Playing Dead in Dixie Read online

  Her days of hiding behind an alias were over.

  Though he'd been doing what he could on his own to figure out her real identity, she hadn't really committed a crime that he could legally investigate. But now, she was a witness to a probable crime. She'd probably be considered a suspect. Even if Wes himself weren't obligated to investigate, there was no way she could avoid questions from the arson investigators or representatives from Floyd's insurance company.

  And once she realized it, what would she do?

  Wes had a real bad feeling he knew the answer.

  Carly plucked at the canvas strap handles of the duffel bag. "Are you sure I can't get started tonight?"

  "Positive." He rose to his feet and held out his hand. "Know what you need?"

  She took his hand and let him pull her to his feet. "A trip to Tahiti and a million in spending money?"

  "Hot chocolate with mini-marshmallows."

  "Ooh, even better." She scooted through the bedroom door ahead of him.

  He glanced at his watch. Ten-thirty p.m. In about seven hours, he was going to have to put a call in to his uncle to let him know about the fire. By eight or nine, the insurance company investigator would probably show up, wanting to ask questions. The arson investigator would be right on his heels.

  Seven hours to figure out the truth about Carly before she realized she was trapped and tried to make a run for it.

  THE CHOCOLATE MILK HAD done the trick. By eleven, Carly's eyelids started drooping, and it had taken little coaxing to put her to bed. Once Wes was certain she was asleep, he headed out to his truck.

  He arrived at the police station around eleven-twenty, surprising his two night shift officers in the middle of a game of poker. He brushed away their guilty explanations and closed himself up in his office.

  Okay. Where to start?

  Floyd knew Carly's real name. He could call the bed and breakfast, say it was an emergency, and grill his uncle for the truth. And maybe, if all else failed, he'd end up doing just that. But he wanted to exhaust every other option first. There was enough hell waiting for Floyd when he returned home without his being jarred from a dead sleep by a bad news phone call.

  Wes unlocked his drawer and pulled out the file folder he'd been keeping since Carly arrived. In it, he'd filed a record of every clue she'd given him. He knew that she'd grown up in the southern part of New Jersey, in the general vicinity of Atlantic City. She'd attended Richard Stockton University—he'd looked that one up on the internet, just to make sure it existed. She'd been at one of the casinos the day of the bus crash. At least, that's what she'd led him to believe.

  That could be a place to start. How could he find out what casinos the bus tour had visited that day?

  He pulled out the report from the bus company, reading over the scanty details until he found the notation. The bus had been to two casinos—the Breakers and the Palais Royale. He marked the two names with a highlighter, then flipped through the rest of the pages to see if there was any more information about the tour stops that day but found nothing else.

  He was about to close the folder when he caught sight of his cousin's name on one of the sheets of paper. The bus manifest.

  Wes ran his finger down the list slowly, remembering Steve's pale, lifeless body on the morgue slab. How many other families had suffered through a moment like that? He lowered his eyes to the tally listed at the bottom of the page. Thirty-seven passengers. Six dead, twenty-two injured, and nine missing at the time of this report.

  The NTSB report had different tallies, he remembered. They'd found most of the bodies now, hadn't they?

  He picked up the file his friend had sent and opened it to the manifest. Yeah, now thirty-seven were accounted for, out of thirty-eight.

  Thirty-eight.

  He grabbed the bus company manifest again. Thirty-seven passengers on the bus manifest.

  Thirty-eight on the NTSB list.

  He found the name of the lone missing passenger on the NTSB list.

  Lottie Sandano.

  He looked over the bus manifest, trying to find the same name. It wasn't there.

  Wes sat back in his chair, a chill washing over him.

  Lottie Sandano. Short for what, Charlotte?

  No. Something Italian, like her last name.

  Carlotta?

  "Carly for short," he murmured.

  Mind racing, he picked up the phone, glancing at the clock on the wall opposite his desk. Almost midnight. Too late to call his old buddy with the NTSB

  But he picked up the phone anyway.

  Vic answered on the third ring, his voice raspy with sleep. "This better be good."

