He’d made a good Marine. Applying his marksmanship skills had come naturally, but so had instructing others. He’d enjoyed the camaraderie, particularly during his tours to the Middle East. He’d even cultivated a few friendships that, later, he regretted having to sever. Of course he hadn’t bought into the God-and-country dogma of the corps. He’d had to fake that, but he’d done so convincingly.
Becoming Amelia Nolan’s suitor had been much more challenging. His callowness hadn’t all been pretense. He felt much more at home in a military barracks than in a ballroom. Randy and Patricia had taught him the basic rules of comportment, and he’d attended enough officers’ functions to know how to conduct himself on formal occasions.
But the Nolans lived in a rarified society that had intimidated him as an enemy target never had. The guidelines of southern gentility hadn’t been written down in any book, yet everyone in the Nolans’ circle seemed to know and understand them. Often, he’d reconsidered the choice of whom he should court with a goal toward marrying. He’d thought perhaps the bar should be lowered a notch or two.
However, to his amazement, his gauche bumbles had made him more lovable to Amelia, not less. He was different from the beaux she was accustomed to, and that was his allure. His etiquette missteps appealed to her rather than appalled. Once he realized that, he’d played into the role and became a puppy, whose efforts were ardent if clumsy and who was eager to win favor.
The ruse backfired somewhat, because her unqualified acceptance had made him fall in love with her. A little. Much more than he’d bargained on. He’d expected never to feel anything except contempt for her and everything she represented—the wealthy, rapacious, greedy, soul-stripping aristocracy of the US of A.
Often he’d wished she didn’t love him so much. If she’d been judgmental and critical, if she’d patronized him, if she’d been intolerant of his postwar condition rather than extremely concerned, it would have made the mission easier. His goal had been to break her, not to break her heart.
He’d also wanted to despise with a passion his father-in-law and his patriotic, flag-waving idiocy. He’d scorned the statesman’s politics and the government he represented, but he’d discovered that it was hard to work up that level of antipathy for the man himself. Nolan was a fair-thinking, generous gentleman.
But the hardest act of all was the evolution of a loving daddy into a drunken, abusive brute that his sons feared. They’d gone from running toward him, arms raised, all smiles because he was home, to cowering whenever he walked into a room and cringing at his raised voice. He had a lot to make up to them.
Soon he would.
After all these years, the goal was days away from being achieved. Willard Strong would be convicted of killing Darlene, and, by extension, Jeremy Wesson. After that, he could wage his private war with impunity. He could wreak havoc in all fifty states, and nobody would be looking for a dead man.
There was one hitch that needed to be ironed out.
He’d been shocked to learn that the woman found dead behind Mickey’s wasn’t Amelia. Jesus, he still couldn’t believe he’d mistaken another woman for her.
The day of the storm, the ocean had become so choppy, he’d decided against going all the way back to Savannah, and instead had docked the boat on Saint Nelda’s. He hadn’t been to the island that much, so he wasn’t concerned about being recognized.
If he happened to cross paths with someone who’d known Jeremy Wesson, it was still unlikely they’d see through the thick beard that covered the lower third of his face, or beyond the cap he wore to cover the patch of missing scalp he’d sliced off himself and tossed into that dog pen. In the fifteen months he’d been in hiding, he’d also put on thirty pounds.
So when he tied up at Saint Nelda’s pier during the downpour, he hadn’t felt in danger of being discovered. He’d been standing inside the wheelhouse of the boat, drinking a cup of coffee and staring out at the water-logged village, when he spotted her.
The rain had been like a curtain, and it was well past dark. She might have gone unnoticed if not for the raincoat. That loud, ugly rain slicker Amelia had bought in Charleston was hard to miss, even in the feeble glow of light coming through the windows of the general store.
For the four hundred and eighty-something days since he’d left those damn dogs fighting over Darlene’s remains, he’d been biding his time until he could remove Amelia and reclaim his sons. It would have been lunacy to attempt anything as bold as kidnapping Hunter and Grant while Amelia remained a key factor in Willard’s trial and was frequently the subject of news stories. Besides, he knew that her testimony would help convict Willard, and he hadn’t wanted to hamper that.
But over those boring days and lonely nights, he’d contemplated several scenarios, thinking hard about how he would bring about her removal when the time was right. He searched for an option other than death, because…Well, just because.
There was such a thing as overplanning, however. Sometimes one could miss an opportunity while strategizing. When a plum was dropped into your lap, it was practically obligatory to accept the gift from Fate, wasn’t it?
Reclaiming his sons would be more easily accomplished with their mother permanently out of the picture. The unfairness of that could be contemplated later. But at that moment in time, he had to act.
He’d set his coffee aside, secured a ball-peen hammer from the toolbox, and tucked it inside his own slicker. A man making a mad dash through pelting rain wouldn’t arouse suspicion. But it didn’t matter, because he made it to the parking lot behind Mickey’s without anyone seeing him.
He’d hunkered behind the Dumpster to wait.
But—damn it all—when she emerged from the store, the guy was with her, the one who’d been playing on the beach with his kids, the tall, rangy stranger with whom Amelia had sat on her porch the night before, in side-by-side rocking chairs, drinking wine.
Heads down, they ran to her car. He could hear them laughing as they dodged puddles. The guy opened the car’s rear door and stowed her purchases in the footwell. She opened the passenger door and tossed her purse onto the seat. They exchanged a brief good-bye, then he jogged away, back toward the store.
As she was making her way around the rear of the car, she dropped her keys. She bent down to pick them up. He seized the moment. He didn’t think of her face, her eyes, the body he’d made love to. He didn’t think of her kind nature, her musical laugh, or her cute frown of concentration. He thought nothing of her humanity. She was a target, like the dozens he’d taken out in Iraq and Afghanistan from hundreds of yards away. She had to go. That’s all there was to it.
He heard the sound, felt the give, when the hammer breached her skull, only fractionally impeded by the hood of the slicker.
Never knowing what hit her, she fell face-first into the mud. He took her by the ankle and dragged her behind the Dumpster. He straightened the hood over her head. Then he ran back to the boat. It had been remarkably easy and quick. His coffee hadn’t even gone cold.
Dawson Scott was the name of the guy who’d almost spoiled it. He was a hotshot writer for a magazine. Jeremy had heard all about him this morning while he was eating a tall stack with a side of sausage at a truck stop off I-95. He was sitting at the counter, so he could see the TV mounted up on the wall above it.
The sheriff’s-office spokesman was coy, but, when pressed by reporters, told them that Dawson Scott had been held in jail overnight and was still a person of interest in the girl’s murder. It had been all Jeremy could do to keep from laughing out loud.
Investigators were also questioning some other guy. Jeremy couldn’t remember his name, but it was inconsequential. What mattered was that one person they were not looking for was the late Jeremy Wesson.