The Final Victim(107)

"The one on Topsail Road?"

"That's the one! Good luck!"

He waves her off.

Disheartened, she pulls slowly ahead, the windshield wipers now set at triple-time doing hide to clear the view.

Her cell phone rings as she pulls onto the shoulder where the officer indicated.

Good. She hasn't been able to get a signal in a while now. Snatching it up, she's certain it will be Royce, wondering why she's not back yet.

"Hello?"

Her greeting is met at first with just a burst of static.

Then she hears a male voice and the name, "Dorado."

"Detective? Is that you?"

"Yes! Mrs. Maitland… Are you…?"

"I'm sorry, your voice is breaking up." She shifts hurriedly into park and steps out of the car, hoping to get a better signal. It works.

"Mrs. Maitland, where are you?"

"I was trying to get home, but the causeway is closed."

"Don't go home. Whatever you do, don't go home! Do you hear me?"

"Not very well. It sounded like you said don't go home."

"I did! Listen to me very carefully…"

More static.

Behind her, she hears a shout and sees that the cop who stopped her is waving his arm in a circle, signaling her to get back into the car and turn it around.

"In a second! I have a phone call!" she shouts to him. But her words are drowned by rain and borne away on the wind.

"Detective Dorado…" Frustrated, she steps farther from the car, buffeted by the gale. "What did you say?"

His next words are punctuated by another burst of crackling interference, but the few she does make out chill her to the bone.

"Royce… and… Aim… kill."

Clutching her cell phone against her ear, Charlotte is certain she misunderstood, because…

She can't have just heard what she thought she did.

Heart racing, she moves farther away from the car, shouting over the wind, "What did you say, Detective? It sounded like-"

"I said, Royce Maitland and his daughter Aimee were killed in a car accident ten years ago in New Orleans."

*

The manilla envelope is tucked safely into the waistband of Tyler's trousers, beneath a protective layer of shirt and his soaked trenchcoat.

The wind repeatedly turns the umbrella inside out as he zigzags his way northeast, toward police headquarters on the corner of Oglethorpe and Habersham. Finally, the metal spokes begin to pop away from the center, and he shoves the umbrella into the nearest trash can. It was useless, anyway, in this storm.

He supposes that a man who wasn't hell-bent on self-punishment would have gone home with the envelope, figuring the contents will keep for another day or two.

But this has waited long enough.

Come hell or high water-and Tyler is enduring his share of both at the moment-he will get this information to the authorities today.

At last, he's arrived at the familiar station house where his business has brought him so often in the past.

The desk sergeant greets him by name.

"Mr. Hawthorne, what brings you out in this weather?"

He hesitates only briefly before answering.

Just long enough to send a silent apology to Silas and Gilbert, wherever they are.

"I have no idea what you're trying to say to me!" Charlotte protests into the phone, screaming to be heard above the roar of the storm, and the louder roar of panic beginning to mount inside her. "Royce and Aimee are at Oakgate. I'm trying to get home to them now."

Even as she speaks, his baffling words echo in her brain.

Killed…

Ten years ago?

Ten years ago!

What in the world is he talking about?

"No-please, Charlotte…" Gone is the masterful interrogator; gone is the Mrs. Maitland-or, for that matter, Ms. Remington.

Dorado's voice is strained as he says, 'You have to listen to me; I just read the obituaries myself, I saw the pictures myself. Royce was forty at the time of the accident ten years ago, and bald. Aimee was fifteen, and a redhead…"

"No, no, no," she says, relief melding into the river of panic within. 'That isn't them. They-"

"Charlotte-"

"You have their names mixed up with somebody else… Aimee is a blonde, and Royce certainly isn't fifty, or bald," she protests with a brief, brittle laugh, wondering how on earth he got so confused. "You met-"

"Charlotte! For God's sake, listen to me. Your life and your daughter's life might depend on it."

Your daughter's life…

"Royce and Aimee Maitland are dead. They were hit by a drunk driver near the French Quarter during Mardis Gras ten years ago." His tone leaves no room for argument.

'Then who-"

She tries again, struggling to stay sane in the face of her own hysteria.

"Who is at my house with my daughter?"

When Dorado speaks, the three words are drenched in the same frantic anguish that has broken like a tidal wave over Charlotte.

"I don't know."

*

Anxiety gnawing at her gut, Mimi sits on a bench in the station house outside the office where Dorado is presumably attempting to alert the authorities on Achoco Island.