  "It's Wes. That NTSB file you sent me didn't match the bus company's manifest. There was an extra name."

  "Uh, yeah. Yeah." Vic made a low, groaning noise, as if he was sitting up and stretching. "There was a stowaway on the bus."

  Wes released a long breath. That verified Carly's story about sneaking onto the bus. "How did y'all find out?"

  "Our investigators found her I.D. at the water's edge near the crash. We figured she'd swept downriver along with the others. I think hers is the body we haven't found yet."

  Wes's heart thudded against his ribcage, hard and heavy. "What do you know about her?"

  "Why are you asking?" Vic sounded wary.

  "I just need to understand everything that happened when the bus crashed. I lost my cousin in the wreck." Wes rubbed his gritty eyes. Between the late hour and his earlier exposure to smoke from the store fire, his eyes felt as if they were full of sand.

  "You think this woman may have caused the wreck?"

  No, but if it got him the information he needed, he wasn't above playing the hick cop with the outlandish conspiracy theory. "I reckon that's what I'm trying to find out."

  "Doesn't look likely. We're pretty sure the eighteen-wheeler that hit the bus caused the crash. Driver was going way too fast on a slick highway. Hit a skid and crossed the median, hitting the bus. I don't see how the stowaway could have caused the bus to roll down an embankment."

  "Any idea why she stowed away?"

  "I don't know," Vic said. "Look, if you're really interested in the stowaway, I can find out who added her name to the list of crash victims. But not tonight."

  "And you don't remember anything else about her? Any idea why she picked that particular bus?"

  "Geez, Wes, it's midnight, and you expect me to have the answers to all these questions? I guess maybe she worked there at one of the casinos or something. Maybe she'd dipped her hand in the till and was making a run for it. Probably had casino security on her tail."

  Wes's stomach twisted. The ten thousand dollars she'd given his aunt and uncle. Had she stolen it? But that made no sense. If she'd stolen the money, why would she have given it to Bonnie and Floyd?

  Focus. Maybe he still had a lead to follow, if she worked at one of the casinos. Either the Breakers or Palais Royale, Wes thought, glancing at his notes. That's where Steve's tour bus had gone the day of the crash.

  He'd give them a call as soon as he got off the phone with Vic. They'd still be open; surely he could find out if someone named Lottie Sandano had worked at one of them. "Thanks, Vic. I appreciate all your help."

  "Yeah, whatever. Don't call me after midnight ever again. Got it?"

  Wes could tell by his friend's voice that he was only half-kidding. "Got it."

  He hung up the phone and turned to his computer, pulling up a search engine on his web browser. He typed in "Breakers Casino Atlantic City" and hit enter.

  A POUNDING NOISE WOKE Carly from a dead sleep. She sat up, still half-asleep, her heart banging in her chest.

  The pounding repeated, coming from somewhere outside the bedroom. Carly grabbed her robe from the bottom of the bed and shrugged it on, padding barefoot into the hall.

  Someone was knocking on the front door.

  A cold flutter of foreboding twisted in the center of her chest. She crept to the front door, wonderin
g why the sound hadn't awakened Wes or Shannon.

  There was no peephole in the door, but two narrow glass rectangles set into the front door allowed her a view of the porch just above her eyelevel. She stood on tiptoe and peered through the glass.

  A man stood on the other side of the door.

  Panic muddied her brain, forcing out all coherent thought. Her nerves jittered and juked, the muscles in her thighs bunching, ready for flight.

  Then she realized she'd seen the man before. It was the fireman who'd talked to her and Wes outside the store earlier that night.

  The one who'd looked at her as if she were the lowest scum on earth.

  Carly slumped against the door frame. Where was Wes? Why wasn't he coming to answer the door?

  "I know you're in there, Miss Devlin." The fireman's voice was muffled by the door. "I hear you breathing."

  The skin on the back of her neck twitched, chill bumps scattering over her arms and chest. "Can't this wait until morning?"

  "I just need to ask you some questions."

  "Ask them from out there."

