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“He sure did end his part fast after that, didn’t he?”
Violet nodded. “Likely bad blood between them, and he left before Skipper could air his dirty laundry in front of us. But it could be something else. I’ll have Selah run a check on Dorn. See how deep their connection is. But it’s probably teenage rivalry that neither got over.”
Violet was probably right.
“Asa texted,” she said. “He’s back at the beach house, and Fiona’s in Natchez. He wants to walk through everything we’ve found on the missing women with a flower in their name.”
“Can we go by and talk to the boutique manager first? Leslie McDonald. I want to ask her about Ahnah too.” Ty stood and slipped into his suit coat.
“Sure. I saw a little shop over there I want to go in.”
“What kind of shop?” he asked as they left the interview room.
“The kind where I buy a Kitty Hawk kite for Stella.”
Ty nudged her with his shoulder. “Aw. Will it be pink and pretty?” Ty loved giving Vi a hard time, but it was cool seeing her soften up as she became a mom to John’s preschool-age daughter.
“She wants to be a sheriff. I saw one with a gun on it. And yes, it was pink. Let it go.”
“Let it go...let it go.” He sang the Disney song and threw his arm around her only to be shrugged off.
“I hate when you do that.”
“I know.” But he couldn’t help it. He had songs on shuffle in his brain. Music had been his escape as a kid. Not that his father ever physically abused him, but there had been a fear of his father deep down. A voice had warned him Father was an evil man and his teachings false, but Ty wasn’t sure where that voice had come from. He’d obeyed blindly, but that didn’t mean he never doubted.
“Hey Violet, remember after you made it through the woods, looking all gnarly and rough?”
“I’d almost been murdered, so I get a pass, but yeah.”
“Remember what you told me? That God was real. You didn’t believe, and then after that night you did.”
“Yeah,” she said, striding through the bullpen to the front lobby doors.
“You still on that bandwagon?”
Violet paused. “Yes. Are you curious?”
He sighed and opened the door for her. “I’m curious why you believe it, but not enough I want to talk about it with you.”
She frowned, pushing open the lobby door. “Except you are talking about it.”
“I changed my mind.” He got inside the SUV and cranked the engine. He shouldn’t have even brought it up. He wasn’t sure why he had. Maybe because of that voice warning him the doctrine was false. It wasn’t coming from his own thoughts. Or maybe he was losing it. As he pulled out of the parking lot, he thought he saw someone in a car watching him.
Nah. His mind was playing paranoid tricks on him. This killer wasn’t stupid enough to sit smack-dab in the sheriff’s office parking lot.
Unless the killer was a cop or welcomed by law enforcement.
Blue Harbor
SCU beach house
Sunday, September 2
1:04 p.m.
Ty wadded up his sub sandwich paper and shot it into the trash from his chair in the dining area. According to the news, Jodie had picked up more velocity after becoming a category 5 and making landfall at Elbow Cay, Great Abaco, in the northwestern Bahamas, decimating it. They reported that Jodie was the strongest hurricane in modern records to make landfall in the Bahamas. After crawling westward and west-northwestward toward Grand Bahama Island, it weakened but then picked up again, the eye of the hurricane east of Florida. They weren’t out of the woods yet. Anything could happen when it came to unpredictable storms.
Barbados flooded his memory. Being caught in the hurricane and hunkering down. And things that he’d never spoken about before.
