Page 59 of Tell Me (Savannah 3)

“But there’s got to be more,” she said as he started walking toward the house.

“Probably. Sure. Lots more. But not from me.” With that he headed up the stairs, his boots thudding on each step.

“Your impression?” Morrisette asked Reed as they drove away from the prison. She was at the wheel again. She liked to be in charge, though not necessarily in the interviews. Those she and her partner shared; sometimes he took the lead, and other times she did.

“She’s telling the truth, at least the truth as she sees it, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t do it,” he said, eyeing the countryside as they drove along the interstate, through farmland and a few wooded tracts. The sun was fighting a losing battle as storm clouds gathered, the day growing gloomy.

“So a stranger comes in, around six feet, a hundred and eighty to two hundred ten pounds, Caucasian male, probably around thirty. She just described half the male population of the state of Georgia.”

Reed drew a breath just as his cell phone rang. Seeing it was a Phoenix number, he said, “Looks like it’s Acencio, Flint Beauregard’s partner.”

Morrisette sent him a pissy look. “I know,” she said, but by that time he was already answering and the farmland was giving way to subdivisions and tracts, the city of Savannah rising in the distance.

Reed and Jasper Acencio went through introductions and explanations before they got down to business, while Morrisette slid her sunglasses from her nose and snapped them into a strap on the windshield visor.

“She was the doer all right,” Acencio told Reed. “We couldn’t find anything to substantiate that someone else besides Blondell and her kids were there. No sightings of a tattooed stranger other than from Blondell. No fingerprints, no footprints, nothing. If there had been tire prints of another vehicle, they’d been destroyed with the storm. A real gully-washer that night. The cabin had been used by others previous to the crime, so we had to sort through the evidence, but there was nothing conclusive to put another person there at the time of Amity O’Henry’s homicide. Just the kid’s testimony.”

“He’s saying now that he was coerced into testifying.”

“Saw his statement on the news.”

“He says Beauregard pushed him into it.”

There was the slightest hesitation on Acencio’s part, then he said, “I wouldn’t go that far.”

“But Beauregard did put the pressure on?”

“He buddied up to the kid. Saw him in the hospital and then again after Niall was released. I got the feeling Blondell’s boy was a little at sea, confused, a little scared, you know. He’d been through hell, and he had a father who came from a military background. Didn’t believe in ‘sparing the rod,’ I think. Calvin O’Henry wasn’t the least bit warm and fuzzy, and that wife of his belonged to some splinter sect.”

“There aren’t any churches like that in Savannah. We’ve looked.”

“You haven’t looked far enough out. Get twenty or thirty miles out of town and things change, some of these weird religions get a toehold. The deal is that the O’Henry kids were raised with an iron fist and a worn family Bible. Hard on Niall, I’d say. On top of his mother going to jail for killing his sister and shooting both him and the little girl, he’s got a whacked-out religious nut for a stepmom.”

“Difficult.”

“An understatement, for sure. And I didn’t see any of his grandparents or aunts or uncles stepping up and coming to the kid’s rescue, so it’s no big surprise that he kinda turned to Beauregard. Flint let him.”

Reed felt his jaw clench. “So with a little coaxing, the boy testified.”

“Well, yeah. That’s what happened. I wasn’t completely comfortable with it, but I was the junior.”

“He coerce the kid?” Reed asked.

“Bribed him some with candy bars and Cheetos and that kind of junk food, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘coerce.’ The boy was impressionable and yeah, Beauregard used that to his advantage.”

Morrisette had turned off the freeway and was heading into the heart of the city, maneuvering around cars quickly, eliciting an angry beep from the driver of a racy little Mazda. “Oh, stuff it, a-hole,” she muttered under her breath.

Acencio was saying, “Flint was kind to the kid. He wasn’t getting a lot of that at home, so he was . . . malleable, for lack of a better word.”

“So Niall’s recanting isn’t a surprise to you?”

“Frankly, I’m kind of amazed it took this long.”

“You never said anything at the time.” Reed was having difficulty not coming down hard on the man.

“Look, all I can tell you is that Beauregard really had a hard-on for nailing Blondell O’Henry, and he had a reason for it. The DA was all over him, the press practically rabid, the public outcry so loud it was deafening.”

“Sounds like a witch hunt,” Reed observed as Morrisette slowed for a traffic light turning from amber to red.

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