  The fireman was silent for a moment. Carly dared a quick peep through the glass. He still stood there, planted tall and solid in front of the door, his face half in shadow. She pulled back from the panes, pressing her forehead against the door.

  Wes, where are you?

  "Fine. We can do it this way."

  Carly sighed, relieved that he wasn't going to press her to open the door.

  "What's your full name?"

  "Carly Marie Devlin." The lie flowed over her lips without a hitch. She was starting to feel like someone named Carly Devlin. Someone who hadn't grown up in the armpit of New Jersey, raised by a father who was never home and a mother who hated life.

  "No, it's not." The fireman's voice tightened with annoyance. "There's no such person as Carly Marie Devlin. Try again."

  "How can you say there's no such person?" Carly protested. "I'm right here."

  "You really shouldn't be treating me like the enemy, you know." The fireman spoke in a flat, reasonable voice. "I'm not the one who wants to hurt you. He is."

  A fresh smattering of chill bumps sprouted on her arms and back. "Who is?"

  The fireman's face filled the glass panes in the door, his eyes looking beyond her, wide and dark. "Him. Behind you."

  Carly's heart lurched. She whirled around, stumbling as her feet tangled up. She grabbed for something to keep her from falling.

  A hand caught her arm, cool and smooth against her shuddering flesh, and she looked up into the midnight eyes of Dominick Manning. Moonlight slashed across his smiling face.

  "Hello, Lottie."

  Carly jerked her arm away, staggering backwards. The back of her head slammed hard against the door. Her vision went black, bright specks of light dancing in the darkness, then slowly vision cleared, revealing the lazy rotation of fan blades on the ceiling above her.

  She was in bed, sitting up, her head pressed against the pine headboard. It ached with each pulse that pounded behind her ears, making her vision dance with each rapid beat.

  Pale moonlight poured through the space between the drapes over the window to the right of the bed, illuminating enough of the room that she could see she was alone.

  Hard shivers wracked her body. With a soft moan, she tucked her knees up to her chest and buried her face against them, willing herself to slow her breathing and calm the frantic cadence of her heartbeat.

  Only a dream. Only a dream.

  After a few moments, the shudders passed, and she found enough strength to lift her head and check the lighted display of the clock radio by her bed. Twelve-thirty-five a.m.

  She leaned back against the headboard, tears seeping from her burning eyes. The details of the dream were beginning to fade, but one snippet stuck with her.

  There's no such person as Carly Marie Devlin.

  A queasy heaviness settled in the pit of her stomach. Maybe it had been a dream, but that much of it was true. There was no such person as Carly Devlin. So far, she'd been able to avoid that particular bit of reality, but the fire had changed everything. She was a witness to a crime. Hell, she was the prime suspect. The fire investigator, the insurance man, even Wes now had a legal reason to investigate her background, invade her privacy and demand the truth from her. She couldn't pretend she wasn't Lottie Sandano. Not anymore.

  It was time to leave Bangor.

  WORKING GRAVEYARD AT THE Palais Royale wasn't everybody's dream job, but it suited Joey Santos just fine. After midnight, things happened. Drunks got drunker, the babes got sleazier and the sharps pulled all their slickest moves to beat the eye in the sky. A guy had to be on his toes working graveyard.

  The surveillance room was the place to be, of course. Joey was shooting for a seat behind the console one day. Work the monitors and you were a god. All seeing, all knowing, with the power to pick up the phone and call down retribution on the fool who tried to pick a pocket or work a scam.

  But Joey had dues to pay before he got the keys to the kingdom. On this particular night, he was paying his dues in the human resources office, filing away resumes and job queries between sporadic phone calls. So far, he'd fielded three wrong numbers, two cranks and a call from some poindexter from Pocatello who wanted Joey to give him a detailed description of every table in the casino, what the odds were, what the limits were and even whether the dealer was male or female.

  "Human Resources, diphead," he'd muttered at the phone as he hung up.

  He'd finished his filing and had just started a crossword puzzle when the phone rang again around one a.m. He was tempted to just let the damned thing ring. But the eye in the sky reached into the human resources office as well.

  Slackers didn't last long on Dominick Manning's watch.

