The Third Grave (Savannah #4) - Lisa Jackson Page 0,89

smelled of dust, but he read the typed report about an interview with George Adams. He’d been seventy-nine at the time of his statement and had died in the intervening years. George had admitted to not having noticed anything out of the ordinary on the day that the girls went missing, but had claimed fiercely that there were “all sorts of shenanigans going on over there at the Duval place! Harvey, he’s an insurance salesman, but I sure as hell wouldn’t have him for my agent, and that wife of his? Margie or whatever she calls herself, she’s a nurse, but she got fired from the hospital, the way I hear it. To become a private nurse to the damned Beaumonts. Who does that? Something’s not right there, let me tell you. I heard, well, it’s just gossip really, but the missus and I, we don’t go for that swingin’.”

“Swinging?”

“You know. That exchanging partners in the bedroom if you know what I mean.”

“The Duvals are ‘swingers’?”

“Well, don’t quote me on that, but it’s pretty much common knowledge.”

“You mean Harvey had an affair.”

“Humph. One? Get real. I don’t want to spread rumors, but trust me, Harvey has a wandering eye. And his wife? Same goes for her.”

“Do you have any idea who they had affairs with?”

“Well, no, I can’t say.”

“But you’re certain?”

“No, no. I mean I got no proof. It’s just what we heard, the wife and I. And those girls they have? Allowed to run loose while their older son—Owen, I think his name is?—there’s something about him I don’t trust. Kind of sulks around, you know, won’t meet you in the eyes. And I saw him once, late at night, leave the house. I was getting a drink of water at the kitchen sink, hadn’t turned on the light as I didn’t want to wake the missus, she don’t sleep so good, and he comes right out of the upper window, clear as day and down the roof he goes, then hops to the ground. Just after one in the morning. And you know I always say, ‘There ain’t nothin’ good happens after midnight. ’”

Amen.

Reed had been a cop too long to not agree with the old man’s observation. He would have loved to interview him, but George was now deceased and his wife, as of the last time anyone checked, was in an elder care facility. The lead investigator who had signed the report, Detective Charles Easterling, had retired at sixty-five two years after the Duval girls had been reported missing. He, too, had died, just last year. Heart failure.

There was only one cop still remaining on the force who had worked the case twenty years earlier, a deputy at the time and now a sergeant. Reed had spoken with her and learned nothing that he hadn’t already read in the files that were now piled on a corner of his desk.

They had offered him no insight in the mystery.

He turned to his monitor and pulled up the computer-generated sketch of what Rose Duval would look like if she’d survived—a pixie of a young woman with blond, curly hair, bright blue eyes, short little nose and a dimple in her chin.

“Yeah, okay. Let me know when you find a match,” Delacroix said into the phone before clicking off.

“Nothing yet?” he guessed.

“Too early. I told you.” She leaned back in her chair and stretched her arms over her head, then caught sight of the image on his computer. “How about you?”

He frowned and shook his head as he stared at the computer model of what Rose Duval might look like. “It’s too generic, I think. And who knows if she’s still blond, or had her teeth straightened, plastic surgery or whatever.”

“Yeah,” she said, “could be anyone.”

Or she could be dead.

Reed considered that option, didn’t like it, but had to admit that it was the most likely scenario.

He sighed through his nose. The investigation wasn’t gaining any traction, his home life wasn’t exactly on track, someone had come into his house uninvited, and in a few days . . .

Oh, Lord.

In a few days, Sylvie Morrisette would be laid to rest.

* * *

Two hours later, Reed pulled up to Peaceful Glen, the adult care facility, and parked in one of the few shady spots available. The cement block building was long and low, built, it looked like, in the sixties with a flat roof and rows of big windows with individual air-conditioning units in the walls. Shadows from a row