I agreed. We walked without talking for a bit. The sound of the waves a few yards away was soothing. A couple of seagulls were wheeling in the sky. I looked out at the water, imagining Karl’s boat adrift. It was white; it had been found pretty quickly, considering how remote the spot it ran aground was, because it was easy to spot against the wet sand.
I asked her, “That data you’re talking about, can you search for it online? I mean, find photos that were taken at a certain place and time?”
“It depends where you look,” she said. “Sites like Facebook strip that data out when you post photos, to protect privacy. But a lot of sites don’t. Things on the cloud or those photo-storage sites could have it, if the user didn’t tweak their privacy settings. Are you thinking we look for photos of Jackson that night?”
“Oh, that too,” I said. Her idea was brilliant, but it hadn’t crossed my mind. “I was just looking at the water and thinking about Karl’s boat.”
“Oh.” She squinted out at the water. I could almost see the math she was doing in her head. “Well, the problem there is you’re looking at a huge amount of possible coordinates. We don’t know what path his boat followed, so we got a whole bay and part of the ocean to search.”
I could tell by her expression that she wasn’t giving up because of that. She was trying to figure out how to make it work.
“There’s also accuracy issues,” she said. “If people’s phone settings are off, or their time zone didn’t update or whatever, we’ll get some results that aren’t right and we’ll miss some that are.”
“I guess that’s why my guy up in Charleston needed an expert witness.”
“Mm-hmm. And if we did find anything useful, you’d need one too.”
“I’m going to need a lottery win to get this case done right.”
She laughed.
I sighed and shook my head. “I guess we cross that bridge when we come to it. If we come to it.”
“You got me curious now, though. I want to figure out how to make this work.”
“You like doing the impossible, don’t you.”
She smiled. “I already know I can do what’s possible. What’s the point in just doing more of that?”
“That seems like a good motto. If—” Before I could finish, I felt my phone vibrate. I pulled it out. Henry had texted me.
“Huh,” I said. “Henry says he found a current address for Pete Dupree.”
“Good,” she said. “If your case doesn’t give prosecutors what they need to put him behind bars, I am going to bring that man down myself. He’s hurt too many women in this town.”
“You got a hell of a to-do list.”
She said, “I am not here on this earth to waste my time.”
28
Sunday, October 27, Morning
Terri dropped by with Buster so we could get some dog walking done at a little park near my house while discussing Jackson’s case. I kept pace with Squatter, picking him up a few times to give him a rest, while her dog barreled off after thrown sticks and balls. It was a strangely wholesome thing to be doing while we discussed the sordid criminal record of Pete Dupree. Or “Lowlife,” as she called him. We used nicknames when talking about the case in public, to keep from being understood by anyone who might overhear, but most of them were less colorful.
According to the mug shot she’d texted me, Lowlife Dupree was about six one and heavyset, with thinning hair gone mostly gray. He looked like I’d expect a guy who ran a waste-haulage business to look: nothing fancy, a regular guy. I wouldn’t have looked at him twice if I saw him on the street. I certainly wouldn’t have figured he had a rap sheet almost three pages long from states up and down the east coast. Various drug crimes, aiding and abetting prostitution, assault. There was even a human trafficking charge from last year, which got dismissed. Terri had forwarded me his record, along with a list of the original charges he’d faced each time, and I found myself wondering how his defense lawyer had worked the miracle of keeping this guy mostly outside of prison. Everything had been tossed out or pled down.
“Goddammit,” I said. “To think Lowlife here is still walking around despite all this, but my guy’s been in jail since June.”
“Lowlife has money,” she said, leaning down to give her dog a treat. He wolfed it and vibrated with joy. “Good boy,” she said. “You’re a good boy. If you and your dog friends ran this world, it’d be a much better place.”
I laughed and agreed. Then, getting back to the task at hand, I said, “I guess there’s not much point my warning Polly about this guy.” We’d started referring to Henry as Polly, short for politician. “I mean, Lowlife doesn’t work for him anymore, and he left on bad terms anyway.”
She looked at me. “You don’t think he already knows?”
I hadn’t seen anything in the Blue Seas file about Dupree’s record, but I didn’t want to tell her I’d been looking there. “Well, you know,” I said, with a shrug. “Folks sometimes don’t do all the due diligence that they ought to. And I can’t see an upstanding churchgoer like him doing business with somebody if he knew about that.”
She nodded, but she looked doubtful. “Some of those churchgoer types, though,” she said, “they go a little overboard on forgiveness. Some crook says he’s found Jesus, they forget all about the people he hurt.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen judges who do that. But I don’t get the impression Polly works that way.”
“Still,” she said, “keep this between us. We don’t want Lowlife hearing from anybody that you’re looking into him.”
Talking about Dupree’s sleaze had put me back in my prosecutorial frame of mind, and my old habit of cracking jokes to relieve