  He grabbed the phone. "Palais Royale Resort and Casino Human Resources."

  The voice on the other end of the line was low and slow, with an aw-shucks drawl that put Joey's teeth on edge. "Does a Lottie Sandano work there?"

  The back of Joey's neck twitched. He sat up straighter. "Not anymore. Who's askin'?"

  There was a brief pause on the other end. Then Aw-Shucks said, "I met her a few weeks ago at a pub on the boardwalk, and she said she worked at the Palais Royale. I suppose she could have been pullin' my leg. She was a real looker—about five-eight, great figure, dark hair and green eyes—"

  "Yeah, that was Lottie."

  "Was?"

  Geez Louise. Why did these calls always happen to him? He took a deep breath. "Hate to tell you, mister, but Lottie died last month."

  The silence on the other end of the line lingered long enough to make Joey's stomach hurt. "How did it happen?"

  "Bus crash. Down in Virginia somewhere. Didn't you hear about it? A bunch of people kicked it."

  There was a click, then a dial tone. Joey stared at the phone a second. "Something I said, jerkwad?"

  He hung up the phone, grabbed his pencil and picked up the crossword puzzle where he'd left off.

  Within a few minutes, one of the casino dicks entered the office and breezed past Joey on his way to Manning's office in the back, his blue blazer flapping open to give Joey a quick peek at the semi-automatic tucked into his shoulder holster. The detective stopped in front of Manning's office and knocked.

  The door to Manning's office opened and the casino detective entered. As the door shut behind him, Joey heard him say, "You need to hear somethin', Dom."

  Joey stared at the closed door, pricked by mild curiosity. But a guy could look at door only so long. After a few seconds, he returned his attention to the crossword puzzle. Seventeen down—five letter word, slang for "caught red handed."

  Too easy, Joey thought. He jotted down the word.

  Busted.

  CARLY LEFT THE NEW PANTSUIT behind. She hadn't paid Shannon for the outfit yet, and she couldn't spare any money. She'd added only one hundred and seventy dollars to the two hundred she'd brought with her into town. She might need ever
y penny of that money to get to Texas.

  She'd picked out her next destination while packing, playing an old, bittersweet game she'd learned from her father. He'd called it Alphabet Adventure. Name a city for each letter of the alphabet. When you hit the right one, you'd know it. It was fate. Fate always told you where to go next.

  Carly had gotten as far as Galveston when her inner radar went off. Galveston would work. Big enough to get lost in. Small enough to be interesting. She could find work in Galveston. Maybe even work on an oil rig in the Gulf. She'd never done that before.

  It was going to be a great adventure. Yes, it was.

  If she ever managed to stop crying.

  She dashed the tears away, angry at herself for giving a damn about leaving. She'd never regretted picking up and going before. Like her father used to say, leaving was just the flipside of arriving. And arriving was always good. New places, new faces, a whole new chance to start over.

  In Galveston, she wouldn't let anybody get close to her, the way she had here in Bangor. She'd find an apartment all to herself, get a job at a place where people weren't such sticklers about tax laws the way Floyd Strickland was. She could go and come as she pleased, without every eye in town following her around like she was some alien from outer space.

  And oh, think what a relief it would be not to have a big, hick cop looking over her shoulder all the time.

  She tried to ignore the twisting pain in her chest as she picked up her overstuffed gym bag and headed for the front door. She didn't worry about being too quiet; Shannon was a heavy sleeper, and Wes was at the police department. She'd found the note he left for her tacked to the refrigerator with a magnet. "Couldn't sleep. I'll be at the office, catching up on paper work. Wes."

  His being gone made leaving that much easier, for a lot of different reasons.

  She couldn't keep herself from peering through the rectangular panes in the front door before she opened it, the hazy terror of her dream still lingering like a cold hand on the back of her neck. The porch was empty.

  Taking a deep breath, she opened the door and stepped outside. The night was darker than she expected, the moon having set already. In the east, the first pale shimmer of morning teased the horizon, reminding Carly that she had only an hour or so to make her escape before the sun rose.