“Anytime.”
Waters drove away slowly, wondering how long Jackson had been following him.
Chapter 7
“I got a preliminary report on Eve Sumner,” Cole said, setting down his morning cup of coffee. “You want to hear it?”
Waters put down his briefcase, sat in a leather chair, and looked around Cole’s one-room shrine to the Ole Miss Rebels.
“You look like shit,” Cole said.
“I didn’t sleep much. Let’s hear what you’ve got.”
“Eve was born Evie Ray Sumner in St. Joseph, Louisiana, in 1970.” Cole read from a faxed page. “Sounds right for St. Joe, doesn’t it? Evie Ray?”
Waters nodded. St. Joe was a center of cotton and soybean farming, an hour north of Natchez.
“She got knocked up when she was fifteen and had an abortion in Baton Rouge.”
“How did they find that out?”
Cole shrugged. “Made some calls, I guess. Old friends talk. For money, anyway.”
Waters felt more than a little sleazy to be funding that sort of muckraking. But he had to know about her.
“Evie graduated St. Joe High at seventeen. Salutatorian, if you can believe it. She lit out for Los Angeles, married a cop, got pregnant, and split town six months later. May have been some spousal abuse involved. She came back to Louisiana to have the kid, and her mother mostly raised it. Evie enrolled in Hinds Junior College and spent her time dating jocks. She didn’t graduate. She did try about eight different lines of work. Beauty school, paralegal school, massage therapist, you name it. Nothing worked out for long. Then she came to Natchez and got a job as a dealer on the casino boat. She studied nights for her real estate license, then went to work for Hubert Hartley’s company. After a year, she was leading salesman, or salesperson, whatever. Then she went out on her own.”
“Any evidence of mental illness? Depression? Suicide attempts?”
“Nothing they could find. And I myself would class Evie as irritatingly sane. You want them to keep looking?”
“Keep looking. What about Mallory’s murder?”
“We’ve got copies of all the newspaper stories coming FedEx. The law firm is trying to set up a call between you and the lead homicide detective on the case.”
“Good.”
Cole put down the papers and sipped his coffee. “John, what are you going to ask this detective if he does call?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Okay. So…are you going to tell me what happened after you stormed out of here yesterday?”
Cole had called twice last night to ask that question, but Waters and Lily had been in tense discussion, and he hadn’t answered the phone. Now, recalling the crazy conversation at the cemetery and the kiss, he didn’t want to answer at all. If he told that story with a straight face, Cole would think he’d lost his mind.
“It’s no big thing. Eve warned me about Danny Buckles. I checked it out. I don’t know how she knew about it, but she did a good thing. There’s some connection between her and Buckles, and I’m trying to find out what it is.”
“I haven’t heard Evie’s name in any of the rumors,” Cole said. “Did you tell the cops she was the one who warned you?”
“No.”
“I see. And that’s no big thing.”
Waters sighed and looked out the picture window at the sweeping vista of the rust-colored river below.
Cole’s chair groaned in protest as he heaved his bulk forward and dropped his heavy hand on the desktop to get Waters’s attention. “John? It’s never a good idea to keep things from your partner.”
Waters gave him a hard look. “I agree. Let’s start with you. You have anything you want to tell me?”
Cole rolled his eyes. “Look, I just don’t want you to get in trouble. Sailing the strange river is always murky waters. And you don’t have any experience at that kind of navigation.”
“I’m fine.”
“Great. Well…Evie’s been around. If you’re going to do it, double up.”
“Double up?”
“Wear two pairs of gloves.”
“Ahh.” Cole’s practicality surprised him.
“How’s Annelise doing? The Danny Buckles thing mess her up?”
“No. She didn’t go into that closet or anything.”
“Good. You know, there’s already a couple of lawsuits coming out of that.”
“Does that surprise you?”
“No, but if we don’t hurry up and sell another deal, I’m going to wish I was representing one of the plaintiffs.”
This was as good an opening as Waters was likely to get to question Cole about his financial problems, but for once he wasn’t in the mood. “I’ve got a couple of prospects in West Feliciana Parish that look good. One’s a close-in deal. If you really want to sell something, I could probably have that ready in a week.”
Cole’s face lit up. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah.”
“You been holding back on me, Rock!”
Waters stood. “I’m going to my office to do some mapping on it right now.”
Cole grinned. “Don’t let me stop you. Get Evie Ray’s ass off your mind and start thinking crude oil. I’ll have lunch sent to your office.”
Waters took an envelope from his pocket and laid it on Cole’s desk. Inside was a check for fifty thousand dollars.
“That’s what we talked about yesterday.”
Cole started to reach for the envelope, then seemed to think better of it. “John…”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll see you in a while.” He picked up his briefcase and went down the hall to his door.
Entering his own space was a relief after Cole’s chaotic office. When they remodeled the two-story warehouse, Waters had taken the office with the most frontage on the bluff. Now he had two massive windows that gave an unsurpassed view of the Mississippi River, and unlike Cole, he had planned his
People were always surprised by the modernity of the room, but living in an antebellum home was all the nostalgia Waters could stand. During his years of postgraduate work-often living in tents on volcanic slopes-he had learned an economy of materials that stayed with him to this day. He liked his lines clean and sharp, his artificial lighting indirect, his corners empty. Four large skylights allowed natural light to fall onto the original heart pine floors, and tasteful displays of rare rocks in unexpected places gave a zenlike quality to the space. Each geological specimen represented a chapter in his life, and each had two provenances: one that chronicled its origin and life, and covered millions of years; the other much briefer, the story of Waters’s discovery and analysis of the specimen. On the walls hung framed satellite photos of global regions he had worked, river deltas and volcanoes and oceans, their unusual colors blending into abstract art to the untrained eye.
He set his briefcase on his desk and went to his drafting table, where a map showing 252 square miles of West Feliciana Parish awaited his attention. On a normal day, he would sharpen his colored pencils and go straight to work. But today was not normal. When he looked at the map, he felt no inclination to study it.
