The Homewreckers(95)

“Dorcas!” Holland Creedmore stormed into the room. He saw the nearly empty glass of vodka she was clutching. “Goddamn it. Be quiet. I talked to Web. He’s calling someone from his old firm. No more talking.”

Dorcas raised her glass in a defiant gesture. “It’s too late, Holl. I told him everything. He knows our boy didn’t kill her. And we didn’t kill her.”

Creedmore sighed. “Goddamn it.”

Makarowicz pointed at his cell phone, which was still recording. “Your wife is right. It’s too late. There’s no putting the toothpaste back in the tube now. I already know enough to arrest both of you in connection with Lanier Ragan’s murder. I’d suggest you sit down and tell me exactly what happened next.”

Creedmore didn’t sit. He stood with his back to the fireplace, feet placed a few inches apart.

“We knew it looked bad for our son. He would never have hurt that woman, but there he was, passed out cold in the dock house, with her corpse a couple hundred yards away.” He rubbed his jowls. “I found the keys to her car. I drove and Dorcas followed in my car. We left the car at a shopping center. We went back out to Tybee, checked on Holland, who was still passed out—”

“I was afraid he’d been poisoned or something,” Dorcas interrupted. “But Holl said…”

“Let him sleep it off,” Creedmore said, picking up the narrative again. “We drove back home and waited.”

Makarowicz was watching Dorcas, who was watching her husband recount their night of horror with chilling, detached clarity. He kept thinking of four-year-old Emma Ragan, being awakened by the storm that night, discovering her mother was gone; forever traumatized by the sound of lightning.

“Home?” he said now.

“Here,” Creedmore said.

“Let me get this straight. You left your son, passed out in the dock house, and Lanier Ragan’s body in the boat shed?”

“I covered it with a tarp,” Creedmore said.

“And then you just … went home, and acted like nothing had happened?”

“It wasn’t our fault,” Dorcas said, her voice pleading, whining really. “We didn’t kill her. And we knew Little Holl wouldn’t have done it. But we had to save our son.”

Makarowicz crossed and uncrossed his legs, struggling to maintain his composure.

“Okay,” he said. “Tell me how Lanier Ragan’s body ended up in that septic tank.”





50

Nobody Knows Nothing




“We don’t know,” Dorcas Creedmore said. She turned to her husband. “Tell him, Holl.”

“As God is my witness, I don’t know how that body ended up there,” Creedmore said.

“You don’t expect me to believe that, do you?”

Creedmore started pacing around the room. “I went back out to the beach house the next morning, around eight. I wouldn’t let Dorcas go with me. She was too upset.”

Makarowicz was fascinated by the dynamic of this incredibly dysfunctional couple. The wife was skilled at passive-aggressive behavior, the husband was a controlling jerk. No wonder they’d managed to raise such a fucked-up, entitled son.

“What did you plan to do with Lanier Ragan’s body?”

Creedmore’s face took on a pained expression. “I didn’t have a plan. I thought about putting her body in our boat, dumping her in the marsh. Doesn’t matter now because when I got to the boat shed, she was gone.”

“Gone, how?”

“She wasn’t there, man. I swear, she was gone. I thought I’d have a heart attack when I opened the shed door and there was no blue tarp and no body.”

“And where was your son while all this was happening?”

“Holl forgot to tell you that part. He’d sobered up, sometime in the middle of the night, and drove home,” Dorcas volunteered. “I kept him home from school that day, obviously.”

“Obviously, he was probably upset, having killed his pregnant girlfriend the night before,” Makarowicz said, his voice dripping sarcasm. “Did you take his binky away and put him in time-out?”

“Don’t you talk to my wife that way,” Creedmore said, his fists balled up.

“Fine,” Makarowicz said. “Tell me what you said to Junior when you saw him the next morning.”

Dorcas looked at her husband, again, for guidance. “I didn’t really say anything. Just gave him some aspirin and told him to take a hot shower.”

“What did you do with the clothes your son was wearing?” Makarowicz asked.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Creedmore interrupted.

“Mrs. Creedmore?”

Dorcas looked down at her empty glass. “I think I threw them away.”

“You think?”

She looked up. “Holl said I should get rid of them. I took them out to our backyard fireplace and I burned them.”

“As one does when one wants to get rid of incriminating evidence,” Mak said.

“I was trying to protect my son,” Creedmore said belligerently. “You’d do the same thing if you were in my place.”

“Wrong,” Makarowicz said, pointing a finger at the older man. “If I thought my son might be falsely accused of a crime, I wouldn’t destroy evidence that might prove otherwise. And if I thought he’d killed someone, I’d hand him over to the police myself.”