it.”
“I had nothing to do with making that page, Eddie.”
“I know that, too.”
Laredo took a sip of his cocktail while he thought about this. “So he could have found you and/or her easily enough but he obviously didn’t. So the question becomes why.”
“So you think it’s strange, too?”
“Everything in this place is strange. They’ve been trying to feed me something called ‘grits’ with my breakfast ever since I got here.”
“I never appreciated your humor before, Eddie.”
“I’m being serious, Atlee.”
“I can tell.”
“So what’s the deal with your assistant, Blum?”
“What do you mean?”
“She gave me the third degree when I first met her. Wanted to know what had gone on between us.”
“And what did you tell her?”
“That it was none of her business. And then she told me she’d done a 411 on me.”
Pine laughed. “Boy, she really did pull out all the stops on you.”
“You really think that’s funny?”
“Don’t you?”
Laredo finally chuckled. “I guess. Anyway, she said I checked out all right.”
“Obviously she failed to talk to the right people.” But Pine tacked on a smile to show she was joking.
Laredo finished his gin and tonic and held his hand up for a second and Pine ordered another Bud.
“Getting back to Jack Lineberry,” he said when the drinks had arrived. “I actually did a 411 on him.”
“What? On Lineberry? Why?”
“He’s a really rich guy and he’s close by here.”
“You think he’s going around killing people and laying them out in old clothes?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“So what did your 411 turn up?”
“That he is really rich. His investment business is totally legit. He gives a lot to charities. He’s well liked.”
“When did he come to Andersonville, or was he born here?”
“He wasn’t born here, at least the records I looked at don’t show that.”
“Where then?”
Laredo’s expression turned puzzled. “Not entirely clear.”
“How can that be, Eddie?”
“I’m not sure, to tell you the truth. But then again, not everybody has a birth certificate, or knows where they’re born.”
Pine reflected on this. She hadn’t known where she was born until she had seen her birth certificate that she needed to get her passport.
“He’s in his sixties, so we’re looking at him being born sometime in the fifties. If it was in a rural area and he was born at home or with a midwife instead of in a hospital?”
“It’s possible. But to the extent we could track his past, the guy’s never been in trouble with the police.”
“So he came here at some point and started working at the bauxite mine in management.”
“Right. That’s what I found, too.”
“Did it say when he first came here?”
Laredo took out his phone and scrolled through some windows.
“Sometime in the 1980s. I don’t have an exact date. We could get one, I suppose.”
“Probably doesn’t matter.”
“You think he had something to do with what happened to your sister?”
“It’s possible but not really probable. He seems to genuinely care for my family, particularly my mother. And he was going to offer my father a job in his investment firm. He was on his way to meet with my father when he found his body.”
“Damn. That must have been a shock.”
“My mother told me it happened in Louisiana. It was Virginia, according to Lineberry. I was nineteen at the time. In fact, he killed himself on my birthday.”
“Wow, I’m sorry, Atlee. That must have been rough.”
She sipped her beer. “It was…not easy. The biggest thing I felt was anger. That I wasn’t there to talk him out of it. That maybe he thought I didn’t love or care about him. It should never have happened.”
“It’s hard to get into the head of someone who’s contemplating killing themselves. But don’t think that you need to shoulder the blame. If someone really wants to kill themselves, they’ll find a way. You know that as well as I do.”
“Yeah, I know it when the person isn’t my father.”
Laredo lifted his drink to her. “Point taken.”
They had another round and when some of the patrons started to hit the dance floor, Pine said, “You want to?”
He looked confused. “Want to what?”
She answered by gripping his hand and pulling him up.
Before they took to the dance floor, Pine slipped off her heels and put them on her chair.
She looked up at Laredo and smiled. “Feel better now?”
He grinned. “Hey, what can I say? You’re intimidating at any height.”
They danced for a while, apart for most of it, dipping, swirling, and spinning to the tunes that were mostly country.
“You move pretty well for an FBI agent,” noted Pine.
“Growing