Full Dark, No Stars(127)

She gave him a chilly spare-me smile, then got up to pour herself a fresh cup of coffee. The first one was already gone.

“You probably know about the Beadie murders,” he said.

“The man who kills women and then sends their ID to the police?” She came back to the table, her coffee cup perfectly steady in her hand. “The newspapers dine out on that one.”

He pointed at her—Bob’s finger-gun gesture—and tipped her a wink. “Got that right. Yessir. ‘If it bleeds, it leads,’ that’s their motto. I happened to work the case a little. I wasn’t retired then, but getting on to it. I had kind of a reputation as a fellow who could sometimes get results by sniffing around… following my whatdoyoucallums…”

“Instincts?”

Once more with the finger-gun. Once more with the wink. As if there were a secret, and they were both in on it. “Anyway, they send me out to work on my own, you know—old limping Holt shows his pictures around, asks his questions, and kind’ve… you know… just sniffs. Because I’ve always had a nose for this kind of work, Darcy, and never really lost it. This was in the fall of 1997, not too long after a woman named Stacey Moore was killed. Name ring a bell?”

“I don’t think so,” Darcy said.

“You’d remember if you’d seen the crime scene photos. Terrible murder—how that woman must have suffered. But of course, this fellow who calls himself Beadie had stopped for a long time, over fifteen years, and he must have had a lot of steam built up in his boiler, just waiting to blow. And it was her that got scalded.

“Anyway, the fella who was SAG back then put me on it. ‘Let old Holt take a shot,’ he says, ‘he’s not doing anything else, and it’ll keep him out from underfoot.’ Even then old Holt was what they called me. Because of the limp, I should imagine. I talked to her friends, her relatives, her neighbors out there on Route 106, and the people she worked with in Waterville. Oh, I talked to them plenty. She was a waitress at a place called the Sunnyside Restaurant there in town. Lots of transients stop in, because the turnpike’s just down the road, but I was more interested in her regular customers. Her regular male customers.”

“Of course you would be,” she murmured.

“One of them turned out to be a presentable, well-turned-out fella in his mid or early forties. Came in every three or four weeks, always took one of Stacey’s booths. Now, probably I shouldn’t say this, since the fella turned out to be your late husband—speaking ill of the dead, but since they’re both dead, I kind’ve figure that cancels itself out, if you see what I mean…” Ramsey ceased, looking confused.

“You’re getting all tangled up,” Darcy said, amused in spite of herself. Maybe he wanted her to be amused. She couldn’t tell. “Do yourself a favor and just say it, I’m a big girl. She flirted with him? Is that what it comes down to? She wouldn’t be the first waitress to flirt with a man on the road, even if the man had a wedding ring on his finger.”

“No, that wasn’t quite it. According to what the other waitstaff told me—and of course you have to take it with a grain of salt, because they all liked her—it was him that flirted with her. And according to them, she didn’t like it much. She said the guy gave her the creeps.”

“That doesn’t sound like my husband.” Or what Bob had told her, for that matter .

“No, but it probably was. Your husband, I mean. And a wife doesn’t always know what a hubby does on the road, although she may think she does. Anyway, one of the waitresses told me this fella drove a Toyota 4Runner. She knew because she had one just like it. And do you know what? A number of the Moore woman’s neighbors had seen a 4Runner like that out and about in the area of the family farmstand just days before the woman was murdered. Once only a day before the killing took place.”

“But not on the day.”

“No, but of course a fella as careful as this Beadie would look out for a thing like that. Wouldn’t he?”

“I suppose.”

“Well, I had a description and I canvassed the area around the restaurant. I had nothing better to do. For a week all I got was blisters and a few cups of mercy-coffee—none as good as yours, though!—and I was about to give up. Then I happened to stop at a place downtown. Mickleson’s Coins. Does that name ring a bell?”

“Of course. My husband was a numismatist and Mickleson’s was one of the three or four best buy-and-sell shops in the state. It’s gone now. Old Mr. Mickleson died and his son closed the business.”

“Yep. Well, you know what the song says, time takes it all in the end—your eyes, the spring in your step, even your friggin jump shot, pardon my French. But George Mickleson was alive then—”

“Upright and sniffin the air,” Darcy murmured.

Holt Ramsey smiled. “Just as you say. Anyway, he recognized the description. ‘Why, that sounds like Bob Anderson,’ he says. And guess what? He drove a Toyota 4Runner.”

“Oh, but he traded that in a long time ago,” Darcy said. “For a—”

“Chevrolet Suburban, wasn’t it?” Ramsey pronounced the company name Shivvalay.

“Yes.” Darcy folded her hands and looked at Ramsey calmly. They were almost down to it. The only question was which partner in the now-dissolved Anderson marriage this sharp-eyed old man was more interested in.