Rebel Island (Tres Navarre #7)(58)

That’s when it hit me—why the wire had bothered me, something that should’ve been obvious. “It’s part of an IED.”

“A what?”

“Improvised explosive device,” Maia said, keeping her voice down. “A bomb.”

“A bomb?” Garrett definitely did not keep his voice down.

Jose and Imelda looked over from the kitchen doorway. They’d been scavenging breakfast for the guests and were now dividing up their loot—a bag of saltines, five green apples.

“A little discretion,” I told Garrett.

“Discretion,” he said. “Somebody tries to blow up Lane and you want discretion?”

“We don’t know that anyone was targeting Lane.” Maia put her hand on Garrett’s arm. As usual, she was able to calm him down a lot more than I could, but he still looked pretty damn angry.

He leaned toward me. “The guy we saw in Lane’s closet—he was real.”

“I think so.”

“We scared him out of there before he could plant a bomb. He dropped this wire.”

“One possibility,” I agreed. “But why target Lane?”

Garrett stared outside. In a burst of optimism, Jose and Imelda had removed the plywood from the last intact dining room window. Slate gray sky and sea spread toward the horizon like unwashed sheets.

“It couldn’t have been about her,” Garrett decided. “Besides, we’ll be outta here soon. Whatever this guy was trying to do—”

“Garrett,” I said, as gently as I could. “Do you want to ask her about it, or should I?”

He twisted his linen napkin. In the stormy light, his three-day whiskers looked grayer than usual. “Yeah,” he said wearily. “I’ll talk to her.”

Jose and Imelda went off to distribute their high-cuisine breakfast, which left Maia and me alone in the dining area, munching stale saltines and watching the rain make claw marks on the window.

“Drugs,” Maia said. “Someday maybe I’ll hear about a case that doesn’t involve drugs.”

We both knew the odds of that were long. It didn’t matter if you worked with runaways, prostitutes, politicians, murderers or socialites. Drugs were as omnipresent as sex and greed.

“Chris Stowall used his manager’s job to make some extra money on the side,” I told her. “He was mad at Alex for closing the hotel because his revenue stream was about to dry up. The twenty thousand from the boathouse—that was Chris’s life savings. He was getting ready to make a break for the mainland and disappear, as soon as he delivered Calavera to Longoria and Lindy. Chris stood to make an extra fifty grand from that. He figured he’d try to milk Chase and his friends, too. Get a little more money that way.”

“You don’t think he fabricated the Calavera story?”

“No. The email was real. Chris found it, somehow he realized what it meant. But I think he found something else, too. Something that really startled him.”

I told Maia about the statue in Alex’s room—the lady who looked like Rachel Brazos. I told her about my conversations with Lindy, who apparently had never visited the island before.

“Lindy’s wife,” Maia said. “You think that was a statue of her.”

I nodded. “She ran away. Now that I’m getting to know Benjamin Lindy a little better, I can’t blame her. I think she came here. The man who ran the hotel back in those days, Mr. Eli, he would’ve taken her in without question. She fell in love with Mr. Huff. She had another child, Alex. She died when Alex was young. I don’t know how. But I think that statue is of Alex’s mother.”

Maia shook her head. “Hell of a coincidence.”

“Not really,” I said. “Welcome to South Texas.”

I remembered what Lindy had said about the whole area being a close-knit community. Mr. Eli had said something similar, back when I was a kid: South Texas is just too small a place. Everyone is connected somehow.

Running into someone you knew, someone you were related to without realizing it—that was commonplace. The bloodlines in South Texas were as twisted as the barbed wire.

“Chris would’ve assumed the statue was Rachel Brazos,” I said. “He’d probably seen her picture in the media many times.”

“And that would’ve convinced him Alex Huff was Calavera,” Maia said. “He may have been right for the wrong reasons.”

I thought about that. Rachel Brazos and her two young daughters had died by mistake. I still had trouble believing Alex was a cold-blooded killer, but if he’d seen Rachel’s picture in the paper after the explosion, and realized who she was…That might be enough to cause remorse even in a man like Calavera.

“Perhaps Alex is gone,” Maia said. “Maybe he found a way off the island. When he left last night and gave Garrett that envelope…it sounded like he knew he wasn’t coming back.”

I wanted to believe her. If Calavera was gone, we were safe. Maybe.

“You really think that?”

“No,” Maia sighed. Her facial color seemed better this morning. She’d managed the stairs all right, over my protests, but still, the idea of her packing bags or moving around at all made me nervous.

“Imelda helped me pack,” she said. “She seemed distracted. I mean…even considering.”