere while I sit here waiting for a knock on the door?”

“You shot Niraj. He’ll go to the cops—”

“I don’t give a shit. The way I feel right now, I might just call them myself. All I did was look the other way. That’s all I did, but you…you. You set the poor fucker up!”

What Jolie was hearing was an impromptu confession. She saw it as a gift.

“Poor bastard…poor fucking fool didn’t know he was sleeping with a goddamn viper!”

The woman said something else Jolie couldn’t catch.

The man again: “I come here, thinking you and I had a thing, and there’s this fucking camel jockey—” A pause. “It was all a lie, wasn’t it? He didn’t beat his wife.”

The girl, whimpering now. “Please…”

He mimicked a female voice. “Oh, Royce, she’s scared to death he’s going to kill her! That was bullshit, wasn’t it, Amy? Like everything else—just something you two girls cooked up to get me on your side.”

Amy and Maddy.

Jolie realized that something had been bothering her all along, but she’d ignored it. Now, though, it all became clear. She recalled the sequence of events—Amy Perdue driving up Chief Akers’s street this morning. An hour later, Maddy Akers drove into Bizzy’s parking lot, just as Jolie caught up with Amy.

Just happened to show up.

Jolie flashed on the interrogation. The way Maddy gave it up so quickly. Jolie had thought at the time how it was like pushing over a domino.

We suicide widows have to stick together.

Maddy Akers had played her.

15

Before going in to interrogate Amy Perdue, Jolie found a quiet spot and tried to put herself in Amy’s place. On a notepad, she wrote four reasons why Amy might have helped Maddy Akers set up Chief Akers’s murder. Jolie would try one rationale after another, until one of them worked.

All you did was arrange to meet Chief Akers at the motel?

Did you think you’d lose your job if you didn’t help your boss?

Was Maddy afraid of Chief Akers?

Did Chief Akers threaten to kill Maddy?

Amy wasn’t the prime target here. Maddy was. Jolie wanted to make it easy for Amy to give up Maddy Akers. Her job was to find the right lever to pull.

To keep Amy around, Jolie was holding her on a domestic violence charge—Royce Brady claimed she’d hit him—but in a few minutes, she would tell Amy she was no longer under arrest. She would tell Amy that her only goal was to take Amy’s statement and get her side of the story.

She’d already interviewed the gunshot victim, Niraj Bandhu, at the medical center in Panama City, and Royce Brady. Brady corroborated what Jolie had already surmised: that Maddy Akers had made her husband’s death look like a covered-up suicide, when in actuality it was a homicide.

Interesting how it unraveled. Royce had thought he and Amy had a thing going, but when he dropped in on her unexpectedly at the Royal Court Apartments, he found out about Niraj, Amy’s boyfriend.

“She set me up,” Royce told Jolie. “I didn’t even know what they were doing until I got to the room and saw him lying there dead.”

He told her Maddy was desperate to escape her bad marriage, that her husband had threatened to kill her.

The gunshot victim, Niraj, had known nothing about the scheme, but he did fill in a few blanks. He told Jolie about the five thousand dollars Amy said she’d be getting soon. Amy told him it was money from a dead uncle. She told Niraj that as soon as she got the money, she’d move in with her cousin in Baton Rouge. He could stay or go— up to him. When she got the money, she’d be gone. She’d rented a U-Haul and had started to move the furniture.

The image of Maddy Akers searching the brush at pond after pond looking for guns and cell phones made Jolie laugh out loud. Despite the fact she’d been fooled, she couldn’t help but admire the way Maddy’s mind worked.

The two of them, beating their way through the bushes—what a show. Wherever Maddy had thrown the weapons, she would never have taken Jolie to the spot.

It was clear Maddy knew about Danny’s suicide. It was common knowledge. She’d used Jolie’s own feelings about her husband’s suicide against her.

The theory was this: Amy lured Chief Akers to the motel, and Maddy snuck up on him and shot him point- blank. In one inspired stroke, Maddy deflected attention away from the act of homicide by making it appear to be a covered-up suicide, eliminating the spouse as primary suspect in the bargain. Not only that, but she’d provided a viable explanation for any trace evidence she might have left at the scene.

It was a brilliant, audacious plan.

But Maddy’s scheme fell apart, as brilliant schemes often did, when she relied on the wrong people.

Amy Perdue looked small and childlike, her limp red hair concealing half her face.

Jolie led her through the confrontation with Royce Brady. As the injured party, Amy was cooperative. She was the wronged woman, a victim of domestic violence.

“No idea why he was so angry?”

“No. It was like he had a crush on me or something. It was crazy. He said really crazy things.”

“Like what?”